The one about the dead pope. In today's episode we look at one of the most insane parts of catholic history: the cadaver synod, within the wider context of the iron age of the papacy. There was a pope that put another pope on trial, The Shyamalan twist? The defendant was a corpse!
Wiki Links:
The Referenced article:
The Cadaver Synod: Strangest Trial in History
Loose transcript:
Hi everyone! Welcome back to episode 2 of Nightmare now! The show where we make up the taglines as we go! We discuss all the horrible happenings of humanity and all the extreme eerieness of everything else. I’m your host erik byrne but before we really get into the rotting guts of this episode I want to get a few clerical things out of the way real quick here:
First thanks for tuning in whether it’s your first or second episode welcome.
Episode 2 is a huge milestone, because according to some bulls*** statistic I read somewhere, 12% percent of all podcasts don’t even make it this far. So thanks for everyone’s support! All ten listeners of the first episode, you tha real ones.
I want to be transparent up front here with my plans for the immediate future and long distance future for the show. Doing a big fully researched episode like the tiger one last week is a lot of work, but at the same time it’s my first go around here. I’ll get better, I promise. What that means, at least for now is, I can’t read multiple sources, write an outline and jokes, record, edit, promote, upload and do all that alone every single week. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to bring you all the spook every week but I’m thinking maybe a shorter episode every two weeks or something to keep it coming. I want to keep the quality high so these ones won’t necessarily need books and books of research to cover the full story in a satisfactory way. This episode is gonna be a little bit like that. We’ll see just how long it ends up being but honestly I couldn’t even find a book on this topic anyway, but it’s wild and right up our alley so without further ado I present to you all, the synod horrenda, known in english as the cadaver synod.
It was january of 897 in Rome, and the vatican was winding up for what would prove to be maybe the second most embarrassing moment for the papacy, after you know, the rampant sex abuse but that’s for another show. The current pope stephen the sixth, or possibly the seventh?? Most of the sources I looked at didn’t seem to agree on this detail, like at all, look it up every other article or thing about it switches between them but for our purposes we’ll call him the sixth. Everyone in this story is dead so the only people I’ll offend with that are medieval scholars anyway, so sorry to you guys.
So stephen the 6th was putting together a synod. We’re just gonna gloss over the fact that the whole time i was doing research for this I thought it was SAI NOD but apparently it’s sinnod. For those of you that don’t know what that is like I didn’t it’s basically a religious assembly, particularly in this context like a court trial. Stephen was effectively the prosecutor, the judge and the jury of this trial himself, which is a little corrupt but not too crazy in the annals of history. What sets it apart is the defendant. The previous pope, pope formosus. Are you seeing the problem here? As far as i know The new pope is not announced or elected or whatever, until the previous one has died. Pope formosus had died on april 4th 869. His corpse had been rotting in st peter's basilica for seven months.
That really didn’t matter to stephen, who was presumably a little bit insane, so he ordered that the corpse of formosus be exhumed from its tomb dressed in his sunday best vestments and brought into the papal court to stand, well you know, sit trial. The rotting worm infested corpse was propped up onto a throne to just take all the verbal abuse thrown at it. There’s a painting of this that’s f***g incredible. Maybe I’ll make it the episode art or something, I’ll at least link it in the show notes. But it looks like ace attorney meets dawn of the dead meets a literal god damned iron maiden album art. It f***ing rules I want it on a T shirt. And this actually happened!
Formosus is sitting there with no eyes and stretched, decayed, greying skin all propped up with the hat and everything while stephen is just giving him the phoenix wright OBJECTION point.
So naturally formosus isn’t really very good at defending himself from the charges levied against him, being dead and mute. But he wasn’t completely helpless, they threw the skelepope a bone by having a young unnamed deacon sit behind the throne and answer as him in his defense, but this kid was obviously told to not do too well, the case was supposed to be a slam dunk after all. This is one of my favorite parts of the story even though it’s not super well documented. Unfortunately most of the documents regarding the cadaver synod were destroyed later on when people realized how fucking batshit insane it was and they were like maybe we leave this bit out of the lore for a while. But back to the young deacon, imagine you’re sitting behind this LITERALLY ROTTING IN FRONT OF A GIANT AUDIENCE CORPSE, and it’s getting grilled about stuff like where were you on the night of march 27th and you just have to do your best jeff dunham and be like “I was dead your honor”
Well how about the july the 13th?
Still dead.
Amazing. But the real charges against formosus fall into a political sort of category, at least most historians seem to think so. So before we close out the trial of formosus, I know you’re on the edge of your seat wondering whether or not stephen is going to find him guilty. I’ll give you two guesses. But I think it’s important to give a little context to this whole affair.
