"Pope Stephen and The Medieval Corpse that was Put on Trial"

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Picture this. The year is 897 in the Common Era. It's the early Middle Ages. A dead man is sitting on a throne in Rome. He is wearing papal robes. He has been dead for nine months. The smell in the room is, by every historical account, extraordinary. And Pope Stephen VI, the living Pope, is screaming at the corpse, accusing it of crimes, demanding it answer for what it did.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

At a corpse. And let's remember that this is one of the most famous synods in history. And let's be clear on what a synod is. It's a formal council or assembly of leaders within the Roman Church, typically bishops, clergy, and sometimes laity convene to discuss, discern, and decide on matters of church doctrine, administration, or policy.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

The corpse, being a corpse, says nothing, but it has a defence attorney, a trembling deacon assigned to speak on its behalf, because this is a formal canonical trial with charges, witnesses, and a verdict already decided before anyone sat down. The dead man on trial is Pope Formos. The man trying him is his successor's successor, Pope Stephen VI. And what happens next? The verdict, the sentencing, the three fingers hacked off the corpse's right hand, the body thrown into the tiber. Like garbage is one of the most deranged things that has ever happened in the history of institutional power. And it is completely 100% historically documented. I am Mike Williams, that is Mark Donnelly. This is the Mike and Mark history experience. And today we are talking about the cadaver synod.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Stop right there. I know what some of you are thinking. There is no way this actually happened. Two guys in Los Angeles are embellishing medieval history for content. I need you to hear me clearly, we are not. The rotting corpse on the throne, the screaming pope, the severed fingers, the river tiber, all of it is in the historical record. Primary sources, multiple accounts, standard disclaimer. Everything here is for educational and entertainment purposes. We are not credentialed historians, and nothing is legal, spiritual, or professional advice of any kind. With that said, a dead pope was put on trial by a living pope. Let us begin.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

Here is what I want you to hold on to as we go through this story. The cadaver synod is not a freak event. It is not the medieval church having a uniquely unhinged Tuesday. It is the most extreme, most unfiltered, most no guardrails version of a logic that shows up in human institutions across every century, including this one. We are going to explain that logic. We are going to show you where it ends. But first, you need to understand the world that made this possible. Because if you think 900 years of supposed progress means this cannot happen anymore, this episode's going to be a very educational hour for you.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Context 897. Rome. And before we get to the trial, and there is absolutely going to be a trial with a defendant, a defense attorney, a judge, a verdict, and a sentencing. We need to understand the world this happened in. Because this story does not make sense without context. Rome in 897 is not the Rome of the Emperors. The city has shrunk to maybe 20,000 people. The Great Forum where Cicero once argued cases and Caesar was assassinated is now a cow pasture. Literally, there are cows grazing between the ruins of the temples.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

The Colosseum is being quarried for building materials, people are chipping the marble off the walls and carting it away. The aqueducts are crumbling. Rome in 897 is a city living inside the skeleton of something that used to be great. Like if you took the island of Manhattan, emptied it down to 20,000 people, and left them living in the ruined shells of skyscrapers that have been standing for a thousand years, the grandeur is still there, the function is almost completely gone.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

And into this shrunken, chaotic post-imperial city, the papacy, the office of the Pope, is supposed to be the center of stability. The moral and spiritual anchor of Western Christendom, that is the theory. In practice, in 897, the papacy is a blood prize. Fought over by Roman noble families who've been in power struggles for generations, by Frankish kings to the north with their own political agendas, by the remnants of the Carolingian dynasty that Charlemagne built. And that is now actively collapsing by local warlords, by bishops with ambitions large enough to embarrass a modern tech executive at his most hubristic. Between 844 and 900, that is 56 years. Rome goes through twelve popes, 12. Several of them are murdered, several are deposed. One gets put on trial after he is already dead.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Let us just sit with that last sentence for a moment. Twelve popes, fifty-six years, multiple murders, and one trial that makes the murders look like the conventional part of the story.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

One gets put on trial after he is already dead, which, to be clear, is not a category of event that should exist. The fact that it required coining a specific term, cadaver synod, tells you everything about how often the medieval church had to classify the previously unclassifiable.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

The defendant, the man at the center of what will become one of the most extraordinary canonical proceedings in the history of the medieval church, is Pope Formosus. He was Pope from 891 to 896. He was approximately 75 years old when he died. He was, by most contemporary accounts, a capable operator in a system where capable operators survived by being smarter and faster and more ruthless than everyone around them. Think of him as the ninth century equivalent of a partner who made it to the top of a very dangerous firm by being better at the game than almost anyone else. And who then discovered posthumously that being better at the game does not protect you from the game being played against your corpse. That is not a metaphor. That is literally what happened to this man.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

