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More on Pope Formosus and the Cadaver Synod

Posted in Christianity, Medieval History, Medieval Studies, tagged , , , on 2021/07/13| Leave a Comment »

Painting Of Trial Of Pope Formosus
Jean-Paul Laurens, Pope Formosus on trial (1870, Musée des Beaux-arts, Nantes)

I wrote a couple of posts back in 2014 about my research on Pope Formosus and the infamous Cadaver Synod. At the time, I noted that I was working on a doctoral dissertation on the subject, and that I hoped to finish it by the end of that year! Well, here we are in July of 2021 (almost exactly seven years later), and I finished and defended the dissertation in March, The Trials of Pope Formosus, for which I was awarded the PhD in history from Columbia University. So I felt that I should update some of the information that I had presented in those older posts: Notes on Pope Formosus (part 1), and (part 2).

The abstract to the dissertation:

           In 896 Pope Stephen VI put the corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, on trial in a Church synod in Rome, known since as the Cadaver Synod. The pontificate and the ordinations of Formosus were annulled and he was reburied in a pilgrims’ cemetery from which his body was quickly removed and thrown into the Tiber. It still is generally assumed that Formosus was tried as revenge for his having betrayed Lambert of Spoleto by inviting Arnulf of Carinthia to become emperor, and that Pope Stephen VI was carrying out the wishes of Lambert and his mother. This dissertation, by examining the entire career of Formosus as well as the manuscript evidence for the Cadaver Synod and the 898 Synod of Ravenna, which overturned it, will present a new view of what happened in this neglected period of European history. In so doing, it has reached very different conclusions about the trial and its purpose.

The six main conclusions of my research are the following:

1. The earlier career of Formosus cannot be separated from the Cadaver Synod. It forms a major part of the context. The experiences he had (such as the mission to Bulgaria) and the relations that he established (as with the Spoletans) had important effects on his time as pope and his relations with the Roman nobility.

2. There is no reason to think that Formosus leaned toward the East Frankish rulers, as most previous publications have asserted. He went into exile in West Francia. The Spoletans had connections with West Francia. Except for his correspondence with the East Frankish bishops over the Hamburg/Bremen dispute, we have no record of any other interaction with East Frankish rulers or with Berengar of Friuli (except for the alleged letters to Arnulf). 

3. It is still too early to define the factions in Rome. They were certainly fluid, as Annette Grabowsky [“La papauté autour de 900,” in Compétition et sacré au haut Moyen Âge (Brepols, 2015)] indicates. Conrad Leyser [“The Memory of Gregory the Great and the Making of Latin Europe, 700-1000,” University of Oxford History Working Paper, no. VII (October 2013)] makes a compelling argument for the circle around John VIII having a special reverence for the memory of Gregory the Great. With that may also go a certain bias against the Beneventans and Spoletans, whom they may have seen as a continuation of the Lombards. Simon MacLean’s idea of the split in the northern Italians between east and west also makes some sense [“‘After his death a great tribulation came to Italy …’: Dynastic Politics and Aristocratic Factions After the Death of Louis II, c. 870-890,” Millennium Jahrbuch 4 (2007): 239-260]. There were people who favored the West Franks and the East Franks, but these were not defining interests, and we should not read the 19th and 20th century biases into them. As Veronica West-Harling [“The Roman Past in the Consciousness of the Roman Elites in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries,” in Early Medieval Roman Identities (De Gruyter, 2017)] writes, the Roman factions may be more aligned by interests in matters internal and external to Rome. Without a thorough prosopography, we cannot see how these relationships and alignments overlapped and shifted over time.

4. Formosus did not invite Arnulf to invade Rome and become Emperor. If Arnulf did receive an invitation, it came from some of the Roman nobility through Berengar, and it may have been in the form of forged letters from the pope, or perhaps the invitation was a fantasy constructed by people around Arnulf who wished to justify his invasion. The Synod of Ravenna declared that Arnulf’s coronation was extorted through force. At least in Italy, people believed that, and Arnulf is not listed among the emperors in Italian sources, as Otto of Freising pointed out long ago.

5. Both the Cadaver Synod and the Synod of Ravenna carefully avoided, in different ways, any charge that they were judging a pope. The Synod of Ravenna, moreover, was very intent upon ending this embarrassing conflict, and tried as much as possible to deflect any criticism from the Church. It granted mercy to those who took part in the Cadaver Synod, saying that they were forced to do so by unnamed lay people. It also implied that the disposal of the body in the Tiber was also done by lay people “seeking treasure.”

