Nine months after Pope Formosus died, his successor had the body exhumed, propped on a throne in ecclesiastical robes, and formally prosecuted. A trembling deacon was assigned to speak for the corpse. It did not go well — for anyone.
A tight visual walkthrough of the strangest trial in Church history — the setup, the charges, and the moment the verdict was read to a rotting defendant.
The full record: January 897, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and Pope Stephen VI screaming accusations at his exhumed predecessor. Start here for the who, when, and why.
A medieval-history deep dive into how a decade of papal feuds, imperial politics, and a body count of pontiffs made this macabre spectacle almost inevitable.
The vivid retelling — the deacon forced to answer for the corpse, the three blessing-fingers hacked off, and the body dumped into the Tiber.
The aftermath: within months a mob turned on Stephen VI, who was thrown in a cell and strangled. Karma arrived fast in ninth-century Rome.
Nearly a thousand years later a French painter froze the scene forever: a shrunken corpse slumped on the throne while bishops whisper in the dark. The image that made the event unforgettable.
How one exhumed body triggered a theological crisis over the validity of every ordination Formosus ever performed — a legal paradox the Church spent years untangling.