Law · Published October 5, 2026

January 897: The Pope Who Was Put on Trial After Death

By TodayInHistory.wtf Editorial Desk. Reviewed by TodayInHistory.wtf Editorial Standards.

In January 897, inside the Lateran Basilica in Rome, a church council sat in judgment. The defendant was a former pope, Formosus. He had been dead for about nine months.

On the orders of the reigning pope, Stephen VI, Formosus's body was exhumed, dressed in papal vestments and propped up on a throne. A deacon was assigned to answer the charges on his behalf. The court found him guilty.

The episode is known as the Cadaver Synod, and sometimes by its Latin name, the Synodus Horrenda. It sounds like the kind of story that must have grown in the telling over the centuries. In fact, the core facts are attested in sources from the period, even though the writers who left them were partisans of one side or the other.

Rome in the ninth century

Making sense of why a pope would put a corpse on trial means knowing something about the papacy at the end of the 800s.

The Carolingian Empire that Charlemagne built had broken apart. Rival families in Italy and beyond were fighting over the title of emperor, and the popes were pulled into those struggles. Because the pope crowned emperors, control of the papacy was worth a great deal. Roman aristocratic families competed for influence, and papal elections were often violent affairs.

Historians often call the stretch that followed the "dark age" of the papacy, or the saeculum obscurum. The Cadaver Synod is one of its most notorious episodes.

Who was Formosus?

Formosus was a capable and ambitious churchman. Before he became pope he had served as a bishop and as a papal envoy on important missions, including one to Bulgaria. He had also fallen out with an earlier pope, John VIII, who excommunicated him for a time. That excommunication was later lifted.

He became pope in 891. Once in office, he was drawn into the fight over the imperial crown. He crowned Lambert of Spoleto as co-emperor, but later turned to a rival, Arnulf of Carinthia, and crowned him emperor in 896. Formosus died in April 896, not long afterward.

Stephen VI and the trial

After a very brief papacy by Boniface VI, Stephen VI became pope in 896. Stephen was aligned with the Spoleto faction, which had good reason to resent Formosus for turning to Arnulf.

The charges brought against the dead pope included breaking church rules by moving from one bishopric to another, which was forbidden at the time, and taking the papacy unlawfully while technically still a bishop elsewhere.

The verdict declared his papacy invalid. As a result, all of his acts as pope, including the ordinations of priests and bishops he had performed, were declared void. That created an enormous practical problem, because a great many clergy suddenly found their status in question.

What was done to the body

According to the sources, the three fingers of his right hand that he had used to give blessings were cut off. The papal vestments were stripped from the corpse. He was buried for a short time in a common grave, and then the body was dug up again and thrown into the Tiber River.

Later accounts say a monk pulled the body out of the river. It was eventually reburied in St. Peter's Basilica.

The backlash

The trial outraged many people in Rome. Within months Stephen VI had been deposed, imprisoned and strangled. That happened in the summer of 897.

His successors reversed course. Pope Theodore II, who reigned for only about three weeks in late 897, held a synod that annulled the Cadaver Synod and arranged for Formosus to be reburied. Pope John IX, who came next, held further synods that confirmed the reversal and banned trials of the dead.

Even so, the dispute did not end there. A later pope, Sergius III, who reigned from 904 to 911 and had taken part in the original trial, once again declared Formosus's ordinations invalid. Arguments over whether those ordinations counted dragged on for years.

How do we know about it?

The main sources include the writings of Auxilius of Naples and Eugenius Vulgarius, both partisans of Formosus who wrote in defense of his ordinations. The chronicler Liutprand of Cremona, writing in the following century, also tells the story. Liutprand was a vivid writer but often a hostile one, and historians read him with care.

The records of the synods held by Theodore II and John IX, which formally annulled the Cadaver Synod, are important evidence that the trial really took place, since they were a direct response to it.

Some details, such as the exact words spoken at the trial, are later reconstructions. The basic sequence, a dead pope exhumed, tried and condemned, and the decision later reversed, is well supported.

Why it matters

The Cadaver Synod is often held up as a symbol of the papacy at its lowest point. It is also an extreme case of something that happens in many political systems: a new regime working to erase the legitimacy of the old one.

Annulling a predecessor's acts is common enough. Doing it by staging a trial of his body is not. The spectacle was the whole point. It was designed to humiliate Formosus and his supporters in public.

There was a legal logic to it as well. In church law, the validity of ordinations mattered a great deal, because priests and bishops administered the sacraments. By declaring that Formosus had never truly been pope, Stephen undercut the opponents who had been ordained by him.

In art and memory

The scene has drawn artists. The French painter Jean-Paul Laurens painted Le Pape Formose et Étienne VII in 1870, showing the dead pope on his throne facing his accuser. The numbering in the painting's title follows an older system for counting the popes named Stephen.

What the record supports

Sources