He had a long career before becoming Pope. He was the bishop of Porto, one of the seas just outside Rome. He served as a papal legate to Bulgaria in the 860s on a genuinely high-stakes diplomatic mission. Bulgaria had recently converted to Christianity, and the question was not whether the Bulgarians would be Christian that was already settled, but whether the Bulgarian church would answer to Rome or to Constantinople. Formosus was Rome's man on the ground, tasked with persuading the Bulgarian King Boris to bring his church under Roman rather than Byzantine authority. He was effective, he impressed people. He was almost elected Pope in the 860s, but the timing was wrong, and then his career collapsed completely. Not gradually, not through a slow accumulation of setbacks, completely. Like a building that was structurally sound on Tuesday and rubble on Wednesday. The 9th century church was very good at that.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Completely. We are not talking about a stumble or a setback. We are talking about the full medieval institutional destruction package, exile, stripping of offices, mandatory oath of renunciation, the 9th century church equivalent of being publicly fired on social media, banned from the building, and forced to sign a non-compete, except the non-compete covers not just the company but the entire industry and also God.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

That is an extraordinary rehabilitation arc.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

More comebacks than a nineties pop star, each one more improbable than the last. And in 891, at approximately 70 years of age, he became Pope. Which brings us to the decision.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

And as Pope, Famosus made the decision that would one year after his death result in his corpse being dug up, dressed in papal robes, propped on a throne, and formally charged with crimes against the Church. The decision involves the most hotly contested political question in ninth century European politics. Who is the legitimate Holy Roman Emperor?

SPEAKER_00 8:06

The stakes here are enormous, even if the terminology makes modern ears glaze slightly. The Holy Roman Emperor is the most powerful secular ruler in Western Europe. The Pope crowns him. In theory, they are the two pillars of Christian civilization, spiritual and temporal, working together. In practice, the relationship is an elaborate, dangerous knife fight dressed up as a partnership, which is actually a pretty accurate description of a lot of partnerships throughout history. And in the late 9th century, the Carolingian dynasty that has held the imperial title since Charlemagne is collapsing. Multiple claimants, multiple armies, multiple popes trying to navigate between them.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

At this moment, and here is your first inflection point of the episode, the first pivot on which everything that follows turns for Moses had three options. Option one, fully back Lambert of Spoleto, who already held a claim to the imperial title and whose family had local political muscle in Italy. Option two, back Arnulf of Corinthia, the Frankish king from the north, with a rival claim and a large army. Option three, commit to neither, play the field, try to maintain independent papal authority. He chose option one first. In eight hundred and ninety-two, Formosus crowned Lambert of Spileto as Holy Roman Emperor.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

And then in a move that historians have spent over a thousand years arguing about, he changed his position. In 894, he invited Arnulf of Corinthia to come to Rome. In 896, he crowned Arnulf as Holy Roman Emperor instead. Two different men, both crowned as Holy Roman Emperor, by the same Pope, four years apart. This is roughly the ninth century equivalent of an employer giving someone a signed contract and then giving a second person the same signed contract and hoping neither of them finds out.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Now I want to defend Formosus for a moment because I think the political situation was genuinely Oh, here we go.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Mark is about to defend a man who crowned two different people, Holy Roman Emperor. In four years.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

I am serious, and you are going to let me finish this sentence. Lambert of Spoletta was not a reliable partner. Arnulf had just militarily secured Rome from a rival faction that was actively threatening the papacy. There is a real case, a serious historical case, that Formosus was being pragmatic in genuinely desperate circumstances, not duplicitous. The man was in his seventies, running the papacy in the middle of a collapsing dynasty, with armed factions competing for influence on all sides. We should not read 9th century crisis management through the lens of modern expectations of diplomatic consistency. He was not a CEO with a communications team. He was an old man holding a crumbling institution together with both hands.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

There is absolutely a case, and Lambert supporters had a word for it anyway. Betrayal. Betrayal. And the man most motivated to act on that word was the man who became Pope just months after Formosus died, Stephen VI. Stephen was not an outlier, not some uniquely deranged figure who came from nowhere. He was a product of exactly the same system. Formosus came from the same Roman noble family networks, the same factional politics, the same culture of institutional score settling. His family was deeply embedded in the Spolitan political alliance, meaning Formosus's decision to crown Arnulf instead of Lambert was not an abstract political grievance for Stephen. It was personal, an injury to his family's prestige and position. What made Stephen extraordinary was not his motivations. It was the specific tool he reached for to act on them. By every account we have, Stephen was extraordinarily angry, not the slow, strategic anger of a veteran politician, the hot, personal, consuming anger of someone who has decided that correcting a specific injustice is the defining mission of his pontificate, and who does not intend to let conventional constraints on papal behaviour stand in his way.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Stephen reached for a tool that no pope before him had ever reached for. He decided to put Formosus on trial. Formosus, who had been dead for approximately nine months, in January of eight hundred and ninety-seven, Stephen ordered the body of his predecessor exhumed, dug up, dressed in full papal vestments, including the papal tiara, propped upright on a throne in the synod hall, and formally charged with crimes against the church. A deacon was appointed to speak on behalf of the corpse, because due process demands representation even for the decomposed I want to let that land for a second.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

