Happy Saturday, Everybody. Today's classic is from our October episode called Why Would You Put a Cadaver on Trial? It tells the story of Pope Formosis, whose body was put on trial after his death in the year eight nineties six, As in his actual cadaver was dug up and put on the stand with a deacon speaking for him. So while this episode has the Halloween e elements of a cadaver and an exhimation which everyone loves, it is also a look at papal history dating back to more than a thousand years ago. That's kind of a random side note. This episode is from former hosts Sarah and Bablina, and as they're talking at the top of the show, they say that they don't go looking for exhamations to talk about in the podcast, They just kind of keep stumbling over them. That is definitely not the case anymore. I do go looking for exhamations. There is a Google alert involved. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deliving chalk Reboarding and we are continuing with our spooky Halloween October series, and we figured it would be the perfect time to discuss an exhimation. And people do suggest exhlimations to us pretty regularly. I was going to say, isn't it always the perfect time to discuss an exhimation is if it is stuff you missed in history class, But we promised that most of the time we don't go looking for these exlimations. They just kind of happen. It'll be something completely unrelated to a potentially disinterred body, and then suddenly there is one, so it's kind of a surprise. But this one is not a surprise. Exhimation is really pretty impossible to avoid, and it's actually drove listeners like Matthew and Naomi and Barry, as well as our friend and former coworker Molly Edmonds to suggest this topic to us in the first place, because it's a strange, strange topic. I mean, to make the most obvious understatement. Yeah, it really is unusual. And like most exhamations that we mentioned on the podcast, this one wasn't done to verify a cause of death or to relocate the body. It was done to place the months old corpse on trial. So of course we have to address the question why would anyone disenter a body to put it on trial. Why indeed, especially when that body wasn't just anyone but was a former pope. So Encyclopedia Britannica always a good place to start if you want a general picture for the basics. Yeah, they call this trial one of the most bizarre incidents in papal history, but you could also call it one of the most brutal incidents, one of the most disturbing incidents. But dead pope on trial wasn't just this freakish event at the time. Before we talk about the trial and the specific popes and players involved, we have to talk a little bit about a dark time called the papal pornocracy. Uh, it was, like I said, a series of kind of dark years that started just before the end of the Carolingian Imperial line in eight So we're talking way back. This is an old podcast. So first, just to give you a little context, we'll talk about something a little more recent. After the death of Pope John Paul the second few years back, people around the world, including non Catholics, learned a little bit about the papal electoral process called a conclave. But the Pope hasn't always been elected by a conclave, and in the ninth and tenth centuries the selection process had a lot of input from Roman noble families and German princes. Now these families put forward their own candidates and had their own factions, and according to papal historian horse k Man quote, the one aim of each party, pursued by every resource of violence and intrigue, was to get control of the chair of St. Peter. Its occupant must be one of theirs at all costs. So it kind of figures that there would be quite a bit of trouble plus a pretty high turnover. And that's also a bit of an understatement. A third of the popes elected between eight seventy two and ten twelve died under suspicious circumstances, and between eight and nine oh four, the most violent unstable period, there were nine popes. Yeah, that's a remarkably high turnover, even considering that these are older fellows most of the time, even when they're actually not always old. But our story takes place in eight so really right in the thick of this highly controversial, unsettled time. And we're gonna start with the pope who started off this high turnover decade Pope for Mosis, who is also are exhumed man on trial unfortunately for him. And I thought it was interesting because it's not just his um the terrible things that happened to him in death, but the ups and downs of his pre death religious career kind of epitomized the hazards of the time of being pope or or being um somebody who was a contender to be pope. So he had been born in Rome in about eight sixteen and he was made a cardinal bishop in eight sixty four by Pope St. Nicholas the First. We're going to really rattle off a lot of successors of his in this brief life story. You may want to take notes. Pope Adrian the Second had sent the future Pope for Mosis on missions to France, where he had