With Pope Francis still recovering fitfully from his recent brush with death, it’s possible that we may soon witness the arcane ritual of a papal conclave. A conclave, as dramatised in the recent film of the same name, is when cardinals gather in Rome to appoint a new pope. A conclave is a secret process, usually lasting days. The only real clue the outside world has to what is going on are the intermittent outpourings of smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. Black for an inconclusive vote and white when a pope is finally chosen.
However any pending conclave goes, we can bet it won’t be a patch on the shenanigans of conclaves past. At the least, it’s highly unlikely anyone will try and starve the cardinals into pulling their fingers out and making up their minds.
That is exactly what happened in 1549. The secrecy of the conclave meant that food deliveries were carefully inspected for secret messages before being passed through a revolving door. As the conclave dragged on for more than two months, people got impatient.
The cardinals’ comforts were reduced in order to push them toward a decision – meals were pared down, servants sent home, and the windows in the chapel were blocked off, making the air stuffy and stale. Crammed in tiny wooden bunks in the Cappella Paolina and the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals grew more and more tense. When a leading candidate took ill and died, they immediately began to sling around accusations of poisoning.
Outside, European monarchs did their level best to meddle continuously in the process, while handwritten newsletters called avvisi flew around the city, spreading the latest rumors. The Roman bankers had their own interest in the outcome, in the form of a lively betting pool; as the conclave continued, they stopped taking bets on which cardinal would be chosen and started taking bets on when it would finally end (including one to 10 odds for “never”).
In an era when popes were far more active and weighty political figures than today, such a long conclave created a power vacuum.
The papal courts went out of session; the jails were opened, and all the prisoners were paraded to the Castel Sant’Angelo on the other side of the city. Trigger-happy neighborhood militias prowled the streets, getting into petty skirmishes with one another. It was a particularly difficult time for the city’s Jewish population, members of which were harassed by both the mobs and the police.
If the previous pope was particularly unpopular, the Roman citizens might take it into their hands to get a bit statue-pully-downy.
After the death of the highly unpopular Pope Paul IV, a mob decapitated his statue and dragged it around the city for four days, ultimately laying it ignominiously to rest in a stable. Bernini’s marble statue of Pope Urban VIII narrowly escaped the same fate, writes art historian Karen J Lloyd; stymied by guards, the people settled for grinding a stucco image of the dead pope into dust. You can read a pragmatic purpose into this violence-in-effigy – at the very least, it gave the next pope an idea of what not to do.
Hmm. Perhaps the good folk of Rome might want to start making a point for Francis’ successor.
Failing that, they could always hire a wizard. Is New Zealand’s Wizard still kicking?
On another occasion, local authorities took advantage of the pope’s absence and hired a wizard to purge the city of plague and conflict. As architectural historian Charles Burroughs describes, “a certain Demetrios, identified in the sources as a Greek and as a wizard, presented himself to the local authorities with an offer to rid the city of pestilence.” This outsider ritually led a wild bull, magically and temporarily tamed by incantation, through the streets, drawing ever closer to the Vatican, until he was finally arrested by papal authorities. (He was later broken out of prison by a crowd of supporters.)
Fun times. If only the bull was gold.
We now live in the information age and no longer rely on handwritten avvisi and recycled prints to get our news. And yet the seal of secrecy on the conclave is stronger than ever before. As [historian Frederic J Baumgartner] notes, we know much more about what happened in the conclave of 1549–1550 than we do about any of the recent ones.
Probably because the recent ones were so boring. Perhaps they ought to try starving the assembled cardinals again, just to liven things up. Survivor: Conclave.