A nine months dead Pope in full papal regalia, sitting in a chair, in a room full of senior clergy, being yelled at by the current Pope about canonical administrative violations. This is not a metaphor, not a dark joke, not a piece of medieval fiction. This is documented history, and we are just getting started.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Stick with us. Because the trial itself, the charges, the verdict, the aftermath, and more importantly, what all of it means for the world you woke up in this morning. That is where this story goes next. The room. Yes. Go.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

It is January in Rome, so it is cold. Not catastrophically cold by the standards of Northern Europe, but cold in the way that large stone buildings in January are cold, the kind of cold that seeps through vestments, that makes your feet ache from standing on stone floors, that keeps your breath visible in the air. The assembled clergy, the bishops, the priests, the deacons, the notaries required to make this proceeding officially exist in the records, are in formal vestments, which are elaborate and heavy and probably the warmest thing most of them own. And at the front of the room, on a throne, wearing the full vestments and tiara of a pope, is the body of Formosus. He has been dead for nine months. He was partially mummified by the burial conditions. That is the only reason the body was in any condition to be displayed at all. The smell in that room was something every single person present was acutely aware of, and none of them were going to note in the official record.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

And every single one of them stayed. Not one person in that room walked out. Not one bishop stood up and said, I cannot be part of this. At least not in any account that survives.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

At least not in any account that survives. And here is where the first real argument of this episode arrives. Because I think you and I have genuinely different readings of why they stayed and what that silence means.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

I think they stared because they had no real alternative. Stephen is the Pope. In the 9th century ecclesiastical hierarchy, the Pope's authority within the church is, at least in theory, absolute within his domain. Defying him in his own synod hall, with his guards present, his temper already at maximum, and the political weight of his office behind him, that is not an act of moral courage. That is a very fast path to prison or exile or worse. Those bishops were not cowards. They were rational people who understood what speaking up in that moment would cost them.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Rational and cowardly are not mutually exclusive. And this is the part I want to say clearly, because I think it is the most important thing about this story for anyone listening right now. The calculation those bishops made, the cost of speaking up is immediate and personal. The cost of staying silent is diffuse and deferred. That is not a medieval calculation. That is the calculation made in boardrooms and government offices and editorial meetings and university committees every single week. I have been in rooms where that calculation was happening. You have been in rooms where that calculation was happening. The logic is always identical. Someone with power is doing something wrong. The people who could object calculate that they personally cannot afford the consequences of objecting. And so the thing happens and the institution is damaged, and the people who said nothing go home and tell themselves, at least I did not personally do the wrong thing.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

I hear you. And I want to push on the framing because I think you are describing a choice when there was not actually a choice available.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

I think the calculation was rational and the outcome was catastrophic, and both of those things are true simultaneously. I also think the calculation was wrong in a way those bishops could not see at the time because the cost of compliance turned out to be larger than the cost of resistance would have been in every long-term sense. The cadaver Synod destroyed Stephen, it damaged the papacy, it created a crisis that took years and multiple popes to resolve. The bishops who sat silently did not protect themselves from those consequences. They just deferred their share of them.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Okay. But here is what bothers me about the they should have spoken up framing. And I want to push on this because I think it matters. We are looking at this from the comfortable remove of 900 years and a podcast studio in Los Angeles. We know how this story ends. We know Stephen gets strangled in August. We know the verdict gets reversed. Those bishops in January did not know any of that. From their perspective, in that cold room, Stephen was the Pope. He had the guards, he had the political weight, and there was no particular reason to believe that this pope was going to be dead by summer any more than any of the other recent popes.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

So they were trapped?

SPEAKER_01 17:47

Structurally trapped, yes. Which is different from morally off the hook. And also, I just want to put this on the record: the defense attorney for the corpse showed up. The anonymous deacon assigned to speak on behalf of a nine months dead body in front of a screaming pope stood up and made a defense. His client could not testify, could not produce witnesses, could not look appropriately contrite. The other side's counsel was also the judge, and the judge was screaming, and the deacon showed up anyway. He said something. Our sources for what he said are extremely limited. The written record was fragmentary to begin with, and what remained was subsequently burned, but the fact of the defence is recorded. He did the smallest possible right thing in an impossible situation. He is not the hero of this story, but he's not nothing.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

And I do not want to dismiss that. The available information argument is real. The deacon argument is real. But here is what I keep coming back to. The available information was also that what was happening was wrong. Not just unusual, wrong. By the canonical and moral standards, every person in that room had spent their life studying. They had the framework to recognize it. Some of them almost certainly did recognize it. And recognition without action in a situation like that is a form of complicity, regardless of how rational the inaction was.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

That is a real point. And now the charges. Because once you hear them, the weight of what those bishops were sitting through becomes even clearer. Every single charge was designed to reach backward in time and unmake something that already existed. Charge one, that for Moses had perjured himself by violating the oath he swore during his exile, the oath never to seek clerical orders again. Charge two, that he had coveted the papacy and obtained it illegally. Charge three, and this is the consequential one that he had unlawfully ordained clergy while serving as bishop of Porto, which he was canonically prohibited from doing. If charge three sticks, every priest and bishop for Moses ordained was never actually ordained.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Why?

