Oh historical people, you so crazy. Today we’re taking a trip to medieval Rome, to attend the trial of a deceased pope. Fair warning, this Historical Thursday is a bit wordy, but before grabbing your pitchforks and yelling “TL;DR!” ask yourself when the last time you read about a dead body being forced to answer for itself in court.
Before attending the trial, some context is needed. Now, we all have our favorite crazy stories about the popes, but the 9th century was an especially odd time. In the span of 100 years there were 22 different pontiffs, many of whom reigned for a matter of weeks. Disagreements and divided loyalties were causing the church to cannibalize itself; political factions, powerful families and even the Holy Roman Emperor were constantly undermining each other by trying to get a candidate to claim the papacy. In extreme cases, some popes acquired power by murdering their predecessor.
Formosus
Formosus, a popular bishop from the port south of Rome, became an iconic figure after successfully converting the Bulgarians to Christianity. Popularity among his converts made his peers suspicious of him, so the church accused him of trying to usurp the the papacy – a popular hobby at the time – and had him excommunicated.
One would assume that being kicked out of the church hurts your chances at becoming said church’s highest official, but it turns out this isn’t the case. After the death of Pope John VIII in 882, Formosus was welcomed back with open arms and elected to the pontificate in 891. But for all that effort, Formosus didn’t actually make a very good pope. His decisions and appointments were unpopular, and he even invited a Bavarian to invade Rome and be crowned king.
Stephen VI
After Formusus’ death in 896, the newly elected Pope Stephen VI decided to show the world what he thought of his preprocessor. He dug up his grave, dressed the body in papal vestments and began the trial. Formosus’ body was declared unfit for its previous position and all of his declarations and appointments were reversed. After being found guilty – reports say Formosus’ defense wasn’t very good – Stephen cut off some of the body’s fingers, stripped it of its clothing and threw it in the Tiber River.
When the public heard news of the trial and found the body, they started to have their doubts about Pope Stephen’s sanity. People began to claim that Formosus’ corpse was performing miracles, and Stephen was quickly thrown in prison, where he was quickly strangled to death, returning the papacy back to its normal state of insanity.
Thanks to user Urh for the idea!
Pictures and Information courtesy of: Netorama and Wikipedia.
As always, if YOU have an idea for a Historical Thursday, let me know at thereifixedit@gmail.com
-
-
Copy & paste this:
![\"Quantcast\"/](\"http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-483xl95pmUiaY.gif\")
Holy Roman Empire didn’t come along until 10th century, a century after these events, so its emperors couldn’tplay a role then. I think author is either confusing HRE with earlier Frankish (Carolingian) empire (Charlemagne being first to be crowned such way in 800 but he was called emperor of the Romans) or is thinking about later imperial/papal clashes.
Umm. We are currently in the 21st century and the 1900′s was the 20th century. I do believe if we extrapolate that backwards the 900′s would in fact be the 10th century.
That’s what I said. HRE came along in 900s, or 10th century. Well after these events so emperors couldn’t have played a role in selection of pope prior to events described here.
Except this was all in the late 800′s, which would be the 9th century.
Chris… Not sure if trolling or just stupid…
You said 800s, or 9th Century. This is BEFORE 900s, 10th century. WTF are you arguing?
The really disturbing thing? At that time the Catholic Church, as an organization, generally had more power and influence over Europe and it’s people than most kings, queens, princes, emperors, or other national rulers. Quite a few of THEM did a lot of things that would make many people question their intelligence and sanity as well, but this one is up there near the top of the list.
nothing much has changed so…
Sound like this is who Qaddafi is channeling. . .
“Your honor, we believe the witness is taking invocation of the Fifth Amendment too far!”
But really, why can’t the dead be put on trail? After all, they vote in Chicago and Louisiana, and many still regularly receive Social Security checks.
Put the dead on trail?
Keep movin’, movin’, movin’,
Though they’re dead an’ stinkin’,
Keep them zombies movin’ Rawhide!
I see what you did there.
And lo, I did say unto ye; goeth thou unto thine internet and maketh thine self unto kludgery that thou might lolerskate they way unto thine rotflolcoptor. And the people did go forth and did maketh much of the kludgery, and then did they celebrate, saying: “Glory unto the Failblog and unto the Membase and unto the Icanhascheezburger Network, for they are lolworth and gigiddy in thine sight.” And it was good. And lo, the people did feast upon the the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and it was good. Ramen.
And there was much rejoicing.
yaaaaaay.
yaaaaay.
That, dear sir, is a shiny bit of awesomeness you’ve created there.
This is quite possibly the best comment in the history of TIFI. Thanks, buddy.
Oh, if I could bookmark comments here. Ramen indeed.
I love you for this.
“ask yourself when the last time you read about a dead body being forced to answer for itself in court.”
I know, I know! The Hunting of the Snark!
Strangely, this wouldn’t seem out of place in most countries’ governments today.
I’d like to indulge in a little semantic quibbling here. I kind of take issue with the 9th century being regarded as “medieval,” but then I’ve noticed in recent times that more and more historians have pushed back the start of the medieval period to the fall of Rome in 476 (some probably even go as far back as the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410). I guess people were offended by the term “Dark Ages,” which is a shame because “Dark Ages” quite succinctly describes the general wave of ignorance, superstition and religious fanaticism that swept Europe as a result of the fall of Rome and the subsequent rise of the Catholic Church. But I guess if you were take into account the rise of Catholicism, one could argue that the Dark Ages started in the mid-to-late 4th century (specifically, the reign of the emperor Theodosius).
