The Vindictive Pope Who Dug Up and Tried a Rival’s Corpse

15. History’s Most Vindictive Pope?

Many popes, in the Dark Ages and later, knew how to hold a grudge. There is no shortage of pontiffs who plotted and schemed against their predecessors, or even went so far as to outright murder them. Nor does history have a shortage of popes who were quite vindictive towards the very memory of their predecessors. However, no pope in the nearly two millennia long history of the pontificate ever came close to the levels of vindictiveness exhibited by pope Stephen VI (died 897). He was the only pope who was so vindictive that he had a predecessor’s corpse exhumed and put on trial, so he could finally tell him to his (dead) face just what he thought of him.

14. Dark Ages Italy’s Decline

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, Italy was fought over by the Ostrogothic Kingdom which ruled the peninsula, and the Byzantine Empire, which sought to reunify the former Roman Empire. The interminable resultant wars, fought on Italian soil, wreaked widespread havoc and devastation. Fighting did not peter out until the seventh century, when the Byzantines, weakened by the Muslim conquests, were forced to focus on survival at home instead of military adventurism abroad. By then, Italy had been reduced from what had once been the central region of an urbanized, thriving, and sophisticated civilization, to a depopulated ruin. The vast infrastructure built during centuries of Roman rule was wrecked. Aqueducts, roads, bridges, and ports, had been either deliberately destroyed or allowed to fall into decay for lack of maintenance.

13. Trade and Economic Collapse

Once-thriving Italian estates lay in ruins, and agricultural productivity shrank as the rural population was reduced to minor peasantry. Trade networks that had once allowed the urbanized culture of the Roman world to thrive, collapsed. That in turn led to a collapse of the economy, which led to a population collapse in turn. Cities emptied, as their inhabitants were either massacred by marauding armies, or had to feed themselves by becoming peasants and turning to subsistence farming in the surrounding countryside. Rome’s population had once exceeded a million people, and the city still had a few hundred thousand people when the Western Empire fell. It was reduced to a small town of a few thousand souls, who scavenged the decaying ruins for building materials. The Dark Ages had arrived in the Italian Peninsula, and it was against that background that the Cadaver Synod took place.

12. Ghost Town Rome

Rome in the ninth century was somewhat of a semi-deserted Mad Max ghost town. The city held an estimated population of about 20,000 to 30,000 – a huge decline from its early Roman Empire peak of about a million to a million and a half inhabitants. It was still encircled by the remnants of the Aurelian Walls that had been built in the 270s AD to a secure a city housing dozens times more people than it did in the days of the Cadaver Synod. Within that vastness, the relatively few ninth century Romans were like a few scattered peas rattling inside a huge pot. Most inhabitants were concentrated along the Tiber, because the aqueducts that had supplied the city in its heyday had been cut. As a result, the only sources of water were wells or the river. All other parts of the city, especially Rome’s iconic seven hills, were green areas occupied by farmers.

11. The Erasure of Classical Rome

Rome’s famous Forum Romanum, where the giants of Roman history had once rubbed shoulders, was now called Campo Vaccino (“Cow’s Field”). The Capitoline Hill, that had once housed the grand temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, was now Monte Caprino (“Goats Mount”). The grand monuments of yesteryear had already been cannibalized for marble, columns, and bricks, while most of the city’s statues had been burned to transform their marble into lime. The destruction of Classical Rome was done not by marauding barbarians, but by the Romans themselves. Most inhabitants lived in ramshackle houses or huts, while the richer sorts lived in older Roman buildings, fortified and repurposed into strongholds.

10. The Papal States

Rome and the surrounding region were the heart of the Papal States – a swath of territory in central Italy ruled directly by the popes. Interestingly, the Papal States came into being as a result of a huge swindle. Back in the eighth century, some monks forged a document to record a generous gift from Emperor Constantine I. In what came to be known as “The Donation of Constantine”, the emperor supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the entire Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I and his successors. Such shenanigans were par for the course in a period of astonishing papal corruption and degeneracy. It was so bad, that it came to be known as the “nadir of the papacy”.

9. A Brief, but Memorable, Papacy

The Holy Father Stephen VI’s time on the papal throne was not that long. It lasted for little more than a year between his election as pope in May of 896, until his death in August of 897. However, that was more than enough time to secure his place in the books, with one of the most controversial episodes in a papal history that has no shortage of controversy. It took place during a period, from roughly the middle of the ninth century to the middle of the tenth, that was marked by severe political instability in the Italian Peninsula.

8. The Papal Merry Go Round

In theory, the papacy spoke for and asserted authority over not only the Catholic Church, but over Christianity the world over. In reality, popes in the ninth and tenth centuries were appointed and dethroned in rapid succession, based on the obscure machinations and intrigues of provincial Italian and Roman aristocratic families. Those rustics did not view the papacy and popes through our current global prism. Instead, to the factions in Rome and the surrounding region, the Holy See was simply another tool to be used to further their parochial ambitions, and to thwart the ambitions of their rivals. Historical sources are scarce as to the details of just what those rivalries revolved around, but the gist of them covered the basics: wealth, power, and prestige.