performed quite well. He was highly regarded. Then under Pope John the Eighth he had been exiled and excommunicated, and um there were some pretty outrageous reasons for this, like despoiling oysters, and it seemed pretty obviously political. Since Formosis had, like I said, a good reputation, he was considered ascetic and considered a very peaceful, intelligent man, so the reasons for this excommunication were probably more that he was himself a good contender to be pope. But after time he was pardoned but still not allowed to return. Then eventually another pope, Pope Marinus the First, allowed him back to Rome and returned him to his position. And then under the next two popes st Adrian the third and Stephen the Fifth sometimes Stephen the sixth, he finally grew more powerful. So that's quite a busy life story just leading up to his eight ninety one election where he himself becomes pope under Stephen, though some big political things gone down, so we should tell you a little bit about that too. Charles the Fat, the last Carolingian in the imperial line, had died in his place. Stephen had reluctantly crowned Duke Guido of Spoleto out of a mess of contenders Roman emperor, but by doing so he was giving tremendous power to an uncomfortably close neighbor of the papal states. So when for Mosis was elected, he also had to go along with Stephen and recognized Guido and his son Lambert as co Roman emperors. But just because for most of this recognized Guido and Lambert as co Roman Empress, didn't mean he was on behind them. In fact, he asked his own preferred candidate, this guy, King Arnulf of the East Franks, to come and invade Italy and take care of Guido, get rid of him, and get rid of his whole faction. And it almost worked. Arnulf launched a campaign to Italy and in eight for Moses did crown him emperor in Rome, so it seemed like almost success. But before Arnolf could actually battle Lambert out in Spoleto, Guido had by this point died. The German contender was struck by paralysis, and that's what you'll see it described as in Missource. I guess this is the eight hundreds, so we don't get too many more details than that. But anyway, Arnulf was out of the running. He had to quit, and not too long after that for Mosis died, So it kind of seems like the end of this immediate story, but that was not the case at all. The story of Formosis actually picked up just a couple of weeks later after the brief pontificate of Boniface the sixth, when a new pope was again elected Stephen the sixth there sometimes the seventh. Unlike for Mosas, Stephen was a supporter of the splatant party Lambert and his mother, the Duchess Agultrude, but he didn't just support them in traditional dignified ways. He agreed to conduct a trial to punish his predecessor who had betrayed them. Less than a year after for Mosis had died, Stephen had him disinterred, dressed in papal vestiments, and enthroned. Stephen acted as a prosecutor here in this trial, charging for Mosis with the charges levied against him during his excommunication, but focusing on three main things perjury, coveting the papacy, and violating church cannons, specifically transferring from the sea of Porto to that of Rome. So, a poor eighteen year old deacon was forced by Stephen to act as for Moses's defense, you know, answer for him, squeaking out some kind of defense whenever he could interrupt Steven's tirade against the deceased pope, and he was really too scared to get out much more than Mumbles. So unsurprisingly, Stephen found for most is guilty and ruled that all of his acts would be null and all of his ordinations void. And this really had a double calculated herk in addition to obviously shaming for moses memory, which was the primary reason to do it, for Moses had appointed Stephen himself as a bishop, and by having that appointment annulled, Stephen got off the hook for some irregularities in his own transfer from one seed to that of Rome. So it was pretty pretty tricky on his part to to clean up his his own record a little bit. But it wasn't just about assuring Steven's legitimacy though, or cutting out for Moses's proteges who he had um consecrated. It was about just completely disrespecting the deceased pope's body. And I mean the following is really pretty disturbing. What they what they did to the guy. And I think this is why um this story has stuck around so so prominently in history. YEA. For example, the papal vestiments were ripped from the corpse and it was redressed in layman's clothes. The finger is used for consecrations were cut off and Ougle Trude got to keep them, and the body was then dragged through the streets buried in a pauper's grave before being dug up again and dumped into the Tiber. But thankfully, there's such a thing as going too far, and even in this violent partisan time in Rome, folks were not happy with Stephen and this disgraceful treatment of his predecessor. So it was kind of a situation of what goes around comes around. For most of his body was eventually pulled out of the river by a