6. The real reason for the Cadaver Synod was not to punish Formosus for having abandoned Lambert in favor of Arnulf. It was, instead, instigated by people who were aligned with Arnulf, and who also held a hatred of Formosus for reasons we do not fully know. But the desecration and disposal of the body in the Tiber was done most likely because there were people who had a great veneration for Formosus and had created a cult around his tomb. This is something that his enemies could not tolerate, and it is for this reason that the trial happened so many months after his death, and not because Lambert and Ageltrude had not yet arrived in Rome. In fact, it probably occurred in haste before they were expected to arrive.

The Cadaver Synod has long been portrayed as a sign of the degeneracy of the papacy leading into the saeculum obscurum and the pornocracy. It is certainly a sign of the rapid change and shifting alliances that came with the end of the Carolingian era, but it also serves to illuminate those changes and help us to understand this period, the end of the ninth century and beginning of the tenth, that has been so neglected until recently. I hope to publish the dissertation as a book in the coming year or so. Meanwhile, the dissertation itself is embargoed.

Since I have never been able to devote all my energies to this work, it has taken a very long time to finish. The research and writing were often done in small parts and presented at conferences over a couple of decades. Here is an updated list of these papers:

“A New Look at the Cadaver Synod.” Proceedings of the XV International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Paris, July 2016  (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, forthcoming)

“A Synod of Ravenna Confirming the Cadaver Synod?” Proceedings of the XIV International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Toronto, 5-11 August 2012.  (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 2016), pp. 313-325.   

“The Cadaver Synod and the Unmaking of Saints,” A paper presented at the 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 2011.

“The Synod of Ravenna of 898 as a Witness to the Cadaver Synod,” A paper presented at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2010.

“Renovatio redux: A New Look at the Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma,” A paper delivered at the 12th Annual Mediterranean Studies Congress, Università di Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy May, 2009.

“Pope Formosus and Hamburg-Bremen,” A paper delivered at the 11th Annual Mediterranean Studies Congress, Lüneburg, Germany, May 29, 2008.

“A Failed Crusade? Pope John VIII and the Arabs Reconsidered,” A paper presented at the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 2007.

“The Role of the Latin Missionaries in Ninth-Century Bulgaria,” a paper presented at the 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2006.

“Who was Auxilius? Ethnic Identity in Carolingian Italy,” a paper presented at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2004.

Available at:

  https://www.academia.edu/45044020/Who_Was_Auxilius_Ethnic_Identity_in_Late_Carolingian_Italy

and at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349007648_Who_Was_Auxilius_Ethnic_Identity_in_Late_Carolingian_Italy

“Invitation or Imitation: The Justification of Arnulf’s Invasion of Italy in 895/896,” a paper presented at the 5th Annual Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association, Granada (Spain), May 29-June 1, 2002.

“The 898 Synod of Ravenna, and the Rehabilitation of Pope Formosus,” a paper presented at the 37th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2002.

I would also like to publicly thank my committee: my long-time advisor, Robert E. Somerville, who supported me over the decades, though it seemed that I would never finish; my other Columbia readers: Adam J. Kosto, Carmela Vircillo Franklin, and Euen Cameron; and my outside reader, Thomas F. X. Noble. I should also thank the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Columbia for allowing me to defend this dissertation, even though I had not been an active student for at least fifteen years! Many more people are named in the acknowledgments, and will be mentioned in the book.

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Notes on Pope Formosus (part 2)

Posted in Medieval History, tagged , , , , , , , , on 2014/06/02| 12 Comments »

The following are my revisions to the received account of Pope Formosus and the Cadaver Synod, much of which is recounted in this article in Wikipedia, and summarized in the previous post.  Since this information is not yet published, the article will need to wait for revision.

I will generally ignore minor errors of fact, like that Formosus was born in Ostia, for which I know of no evidence (there is no evidence as to where he was born). The Wikipedia article says that he fled Rome in 872 and was condemned that same year. Yet, it also says that he persuaded Charles the Bald to be crowned emperor in 875. In fact, he was sent by Pope John VIII to West Francia to ask Charles the Bald to become emperor, and Charles came to Rome and was crowned by John VIII at Christmas 875. It was only after that, in 876, that Formosus and a group of associates fled Rome under mysterious circumstances. They were ordered to return, and when they did not, they were excommunicated.   The group had fled to the protection of the Duke of Spoleto, who was an adversary of Pope John VIII, and Formosus later went to West Francia, the kingdom of the Emperor Charles the Bald. John VIII issued letters claiming that Formosus and the others were traitors, expecially against the Emperor, but the fact that Formosus fled to Charles’ kingdom would make that claim appear specious. The claim that Formosus also had been a rival to the papal see in 872 was also in these letters, but there is no other evidence for this (although most historians have generally accepted the claim).

