Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Early Medieval Papacy (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined by guests Prof Brett Whalen and comedian Alison Spittle in 9th-century Rome to explore the early medieval papacy. As the political heart of the papacy is plunged into chaos, we step into a world consumed by debauchery and a thirst for power and hear about perhaps the most unhinged courtroom trial of all time.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Research by Jessica Honey
Written by Emma Nagouse, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner
Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow
Project Management: Isla Matthews
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
0:06 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
0:33 Speaker 02 Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is the AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task, like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you, and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and
1:18 Speaker 02 Slack. And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/solve.
1:47 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are donning our fanciest vestments and going on pilgrimage to ninth century Rome to learn all about the early medieval papacy, when the political heart of the Catholic Church was plunged into such chaos that historians have Called it the Papal Dark Ages. And that's not even the meanest thing they've said. And to help me shed some light on this tantalisingly tumultuous time, I am joined by two very special guests. In history corner, he's a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he works on Christian intellectual and cultural history during the Middle Ages. He has published on the Crusades, apocalypticism and pilgrimage.
2:31 Greg Jenner? And luckily for us, he literally wrote the book on the medieval papacy. It's Professor Brett Whalen, welcome Brett. Thank you so much for having me. And in comedy corner, she's a comedian, writer, radio producer and actress. You might have seen her hilarious stand up shows or seen her sitcom Nowhere Fast. Maybe you've heard her on the Guilty Feminist podcast or her BBC show Wheel of Misfortune. She's podding fabulous. It's Alison Spittle, welcome Alison.
2:53 Speaker 04 Hello, I'm so excited about being here and what a subject, first of all. The Papal Dark Ages sounds like an entry for Finland in Eurovision. It's an incredible band I would love to see.
3:04 Greg Jenner? Me too, absolutely. Alison, this is your debut performance on the show, which means I have to contractually ask you, do you like history? Did you like it at school?
3:13 Speaker 04 I did. I loved history. I had a great history teacher. So yeah, I've always been very interested in history.
3:18 Greg Jenner? Today we're doing medieval history. It's quite far back and it's quite specific as well. And I know you were raised Catholic, you're comfortable with the history of Catholicism, but perhaps less so with medieval papacy, the political papacy. Do you know anything about it?
3:32 Speaker 04 No, I know nothing about it. Being former Catholic, like I was very big into saints. For me, popes are administration people. Saints for me were like the superheroes and popes were like the guys in the FBI supporting them quietly. So for medieval, medieval popes as well, it's, there must have been some absolute skullduggery, I'd say. I don't know. I don't want to predict, but I want drama. I want this to be a mini series on an American network TV show with Jeremy Irons in it or something like that.
4:02 Greg Jenner? I can promise you today, there's a lot of drama. This is an extraordinary story and some serious shenanigans happening. So what do you know?
4:15 Greg Jenner? That brings us on to the first segment of the podcast called the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what our listener might know about today's subject. I'm guessing you know what the Pope is, you know where the Vatican is, but the power struggles of the papacy a thousand years ago? Nah, that's not going to register, is it really? In terms of pop culture, or rather, I guess, in terms of Pope culture, there aren't loads of TV shows or films I can point to. I mean, there's the sort of Dan Brown Angels and Demons, if you have to read that or watch that, I'm so sorry. There's Jude Law and the Young Pope. There are some TV series that bounce around in this era, things like The Last Kingdom, but that's all about kings and princes and warriors, not popes. So I reckon the so-called Papal Dark Ages is pretty dark and dingy for non-specialists,
4:57 Greg Jenner? which is a shame, because it was extremely chaotic and debauched and corrupt. So let's crack on. First of all, Papal history is all about popes. And the popes, of course, are the Bishop of Rome, head of their worldwide Catholic Church, the supreme pontiff. They have more names than the Mother of Dragons. So Alison, how many popes have there been since the very beginning, do you think?
5:17 Speaker 04 Oh, okay. So people lived for a shorter time before. I'm going to go for 10,000 popes. Like, that's not the name of a band that I would love.