hermit, where it was reburied, and not long after that miracles started being attributed to him. And to add to matters for for the Romans who were paying attention to the story, the latter in Basilica, which is the official ecclesiastical seat of the Bishop of Rome, also known as the Pope, collapsed in an earthquake, which seemed like a terrible, terrible sign. And so all of this, plus Stephen really pushing the point too hard his insistence that the clergy, ordained by forms to send in letters acknowledging that their appointments were invalid. All of this bubbled up and finally led to rebellion. The clergy and the people of Rome rose up against Stephen. So Stephen was stripped of his papal powers and thrown into prison, and there the allies of Formosis strangled him in August. The next Pope, Romanis, lasted only a few months, and the one following him, Theodore the Second, just a few weeks. But before Theodore died, he got right to work on honoring the dead desecrated Formosis. He held his own synod regarding the cadaver synod and knowing Stephen's ruling and restoring Formosis acts in consecrations. He also had the body brought back exhoomed once again to St. Peter's and reburied in it's old tomb. So after the brief pontificate of Theodore the Second, next came John the Knight, who, to really make it clear how uncooled this whole trial of the dead pope had been again nullified Stephen Senate twice, just for a good measure, and because it apparently needed spelling out too. He also prohibited future trials of dead people. Probably a good policy for anyone, but um not or at least if you're actually putting the body on trial. I'll add that caveat. But not everyone was a foremost a supporter, I know, we're talking about overturning this cadaver senate. Uh. The last pope in this decade of rapid fire succession and intrigue, Pope Sergius the Third had supported Stephen from the beginning. He had even taken part in the cadaver sen of the trial himself. And like Stephen, Pope Sergius the Third also had an allegiance or alliance with the Spoletant fact Action and Um he had had a pope and an anti pope strangled to pave the way for himself, and Um allied himself further with the most powerful family in Rome, Senator Theophile act and his Byzantine princess wife Theodora. And just kind of a side note here, Sergius even had a son with their teenage daughter, who became a very very powerful future Roman matriarch and popemaker herself. But as back back to our maintail here, as proof of his loyalty to the House of Spleto, Sergius reaffirmed the cadaver Senate. And this was really more than just talk. I mean, I know it sounds like a few years after the fact, maybe just trying to keep your allies comfortable but it meant that all of formosis ordinations were again invalid, so anyone who had received orders under him needed to go back and do it again. And Sergius was especially vengeual for any bishops who had been consecrated by for Moses, who would obviously be the men most closely connected to the former pope and his enemy. So all in all, this is a pretty grizzly story, and during the papal pornocracy it extended a bit beyond Sergius. To John Peter Fam, former Vatican diplomat and author of Heirs of the Fisherman Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession, puts it pretty succinctly when he writes that quote, Although at least in the minds of believers, the office that these popes have held in succession is of divine origin, how these men have been raised to that office is a very human affair. Yeah. And FAM's book that we just mentioned, I mean, really does go into the nitty gritty of it all, you know, um, looking at the history of popes and and how they died and what happened after they died, and how uh the new pope was was chosen, and I think it's interesting to look at that we're probably more familiar with the twentieth century history, but to look at these times in the eight hundreds and nine hundreds and and see what was going on and what power plays where we're going on, but we want to leave on a pretty interesting side net something to think about. There hasn't ever been a pope for mostes the second poor guy. Though Cardinal Pietro Barboa did consider the name in fourteen sixty four, he had to be talked out of it. Apparently his choice instead was Paul the Second sounds a lot safer, a lot safer, not calling to mind any dark chapters in history, and um, anything you might not want to think about during a celebratory time. So anyway, though, this was a really interesting thing to research. So I'm glad that Molly let us know about it. And thanks to Matthew and Naomi and Barry for all suggesting it as well making letting us know that it's something you all really wanted to hear about. Two. Yeah, it seems like you can get taken to tests sometimes for looking at the pope in such a human light, but it is really fascinating. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday, since this episode is out of the archive. If you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday, Everybody. Today's classic is from our October episode called Why Would You Put a Cadaver on Trial? It tells the story of Pope Formosis, whose body was put on trial after his death in the year eight nineties six, As in his actual cadaver was dug up and put on the stand with a deacon speaking for him. So while this episode has the Halloween e elements of a cadaver and an exhimation which everyone loves, it is also a look at papal history dating back to more than a thousand years ago. That's kind of a random side note. This episode is from former hosts Sarah and Bablina, and as they're talking at the top of the show, they say that they don't go looking for exhamations to talk about in the podcast, They just kind of keep stumbling over them. That is definitely not the case anymore. I do go looking for exhamations. There is a Google alert involved. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deliving chalk Reboarding and we are continuing with our spooky Halloween October series, and we figured it would be the perfect time to discuss an exhimation. And people do suggest exhlimations to us pretty regularly. I was going to say, isn't it always the perfect time to discuss an exhimation is if it is stuff you missed in history class, But we promised that most of the time we don't go looking for these exlimations. They just kind of happen. It'll be something completely unrelated to a potentially disinterred body, and then suddenly there is one, so it's kind of a surprise. But this one is not a surprise. Exhimation is really pretty impossible to avoid, and it's actually drove listeners like Matthew and Naomi and Barry, as well as our friend and former coworker Molly Edmonds to suggest this topic to us in the first place, because it's a strange, strange topic. I mean, to make the most obvious understatement. Yeah, it really is unusual. And like most exhamations that we mentioned on the podcast, this one wasn't done to verify a cause of death or to relocate the body. It was done to place the months old corpse on trial. So of course we have to address the question why would anyone disenter a body to put it on trial. Why indeed, especially when that body wasn't just anyone but was a former pope. So Encyclopedia Britannica always a good place to start if you want a general picture for the basics. Yeah, they call this trial one of the most bizarre incidents in papal history, but you could also call it one of the most brutal incidents, one of the most disturbing incidents. But dead pope on trial wasn't just this freakish event at the time. Before we talk about the trial and the specific popes and players involved, we have to talk a little bit about a dark time called the papal pornocracy. Uh, it was, like I said, a series of kind of dark years that started just before the end of the Carolingian Imperial line in eight So we're talking way back. This is an old podcast. So first, just to give you a little context, we'll talk about something a little more recent. After the death of Pope John Paul the second few years back, people around the world, including non Catholics, learned a little bit about the papal electoral process called a conclave. But the Pope hasn't always been elected by a conclave, and in the ninth and tenth centuries the selection process had a lot of input from Roman noble families and German princes. Now these families put forward their own candidates and had their own factions, and according to papal historian horse k Man quote, the one aim of each party, pursued by every resource of violence and intrigue, was to get control of the chair of St. Peter. Its occupant must be one of theirs at all costs. So it kind of figures that there would be quite a bit of trouble plus a pretty high turnover. And that's also a bit of an understatement. A third of the popes elected between eight seventy two and ten twelve died under suspicious circumstances, and between eight and nine oh four, the most violent unstable period, there were nine popes. Yeah, that's a remarkably high turnover, even considering that these are older fellows most of the time, even when they're actually not always old. But our story takes place in eight so really right in the thick of this highly controversial, unsettled time. And we're gonna start with the pope who started off this high turnover decade Pope for Mosis, who is also are exhumed man on trial unfortunately for him. And I thought it was interesting because it's not just his um the terrible things that happened to him in death, but the ups and downs of his pre death religious career kind of epitomized the hazards of the time of being pope or or being um somebody who was a contender to be pope. So he had been born in Rome in about eight sixteen and he was made a cardinal bishop in eight sixty four by Pope St. Nicholas the First. We're going to really rattle off a lot of successors of his in this brief life story. You may want to take notes. Pope Adrian the Second had sent the future Pope for Mosis on missions to France, where he had performed