In 878, John VIII, still having problems with the Duke of Spoleto, travelled to West Francia in search of aid. While there, he held a council at Troyes, after which he met with Formosus and agreed to restore him to lay communion if he swore an oath never to return to Rome and never to seek to regain his bishopric. On the death of John VIII in 882 (he was the first pope to be assassinated), his successor, Marinus, absolved him of that oath and invited him to take up the see of Porto again.

But my main revisions of the accepted story involve the lead-up to the Cadaver Synod. Formosus became Pope on the death of Stephen V, in 891.   At the time, Wido II, Duke of Spoleto, was now Emperor, having been crowned by Pope Stephen V. Wido asked that his son, Lambert, be crowned co-emperor, which Formosus did. Wido subsequently died and Lambert was crowned Emperor by Formosus.   The assumption has long been that neither Stephen V nor Formosus really wanted the Spoletans to gain the imperial title, but would rather have crowned a Carolingian (descendents of Charlemagne). This is based on entries in a German chronicle, the Annals of Fulda, which claim that both Stephen and Formosus sent secret envoys to Arnulf of Carinthia inviting him to invade Italy and become emperor. I believe that is is also based on some faulty reasoning that no one could conceive of a non-Carolingian emperor, and that the papacy was always in an adversarial relationship with the Spoletans. But, while John VIII (and perhaps other popes) was an adversary of the Spoletans, this was not true of Formosus, as we have already seen, above.

I believe that neither Formosus nor Stephen V invited Arnulf to invade, but the Annals of Fulda, being a source close to Arnulf gave that as an excuse for his invasion, which was really an usurpation of the imperial crown. Arnulf had only recently succeeded to the German kingship, and having consolidated his power there, now felt strong enough to seize the imperial title as well. He invaded Italy and forced Formosus to crown him emperor. Formosus died just over a month later, probably having been tortured and held in captivity. Arnulf, meanwhile, had left Rome in the hands of a governor (Farold) and had gone off to fight Lambert and secure his imperial title. Unfortunately for him, he was stricken by some sort of paralysis, and had to retreat to Bavaria, where he later died. Thus Lambert retained his imperial crown.

In Rome, Formosus was succeeded by Bonface VI, an old man who died only two weeks later. The next pope was Stephen VI, who had been ordained Bishop of Anagni by Pope Formosus. It was Stephen VI who convened the Cadaver Synod, in which the body of Formosus was removed from its tomb and placed on trial. We do not know for certain what the charges were because the acts of this council were ordered to be burned by the Synod of Ravenna in 898, which overturned them and restored Formosus to his place on the papal lists. However, it has always been assumed, and is most likely, that Formosus was accused of having violated his oath to John VIII by returning to Rome and taking up the see of Porto, and also having violated canon law by allowing himself to be translated from the see of Porto to that of Rome. (At the time, is was against canon law for a bishop to move from one see to another – a restriction that was often waived.)   Formosus was found guilty, and his papacy was invalidated as were the ordinations he made while pope. Two fingers were cut off of his right hand (the fingers he would have used to annoint), and he was buried in a pauper’s cemetery, from which he was immediately dug up again and thrown into the Tiber River (with weights to hold the body down).

It has long been claimed that Pope Stephen VI was the “creature” of Lambert and his mother Ageltrude, and the trial was their revenge for his having abandoned Lambert in favor of Arnulf. It used to be assumed that they were even present at the synod. An Italian historian long ago showed that is probably not true. As I have tried to show, Formosus did not invite Arnulf to invade, and our major source for the synod, the acts of the 898 Synod of Ravenna, would indicate that Arnulf was not a valid emperor because he had seized the imperial title by force. Moreover, Stephen VI became pope while Arnulf’s governor, Farold, was still in control of Rome, so he was the “creature” of Arnulf, not of Lambert and Ageltrude. (His first extant letter is dated in the reign of the Emperor Arnulf.)   It is also often claimed that Stephen VI, having been ordained Bishop of Anagni by Formosus, annulled his papacy and his ordinations in order to absolve himself of the very same crime of translation from one see to another. But, since this restriction was often waived, such twisted reasoning was hardly necessary.

Formosus had a long and controversial career in the Church, and had made many friends and also many enemies. There were very powerful factions in Rome at the time, and their origins and their memberships are obscure, and would be a good subject for research. Stephen VI and the small group of other clerics who put Formosus on trial found some valid accusations against him, but none of the crimes would necessitate placing the actual body of the accused on trial. The only really good explanation is that some other people considered Formosus to be a very holy man, and even perhaps a martyr, having been killed as a result of Arnulf’s forcible capture of the imperial title. The enemies of Formosus could not bear the idea of their arch-enemy being regarded as a saint!   The whole point of putting his body on trial was to desecrate it and to destroy his tomb, thus putting an end to the growing cult!   In this they succeeded, despite that fact that the acts of the Cadaver Synod were overturned and burned. The body of Formosus was found and reburied in St-Peter’s, but he has never been considered a saint in the Roman Church.

