The Cadaver Synod (897)

A bad time to be pope

Rome in the late 800s was run by feuding factions, and the papacy was one of the prizes. Between 896 and 904 the city got a new pope roughly every year. Formosus, bishop of Porto, had a record: in 876 Pope John VIII had excommunicated him over accusations of scheming for the papacy and abandoning his see. He returned to his see after John VIII died in 882, and became pope in 891. He died in 896 after crowning the Frankish king Arnulf as emperor, which did not please everyone in Italy.

His successor Boniface VI lasted about two weeks. The next pope was Stephen VI.

The trial

In January 897 Stephen had Formosus dug up. The body, dead about nine months, was dressed in papal robes and propped on a throne in the Lateran basilica. A deacon was appointed to answer for it. The charges were perjury, serving as a bishop while a layman, and taking the papacy while bishop of another see, which church law forbade. The tenth-century writer Liutprand of Cremona has Stephen demanding to know why Formosus had grabbed the Roman See out of ambition.

The corpse said nothing. It was found guilty.

The sentence

Stephen declared everything Formosus had done as pope void, including his ordinations. By Wikipedia’s account of the sources, that included Stephen’s own ordination as a bishop, which Formosus had performed. The body was stripped of its robes, and three fingers of the right hand, the ones used to give blessings, were cut off. The body was then thrown into the Tiber.

Aftermath

Rome did not take it well. The body was reportedly pulled from the river, and the rumor was that it was working miracles. A public uprising deposed Stephen and put him in prison, where he was strangled in July or August 897. He had been pope for a little over a year.

Two popes later, Theodore II held a synod in December 897 that annulled the trial, rehabilitated Formosus and had the body reburied in St. Peter’s in papal vestments. In 898 John IX confirmed this at synods in Rome and Ravenna, ordered the records of the Cadaver Synod destroyed, and prohibited trials of the dead in future.

Why did he do it?

Nobody can prove it. The trial is generally presumed to have been political, and historians disagree about whose politics. For a long time the standard view was that Lambert of Spoleto, a rival to Formosus’s Frankish ally, forced Stephen’s hand. That view is now considered obsolete, because Lambert attended and approved the council that reversed the trial the next year. Other historians point to a different branch of the Spoleto family. The documented answer is that nobody wrote down a clear one.

What we know

• Stephen VI put the corpse of Formosus on trial in Rome in January 897, about nine months after Formosus died.
• A deacon spoke for the body. It was convicted and its acts as pope were declared void.
• Three fingers were cut off and the body was thrown in the Tiber.
• Stephen was imprisoned and strangled in the same year.
• Theodore II and John IX reversed the verdict, and John IX’s 898 synods prohibited trials of corpses.

What we don’t know

• Stephen’s motive, or who was really pulling the strings.
• The exact date. Historians say “probably January 897.”
• Whether the earthquake some later writers describe during the trial happened. JSTOR Daily calls it an embellishment by later commentators, and we left it out.
• Which details to trust from Liutprand, who wrote in the tenth century and also reported at least one miracle.