Title

The Cadaver Synod: Strangest Trial in History

Authors

Donald E. Wilkes Jr., University of Georgia School of LawFollow

Flagpole, October 31, 2001, pp. 8-9

Abstract

One thousand one hundred and four years ago a criminal trial took place in Italy, a trial so macabre, so gruesome, so frightful that it easily qualifies as the strangest and most terrible trial in human history. At this trial, called the Cadaver Synod, a dead pope wrenched from the grave was brought into a Rome courtroom, tried in the presence of a successor pope, found guilty, and then, in the words of Horace K. Mann's The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages (1925), "subjected to the most barbarous violence."

Repository Citation

Wilkes, Donald E. Jr., "The Cadaver Synod: Strangest Trial in History" (2001). Popular Media. 42.
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_pm/42