My arguments depend on much more detail that was provided in the papers listed, and will be documented in my dissertation which I will certainly publish in some form later.   I hope to have finished this dissertation by the end of 2014.    A list of my own papers on this topic are in the previous post.

 

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Notes on Pope Formosus (891-896) (part 1)

Posted in Medieval History, tagged , , , , , on 2014/05/30| 2 Comments »

As I mention in the “About” page on this blog, I have been working for a long time on a PhD dissertation on the subject of Pope Formosus, who was Pope from 891 to 896, but had a long and very interesting career before that as Bishop of Porto (the port of Rome).   Most people I talk to about this have never heard of Pope Formosus, but if someone has it is always because of what happened to him after his death. I have put it this way in the introduction to several papers I’ve presented on the subject:

“Sometime near the beginning of the year 897, a shocking spectacle took place in Rome, as the sitting Pope put one of his predecessors on trial. That the predecessor was dead was only one unusual fact about the trial. What shocked contemporaries even more was that Stephen VI actually had the body of Formosus removed from its tomb and placed on the papal throne to face the charges against him! The contemporary Annales Fuldenses report the event in spare terms:

‘At Rome pope Formosus died on the holy day of Easter [April 4]; in his place Boniface was consecrated, who was attacked by gout and is said to have survived for barely two weeks. In his place a pope called Stephen [VI] succeeded, a man of notorious reputation, who in unheard-of fashion turned out his predecessor, Formosus from his grave, had him deposed by proxy and buried outside the usual place where popes are buried. (Annals of Fulda, trans. by Timothy Reuter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), under the year 896, p. 135.’”

When I came upon this event many years ago, I found it interesting enough to investigate further. But I was not satisfied with the existing explanations for the ghastly trial, known commonly as the “Cadaver Synod.” So I began to do more research into the subject, and I determined that one cannot really understand the trial without looking at the entire context, including the long career of Formosus, which no one had done in about a hundred years. Many fine historians had investigated various aspects of the subject, as they related to issues they themselves were studying, such as the deposition of popes, or the question of who might judge a pope, but they always accepted the basic assumptions of a hundred years before (which was a natural thing to do in such cases). Over the past ten years and more, I have presented nine papers on various aspects of the career of Formosus, and on the Cadaver Synod, and have reached very different conclusions. I am currently attempting to stitch these papers (listed below) together into a dissertation, but because I get inquiries about this topic, I would like to present the conclusions I have reached, and how they differ from the earlier assumtions that one generally finds in the literature.

The general story can be found in Wikipedia, much of which is based on the work of Horace Kinder Mann, which was based on the work of Louis Duchesne. Duchesne was a great historian of early Christianity and of the papacy, and his work was extremely good, but suffered from some biases not unusual for his day.    In the next post, I will address how my conclusions differ from the generally accepted story.    Meanwhile, here is a list of the papers I have presented over the years that have brought me to those conclusions.

A Synod of Ravenna Confirming the Cadaver Synod?” Paper presented at the XIV International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Toronto, 5-11 August 2012.     (In publication)

“The Cadaver Synod and the Unmaking of Saints,” A paper presented at the 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 2011.

“The Synod of Ravenna of 898 as a Witness to the Cadaver Synod,” A paper presented at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2010.

“Renovatio redux: A New Look at the Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma,” A paper delivered at the 12th Annual Mediterranean Studies Congress, Università di Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy May, 2009.

“Pope Formosus and Hamburg-Bremen,” A paper delivered at the 11th Annual Mediterranean Studies Congress, Lüneburg, Germany, May 29, 2008.

“A Failed Crusade? Pope John VIII and the Arabs Reconsidered,” A paper presented at the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 2007.

“The Role of the Latin Missionaries in Ninth-Century Bulgaria,” a paper presented at the 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2006.

“Who was Auxilius? Ethnic Identity in Carolingian Italy,” a paper presented at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2004.

“Invitation or Imitation: The Justification of Arnulf’s Invasion of Italy in 895/896,” a paper presented at the 5th Annual Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association, Granada (Spain), May 29-June 1, 2002.

“The 898 Synod of Ravenna, and the Rehabilitation of Pope Formosus,” a paper presented at the 37th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2002.

 

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