The Cadaver Synod

At the end of the ninth century the papacy was in a weak and dangerous position. The Carolingian Empire had broken apart, and rival nobles fought over the title of emperor, which only the pope could confer in Rome. In Italy the most powerful contender was the family of the dukes of Spoleto. Guy of Spoleto had been crowned emperor by Pope Stephen V in 891, and in 892 Pope Formosus crowned Guy’s son Lambert co-emperor, apparently under pressure.

Formosus was an experienced and controversial churchman. As bishop of Porto he had served on papal missions, including to Bulgaria, but in 876 he had fallen out with Pope John VIII, fled Rome and been excommunicated. He was later restored and became pope in 891. At that time Church law strongly discouraged a bishop from leaving his own see to take another, and his opponents would later call his election unlawful for that reason. As pope, Formosus looked for protection from the Spoletans and turned to Arnulf of Carinthia, the East Frankish king. Arnulf marched on Rome, and in February 896 Formosus crowned him emperor. Soon afterwards Arnulf fell ill and returned north, leaving the pope exposed. Formosus died on 4 April 896.

His successor, Boniface VI, reigned for only about two weeks. He was followed by Stephen VI, whom Formosus himself had made bishop of Anagni, and who was close to the Spoletan party led by Lambert and his mother, the duchess Ageltrude. In early 897, probably in January, Stephen summoned a synod of clergy to the Lateran basilica and ordered that the body of Formosus be exhumed and brought before it.

According to the accounts that survive, the corpse was dressed in papal vestments and seated on a throne. A deacon was appointed to answer the charges on the dead man’s behalf. Stephen accused Formosus of perjury, of having coveted the papacy, and of transferring unlawfully from the see of Porto to that of Rome. The verdict was guilty. The synod declared his reign void and all his ordinations invalid. The vestments were torn from the body, the three fingers of the right hand used for blessing were cut off, and the corpse was buried in a common grave. Soon afterwards it was thrown into the Tiber. Tradition says a monk or hermit retrieved it from the river and buried it secretly.

The annulment of Formosus’s ordinations had a practical side. Many clergy in Rome owed their posts to him, including Stephen himself as bishop. By declaring Formosus never to have been pope, Stephen cleared away the legal problem that he too had moved from one see to another, and reasserted the Spoletan interest against Arnulf. The trial was horrifying even to contemporaries, but it was not simply madness. It was politics carried to a grotesque extreme.

Much about the synod remains unclear, because its official records were later destroyed. Its date is usually given as January 897, though some historians place it in February. The fullest descriptions come from the records of the synods that annulled it and from writers who defended Formosus, so they are hostile to Stephen. The pope himself is numbered Stephen VI in most modern lists and Stephen VII in some older ones, because of confusion over an earlier Stephen who died before being consecrated. Even so, the main facts, the exhumation, the trial before an assembly of clergy and the condemnation, are not in doubt.

Public opinion in Rome turned quickly. Around the same time, the Lateran basilica partly collapsed, which many took as a sign of divine anger. In the summer of 897 a revolt overthrew Stephen. He was stripped of his insignia, imprisoned and strangled. Two short-lived popes followed. Theodore II, who reigned for about twenty days, recovered the body of Formosus, had it reburied in St Peter’s with full honours and recognised the clergy he had ordained. Later writers added that, as the body was carried in, images of saints bowed to greet it, a legend that expresses the sympathy Formosus came to enjoy.

In 898 Pope John IX held synods in Rome and Ravenna that formally annulled the Cadaver Synod, ordered its records burned and forbade the trial of anyone after death. Yet the dispute did not end. Sergius III, who had taken part in Stephen’s synod and who became pope in 904, reaffirmed the condemnation of Formosus and again declared his ordinations invalid. The resulting confusion over which priests and bishops were validly ordained provoked a lively debate. Writers such as Auxilius of Naples and Eugenius Vulgarius defended the Formosan ordinations in treatises that are among our main sources for the affair. The later Church set Sergius’s position aside and treated the trial as invalid.

The Cadaver Synod became the most notorious episode of what later historians called the papacy’s dark age, a period in the late ninth and tenth centuries when Roman noble factions made and unmade popes. Between 896 and 904 nine popes reigned, several of them for only weeks or months. The tenth-century bishop Liutprand of Cremona, whose lively and hostile accounts shaped later views of this period, helped fix its reputation for scandal. Protestant polemicists of the sixteenth century later seized on the episode as proof of papal depravity, while Catholic historians such as Cardinal Baronius, who coined the phrase ‘iron age’ for this period, also condemned it in strong terms. Both sides, for different reasons, kept the story alive.

The trial has since been retold many times, often with gruesome invented details. A painting by the French artist Jean-Paul Laurens in 1870 shows the robed corpse slumped on its throne before an accusing pope, and it remains the image most people associate with the event. Some modern retellings present the synod as a symbol of papal corruption in general. Historians prefer to see it as a product of a particular crisis, when the papacy had no strong protector, Rome was torn by faction, and spiritual authority had become a prize in the struggle for the imperial crown.