5:26 Greg Jenner? That does sound like the name of a band. 10,000, yeah.
5:29 Speaker 04 They're like so salakr, we don't know how many people are in them. It's innumerable.
5:33 Greg Jenner? The Vatican says 266 popes.
5:37 Speaker 04 That's less people that's been on RuPaul's Drag Race.
5:39 Greg Jenner? Brett, in terms of setting the Papal stage, was St Peter the first Pope? Or is it a political office constituted after his death? Where do we start Papal history?
5:51 Speaker 05 I mean, it sort of depends on where you look at it. You know, on one level, the Pope is just the Bishop of Rome. He's the leader of the local church in the city. And there were certainly Christians in Rome back in the first century, back in the days of St Peter, and they presumably had a bishop pretty early on. And there were Christians with bishops spreading all around the Roman Empire. All those bishops were sometimes called popes, by the way, papa in Latin. But what's going on different in Rome is the fact that the idea that Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew 1618 made the apostle Peter his kind of deputy, right? He was the rock- That Jesus founded the church on and he gave him the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And then according to tradition, Peter went to Rome and actually founded the church there and handed down that power to the next bishop, his successor, according to some of the list named Linus.
6:36 Speaker 05 It gets passed down this power down through the ages, right? So by the second, third centuries, what you start to see are bishops like Victor. He's Pope around the year 199, weighing in on controversies in the church. There was a big controversy about the correct way to date Easter at the time. And, and they start to claim a power that isn't just about being the bishop of Rome, but is a universal power over the entire church. So, you know, four or 500 years after the time of St. Peter, you start to see the, the title of Pope being reserved for not all bishops, but just the bishop of Rome. And that's when he's really becoming like the Pope. No one was keeping a list of popes in the first, second century. And I think in the third and fourth century, people kind of retroactively made these nice tidy lists.
7:16 Speaker 05 So I, I, I think we can be, you know, appropriately suspicious of the, the exact number of popes.
7:23 Greg Jenner? And Alison, do you know why the papacy is based in Rome? It's not just the gelato.
7:28 Speaker 04 It only occurred to me today, where does the term Roman Catholic come from? Tell me why this is, I'm trying to think of something funny, but the curiosity has overtaken my brain.
7:37 Speaker 05 St. Peter's critical here, but also St. Paul, you get two for the price of one here. But there's a tradition that, uh, that St. Paul also went to Rome. It's the capital of the Roman Empire, it's the heart of the Roman world. And so the idea that these two really important apostles went there and they founded the church there. I think, you know, I guess nowadays we call it an origin story, right?
7:56 Greg Jenner? So that is the origin story, but today we're looking at the early medieval European situation. So we're scrolling forward into the sort of 800s and 900s. We've got this massively important religious and political institution, but it descends into absolute infamy. The Papal Dark Ages is the nice way of describing what happens.
8:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, they had this chronicle, it's called the Book of Popes.
8:14 Speaker 04 Amazing name.
8:16 Speaker 05 Isn't it? I think that runs from about the sixth to the ninth century and it gives these little like mini papal biographies. But after the ninth century, it, it kind of trails off. No one writes another people biography for like a hundred years.
8:28 Greg Jenner? So for 300 years, they've done the papal biographies and then they get to the crisis and they're like, you know what? We haven't got time, that we haven't got time, there's another Pope in.
8:34 Speaker 04 The popes are like the sugar babes in the way that like the middle sugar babes are not really talked about that much. It's just Siobhan. Remember the early days.
8:43 Greg Jenner? Justus Rommel, that's what I say.
8:44 Speaker 04 I know.
8:47 Greg Jenner? Okay, we reached the late 800s. The Papal Dark Ages is a phrase that's sort of commonly used by historians to talk about this period where, politically speaking, the papacy is weak and vulnerable and chaotic. Alison, you ever heard of Formosus?