Cool story, bro.
TL;DR
DILLIGAF?
I can’t see what you LL.
That’s better. Short and concise.
Ignorance, superstition and religious fanaticism? How is that different from today?
Less people are ignorant, superstitious, religious fanatics. Not much less, but less.
I think you’ll find that as the population today is far far larger, that more people are ignorant superstitious religious f*ckwits today than back in medieval times…
Yes, more people, but due to the huge increase in population… percentage-of-the-population-wise, probably not so.
Internet and TV. That’s how. Information flows, even if it doesn’t hit where it should usually, those who want to know, know.
and continued through at least the middle of last week, if not later.
Ooh, massive troll there.
I think you’ll find that whenever there’s a general system collapse, conditions such as you describe generally follow. Not that they were starting from a particularly high point as far as ignorance and superstition go. The *high* estimate for literacy rates in ancient Rome is 15%, so we’re hardly talking about an educated populace to start with, and the existence of magic and validity of various fortunetelling schemes was accepted without serious question. The Church actually preserved much culture that otherwise would have been lost, even if, from our modern perspective, we might have wished they’d had different priorities.
I think an impartial historian would have a hard time detecting any “waves of religious fanaticism” at this time. It’s difficult for a modern person to appreciate how intertwined religion was with everyone’s daily lives in premodern times, Christian or not.
“Dark Ages” is inappropriate not because it’s offensive, but because it has come to be pejorative in recent decades; scholarship prefers neutral terms. And the term was invented and came into use in Renaissance Italy; it would be strange indeed if the powers-that-be in the Church found it offensive. It was commonly accepted that classical antiquity enjoyed a higher level of culture than the period after the fall of Rome, and that’s all it was meant to imply.
As “medieval” means exactly “middle age”, it’s precisely the right term for the period between the end of Antiquity and the Renaissance. If you’d rather refer to the Early Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages”, I really don’t think anyone would care — unless you start to insist you’re right and everyone else is wrong.
Are you kidding? When do the vast majority of “relics” pop up? The Middle Ages. When does the legend of the Holy Grail appear? The Middle Ages. Many of these things are associated with religious fanaticism so don’t try to say there was no religious fanaticism in the Middle Ages. Oh and let us not forget the Crusades. No religious fanaticism indeed…
That’s not what I said. Reading comprehension, plz.
Kinda a reverse version of the live TV dig-up-o-gasm that Hugo Chavez threw about Simon Bolivar.
That should be “predecessor”, not “preprocessor”.
Indeed the “dark age” is a misnomer and is not used anymore as such (although the late usage among historian was rather to indicate that not much information was left from it).
But on the other hand saying that the church preserved knowledge , is quite embelishing it a lot too. The church preserved what did not go against its teaching. There are enough evidence that when something , however rational, went against their “teaching” it was declared an ehresy fought against, up to the point of burning people. Remember Bruno giordano, or even gallileo, one did not recant (and was executed) the other did recant and let live.
So , no , the church did not crush intellectual rationality in the middle age period, and as far as I remember rationality was praised. But it certainly did attempt to crush as much as possible any intellectual path leading away from it. This is also one of the reason the arab world was much more advanced in anatomy than the european world was : church interdictions. Not even mentionning celestial mechanic demonstrating earth as anything but the center of the universe.
That’s what I meant about priorities. But by the time you get to Girodano and Galileo, we’re well past the Early Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. There’s also more to both stories than simply offensive teachings, particularly in Galileo’s case. And the fact that when this subject comes up, these two names are always associated with it shows that the kind of treatment they got was actually anything but typical. Otherwise, they’d be lost in the noise.
Really, medieval Europe was too busy with things like subsistence and internal wars and Crusades to bother with free thinking.
Of course, the main reason the Arabic world was so advanced was that they conquered the Eastern Roman Empire which, while Christian, had never descended to the level of the West and never lost most of its recorded knowledge. That’s why so much Greek philosophy only reached the West in the form of translations from Arabic.
I think term “dark ages” refermore to the general collapse of organised state than some lost knowledge. After Octavian defeatedhis opponents till late 4th century when Germanic tribes became a serious problem Mediterraneaworld experinced peace, organized bureacracy (to an extent that existing technology allowed), stability and order. Once western Roman empire collapsed (or since late 4th century) all that was gone. instead ofone big state you had numerous small ones fighting each other, punctuated with occasional nomadic tribe invasion. Basically entire european continent became a battlefield, whatever protection Romans had from law was gone to a large degree. The biggest loss was disaperance of bureaucratic tradition Rome had, which in turn ment that whatever succesor states rose were run less efficient. Absence of roman law ment that rulers could do whatever they wanted and so forth.
hile we all aspire to great things and bemoan the absence of astronomy, philosophy etc themore mundane knowledge of running the state was far worsde.
The idea of a Dark Age was started by Petrarch in the 1330s and was originally intended as a criticism of Late Latin literature. Petrarch considered the Post-Roman centuries as “dark” compared to the “light” of classical antiquity. Later historians expanded the idea of a Dark Age to a general decline in culture and economy.
“preprocessed”? I think you spend too much time writing C programs. Also: “I don’t think it means what you think it means”
Autocorrect strikes again!
My god, I didnt realize that many inteligent people read this site. So, anyone here familiar with the SCA?
BRING OUT YOUR DEAD… so we can put them on trail.
I’m not dead yet!