First off, basically everyone but stephen rightly thought this was totally gross and insane. This kind of thing was not common at the time, it was completely wild back then too. And not just the immediate surroundings of this macabre trial were crazy. This was a tumultuous time for the the papacy in general, so much so that it got a reputation as the quote “iron age of the papacy.”
Most of this hinged on the fact that more or less the pope was the only one that could crown a new holy roman emperor, and because of this and the power that it brought, the papacy didn’t always attract the most uh, scrupulous people to be involved with it. So basically all these families and factions vying to become emperor would try to make one of their supporters a pope, or have other high ranking members of the church killed or exiled to further their own ambitions. There’s a fabulous article about this by this guy, donald wilkes junior that really helped putting this episode together that goes into a lot of detail about this so called iron age. It’s all very game of thrones. I’ll link to that in the notes. So in the 8 years from eight ninety six to nine oh four there was nine popes compared to there being nine popes from 1900 to 2 thousand. With all this intrigue and murder the papal turnover was pretty damn high. Some were poisoned, some clubbed to death, others thrown in jail to rot, and others died in giant air quotes mysterious circumstances. Read that as probably also murdered.
So it’s in the middle of this crazy violent century of the catholic church in rome that this ridiculous trial takes place. Historians suggest that the specific motivations for the synod most likely were due to a sort of rivalry between formosus and steven, where both people were sort of members of opposing factions vying for the emperorship. Is that the right word? Empire? Whatever. So stephen was in with the previous emperor guy the third of spoleto and formosus encouraged this other dude arnulf of corinthia to invade and usurp this other guy… guy. The third. So he does and formosus makes arnulf emperor. This made a number of people very upset for reasons that are honestly beyond the scope of my research today. Maybe we’ll go back and do a deep dive on the iron age here some other time.
So when formosus dies in april, holy crap I forgot about this part, steven wasn’t actually the next pope. It was this guy boniface, bony face? Bonifachy? the sixth. He got in right after formosus died but he died 13 days later from the gout. So that happened. In and out, like I said, high turnover rates on the popes.
After that stephen takes over and he’s part of the opposing faction to formosus. And all that craziness sets the stage for the cadaver synod.
So we go back to the synod, we’ve got a rotting corpse on a throne, we’ve got stephen hurling insults and doing a whole inquisition on this body and we’ve got some teeenager hiding behind said throne and answering yes or no or denying any of these quote unquote charges as best as he can, which would make a f***g awesome alternate universe saturday night live sketch where they did all history.
One thing we didn’t touch on yet though was the fact that this wasn’t a 2021 covid zoom trial. There was plenty of other people kicking around. There was a whole audience slash jury of people watching this shitshow take place and I can’t help but thinking about them like this: Imagine your boss shows up and wants to do some kind of stupid leadership, synergy, team building insert your own buzzword here exercise and you’re just like f***k it, its better than working right?
I imagine the whole thing was catered and stuff and what are you gonna do? Tell the pope he’s being a ridiculous a-hole? I feel like that’s a shortcut to being hanged for heresy. This is the perfect example of how I'm doing the “Night bite” episodes differently. I don’t need to look that up. You’re not here for a citation for your medieval history PHD. Do they get hanged? Hung? Some other form of execution? Who knows? Who cares? This is nightmare now after dark, cite the main episodes, we’re playing it fast and loose here. Just like pope stephen was. So while he's grilling the body of formosus, not literally it didn’t get that crazy, they were catholics not cannibals. That’s for another episode. While he’s aggressively interrogating the body and the deacon is doing his best to defend this corpse from behind the throne, stephen shouts out the charges, violating the church canon by becoming pope in the first place, coveting the papacy and perjury. It’s unclear whether the perjury was in the trial after he was dead or in some other capacity but it’s even funnier to imagine it in that trial. Just stephen shouting down the deacon while he’s trying to do the shaggy, wasn’t me” bit from behind this body. And getting called out for lying under oath.
Unfortunately any transcripts of the cadaver synod were destroyed so we don’t really know how long the trial lasted or what exactly was said but what we do know is mostly from testimony of people that were there and what they wrote elsewhere and from this long form twenty thousand line poem called the ring and the book. As for the length You have to imagine it was at least a long afternoon ordeal. However long it took, the verdict was reached with very little deliberation. Guilty. Of all charges. Shocking right? And he put up such a good defense! One interesting part of the defense actually, might have been God himself appearing as a witness. Reportedly there was a minor earthquake in the middle of the trial as if to be like yo, cut this shit out or take it out of my house. I couldn’t find more than one source to corroborate that though so it might be bullshit. Who knows? Either way it didn’t help formosusus case at all; he was still found guilty.
