The conclave is a meeting between all the cardinals to elect the next pope. This closed -door ceremony can sometimes last a very long time.
You need a successor to Pope Clément IV
In November 1268, Pope Clément IV died in the Palais des Papes in Italy. You must then find a successor to him. The conclave begins. We bring together all the cardinals in the episcopal palace of Viterbe (the residence of the bishops at the time). They are 19 cardinals to meet. The pope had to be a man baptized, orthodox in faith and had to have no known heresy.
Problem: they can’t find a pope. No names stand out and even worse, temptations go up. The cardinals are divided between nationalities and allegiances.
Endless election
With at least one ballot per day, hearts will pass two years to debate without finding a single candidate. Many quarrels will be born.
Strongly annoyed, the population decides to lock up all the men of church in the same room which will be closed to key. It was in 1270, already two years after the start of the conclave, that this confinement takes place. Not having a pope arouses strong reactions from the population.
Thus, this is where the tradition is from the way to lock itself far from the outside world that we know today.
Read also: Pope’s election: How is the conclave?
Precautionary repetition
The forced cardinals still fail to agree. The elections stagnate and the pressure is gradually rising. So the inhabitants would have gone even further: the cardinals would only have bread and water as a meal.
The access to the episcopal palace would have been walled. And under great anger, the roof of lean cells in which the cardinals were sleeping would have been removed by the inhabitants themselves. All this would not have been planned or carried out under the control of the city authorities. This exposes cardinals to bad weather and cold. Rustic conditions that would have made several sick cardinals. They couldn’t go out to heal.
We go around in circles
Under his conditions, many cardinals would have fallen ill and they would have been forbidden to be able to leave the palace.
The political context outside the episcopal palace does not help to appease the climate of quarrels between the cardinals. And the population continues to put pressure. The situation stagnates.
It is under pressure from the King of France, Philippe III, that the cardinals will choose a commission of six of them to elect the next Pope. They manage to agree on the cardinals being part of the commission.
After two years and nine months …
Finally, the cardinals of this long conclave will agree on a candidate: Grégoire X. elected the 1erSeptember 1271, the latter will directly set up a decisive reform: that of creating the conclave as we know it today. The cardinals will now be locked in the same room until the election of a pope. After 5 days, if no name occurs, church men will have to feed on water and bread again. Today the restrictions are less violent.
Grégoire X promulgated in 1274 a constitution. It confirmed the election of the Pope by the cardinals alone and the rule of two thirds of the votes. But there were two new products. On the one hand, the election would only start ten days after the Pope’s death so that the cardinals had time to go to Rome. (Yves Chiron, historian for the newspaper Le Point in 2025.)
