In January 897, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, a pope put a corpse on trial.

The corpse belonged to Pope Formosus. He had been dead for about nine months. His successor's successor, Pope Stephen VI, had a political problem with him. Formosus had crowned the wrong man as Holy Roman Emperor, and the faction that now controlled Rome wanted his entire papacy erased. Not criticised. Not revised. Erased from the record as though it had never happened.

Stephen's solution was direct. He had the body exhumed from its tomb in St. Peter's, dressed in full papal vestments, carried across Rome, and propped up on the papal throne in the Lateran Basilica. In front of an audience of bishops and clergy. Then he appointed a teenage deacon to stand behind the throne and answer the charges on the dead man's behalf.

The charges were perjury, illegally holding two bishoprics, and seizing the papacy through ambition. Stephen screamed the accusations at the vestments on the throne. "When you were Bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See?" The deacon, standing behind a nine-month-old papal figure in full decomposing regalia, answered for him. Nobody recorded what he said. Formosus was found guilty. His papacy was declared null. Every ordination he had ever performed was voided. Every bishop he had appointed was stripped of office. Then Stephen ordered three fingers cut from the right hand: the fingers of benediction, the fingers Formosus had used to give papal blessings in life. The vestments were stripped, replaced with a commoner's rags, and the remains were dragged through the streets and thrown into the Tiber.

It did not end well for Stephen. The spectacle was so grotesque that Rome turned on him within months. A mob seized him, stripped him of his own vestments, and threw him in prison. He was strangled in his cell before the year was out. The next pope, Theodore II, annulled the entire Cadaver Synod, had Formosus recovered from the river, dressed in papal robes for the third time, and reburied in St. Peter's Basilica with full honours.

The pope who tried a dead man was himself dead within the year. The dead man he convicted got his job back.

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