On to the sentencing: if you thought the trial was grisly, get a load of this: becaues formosus was found guilty, and they couldn’t exactly give him the death penalty, they instead decided to strip him of all aspects of his papacy starting with his clothes and then the three fingers on his right hand, the ones that a pope uses to bestow blessings onto people. Next they invalidated every proclamation and act that he ever did as pope. Another funny bit of this was that one of formusus actions as pope was actually what made Stephen a bishop initially. By invalidating that does he invalidate his own papacy? Apparently not, and he just kinda glosses over that detail, much like I’m going to. At least I pointed it out right? And finally they dressed him up as a commoner and buried him in a grave for foreigners and heathens. But his troubles didn’t end there. Maybe they already had, you know, he was dead after all, so that brings up all sorts of afterlife questions that are beyond the scope of what I'm trying to accomplish here. But the corpse’s troubles didn’t end there. Almost immediately after he’s buried in this heathen cemetery, Stephen is like, screw that, he aint getting off that easy. So formusus is exhumed again, take a shot every time this guy gets dug up or buried and you’ll have a good buzz going by the end of the episode. So they exhume him from the foreigner cemetery and toss his body into the tiber river.
The tiber river was basically where they threw anyone and anything they wanted to get rid of permanently
Shortly after that a monk pulled the body out of the river and presumably preserved it somehow. After this the corpse reportedly performed miracles. What’s interesting about that is not a single one of the sources I had could describe what those miracles were, they all just said exactly that “Reportedly performed miracles” unquote. We’re left to speculate, so how I interpret that is he gets pulled out of the river and just does the WB frog Hello muh baby hello my honey hello my ragtime gal, jig dance and then collapses into a waterlogged pile of bones barely hanging together.
Flash back over to stephen, while formosus is off performing miracles on the banks of the tiber, stephen is facing down an angry mob at the vatican. Turns out a massive macabre show trial of a popular pope’s dead body wasn’t well received by the masses. A few months after the trial there was a revolt and Stephen was removed from his post, forced to wear the clothes of a peasant and then thrown in prison. As if that wasn’t bad enough, after spending a few months in prison, he was strangled to death by a cellmate. Again high turnover, iron age yada yada yada. Being pope aint easy like it is today.
Here we are then. Formosus is long dead, Stephen is short dead. You’d think that’s where the story ends right? Wrong. One of the popes after Stephen the sixth was this dude Theodore the second and he was a formosus fan. He said the whole affair was, I’m paraphrasing here, an irredeemable f**show. OL theo 2 called his own synod that nullified the whole thing and reinstated formosus. The problem with that is that they had to get his body back from the monks and dress him up, bring it back to rebury it at saint peter's basilica… Again. Drink if you’re following along. The next pope John the ninth also agreed that the trial was a sham and doubly nullified it. Additionally they made it illegal to hold trial against a corpse. A rule you would think would be unnecessary, but hey they’re their for a reason, just like making tying an alligator to a street sign is illegal in indiana someone has to f***k it up before they make it a rule.
again you might think that the story ends there, and again you’d be wrong. After those two popes came this dude sergius the third. This guy was a real bastard. And he was not a formosus fan. He was actually at the proceedings of the cadaver synod and was one of the few people that was just like “hell yeah screw formosus, this rules.” So when he became pope he decreed that the synod was in fact legit and even went so far as to add an extra plaque on stephen’s tomb that said he was a rad dude and ahead of his time with the cadaver synod, and that formosus was a piece of s**t. History did not remember Sergius the third favorably. He was the only pope to order the murder of another pope and also he fathered an illegitimate son as pope. I’d like to reiterate here that I’m by no means an expert on catholic law or theology, but I’m pretty sure the pope isn’t supposed to be knocking chicks up. After sergius the third, people generally agree that the whole cadaver synod was an insane, illegal, ridiculous blemish on history and formosus basically did nothing wrong.
And that, folks, is where this story ends. Formosus stands vindicated after being used as a macabre prop in one of the most ridiculous events of the time period. Stephen and Sergius lie in disgrace and the catholic church has other matters to attend to.
I’m erik byrne, signing off for this week's nightmare now episode, I’ll see you next week! In the meantime check out my website, That at the time of recording isn’t set up haha, but at least i've got instagram at nightmare dot now. Twitter is coming soon and Hopefully I’ll have a way to link all of that by the time I get this uploaded. Thanks everyone for listening and if you’ve got it in your heart throw ya boi a like, subscribe and a review on apple podcasts or whatever. In the first few weeks of a show releasing is where all that makes a huge difference so every single one counts big time. Thanks again for listening, it means so much to me that you think my show is worth your time. Any questions or comments shoot me a line at
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