8:59 Speaker 04 I've never heard of Formosus before. Is it a type of yogurt?
9:06 Speaker 04 It sounds like it would keep my blood pressure down.
9:10 Greg Jenner? Formosus in Latin means handsome.
9:12 Speaker 04 Do we get a handsome Pope?
9:14 Greg Jenner? You get a handsome Pope, the Jude Law Pope, the young Pope.
9:17 Speaker 04 Young Pope.
9:17 Speaker 05 He is handsome, undeniably.
9:20 Greg Jenner? He's handsome for a bit, and then it goes a bit wrong. Brett, can you tell us about Pope Formosus and the notorious thing that happens to him?
9:29 Speaker 05 Formosus is a bishop. He's the bishop of Porto, which is just outside Rome. The Pope Nicholas I sends him up to Bulgaria on a mission to convert the Bulgarians, and he does a good job. He's a successful missionary. Later on, though, he gets tangled up in these kind of local nasty Roman politics. He's deposed at one point, and eventually he actually manages to become Pope himself. This is in 891. He's now holding the top spot in the church. But again, he gets caught up in this political infighting, including this question of who's going to be the next king of Italy. He dies, apparently of natural causes, in 896. There's a Pope right after him, Boniface VI, but he's only Pope for like 15 days, so we don't really
10:09 Speaker 05 need to worry about him. The Pope after that, Stephen VI, is not a fan of Formosus, and some things happen from there that are a bit shocking.
10:20 Greg Jenner? Some things happen is a very, very kind way of describing what is about to happen. Alison, in 897, we get the most unhinged courtroom drama you can possibly imagine. How do you think Pope Stephen VI continues his beef with Pope Formosus, who by this point is dead?
10:36 Speaker 04 They're gonna dig him up, aren't they?
10:37 Speaker 05 Good job.
10:38 Speaker 04 Is this gonna happen? Okay, okay, cool, cool, cool. Oh, wow. I mean, you gotta have a special type of spite to dig as well, you know. What did it do? Okay, tell me, tell me, tell me.
10:50 Greg Jenner? Pope Stephen VI orders the exhumation of the corpse of Formosus, and he is put on trial. So it is called.
11:01 Greg Jenner? It is called the cadaver synod. And Brett, do you want to give us the lurid details?
11:06 Speaker 04 This is amazing. This is amazing.
11:09 Greg Jenner? How do you try a rotting corpse?
11:11 Speaker 05 Weekend at Bernie's just like popped into my head. There's this great, so there's this great painting by Jean Paul Laurent. It's from 1870. It's not medieval at all, but it's one of these great, I think one of the more famous representations of the cadaver synod. So Formosus's rotting body is after nine months in the tomb. He was dug up, he's dressed up in the full papal regalia. He's propped up on the throne and his body is put on trial. Pope Stephen VI is there leveling the charges against him and kind of interrogating him. And supposedly there was a deacon off to the side or behind him, acting like a ventriloquist.
11:44 Speaker 04 No.
11:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, speaking for Formosus.
11:47 Speaker 04 Oh, I'd love to see that on Britain's Got Talent.
11:51 Speaker 04 So he put his hand into the back of the head.
11:53 Speaker 05 I don't know if he literally like shoved his hand in and moved his jaw. That would be really, it's the bridge too far, I think, yeah.
11:59 Greg Jenner? There's definitely someone giving answers on behalf of Formosus, who is a rotting shell of a man. But anyway, Alison, that is the scene. So, I mean, can you imagine that as a TV drama now?
12:09 Speaker 04 How does the defendant plead? Dead, your honour. Dead.
12:14 Greg Jenner? So Stephen is yelling his questions, the deacon is doing the corpse ventriloquism. The corpse is found guilty, obviously, of course he is, because they're not going to be like, oh, he got off on a technicality.
12:24 Speaker 05 Right.
12:26 Greg Jenner? Clearly they're finding him guilty. What do you think his posthumous punishment is?
12:30 Speaker 04 Please say it's death again. Please. It has to be. This is double death. This is great.
