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Vivario is a small village right in the heart of Corsica, as if nestling on a craggy hillside, in a cirque in the mountains overlooking the Vecchio valley. At the edge of the road that runs through the village stands the small, sturdy church of Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens, a building that at first glance seems unremarkable. In the church’s transepts, however, you’ll find an astonishing Italian painting depicting a 9th-century pope: Formosus.
A pope judged after his death
Regarding Pope Formosus (891-896), most people remember events that took place after his death, not during the immediately following pontificate—the short-lived Pope Boniface VI reigned for just 15 days—but under that of Pope Stephen VI. The latter was at that time under the control of the troops of Lambert, Count of Spoleto, head of an Italian Frankish dynasty that had long worn the imperial crown with the support of the popes.
The Spoletos (from a fortified town north of Rome) had a grudge against the papacy, and in particular against Formosus. That pope had crowned the German king Arnulf, one of the heirs to the eastern part of the Carolingian empire, emperor. To overturn the judgment, Count Lambert forced Stephen VI to dig up Formosus in January 897 to put him on trial.
This episode will go down in history as the “Cadaver Synod,” at the end of which Formosus’ election was annulled. His remains, which had been dressed in pontifical vestments for the duration of the episcopal synod, were then handed over to the crowd, who are said to have thrown them into the Tiber.
Debated birthplace
“Tradition has it that Formosus came from Vivario,” explains Claude Grimaldi, Vivario’s town hall secretary, who is passionate about his village’s past. His house is actually located in the hamlet of Perello, where, it is said, a stone bearing the papal coat of arms once stood on the door mantle.
This version of the story, however, is not that of the Vatican, which claims that Formosus was born in Porto (now Fiumicino), the ancient port of Rome north of Ostia. But even if it was in this city that he was bishop before becoming pope, nothing seems to prove that history’s 111th pope was really born there, probably around the year 816.
To shed light on this mystery, a meeting was organized in the nearby village of Murraciole in 1996, the 11th centenary of the pope’s death. One of the focal points of the talks was the painting in the Church of Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens, the only tangible evidence of Formosus’ presence in Vivario.
It was a gift from a certain Oreste Ferdinand Tancajoli, a knight of the Order of Malta and, above all, an art historian. Sympathetic towards Fascism, this Sardinian had irredentist views. Consequently, he considered that certain Mediterranean territories, including Corsica, should return to the Italian fold. Is the legend of the Corsican pope therefore a creation of this historian, aimed at culturally legitimizing the kinship between Corsica and Italy? Possibly, but the fact remains that traces linking Pope Formosus to Corsica are in fact older, the first occurrence appearing in Fr. Agostino Oidono’s Athaenum Augusticum in 1680.
Corsicans in Italy
Despite the absence of period evidence concerning Formosus’ birthplace, the context allows us to create a bridge between Pope Formosus and Corsica. In the early 9th century, the island became the target of the Moors, Muslim pirates who wreaked havoc throughout the Mediterranean. The confrontation with this enemy left such a deep impression on Corsica that a Moor’s head appeared on its flag.
Popes Leo III (795-816) and Leo IV (847-855) welcomed Corsican refugees in the countryside near Rome—for example, a monastery of Corsican nuns on the Via Appia—but also in the city of Porto. The Liber pontificalis reports that Pope Leo IV “urged Corsicans who, terrified by the Saracens, were fleeing their own land and wandering here and there in exile, deprived of a homeland, to seek refuge and salvation from the Apostolic See of Rome as soon as possible.”
The city of Porto, which had undergone a significant period of decadence, would then have been entrusted to the Corsicans. But was Formosus one of these refugees, or a descendant of them? For Philippe Pergola, a historian at the Pontifical Institute for Christian Archaeology, both hypotheses are unlikely. In his contribution to the 1996 colloquium, he argued that it was difficult to imagine that Formosus, a refined intellectual, was descended from this group of refugees with peasant origins.
At Vivario, we recognize that, in the absence of proof, the mystery of Formosus’ origins remains unresolved. “Even if we have to be careful with history, we are very proud to think that our town is attached to the history of a pope,” concludes Claude Grimaldi.
And today we celebrate...