A roofless palace in Italy's Viterbo hosted the first and longest conclave

A roofless palace in Italy's Viterbo hosted the first and longest conclave

It was the mounting rage of citizens in Viterbo, a small town north of Rome, that ended the longest papal election in the Catholic Church’s history, forging for the first time the word “conclave.”

The first conclave: in 1241 the pope's election took place under difficult, warlike conditions. Because the cardinals were divided among themselves and could not agree, the influential Roman senator Matteo Rosso Orsini had the cardinals included. They then, after one of the present cardinals had already died, made the oldest one from among them Pope: Celestine IV. But he died, weakened by the conclave, after 17 days, before he could be crowned. …

It was 1268 when Pope Clement IV died in the Italian city of Viterbo. What no one could imagine was that his successor would take almost three years to be elected, in what would become the longest and most controversial papal election process in history. This episode not only left an indelible imprint on the history of the Catholic Church, but transformed forever the system of election of the pontiffs. When the 19 cardinals gathered in Viterbo t…