quite well. He was highly regarded. Then under Pope John the Eighth he had been exiled and excommunicated, and um there were some pretty outrageous reasons for this, like despoiling oysters, and it seemed pretty obviously political. Since Formosis had, like I said, a good reputation, he was considered ascetic and considered a very peaceful, intelligent man, so the reasons for this excommunication were probably more that he was himself a good contender to be pope. But after time he was pardoned but still not allowed to return. Then eventually another pope, Pope Marinus the First, allowed him back to Rome and returned him to his position. And then under the next two popes st Adrian the third and Stephen the Fifth sometimes Stephen the sixth, he finally grew more powerful. So that's quite a busy life story just leading up to his eight ninety one election where he himself becomes pope under Stephen, though some big political things gone down, so we should tell you a little bit about that too. Charles the Fat, the last Carolingian in the imperial line, had died in his place. Stephen had reluctantly crowned Duke Guido of Spoleto out of a mess of contenders Roman emperor, but by doing so he was giving tremendous power to an uncomfortably close neighbor of the papal states. So when for Mosis was elected, he also had to go along with Stephen and recognized Guido and his son Lambert as co Roman emperors. But just because for most of this recognized Guido and Lambert as co Roman Empress, didn't mean he was on behind them. In fact, he asked his own preferred candidate, this guy, King Arnulf of the East Franks, to come and invade Italy and take care of Guido, get rid of him, and get rid of his whole faction. And it almost worked. Arnulf launched a campaign to Italy and in eight for Moses did crown him emperor in Rome, so it seemed like almost success. But before Arnolf could actually battle Lambert out in Spoleto, Guido had by this point died. The German contender was struck by paralysis, and that's what you'll see it described as in Missource. I guess this is the eight hundreds, so we don't get too many more details than that. But anyway, Arnulf was out of the running. He had to quit, and not too long after that for Mosis died, So it kind of seems like the end of this immediate story, but that was not the case at all. The story of Formosis actually picked up just a couple of weeks later after the brief pontificate of Boniface the sixth, when a new pope was again elected Stephen the sixth there sometimes the seventh. Unlike for Mosas, Stephen was a supporter of the splatant party Lambert and his mother, the Duchess Agultrude, but he didn't just support them in traditional dignified ways. He agreed to conduct a trial to punish his predecessor who had betrayed them. Less than a year after for Mosis had died, Stephen had him disinterred, dressed in papal vestiments, and enthroned. Stephen acted as a prosecutor here in this trial, charging for Mosis with the charges levied against him during his excommunication, but focusing on three main things perjury, coveting the papacy, and violating church cannons, specifically transferring from the sea of Porto to that of Rome. So, a poor eighteen year old deacon was forced by Stephen to act as for Moses's defense, you know, answer for him, squeaking out some kind of defense whenever he could interrupt Steven's tirade against the deceased pope, and he was really too scared to get out much more than Mumbles. So unsurprisingly, Stephen found for most is guilty and ruled that all of his acts would be null and all of his ordinations void. And this really had a double calculated herk in addition to obviously shaming for moses memory, which was the primary reason to do it, for Moses had appointed Stephen himself as a bishop, and by having that appointment annulled, Stephen got off the hook for some irregularities in his own transfer from one seed to that of Rome. So it was pretty pretty tricky on his part to to clean up his his own record a little bit. But it wasn't just about assuring Steven's legitimacy though, or cutting out for Moses's proteges who he had um consecrated. It was about just completely disrespecting the deceased pope's body. And I mean the following is really pretty disturbing. What they what they did to the guy. And I think this is why um this story has stuck around so so prominently in history. YEA. For example, the papal vestiments were ripped from the corpse and it was redressed in layman's clothes. The finger is used for consecrations were cut off and Ougle Trude got to keep them, and the body was then dragged through the streets buried in a pauper's grave before being dug up again and dumped into the Tiber. But thankfully, there's such a thing as going too far, and even in this violent partisan time in Rome, folks were not happy with Stephen and this disgraceful treatment of his predecessor. So it was kind of a situation of what goes around comes around. For most of his body was eventually pulled out of the river by a hermit, where