12:36 Greg Jenner? Death squared.
12:37 Speaker 04 It can't be, it can't be nine months in on community service. He's not going to be able to sweep up. He's a corpse. It has to be death.
12:44 Greg Jenner? It's a sort of reputational death.
12:46 Speaker 04 Oh.
12:47 Greg Jenner? All of his acts as pope were nullified.
12:49 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
12:49 Greg Jenner? He was stripped of his papal vestments that they'd put on him. Remember those robes they put on him? Well, they took them off again ceremonially. They snapped off his three fingers he had used to bless people.
12:58 Speaker 04 Whoa.
12:59 Greg Jenner? And then they reburied him in a commoner's grave. And Stephen said it was because Formosus had committed perjury, coveting the papacy, violating the laws of the church. So those are the sort of crimes he's accused of.
13:10 Speaker 04 Because we're hearing about him now, was there like a retrospective on this? Is it from Rosia?
13:15 Greg Jenner? Formosus.
13:16 Speaker 05 Formosus.
13:16 Speaker 04 Formosus. Was there kind of like a renaissance for him? Because why do we know so much about him?
13:22 Greg Jenner? Great question. Yeah. Looking like a historian, Alison, very nice. He's reburied in a commoner's grave and then the chaos is not over yet, is it, Brett?
13:29 Speaker 05 Pope Stephen seems to get concerned that some of Formosus's supporters might actually dig up the body and kind of turn it into like a martyr or almost like a saint, right? Get the relics and turn those into a focal point for devotion. Stephen orders the body to be dug up again. And according to some of these chronicles, he gets thrown in the Tiber. The cult of relics was a really big deal in the Middle Ages.
13:50 Speaker 04 I mean, I visited St Valentine's Bones. There's an incredible thing in Dublin where you can look at like wish books and I'm no longer Catholic, love the iconography, I won't lie, love sitting in a church. But like, yeah, this is so interesting to me. Sorry, I totally interrupted you there.
14:05 Speaker 05 No, no, no.
14:05 Speaker 04 With my enthusiasm, Brett. Continue, continue, continue.
14:08 Speaker 05 No, you're you're spot on and you're the one who first brought up saints at the beginning of the show. That's really helpful to remember that there's this whole kind of culture around dead bodies, you know, breaking them up into little bits and sending them around and putting them into altars. That's what they do to Formosus, though, that they throw him in the river because they want to make sure that no, no one gets their hands on his body and turns it into a saintly relic.
14:31 Greg Jenner? And yet.
14:32 Speaker 05 He doesn't become a saint, but uh.
14:33 Speaker 04 Okay.
14:34 Speaker 05 There are stories here that a monk or in other stories, it's like a fisherman who's in the Tiber. Imagine that, you're like fishing in the Tiber and, you know, you put up the pope's corpse. Wow, where did that come from? And the body does get rediscovered, right? And some sympathetic supporters of Formosus get their hands on it. To do it, I think Stephen was probably worried about. There's this one priest, actually, yeah, this other story, Auxilius of Naples is this guy. He's writing at the time, he says there was a thunderstorm. So this is where maybe God was getting involved and it caused the Tiber to rise up. And at that point, the body was discovered. According to another story, this monk had a prophetic dream.
15:10 Speaker 04 Of course.
15:11 Speaker 05 These are signs that Formosus was wrongly, I think, convicted, right? Clearly.
15:18 Speaker 05 Auxilius, by the way, is one of these priests who was ordained, made into a priest, by, guess who? By Formosus. So I think he has his own vested interest in wanting to be Team Formosus. And when Formosus's acts are all nullified, that would send these kind of ripples through the whole church if you just nullified everything a pope did. And so someone like Auxilius, I think, probably had his own reasons for wanting to rehabilitate Pope Formosus.
15:42 Greg Jenner? So I guess Stephen has failed in his quest. He buried him and then threw him in the river, and both times it's gone wrong. What do you think happens to Pope Stephen VI, Alison? Do you think it all ends very nicely for him?
