Holy Shit, the Walk to Canossa!

Once upon a time, there was a Holy Roman Emperor named Henry IV. He wasn't a big fan of the Catholic Church having control over his business. In particular, he wanted to be able to assign his loyal subordinates as bishops within the Empire. Pope Gregory VII felt differently about the matter.

This all more came to a head when the two of them assigned separate candidates for the same position. Fuming, the Pope decided to push the big red button. The one marked "excommunicate." He notified Henry that he had exactly one year to prove that he's stopped being a dick about this whole investiture thing.

All while giving the "Oh no you didn't" finger wag

This being the year 1076, being excommunicated was a much bigger deal than it is today. Especially for a Holy Roman Emperor. His right to rule was, in the public perception, a divine mandate from god. To have God's corporeal press secretary declare him unfit to be a member of the church was a huge blow to his authority. Rebellion sprouted up across the Empire. Rebellion that had been growing underground among the aristocracy for some time...but now it had a religious excuse, so it burst to the surface.

So Henry had to do something. In the Winter of 1077, he got an entourage together in Speyer and headed South, away from Germany and across the Alps toward Canossa. Legend has it that he made the journey barefoot, wearing a cilice, braving frigid temperatures, snow, and ice the whole way. When he arrived, he found that the Pope ordered the gates closed. So he knelt in the snow.

And after the whole "uphill both ways" journey, too.

A blizzard raged outside, and Henry IV stayed. He ate nothing and wore little to ward off the snow. For three full days, he stayed outside the gate silently begging the church for forgiveness. It became clear to Gregory that to refuse Henry reconciliation with the church after that would be impossible. So he invited the Emperor inside, where they shared Communion.

I mean, how could you not?

The Pope still didn't support Henry as Emperor, but the effects of the Walk to Canossa were long-term and far-reaching. During the Protestant Reformation, Henry's Walk was a rallying symbol for Protestants in Germany, who decided that their nation's rulers (and their nation itself) should never again have to face such humiliating submission to foreign powers, especially the Church. This same language was used by Adolf Hitler in his rise to power, against both the imagined conspiracy of the Jews and against government officials when the Nazi Party was banned.

Even today, people of many countries refer to a humiliating apology as their "Walk to Canossa." Just goes to show that a little hiking can do a lot for history and colloquial language.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Dracula!

When you get one of the most infamous monsters in all of storytelling named after you, you know you've done something right. Or wrong. Depends on how you respond to the whole "No such thing as bad publicity" adage. Posthumously. Very posthumously.

ANYWAY.

I shouldn't be getting off track this early.

Vlad III "Motherfucking" Țepeș was a Voivode (warlord) of Wallachia back around the time when the Byzantine Empire finally had enough with being the legacy of old Rome and rebelled via being utterly vanquished by the Ottomans. Wallachia, being a nearby neighbor of Constantinople, had its own problems with potential Ottoman invasion. Vlad's father, Vlad II, dealt with this threat pragmatically.

That is to say, he allied himself with Ottoman Empire, paid them tribute, sent his sons to them as hostages, and in return was installed as Voivode of Wallachia.This is after he joined a chivalric order called The Order of the Dragon, which was dedicated to fighting the "enemies of Christianity" -- chief among which were the Turks themselves.

The best defense is a good mewling surrender.

As an aside: the Romanian word for "Dragon" is "Drac." Vlad II's association with The Order of the Dragon earned him the name "Vlad Dracul," or "Vlad the Dragon." I think you know where this is headed. Adding an "-a" to the end of a name makes it patronymic in this context. So Vlad III was also known as "Son of the Dragon," or "Dracula."

Vlad III's younger brother Radu got along famously with the Ottomans, and ended up converting to Islam. Vlad...not so much. He was constantly at odds with his captors, which meant he was constantly punished. This did nothing to improve the relationship. Eventually, his father and older brother were both killed, and Wallachia was taken over by a rival faction. The Ottomans' solution to this little problem was to install Dracula as Voivode.

Which went thusly.

This didn't work out so well. First, because he was immediately overthrown. Then he came back and described to the usurpers all the vicious fantasies he had about just...straight up destroying Turks. And that pleased them enough to make him Voivode again. When Sultan Mehmed II sent envoys to his childhood playmate, Dracula responded by saying, "Hey, envoys, you didn't tip your hats to me when you came in. You must really like those turbans." Then he had their turbans nailed into their heads.

The Sultan was understandably a bit miffed by this turn of events. He sent an army under Hamza Bey to "make peace" with Wallachia and "remove" Vlad III if necessary. Vlad apparently caught Bey sleepin', though, and launched a surprise attack that killed or captured almost every single man under Hamza Bey's command. Then Vlad went to work earning the epithet Țepeș, or "the Impaler."