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Every sacrament, everyone. Every sacrament. Picture a priest in a village in the Italian countryside. He has been serving his congregation for years. He baptized their children, heard their confessions, celebrated Mass every Sunday, and then word reaches him that the Synod in Rome has declared his ordination invalid. Not going forward retroactively. Every mass he has ever celebrated, not valid. Every absolution he granted, not valid. Every last rite he administered to the dying. In a world where people genuinely believe improperly administered last rites affect where your soul goes, not valid. He has not just lost his job. He has been informed that he has been accidentally failing everyone he loves for his entire career.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

There are hundreds of priests in exactly that position. The pastoral catastrophe of actually accepting the cadaver verdict was not just logistically unmanageable. It was spiritually terrifying, rippling outward through every community, every affected priest had ever served. And if this story is making you think of anyone you know who has had their professional contributions retroactively questioned by new leadership, that is exactly the kind of modern parallel we are here for. Send this episode to them. They will understand it on a on a cellular level.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

And the staging of a formal trial, rather than simply issuing a decree, makes a kind of institutional sense if charge three is what you actually care about. A decree can be challenged and ignored. A formal trial with witnesses, with a record, with a verdict rendered in a proper synod that has the form of law, it is harder to dismiss.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Except the presiding judge is screaming at the defendant.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Except the presiding judge is screaming at the defendant who is nine months dead and cannot respond. Stephen addressed Formosus directly in the second person, demanding answers. The paraphrase that survived through the hostile accounts goes something like Why did you usurp the universal see, you who were merely Bishop of Porto. He screamed this at a body. The body did not respond. The deacon responded on the body's behalf. The body was found guilty on all three charges. And I just want to pause and note the deacon is standing there next to his client, who is both his strongest argument and his biggest liability simultaneously, and he has to give a defense while whatever the ninth century basilica equivalent of this is fine plays in the background.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

The deacon deserves his own entire episode, possibly his own podcast, possibly a cinematic universe. This man showed up to argue on behalf of a nine months dead body in front of a screaming pope with the verdict already written, and he made a defense anyway. That is not just the hardest job in 9th century ecclesiastical law. That is the hardest job in the history of legal representation. Your client cannot testify, cannot take notes, cannot give you a reassuring nod when you make a good point, cannot even pretend to look contrite when the judge wants contrition. Your client is nine months dead and it shows. And I want to be clear, the medieval legal system did not lack for difficult clients. This is a legal culture that also put animals on trial. Pigs formally tried for crimes. In actual courts, medieval England and France have documented records of livestock facing criminal charges. So the bar for challenging courtroom situation was very high. And even by those standards, even granting that the medieval legal world apparently looked at a pig and thought, yes, this belongs in a courtroom. The deacon's situation was worse.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

The pig was alive, Mike. At minimum, the pig could make eye contact with the judge.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

The pig had something to work with. The deacon's client could express nothing. His client was nine months dead, and it showed and he stood up anyway. He said something. That deacon is the patron saint of impossible briefs, and we should say his name more, except we do not know it. Which honestly makes it worse.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Guilty. On all three counts. And then the sentencing.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

The fingers specifically?

SPEAKER_01 24:01

The fingers. Specifically the right hand, the hand used for ordination gestures in the Roman Rite, the hand whose blessing had made priests. Stephen ordered the body stripped of its papal vestments, the three fingers cut off, the body redressed in the plain clothes of a layman and thrown into the Tiber. And in the ninth century Catholic theological framework, that last part is not merely a practical disposal of remains. Denying proper Christian burial was a theological statement about the soul of the deceased. Stephen is attempting to erase Formosus from the community of the faithful, to unmake his papacy, his ordinations, his sacraments, his standing before God. All of it with a trial and a verdict. And three fingers in the river.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

And then the strangest, most quietly heroic thing in the entire story happens. Somewhere along the banks of the Tiber, a group of monks found the body of Formosis washed ashore, and they secretly reburied it. We do not know their names. We do not know their monastery. We do not know what they risked, but they looked at what had been done, decided it was wrong, and did the smallest possible right thing about it. Those anonymous monks changed what was possible for everyone who came after them. We will come back to them.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

The anonymous monks. Hold that image. That is where this story is going, and we will be right back.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