15:53 Speaker 04 Does he get tried when he's dead?
15:55 Speaker 05 I wish.
15:55 Greg Jenner? Oh, sweet justice.
15:59 Greg Jenner? He doesn't get tried in a court of law, but he gets his comeuppance, doesn't he, Brett? And it's a pretty violent comeuppance?
16:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, so people like Auxilius of Naples have it out for Stephen after this all goes down. And he gets pushed out of power not too long after. And he's stripped of his vestments. He's demoted to being a monk, kind of on a house monastic arrest. And he's eventually strangled to death.
16:20 Speaker 04 There's so much bloodlust for these popes. I am aghast. I'm from Ireland. They love popes there.
16:29 Greg Jenner? So thank you for that, Brett. That's an excellent summary of the cat of a synod and its consequences. So karmic justice for Stephen. Then we get the new guy, Pope Romanus. Now, he's got a good name. It's Rome. He's called Romanus. I've got a good feeling about him. Does he do well?
16:43 Speaker 05 I'm sorry. Yeah, he gets overthrown pretty quickly and strangled off to a monastery and dies four months later.
16:51 Speaker 04 What of?
16:52 Greg Jenner? We think maybe poisoned. But I've got a really strong feeling that Pope Theodore II, the best of the chipmunks, he's going to nail this. How long does he last, Alison?
17:01 Speaker 04 Let's, uh, I'm gonna go two years.
17:04 Greg Jenner? Three weeks.
17:05 Speaker 04 No.
17:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:07 Greg Jenner? When I say three weeks, that's the generous version of the story, because the other story is that he dies within 12 days. So Theodore II has not, it's not gone great. He's murdered by foul play, but Brett, he is still linked to the cadaver synod. He's still linked to Formosus, isn't he, Theodore?
17:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, already, Romanus had already started this process of actually of annulring Stephen VI's acts, right, and kind of rehabilitating Formosus. Romanus held a synod reinstating Formosus and condemning Stephen. And then, yeah, Theodore keeps this process going. It's interesting, right? There's like multiple synods by multiple popes after condemning Stephen VI's actions and overturning the verdict of the cadaver synod. So you get the sense of how important this was for people to unwind this. Putting a corpse on trial, it wasn't really a winning move in the, in the long run.
17:59 Speaker 04 No, it makes you look petty, I have to say.
18:02 Greg Jenner? It's really petty.
18:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:03 Greg Jenner? Okay, so we have Theodore dies after only three weeks maximum. He's then replaced by another pope. Things are unfortunately not massively improving. Alison, we asked you at the beginning to guess how many popes there were in total. I'm now going to ask you to guess how many popes were there in the eight years between 896 and 904.
18:22 Speaker 04 I'm gonna go for 18.
18:26 Greg Jenner? I love the way you embraced the chaos. It was nine popes in eight years.
18:32 Greg Jenner? Which is still pretty bad, but not all of those did one year. Some of those were doing just a few months.
18:36 Speaker 04 There were some caretaker popes involved in this.
18:39 Greg Jenner? Some definite caretaker popes. These popes being elected, you know, inverted commas, but there's actually an awful lot of sort of sinister underhand politics happening here. We have some very powerful families with wonderful names, the Theophilacti, the Crescenti, and the Tusculani. They are the kind of medieval mafia mob bosses of papal politics, aren't they?
18:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, you can't, you can't understand what's happening without really thinking about these powerful Roman families.
19:03 Greg Jenner? And so they're putting their own on the, on the throne. And then within a few months or a year, that pope is bumped off, murdered, deposed. So many popes were killed or deposed, we don't even have time to list them, Alison. That's how many it was.
19:15 Greg Jenner? The papacy clearly is in dire straits here, Brett. The obvious question, I suppose, is are various kings and princes and rulers and political decision makers, have they just given up on the papacy?