And boy howdy, did he ever work hard to earn it. The more squeamish readers might want to go ahead and stop here. It's about to get graphic up in this blog.

See, impalement is one of those execution methods that isn't meant to just kill you. It's meant to keep you alive until you really, really want to die. They'd grease a stake, stick you on it (and I'm gonna let you use your imagination as to where exactly they put you), and try to avoid rupturing any of your internal organs. In that way, you could live up to eight excruciating days in blinding, horrific pain before you finally died.

Vlad did this to about 1,000 of Hamza Bey's men, and to Hamza Bey himself. Then he brought small bands with him and, using the fluent Turkish language and customs he learned in his youth, waltzed into various Ottoman camps and put everyone within them to the sword. Or the stake.

While Vlad treated himself to the steak.

Mehmed was displeased. He sent an army of almost 100,000 men in retribution, which Vlad the Impaler proceeded to dismantle and impale little by little over a series of stunning victories. Finally, it became too much. He was out of money, his mercenaries abandoned him, and he fled to Hungary where a rival imprisoned him.

For about a dozen years. Then he went back to Wallachia and took over again. Can't keep Dracula down. Or rather, you can. You just have to finally defeat him in battle to do it. Which is what happened about two months into his reign. The Turks brought his head back to Constantinople and everyone in the Ottoman empire changed their underpants and hoped no one like that would rise to power in the Balkans again.

Several hundred years later, an old writer named Bram Stoker was working on a vampire novel and came upon a tome that detailed some of the nastier figures in history. Vlad III Dracula turned out to be a perfect fit for the main villain, and the rest is pop culture history.

He's missing some of that Wallachian charm.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Cadaver Synod!

Pope Stephen VI had a problem. Well, his sponsors had a problem. Stephen's predecessor (not his immediate predecessor, who had a William Henry Harrison-like truncated reign) was both fairly popular and not a huge fan of the current Holy Roman Emperor. Pope Formosus, in his time, actually invited rivals of the Emperor to invade Italy and seize Rome for themselves.

As you might imagine, this made the folks in charge (House Spoleto) a little bit unhappy. Having reaffirmed their claim on Rome by giving up any claim to the rest of Italy, they were finally in a position where they could get back at Formosus. Unfortunately for them, he had died in 896, and it was 897. They wanted to hold a trial and strip him of his title, but he was already dead. What were the Spoletos to do?

If you answered, "Dig up the old Pope's remains, dress him up in his old vestments, and put him on trial anyway," congratulations! You're just as batshit insane as old Pope Steve and company, who did exactly that.

Clint Eastwood later performed a misunderstood stage adaptation of the event at the Republican National Convention.

It's hard not to think that the whole ordeal happened just to give me the surreal pleasure of writing these words: Pope Stephen dug up Pope Formosus' body and had it placed on the witness chair. He asked the corpse such leading questions as, "When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?" A deacon loyal to the (living) Pope provided the departed Pope's answers, which were presumably something like, "Probably because I'm such a dick."

The ghost of Formosus was found guilty of perjury, moving his bishopric office (which was super bad in canon law), and holding a bishopric before being ordained. His body was ceremoniously stripped of vestments, three fingers of his right hand were removed (the ones used for blessing), and all acts and ordinations he performed were declared null and void. He was then buried in a graveyard for foreigners. Stephen's faction wasn't satisfied with that, so they dug him back up a short while later and haphazardly tossed him into the Tiber River.

Which they presumably then charged with murder.

Unluckily for Stephen, people in the late 9th Century weren't actually all that stupid. They saw the farcical trial for what it was: petty papal politics. They also saw it as horrifically disrespectful of the dead. Not just any dead, either. The dead Pope. God's literal voice on Earth, according to Catholic doctrine. Treating any body with callous disrespect would have been bad. Treating a pope's body led directly to uprising.

Rumors abounded that the body of Formosus washed up on the shores of the Tiber and began performing miracles. Despite having been dead for some time, the Cadaver Synod made him a martyr. A few months later, an uprising led to Pope Stephen VI being deposed, imprisoned, and later strangled to death in jail. Further trials featuring dead bodies were banned in what I hope was called the "Oh My God, I Can't Believe We Have to Specify This" Edict.

"It's Like Having to Specify That You Shouldn't Rape Altar Boys."

Formosus was post-posthumously acquitted and reburied at St. Peter's Basilica, and the results of the trial were declared dumb as hell and thus void. In 904, Pope Sergius III, who served as a judge at the Synod, more or less said "Nuh uh." While he didn't bother digging up the corpse again, he declared the original trial's result to be legitimate, requiring all the clergy ordained by Formosus to go through the process again.

That was pretty much the end of it. A bit of a compromise. A tit for tat, with the tit being "Everyone has to say I was right all along" and the tat being "I won't subject a corpse to another line of questioning."

Holy shit.