Stephen the Sixth has won the trial. For Moses is guilty. The ordinations are declared invalid. The body is in the Tiber. Stephen has gotten every outcome he wanted. And within months, not years, months, Stephen the Sixth is in prison. And then he is strangled. Same year. Same year. January to August of eight hundred and ninety-seven. The cadaver Synod is in January. Stephen is dead by August. He wins one of the most audacious, most unprecedented proceedings in the history of the medieval church, and seven months later he is murdered in his cell. I know that sounds like poetic justice, and it is, but what I want to focus on is the mechanism, not the justice. The mechanism walk us through it within weeks of the cadaver synod, not months. Weeks the reaction in Rome begins. And it is not the reaction Stephen expected. The popular response is revulsion. Not just among clergy with professional reasons to oppose the verdict among ordinary Romans. Multiple accounts describe public expressions of horror. There are reports of clergy refusing to treat the verdict as binding. And there are, and I want to handle this carefully, multiple sources recording seismic events in the weeks immediately following the cadaver. Whether those earthquakes were genuine seismic events or whether they were added retrospectively by hostile chroniclers to make a theological point, we genuinely cannot say with certainty. What we can say is that the story the ninth century church told about this event included the earth objecting, and in the ninth century that framing carries enormous rhetorical weight.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Stephen has catastrophically misjudged the political temperature of Rome. He believed the formal structure of the trial would give his verdict institutional weight. What he produced instead was the defining symbol of a papacy that had lost its mind. The Roman noble families with interest tied to Formosus's alliances see their opportunity. There is a revolt. Stephen is deposed, arrested, stripped of his papal vestments. Note the deliberate symbolic reversal of what he did to Formosus and thrown into prison. Where he is strangled.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Seven months. You know what you can do in seven months? You can write a screenplay, you can train for a marathon, you can have a baby well start one. You can read all of Proust if you are very committed and have no other obligations. You can theoretically reform the entire canonical structure of the medieval church if you came in with a plan and reasonable impulse control. Stephen used his seven months to stage a trial that caused a citywide revolt, get himself deposed, get himself stripped of his vestments in a pointed reversal of what he did to Formosis. Someone in the ninth century had a sense of symmetry, get himself imprisoned and get himself strangled. That is not just a fast self-destruction arc. That is a speed run. Stephen holds the record. Nobody has ever gone from most powerful religious figure in Western Europe to strangled in a jail cell faster, and nobody has ever done it more thoroughly as a result of their own choices.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

I want to be historically fair to Stephen for exactly one sentence. The ninth century papacy was an extraordinarily dangerous position in which many incumbents were murdered regardless of what they did or did not do. Stephen's murder is not purely a consequence of the cadaver synod.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

One sentence of historical fairness noted. Before the cadaver synod, Stephen's enemies disagreed with his political positions. After the cadaver synod, Stephen's enemies were morally revolted by what he had done. That is a much larger coalition with much higher motivation. He did not just make political enemies, he made people feel that removing him was righteous. That is a significant tactical error on top of everything else.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

And here is where the second real argument of this episode arrives. Because I think you and I are going to genuinely disagree about what the cadaver synod proves at the big picture level. Give me your read first.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

My initial read is institutional failure. The cadaver synod happened because the ninth century papacy had no functioning internal constraints, no appeal process that worked in real time, no body of canon law robust enough to be invoked in the moment of overreach. No college of officials with independent standing sufficient to say this is not permitted. The institution was so structurally broken that the only corrective mechanism available was a popular revolt and a murder. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

And that structural failure is not a medieval problem. It is not.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

But here is where I want to push past pure institutional analysis because I think it lets the individuals in the room off too easily. It is not just that nobody could stop Stephen, it is that nobody in that room tried. There were bishops and senior clergy in that hall who almost certainly understood that what was happening was wrong and they sat there. The institutional failure and the individual moral failure are not separate problems. They are the same problem at two levels. And I think you have more sympathy for the bishops than I do.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

I have enormous sympathy for the bishops, but I think you are framing it as individual weakness when it is actually a systemic inevitability. When you build an institution with no protection for dissent, you are not just creating conditions for a bad leader. You are creating conditions in which good people structurally cannot act like good people. You cannot expect individual moral courage to substitute for institutional design. It is not ethical and it does not work.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

You know what? I think we actually agree more than we are disagreeing. The institutional failure and the individual failure are the same problem at two levels, yes. You cannot substitute courage for design, yes. But here is where I land. Even in the absence of design, even in a broken institution with no protection for dissent, individuals sometimes do the small right thing anyway. Not because the institution asked them to, despite the institution, and that is the thread I want to follow. Because the recovery of this specific institution depends entirely on exactly that people doing the small right thing when nothing is requiring them to.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

And I want to say something about that thread, because I think it is easy to romanticize the small right thing from a distance. The monks who recovered Formosus from the Tiber were not romantic figures in the moment. There were people who saw a body in a river that belonged to a recently condemned criminal and decided to handle it respectfully in direct defiance of the verdict of the current Pope in a city where that pope still had his guards and his political allies. The small right thing in the moment is frequently also the terrifying right thing. The distance of 900 years makes it look small. It probably did not feel small.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