19:25 Speaker 05 No, I don't, I mean, Rome still, it is still such a touchstone point, right? Popes still have this layering of legitimacy, they're the only ones that can bestow. You can be a really powerful king, but if you want to really have the imperial title and have people recognise it as meaningful, you need a pope to be the one to hand that crown over. Just to give you an example, there are these rulers in Germany in the late 900s, conveniently named Otto I, Otto II and Otto III. They become really powerful, powerful enough that they want to reclaim the imperial title. So Otto goes down, I think around, it's like 955, he goes down to knock some heads in northern Italy and actually meets with the pope and gets crowned as emperor.
20:07 Speaker 05 The Autonians, as they're called, the Autonian dynasty, donates properties to the papacy. Emperor Otto III is interesting because he works really closely with Pope Sylvester II, who was his former tutor, actually, and they seem to have these big ambitious plans to kind of bring back the glory of the Roman Empire. They both die at 1002 and 1003, like within a year of each other, and nothing much comes of this partnership. And it takes another decade or so before another emperor is crowned. These rulers don't walk away from the appeal of Rome.
20:38 Greg Jenner? Okay, but there's clearly a crisis going on. Alison, if you were the chief exec of the papacy, we've reached the year 1000 here, so what reforms would you be putting in place to try and protect the brand?
20:50 Speaker 04 Is there celibacy now or is that later on in the?
20:53 Speaker 05 It's theoretically on the books at this point, but not always observed, let's put it that way. It's a great, it's a great question.
21:00 Speaker 04 I would get the devil out of church, that would be my big thing if I was pope.
21:04 Speaker 05 Step one.
21:05 Speaker 04 Step one.
21:06 Greg Jenner? Brett, how do you remove the devil from the church? How do you reform the papacy? After 200 years of absolute crisis, we've reached the early 1000s. Are there going to be reforms coming down the pipeline?
21:17 Speaker 05 The 11th century, I'm certainly not the first medieval historian to talk about, sometimes called like the papal reform movement, where people are Trying to sort of clean house here a bit. One example of this is in 1049, you get a new pope, Leo IX, he's generally considered the first reformer pope of the 11th century. He's more or less installed by the emperor at the time, Henry III. But when he shows up, actually shows up in Rome to take up the papal office, he comes, it's described in some accounts in the manner of a pilgrim, he's barefoot, he's humble, he tells the people of Rome that if he's not worthy to be their bishop, he'll leave, right? So, and then in the 1070s, you get to Pope Gregory VII. And he left such a stamp on this new spirit of reform. It's sometimes actually called the Gregorian papacy. And to your point, he wants to get priests to be celibate.
22:01 Speaker 05 He wants priests to stop getting married and passing their church property on to their kids. He wants to get rid of simony, which is the idea that you can like buy a bishop or a bishop, buy a position as an abbot. And so there really is this idea, they want to get the pope out from under the thumb of laypeople, which includes kings and emperors, by the way. And, and really broadcast the idea that the papacy is the ultimate spiritual head of the Christian world. And that's how you're going to reform the church, is by the pope stepping up into this role.
22:26 Speaker 04 So is it given to pope ultimate power?
22:28 Speaker 05 In some ways, I think when we think of the papacy as being a big deal in the Middle Ages, it's really the 11th century when that starts to happen. So you wind up with Clement, and then you have a series of popes over the following decades, who are basically kind of popes in exile, right? They're not actually in Rome, but they have a lot of support. You see the popes, a series of popes, what was it, sticking with the reform up to their eyeballs? One of the interesting ones is Urban II, he's elected pope in 1088.
22:50 Speaker 04 Pope Urban, that's a genre of music that wasn't happening in the mid 200s.
22:55 Speaker 05 Have you heard of Urban, Alison? Does that name ring any bells?
22:58 Speaker 04 I have an idea related to Keith Urban, the husband of Nicole Kidman.
23:02 Greg Jenner? Yeah, Carl Urban, Pope Urban, and Keith, they're all the same Urban, all the same family. No, it's...
