Pope Formosus

Before the corpse trial, before the ghoulish spectacle that would define his legacy for a thousand years, Formosus was something genuinely rare in ninth-century Rome: a pope who was good at his job. Elected in 891 AD at roughly seventy years old, he inherited a papacy that was less an institution than a battlefield — carved up between rival Roman noble families, bullied by Lombard warlords, and existentially anxious about who, exactly, was going to protect it. Formosus had spent decades as a diplomat and cardinal before the throne fell to him, and he understood power the way only someone who had survived several attempts to strip him of it could.

His real obsession was stabilizing Christendom's political architecture. In 896, he crowned Lambert of Spoleto's rival — the East Frankish king Arnulf of Carinthia — as Holy Roman Emperor, a move calculated to break Spoletan dominance over Rome. It worked, briefly. Arnulf marched on Rome, took it, and Formosus finally had a protector. Then Arnulf suffered a stroke. He retreated north, Lambert reasserted control, and Formosus died in April 897, probably of natural causes, probably exhausted. He had held the papacy for five years and stabilized almost nothing permanently. That was the tragedy of the era, not of the man.

What came next is where history gets genuinely deranged. Pope Stephen VI, backed by the Spoletan faction that Formosus had spent his career undermining, had the body exhumed, dressed in papal vestments, propped in a chair, and formally tried for perjury and for violating canon law by switching dioceses — a charge that, if upheld, would invalidate every ordination Formosus had ever performed. The verdict was never in doubt. The corpse lost. Its vestments were torn off, the three fingers of consecration on its right hand were cut away, and the body was thrown into the Tiber. It was politics dressed as theology, vengeance costumed as justice.

Formosus was posthumously rehabilitated within a year, when Roman mobs turned on Stephen VI, imprisoned him, and strangled him in his cell. The river fishermen reportedly found the body and returned it quietly to a papal tomb. History, though, kept the trial.