That is a genuinely important point. And I think it is the question that actually matters, not how do you identify what is wrong with the system, but what do you do about it when you cannot tear the system down. When you are inside it, not in a position to blow it up, just trying to figure out what is in your reach. And the answer that Cadavinid gives is you do the thing that is in your specific reach, not the big thing. The thing that is in your reach, even if it is just pulling a body out of a river.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

And here is something that I find genuinely, deeply, cosmically funny in the way that only medieval history can be funny. Some accounts suggest that Stephen VI himself may have received holy orders from Formosus, which would mean that the man screaming at the corpse and invalidating its ordinations was, at the exact same moment, potentially invalidating his own. The historical record is disputed on this. But if true, and I want to be clear, this is contested, we are not asserting it as fact. It is the single greatest cell phone in the two thousand year history of the Catholic Church.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Wait, he may have ordained Stephen. Possibly.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Stephen summoned the corpse of the man who may have ordained him, screamed at it, stripped it, cut its fingers off, and threw it in the Tiber, and may have been screaming himself out of a valid papacy the whole time. He did not just destroy his enemy, he may have destroyed his own foundation in the same room on the same afternoon.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

If that is true, it is genuinely the most spectacular, unforced error in medieval institutional history. No fiction writer would dare write it because an editor would flag it as implausible. You cannot have a character be this thorough in their own destruction. It is too on the nose, and yet history, history does not care about plausibility. History just keeps going. Stephen held the trial, cut the fingers off, threw the body in the river, and may have been dismantling the only thing standing between him and canonical illegitimacy the entire time. That is not a tragedy, that is a farce. A very cold, very smelly, extremely well documented ninth century farce. And somehow it gets worse from here.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

No fiction writer would dare. So the recovery at the moment, Stephen is strangled, the papacy is in complete chaos. No functioning succession process, no constitutional mechanism guaranteeing any particular outcome. At this second inflection point of the episode, the institution had three options. Option one, find a successor willing to double down on the cadaver synod verdict and enforce it. Option two, ignore the whole situation and hope it fades. Option three, formally reverse the verdict and attempt to repair the institutional damage. And through three successive and very short pontificates, the institution consistently, remarkably, chooses option three.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Stephen's immediate successor, Pope Romanus, serves four months and then is deposed without resolving the question. Then comes Pope Theodore II, who serves for about twenty days. About twenty. He uses every one of them to do one thing. Convene a synod, nullify the cadaver synod entirely, declare everything Stephen did invalid, and order the body of Formosus properly reinterred with full papal honors. Theodore serves for about twenty days, leaves almost no other historical trace, and uses the entire pontificate to undo one wrong. I find that quietly extraordinary.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

The body of Formosus gets buried three times. Once when he dies, naturally, in eight hundred and ninety-six. Once in the Tiber courtesy of Stephen, once with full papal honors, when Theodore reverses the verdict, three burials for one man in two years.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

That man could not stay in the ground, which is not something you expect to say about a Pope.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

And it is still not finished. After Theodore, Pope John IX convenes the Synod of Ravenna in 898, formally rehabilitates Formosus, condemns the participants in the Cadaver Synod, and burns the written record of the trial. The official transcript, the charges, the defense, the verdict gone.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

They burn the documents. And here is what I find most remarkable. It did not work. The cadaver synod survived the document burning because it had already been encoded in too many hostile accounts, too many letters, too many oral traditions. The document burning was a declaration that the official institutional version of the event was over. The human version already in circulation, already in too many minds and too many manuscripts to be retrieved, survived completely. You cannot burn an event out of human memory when enough people have already shared it. That is not a ninth century observation. That is how information works in every era, including this one. And here we are 900 years later, in Los Angeles, with a microphone, which the monks would have found either miraculous or deeply confusing, and possibly both.

SPEAKER_01 37:13

Which is why the cadaver synod is the most Google thing you are going to search for today. I guarantee it. If you are listening to this while driving, you are going to pull over. If you are listening while commuting, you are opening your phone the second you get off. We know. We have made peace with it. We are not going to pretend your first instinct is not to verify that this is real. It is real. We will be here when you come back. And when you do come back, welcome. Now let us talk about what it means.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

Did the cadaver synod work? Did the invalidation of Formosis' ordinations actually stick? Short answer, no. The longer and more useful answer is that the way it failed to stick reveals something essential about how institutional legitimacy actually functions and about a historically recurring dynamic. This story is a perfect case study of The mechanism of collapse is the instructive part.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Walk us through it.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

The problem with declaring all of Formos' ordinations invalid is scale and pastoral reality. Formosis was Pope for five years. Five years of ordaining priests, deacons, and bishops across a substantial territory. When Stephen declares all those ordinations invalid, he's not just attacking the reputation of a dead predecessor. He is attacking the vocational identity of every living person. For Moses ordained, he is saying your priesthood is not real. Your mass is not valid. The Eucharist you celebrated last Sunday, which your congregation believed to be the actual body and blood of Christ, it may not have been what you or they thought it was.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

The theological stakes make it worse by an order of magnitude. In a framework where salvation depends on the valid administration of sacraments, invalidating the ordinations is not an administrative inconvenience. It is an existential catastrophe rippling outward through every congregation, every affected priest ever served. The last rites administered to your dying relative, possibly not valid. The confession you made last month, possibly not absolved. The pastoral consequences of genuinely accepting the cadaver sinned verdict are not just logistically unmanageable, they are spiritually terrifying for everyone involved. And the church, at every level below Stephen, knew it immediately.