23:07 Speaker 05 He's, he's an important pope. He's savvy, he gathers a lot of support from different European rulers and bishops.
23:13 Greg Jenner? Pope Urban II is one of the most famous popes from history. He's going to do something very, very famous. Do you know what it is, Alison? It's in the 1090s.
23:21 Speaker 04 Oh, I am...
23:23 Speaker 05 All right, I'm going to give a hint.
23:25 Speaker 04 Okay, please.
23:26 Speaker 05 Orlando Bloom.
23:27 Speaker 04 Orlando Bloom, the calcium kid? Does he become a boxer? Does he become a boxer?
23:35 Speaker 04 Or is he a pirate?
23:36 Greg Jenner? You've gone two pirates of the Caribbean, Brett. We should have gone the other, we should have gone with Ridley Scott.
23:39 Speaker 04 Oh, yes, yes.
23:41 Speaker 05 Kingdom of heaven.
23:43 Speaker 04 So Kingdom of Heaven, okay, cool. So is he a tough pope?
23:46 Greg Jenner? He calls the First Crusade.
23:48 Speaker 04 Ah, yes, okay.
23:51 Greg Jenner? Which is a huge moment in global history. It's obviously going to be a horrifically violent religious war. Brett, this is, in terms of medieval Christianity, this is a sort of watermark moment, isn't it, for the papacy, because this is an assertion of strength?
24:03 Speaker 05 I think so. You know, here's Urban. He's in the middle, still of this ongoing fight with Henry IV. He can't even really go to the city of Rome, but he's outworking the crowds sometimes, literally. And in 1095, he preaches this sermon in Clermont in France and calls for Christians to go. And as he sees it liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, and this becomes known as the First Crusade. At the time, and certainly in retrospect, the kind of showstopping demonstration of the Pope's authority on a, I guess we now, we might call it like an international level. In the Crusade, it actually captures Jerusalem in July 1099. And Pope Urban II dies just like a few weeks before news reaches Rome that the Crusaders had actually, after this three-year campaign, managed to capture the city. Urban's very symbolic of a kind of a new direction with the papacy, I think.
24:49 Greg Jenner? We now get into a new phase where the papacy is still political, it's still controversial, but there is more strength in the office, I suppose.
24:56 Speaker 04 Was Urban looking for that war to get the Europeans together against like what they would perceive as a common enemy and give these rich people something to do?
25:04 Speaker 05 Rich, also inviolent.
25:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:06 Speaker 05 The peace of God is happening at the same time. And there's this idea like, stop killing each other.
25:10 Speaker 04 Start killing other people.
25:12 Speaker 05 Sadly, yeah, go kill, go, go kill the so-called infidels as they view, as they view them.
25:17 Speaker 04 Interesting.
25:18 Greg Jenner? Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other episode, Alison, but you know, that's brought us to the end of our conversation, to the end of the Papal Dark Ages.
25:30 Greg Jenner? This is where Alison and I spend our two minutes reburying a pope we've just dug up, while Brett has two uninterrupted minutes to tell us something we need to know about today's conversation. So my stopwatch is ready Brett. If you are ready, the nuance window, please.
25:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, great. And you know, you've made this, Alison particularly, I think with all of your great comments, you've made this pretty easy. I think we've really grabbed a hold of some of the nuance of the situation, right? I'll be the first to admit that something like the cadaver sin, you can see it as a sign of the fact that the Middle Ages were the dark ages and it was irrational, it was grotesque, it was barbaric. But I do think we need to avoid this impulse, right? I think of it as like a historical confirmation bias, if you see what I mean, for the way we view the medieval as opposed to the to the modern world. But we saw on the show today, right, bishops around medieval Europe, like the popes of Rome, were deeply enmeshed in political life, right? Italian politics, the pope is the biggest landlord in medieval Italy after all. And they're certainly involved in local politics with these families that Greg mentioned earlier, struggling for control of the of
26:27 Speaker 05 the city. And this is really the case after the collapse of the of the Carolingian Empire. Governing institutions like of all different kinds were really, really under new kinds of pressure. In that context, the cadaver sin kind of makes sense, so to speak. It has its own kind of internal logic. You know, on the other hand, keep in mind contemporaries knew the cadaver sin was outrageous, right? This wasn't just like another day in the crazy Middle Ages. I mean, people in the ninth century knew that this isn't how the successor of St. Peter is supposed to act with the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. And the same thing goes for like being murdered with a hammer, or sleeping with your mistress, or using church property for your own personal gain. So even in the middle of these struggles, and in the middle of these troubles, you see these calls for reform, which really pick up steam in the 11th century to get the Roman popes out from under the thumb of these local
27:11 Speaker 05 families, out from under the thumb of emperors, and really do things differently. And you know, that leads to something like Urban II being in a position to stand up as the leader of Christendom and call for the first crusade. So from that kind of more nuanced perspective, I think that the people of dark ages, and I'm making air quotes here with my fingers, really become less like sensationalistic and more historically important because, you know, they allow us to kind of to see and track these broader changes in medieval European history as a whole.
27:37 Greg Jenner? Thank you so much Brett. That's fascinating. Alison, any thoughts on that?
27:41 Speaker 04 I feel nuanced up to the eyeballs.
27:45 Speaker 04 My mind has been opened so hard. Like with medieval ages, I just thought it was like eating large drumsticks and jousting, but this has been so, so great.
27:55 Greg Jenner? Fabulous. Well, thank you so much, Alison. Thank you so much, Brett. And listener, if after today's episode you want to know about the Crusades, why not go listen to our episode on Saladin? And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me to do is say a huge thank you to my guests. In History Corner, we had the fantastic Professor Brett Whalen from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thank you, Brett.
28:20 Speaker 05 Thank you so much. Thank you, Alison. I had such a great time. Thanks.
28:23 Speaker 04 Me too, Brett. You're a legend. Thanks so much.
28:28 Greg Jenner? And in Comedy Corner, we had the awesome Alison Spittle. Thank you, Alison.
28:32 Speaker 04 Greg, Brett, everybody else, it's been knowledgeable and beautiful. Thank you.
28:38 Greg Jenner? Pleasure. Thanks for coming. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we excitedly exhume more forgotten historical subjects and then put them on trial. But for now, I'll have to go and change my name to Corpus Ventriliquist. Bye.
28:57 Greg Jenner? You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4.
29:12 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Phil Wang, and this is a podcast to podcast trailer for a different podcast than this podcast that you've listened to or are going to listen to. But nonetheless, I'm talking about another podcast that you should also definitely listen to. The podcast I'm talking about is Comedy of the Week, which takes choice episodes from BBC sitcoms, sketch shows, podcasts and panel shows, including my own show, Unspeakable, and puts them all into one podcast. Maybe I'll trail this podcast on that podcast. Who's to say? I'll do what I like. Listen to Comedy of the Week now on BBC Sounds. Podcast.
29:50 Speaker 02 Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is the AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task, like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you. And Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack.
30:35 Speaker 02 And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/solve.
31:03 Speaker 07 How do you build a career you're proud of? It's easy to get caught up in the impact you hope to have or the legacy you want to leave behind. But how much of that is actually within your control? Something that I believe is that legacy is totally out of your control. Like, legacy is something that other people determine. But what is in your control is, is contribution. And your actions around that. I really grew up, you know, into my twenties, maybe even thirties, thinking that, that like, if I didn't do something that meaningful and important, then like, I hadn't done something worthwhile. Find out how to build a career you're proud of in this episode of my podcast, Work Life, featuring actress and director Bryce Dallas Howard. And don't worry, we'll get into the nepo baby conversation.
31:46 Speaker 07 I'm Molly Graham, and you can find Work Life, a podcast from TED, wherever you listen.
Previous The Columbian Exchange (Radio Edit) Next American War of Independence (Radio Edit) Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated