THE WASHINGTON POST: A short history of weird papal conclaves, from open bribery to riots

The pomp and ceremony of a papal conclave - the flutter of cardinals gathering in their red robes, the crowds at the Vatican awaiting the white smoke that proceeds the proclamation from a balcony - “Habemus papam!” “We have a pope!” - is a set drama the modern world knows well.

But the formality and order aren’t the way these things used to go. For centuries, the process had been messy.

Street riots, bloody brawls, beheadings, bribes and a pope sentenced to labor in a horse stable all featured in leadership skirmishes in the early days of the Catholic Church.

One pope exhumed the corpse of his predecessor and put it on trial.

Another pope was elected by a bird.

For the first 1,000 years of the church, papal selection was an unruly process involving everyone who counted themselves as faithful. In the year 236, the election was dragging on, and voters gathered for days of debate and lobbying.

A humble and devout farmer came to participate, and when a dove flew into the room and rested on his shoulder, it was taken as a sign.

“Thereupon all the people, as if moved by one Divine Spirit, with all eagerness and unanimity cried out that he was worthy, and without delay they took him and placed him upon the episcopal seat,” St. Eusebius, the earliest church historian, wrote about the election of Pope Fabian.

Papal elections that followed involved lobbying and lethal battles. Imperial powers swayed decisions.

The first papal assassination, the poisoning and clubbing of Pope John VIII in 882, plunged the church into dark times.

“His murder began what most historians would agree was the worst period in the history of the papacy,” Frederic J. Baumgartner wrote in his book, “Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections.”

Nearly a dozen popes were assassinated - most were strangled or poisoned - over the next 300 years. A legend grew out of that tempestuous time that one of them was Pope Joan, a woman who reigned while disguised as a man for 25 months. Despite centuries of lore and a 2009 Hollywood movie, most historians dismiss her as a myth.

After a millennium of chaos and bloodshed, the church finally called for reform in papal selection

Limiting the throne’s power, 1059

Pope Nicholas II overhauled the process in 1059 to give cardinals the vote, establishing the church’s independence from nobility. He allowed for the possibility that “the perversity of depraved and wicked men shall so prevail that a pure, genuine, and free election cannot be held in Rome,” suggesting the cardinals might need to decamp from the Italian capital to dodge the temptations of simony - the buying or selling of an ecclesiastical office or privilege.

That did little good.

When Pope Callistus II died in 1124, two of the wealthiest Roman families - the Pierleonis and the Frangipanis - went to war over control of the church.

After the Pierleonis’ choice became Pope Celestine III, the Frangipanis burst into the church with an armed force, demanding they pick their favorite cardinal instead.

In 1241, Pope Gregory IX’s disagreement with the Roman emperor continued even after the pope’s death. The remaining cardinals were locked in the Septizodium Palace with Gregory’s corpse until they made a decision. It was a hot August. One cardinal died, and another complained “that whenever he tried to sleep a soldier would poke him with his spear,” Michael J. Walsh wrote in his book “The Conclave.”

The three-year election, 1268

The cardinals took their time after the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268, coming and going for months - then years - between their homes and the cathedral in Viterbo, where the elections were being held.

Kings and princes from across Europe begged them to make a choice. Two years in, it is said, the locals ripped the roof off the Viterbo palace after someone made a joke that removing it might give the Holy Spirit better access.

After the replacement with an interim roof and the death of two cardinals, Gregory X was finally named the new pope.

One of his first actions was to change the way popes were chosen. In 1274, he established the papal conclave with strict rules: The cardinals would sleep in a large, locked room, their beds separated by curtains. They were each allowed a servant, but there would be no communication with the outside world. Meals would be passed through a turnstile and would consist of no more than one plate of food and a bowl of soup. Chickens were forbidden because they may contain hidden messages. If a pope wasn’t chosen within five days, the rations would be reduced to only bread, water and a little bit of wine, Baumgartner wrote.

When Gregory died two years later, a humble friar was elected in an hour, with just one round of voting.

The overwhelmed pope, 1292

The deliberations in 1292 were doomed from the moment King James I of Aragon provided gold for bribing. Baumgartner said it was never proved that the gold was distributed, but the balloting didn’t go well and dragged on for 10 days. The cardinals relocated but were plagued by an epidemic that killed one of them. Balloting continued for three summers, but no candidate received the needed two-thirds majority.

As they were about to retire after the third summer of no pope, a hermit known by the cardinals as a “saintly miracle worker,” Pietro di Morrone, sent them a letter, Baumgartner said.

God told him the cardinals would be “severely punished” if they didn’t pick a pope soon.

So they nominated him. Believed to be about 86 years old, he was shocked by the news but took the job and rode a donkey to the nearest cathedral to be enthroned. The radical Franciscans loved this pick, calling him the “Angelic Pope” who would reform and revive the church.

But Pope Celestine V was quickly overwhelmed by the job and eventually abdicated.

The two popes of 1378

It was Franco-Italian strife that tainted the conclave following the death of Pope Gregory XI.

The home of the papacy had switched to France in 1309 and had remained in Avignon for decades until Gregory XI returned to Rome. When the cardinals convened in Rome for the conclave after he died, a mob of at least 20,000 Italians had their say after the bells known as the call to arms tolled across the city.

“Give us a Roman pope or your heads will be as red as your hats!” was one of the slogans the cardinals heard from the mob, Baumgartner wrote.

Terrified, the cardinals considered dressing up an elderly friar as pope and putting him in the window to appease the mob while they escaped and continued the conclave elsewhere.

They agreed on the election of a humble and efficient Italian bureaucrat from Bari who had been quietly serving as a vice chancellor for two decades, assuming he would agree to renounce the election after the mob calmed down. No such luck.

“Having been raised to power far beyond his dreams, he was not about to let it slip through his fingers,” Baumgartner wrote. Pope Urban VI turned out to be violent and mentally disturbed. The cardinals admitted they didn’t mean to elect him and went on to elect Pope Clement VII. But Urban VI wasn’t going away, and the church had two popes.

The bribes of 1492

In the darkness of an August night before a conclave was set to begin, four mules loaded with silver clip-clopped to a cardinal’s home. It was a bribe allegedly sent by Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, a member of one of Italy’s wealthiest families, to sway a cardinal’s vote his way.

King Charles VIII of France allegedly moved more than 200,000 ducats into Roman banks to spend on lobbying for a French pope.

The first conclave held in Rome’s Sistine Chapel was awash in bribery money. Despite rumors of offspring and mistresses, Borgia became Pope Alexander VI.

Cardinals in fisticuffs, 1605

It was the second conclave of 1605, after Pope Leo XI died only a month into his reign. The cardinals were ragged and went into round two deeply divided between two favorites to succeed Leo - former soldier Domenico Tosco and church historian Cesare Baronius.

When it appeared that Tosco would win, a cardinal began shouting that he was “unsuitable and that his style of speech and dress would cause great scandal,” then others began shoving. It became a melee heard outside the conclave.

Cardinal Alfonso Visconti suffered several broken bones, Baumgartner wrote. In the end, Camillo Borghese was the compromise candidate who won and became Pope Paul V.

Paper papacy, 1800

The conclave following the death of Pope Pius VI was held in Venice after Napoleon’s army invaded Italy. When the French army seized control of the papal treasury, the troops discovered the papal tiaras. They melted down three of them and tore a 400-carat emerald from another, sending the jewel home to Paris, according to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C., home to one of the tiaras.

So when the displaced conclave elected Pope Pius VII, he was crowned with a papier-mâché tiara bedazzled with jewels donated by Venetian families.

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