SPEAKER_00 39:21

And that knowledge, that collective recognition, is what drives the reversal, not heroism, not institutional design. The system simply could not absorb the verdict, which is the third and most instructive argument of this episode. Because I think you and I are going to land in different places on what that collective non-acceptance actually represents.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

I am going to push back on that immediately, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

I am going to argue that the institutional rejection of the cadaver synod verdict is evidence of genuine institutional resilience. Even in the complete chaos of the ninth century papacy, even with no functioning formal checks, even with popes lasting about 20 days, the institution found a way to reject a decision that would have destroyed it from within. The monks recovered the body, Theodore convened his synod, John burned the documents. The system, through messy and violent mechanisms, corrected itself, and I think that is worth something.

SPEAKER_01 40:17

It is too hopeful. What you are describing as institutional resilience is actually a coalition of politically interested parties acting in their own interests, which happened to align with the institution's survival. The clergy ordained by Formosus had the most powerful, self-interested reason in the world to support the reversal of the verdict. Their ordinations, their identities as priests, their entire careers depended on it. The noble families tied to Formosus's political alliances had secular reasons to push for rehabilitation. This is not the institution's immune system activating heroically. This is people protecting themselves, which happened to require also protecting the institution.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Self-interest in doing the right thing can point the same direction. That is not a bug.

SPEAKER_01 41:00

Fine, but pointing the same direction once does not make it a system. You cannot call it institutional resilience if the only corrective mechanism is the people who are harmed by the bad decision mobilizing to reverse it. That is not a check on power working as designed. That is the consequence of power being exercised so badly that it created its own opposition, which matters enormously for institutional design, because a well-designed institution should not have to wait for the leader to overreach catastrophically before it can course correctly.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

I will grant you the distinction, but here is what I want to push back on. You are describing the mechanism as though it disqualifies the outcome. Stephen overreached so badly that the people he harmed had no choice but to fight back. And in fighting back, they saved the institution. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the only version of institutional correction that has ever reliably worked in human history. Not enlightened leadership, not well-designed checks, people with skin in the game refusing to absorb a verdict that destroys them. If that is what institutional resilience looks like in practice, then maybe the design question is not how do you prevent overreach, it is how do you make sure the people harmed by overreach have enough standing to fight back. The priest had that standing, the verdict collapsed. I am not sure that is a flaw in the story.

SPEAKER_01 42:23

That is a fair reframe. And I will concede that the standing argument is real. The priest had standing, they used it, it worked. What I would add is this the timeline, Stephen died in August of 897. The Synod of Ravenna was 898, roughly a year from the catastrophe to a formal institutional reversal. In the context of medieval church governance, that is not slow. That is almost immediate. The reason it was fast is not complicated. The people most motivated to act had the strongest possible incentive not to wait. Their ordinations were invalid, their sacraments were void, their entire vocational identity depended on reversal. When the people harmed by a bad decision are also the people with the most institutional standing to reverse it, you do not need a functioning system. The system's failure becomes almost paradoxically the source of its own correction.

SPEAKER_00 43:16

And it raises the question I want to put directly to our listeners. If you knew you only had 20 days to fix one wrong thing in an institution you were part of, what would you fix? Because Theodore knew he had been in the church his entire adult life. He had watched this institution stagger through 12 popes in 56 years. He knew exactly which wrong needed fixing. And when the power was his for about 20 days, he did not waste a single hour of it on email management or scheduling or the institutional equivalent of rearranging the furniture. He fixed the thing and then he was gone. I think about that every time I spend 45 minutes on something that will matter to no one in 900 years, which is most things. Theodore was better at this than I am.