it was reburied, and not long after that miracles started being attributed to him. And to add to matters for for the Romans who were paying attention to the story, the latter in Basilica, which is the official ecclesiastical seat of the Bishop of Rome, also known as the Pope, collapsed in an earthquake, which seemed like a terrible, terrible sign. And so all of this, plus Stephen really pushing the point too hard his insistence that the clergy, ordained by forms to send in letters acknowledging that their appointments were invalid. All of this bubbled up and finally led to rebellion. The clergy and the people of Rome rose up against Stephen. So Stephen was stripped of his papal powers and thrown into prison, and there the allies of Formosis strangled him in August. The next Pope, Romanis, lasted only a few months, and the one following him, Theodore the Second, just a few weeks. But before Theodore died, he got right to work on honoring the dead desecrated Formosis. He held his own synod regarding the cadaver synod and knowing Stephen's ruling and restoring Formosis acts in consecrations. He also had the body brought back exhoomed once again to St. Peter's and reburied in it's old tomb. So after the brief pontificate of Theodore the Second, next came John the Knight, who, to really make it clear how uncooled this whole trial of the dead pope had been again nullified Stephen Senate twice, just for a good measure, and because it apparently needed spelling out too. He also prohibited future trials of dead people. Probably a good policy for anyone, but um not or at least if you're actually putting the body on trial. I'll add that caveat. But not everyone was a foremost a supporter, I know, we're talking about overturning this cadaver senate. Uh. The last pope in this decade of rapid fire succession and intrigue, Pope Sergius the Third had supported Stephen from the beginning. He had even taken part in the cadaver sen of the trial himself. And like Stephen, Pope Sergius the Third also had an allegiance or alliance with the Spoletant fact Action and Um he had had a pope and an anti pope strangled to pave the way for himself, and Um allied himself further with the most powerful family in Rome, Senator Theophile act and his Byzantine princess wife Theodora. And just kind of a side note here, Sergius even had a son with their teenage daughter, who became a very very powerful future Roman matriarch and popemaker herself. But as back back to our maintail here, as proof of his loyalty to the House of Spleto, Sergius reaffirmed the cadaver Senate. And this was really more than just talk. I mean, I know it sounds like a few years after the fact, maybe just trying to keep your allies comfortable but it meant that all of formosis ordinations were again invalid, so anyone who had received orders under him needed to go back and do it again. And Sergius was especially vengeual for any bishops who had been consecrated by for Moses, who would obviously be the men most closely connected to the former pope and his enemy. So all in all, this is a pretty grizzly story, and during the papal pornocracy it extended a bit beyond Sergius. To John Peter Fam, former Vatican diplomat and author of Heirs of the Fisherman Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession, puts it pretty succinctly when he writes that quote, Although at least in the minds of believers, the office that these popes have held in succession is of divine origin, how these men have been raised to that office is a very human affair. Yeah. And FAM's book that we just mentioned, I mean, really does go into the nitty gritty of it all, you know, um, looking at the history of popes and and how they died and what happened after they died, and how uh the new pope was was chosen, and I think it's interesting to look at that we're probably more familiar with the twentieth century history, but to look at these times in the eight hundreds and nine hundreds and and see what was going on and what power plays where we're going on, but we want to leave on a pretty interesting side net something to think about. There hasn't ever been a pope for mostes the second poor guy. Though Cardinal Pietro Barboa did consider the name in fourteen sixty four, he had to be talked out of it. Apparently his choice instead was Paul the Second sounds a lot safer, a lot safer, not calling to mind any dark chapters in history, and um, anything you might not want to think about during a celebratory time. So anyway, though, this was a really interesting thing to research. So I'm glad that Molly let us know about it. And thanks to Matthew and Naomi and Barry for all suggesting it as well making letting us know that it's something you all really wanted to hear about. Two. Yeah, it seems like you can get taken to tests sometimes for looking at the pope in such a human light, but it is really fascinating. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday, since this episode is out of the archive. If you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.