In January 897, Pope Stephen VI convened and presided over a synod in St Peter’s Basilica to put the now-deceased Pontiff on trial. The mummified body of Formosus was exhumed and, dressed in papal vestments, was placed on a throne and subjected to a solemn judgement

From Adrian VI, elected in absentia and the last non-Italian pope until Karol Wojtyla, to the 12-day reign of Urban VII, the shortest papacy in history

From Alexander III, the pope who faced the schism caused by Frederick I Barbarossa, to Sergius I, elected in defiance of the hundred pounds of gold offered by Archdeacon Pasquale, via the unpredictable conclave of 1914 which took even the tailors—who had been left without their cassocks—by surprise

He went down in history as one of the three Popes to whom the title ‘the Great’ is bestowed. His greatest legacy was the radical rethinking of the very concept of the head of the Church: he conceived the papal office, first and foremost, as that of the ‘servant of the servants of God’