SPEAKER_01 43:57

The verdict collapsed because The sequence held monk to Deacon to Theodore to John, each act creating the conditions for the next one, none of them knowing it was doing so. What is worth noting is what that sequence was not. It was not a coalition. It was not a coordinated strategy. It was not people who had read the room and decided the moment was right. It was people in different places with different stakes doing the specific thing that was available to them. The institution did not design that. It could not have designed that. And yet it is precisely that kind of uncoordinated, unplanned, individually motivated action that tends to be what actually works because it does not require the institution to function. It only requires enough individuals to notice what is in front of them.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

And that is what gets me. The monks did not know they were providing a necessary condition for anything. They were not playing a long game. They saw a body in a river. They got it out. The fact that it mattered, the fact that Theodore's reburial needed that body, and John's synod needed Theodore's synod, none of that was visible to them standing on the bank. They just did the thing. The whole sequence that followed is built on people who could not see the sequence.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Stephen is still dead. Formosus is still Pope. The monks are still anonymous, and the institution survived. Right now, not in the abstract, uh not as a historical curiosity, there are institutions across the professional landscape where incoming leadership is attempting to delegitimize the work of predecessors, not just criticize it, not just change direction, retroactively invalidate it. Declare that decisions made, structures built, people appointed and promoted were not legitimately made or built or appointed. The language is different from ninth century canon law. The logic is identical. And what a thousand years of documented evidence tells us is that total retroactive invalidation consistently fails. Not because it is wrong, though, it is wrong because the people whose work has been invalidated do not accept the verdict. They resist it, not heroically, practically, because their identities, their careers, their sense of what they have given their lives to depends on the resistance.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

Stephen thought he was erasing Formosis. He was building his opposition.

SPEAKER_01 46:15

Every time, and that resistance pursued persistently and collectively by enough people tends to outlast the person who issued the verdict. This is not optimism. This is not wishful thinking. This is a pattern that is repeated so many times across so many centuries that calling it a prediction feels too weak. It is closer to a law.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

The deacon who defended the corpse of Formosis is not remembered by name. The monks who pulled his body from the Tiber are not remembered by name. Theodore, who used about 20 days to reverse one of the most extraordinary canonical injustices in medieval history, is barely remembered at all. He left almost no other historical trace. And yet without the deacon's defence, the record would show no resistance. Without the monk's recovery, Theodore's reburial would not have been possible. Without Theodore's synod, John's Synod would have had no formal basis to build on. Each small ride act was a necessary condition for the next one.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

The pattern the cadaver synod gives us is historically consistent and structurally simple. Every successful reversal in this story shares one characteristic. The person acting did not wait for conditions to be favourable. The deacon had a courtroom and a voice and used them. The monks had a riverbank and hands and used them. Theodore had 20 days in a synod and used every hour of both. None of them knew what the person before had done. None of them knew what the person after would need. They acted without that information. That is not incidental to why it worked. That is why it worked.

SPEAKER_00 47:43

Be the deacon, be the monk, be Theodore, if you get 20 days in a synod and use them correctly as Theodore did. If you do not, and nobody is giving you those, you probably have a conversation, an email you have not sent, a record you could make accurate, a meeting where you could say the one thing nobody is saying, the institution may not thank you, history may not remember you, the monks did not get a monument, they got this podcast 900 years later, which honestly might be the most ninth century possible outcome for people who did the right thing quietly and asked nothing in return.

SPEAKER_01 48:16

I want to add something practical because the be the monk message can feel abstract when you are sitting in a meeting that has gone completely sideways and your options appear to be speak up and get fired, or say nothing and feel terrible about it for the rest of the week. The monks did not have a strategy. They did not have a plan. They did not know their act of recovering the body would eventually be part of a sequence that ended in a formal rehabilitation at the Synod of Ravenna. They did not know there would be a synod of Ravenna. They just did the thing that was directly in front of them. The body is in the river. We can get the body out of the river. That is the entire decision tree. Not a five-year roadmap, not a strategic framework, a body, a river, a decision. Sometimes that is all the clarity you need.

SPEAKER_00 49:03

I have been in institutions my whole life and nobody ever put it that simply.

SPEAKER_01 49:08

What is in front of you? What can you actually do about it? Do that. The rest is above your pay grade and also not your problem. And honestly, that is not bad life advice for a Tuesday or whatever day it is when you are hearing this. The monks did not know what day it was either. They just got the body out of the river.

SPEAKER_00 49:26

900 years, same river, same decision. I did not expect a ninth century monk to be the most useful person I thought about this week.

SPEAKER_01 49:34

And yet that is the cadaver synod. A dead man on trial, a screaming pope, three fingers in the Tiber, and a thousand years of evidence that the truth about what happens in institutions does not stay buried, no matter how thoroughly someone tries to bury it. The cadaver synod was documented in hostile accounts that circulated before the official records were burned. The rehabilitation of Formosis happened within a year. The name of the anonymous deacon is lost, but the fact of his defense is not. And here we are, 900 years later, using this story to think about what is happening in institutions right now, which is exactly what history is for. If this episode made you think, send it to one person today. We are listener powered. The only way this show finds the people who need it is because someone decides to pass it along.

SPEAKER_00 50:27

If this episode made you think, send it to one person today. This is the Mike and Mark history experience. I am Mike Williams, that is Mark Donnelly. We will see you next week. The history is always stranger than what makes it into the books.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

Show up. Say something. The record will reflect that you tried, that matters more than you know, and often longer than you expect. You do not need a cadaver to find a moment worth showing up for. The monks did not have one either. They just had a river and a decision. That is enough.