7. The Cadaver Synod’s Defendant

Formosus, the defendant in the Cadaver Synod, was born in Rome in 816. He rose within the Catholic Church’s hierarchy to Cardinal Bishop of Porto, Rome’s port city and main harbor, in 864. Two years later, Pope Nicholas I appointed him papal legate and missionary to the pagan Bulgar tribes. He was so successful at it, that the converted Bulgarians clamored to have him appointed as their bishop. However, technicalities in the Catholic Church’s laws forbade that. In years to come, Formosus’s enemies used that success in converting the Bulgars, and his popularity with them, against him. They asserted that he had corrupted the minds of the Bulgarians “so that as long as he was alive, they would not accept any other bishop from the apostolic see“.

6. The Origins of a Papal Beef

Formosus was also accused of conspiring with others to usurp the authority of Pope John VIII, and of plundering church property. Between those charges and the Bulgar-related allegations, he was excommunicated. He was restored to the Church’s good graces after John VIII’s death in 882, and resumed his bishopric of Porto, which he held until he was elected pope in 891. His prosecutor, or persecutor, Pope Stephen VI was born into the ruling family of Spoleto, an independent duchy in central Italy. In 891, an earlier Pope Stephen V had reluctantly crowned Guy III, Duke of Spoleto, as Holy Roman Emperor. However, his preference had actually been for the East Frankish King Arnulf of Carinthia. When Formosus became pope, he was lukewarm at best towards the Spoletan Emperor Guy. Like Stephen V before him, he also preferred Arnulf.

5. A Pope Stuck Between Kings

In 892, Guy and the Spoletans forced Pope Formosus to crown Guy’s underage son Lambert as co-emperor. While at it, the Spoletans also forced him to make their relative, Stephen, the future pope and persecutor of Formosus’s corpse, a bishop. Formosus resented such ham-handedness, so he persuaded Arnulf to invade Italy and liberate it from the Spoletans. Arnulf complied, and in 894, he invaded and occupied northern Italy. Guy died later that year, leaving his son Lambert in the care of his mother. Mother and child proved no match for Arnulf, who defeated their forces, and seized Rome in 895. Formosus promptly ditched the Spoletans, and crowned Arnulf Holy Roman Emperor in Saint Peter’s basilica. The new emperor then set out to mop up the Spoletans, only to suffer a stroke, which paralyzed him and forced him to end the campaign. Formosus himself died a few months later, in 896.

4. The Vindictive Stephen VI

Pope Formosus was succeeded by Boniface VI, who lasted only fifteen days as Holy Father, before he died of gout. He was followed by the Spoletan Stephen VI, who was livid at Formosus for what he perceived as an unforgivable offense against, and betrayal of, his family. Formosus was dead, but that would not stop the Stephen VI from giving him a piece of his mind. The Spoletan pope ordered the rotting corpse of Formosus exhumed, and had it hauled to the papal throne. There, in one of the papacy’s weirdest episodes, the remains were subjected to an ecclesiastical trial before the Roman clergy, that came to be known as the “Cadaver Synod”. With the reeking corpse of Formosus propped on the throne, Stephen VI conducted the prosecution, while a teenage deacon, hiding behind the dead pope, conducted the defense.

3. Trying a Corpse

Pope Stephen VI’s list of charges against Formosus was long. It included perjury; serving as bishop while actually a layman; transmigration of sees in violation of canon law; and of generally having been unworthy of the pontificate. The proceedings were just as ghoulishly farcical and macabre as one might imagine. The unbalanced Stephen would scream the accusations against Formosus’ cadaver, then the deacon hiding behind the dead pope, imitating Formosus’ voice, would deny the charges.

2. Punishing a Corpse

To no one’s surprise, Formosus’s corpse, being a corpse, lost the case, and was found guilty. An ancient Roman penalty, damnatio memoriae, meaning “condemnation of the memory” and typically decreed by the Senate against those who brought dishonour upon the state, was applied. Stephen VI then had the papal vestments stripped from Formosus’ corpse, to be replaced with rags. Next, he ordered the amputation of three fingers from Formosus’ right hand, which he had used in consecrations. Then he had the body dumped in a pauper’s grave. However, even that failed to satisfy Stephen and sate his vindictiveness for long. Soon thereafter, still hopping mad at the insult to the Spoleto family, he again had Formosus’ corpse dug up, then ordered it loaded down with stones, and tossed into the Tiber river. 

1. The Ouster of Pope Stephen VI

Stephen VI was clearly unhinged, and his bizarre behavior led to widespread rioting. The rioters got a hold of Stephen VI, and he was stripped of his papal vestments, imprisoned, and strangled to death in his cell. Stephen VI and the Cadaver Synod might have been the era’s weirdest pope and papal episode, but neither would prove to be the worst in a period that is often described as the nadir of the papacy. In the following few decades, before serious reform efforts were finally made, the woeful list of Stephen VI’s successors would include Pope Sergius III, who murdered two predecessors, and fathered an illegitimate child (who would go on to become pope). Another pope, John XII, became a serial predator and murderer, and transformed the papal palace into a de facto brothel. Yet another, Benedict IX, sold the papacy in order to fund his retirement.

_________________

Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Atlas Obscura – The Cadaver Synod: When a Pope’s Corpse Was Put on Trial

History Collection – The War Fought Over a Bucket, and Other Medieval Warfare Facts

Llewellyn, Peter – Rome in the Dark Ages (1970)

Medievalists – The Cadaver Synod: Low Point in the History of the Papacy

Vintage News – The Pope Who Exhumed the Body of His Predecessor, Dressed It, and Put it On Trial