The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections by Michael Walsh

Lateran. The solution which had prevailed last time was tried again. Leading figures from the army, the clergy, and the civilian population of the city met in the Palatine palace to find a compromise candidate. They chose the priest Sergius – the Liber Pontificalis makes it sound as if the decision was sudden and spon- taneous. He was, it says, “taken from the midst of the people,”
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    rushed o ff to a chapel in the imperial palace, there acknowledged as pope (there does not seem to have been a formal election), and hurried on to the Lateran.
    The Lateran was still in the hands of the rival factions, who were unwilling to allow Sergius’s entry but, says the Liber Pontificalis complacently, Sergius’s supporters were in the majority and they were able to force an entry. Theodore promptly gave way. Paschal, however, did not. He sent for his supposed ally the exarch, who came hurrying from Ravenna, but in secret – so secretly that the usual welcoming ceremony could not be mounted. He arrived, sized up the situation, and backed Sergius, pausing only to exact from Paschal the bribe which had been promised him. So Sergius, Syrian by origin and born in Sicily, became pope, and was a very good one.
    The elections which followed in the early eighth century had none of this drama. For the most part those chosen were, like Sergius, of Syrian background or were Greek in origin, perhaps elected because the people of Rome, or at least the clergy, the army, and leading nobles who cared about such things, thought those of an Eastern background might have some chance of understanding, and coping with, the imperial court at Constantinople. There was one curious election, if “election” is the word. In February 731, during the funeral procession of Gregory II, the people of the city seized hold of the priest Gregory, rushed him o ff to the Lateran basilica, and made him pope by universal acclaim. Gregory sought, and the following month received, confirmation of his election from the exarch. But he was the last pope to seek it.
    The emperor in the East, threatened as he was by the rising tide of Islam and beset by (to Roman eyes) theological vagaries, was of only modest significance. The real power with which the pope had now to deal lay elsewhere, in Italy itself or across the mountains in France and Germany.
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Descent into Chaos

    The Syrian Pope Gregory III died on 28 November 741. He was followed remarkably quickly (a sign of a trouble-free election) by the Greek Pope Zacharias. There had been a long succession of Greek or Syrian popes, broken only by the Roman Gregory II. They were not, and Zacharias certainly was not, sympathetic to the emperor in the East, but clearly the clergy and people of the city thought it wise to have as bishop someone capable of understand- ing and dealing with the – to the Roman mind – peculiar problems of theology that arose in the Greek-speaking part of the Empire. But now they were going to look more to the West. Zacharias was not only the last pope in the sequence of Greek-speakers, he was the last pope ever with Eastern Christian origins – so far at least. The emperor and the Patriarch in Constantinople had not ceased to matter, but they no longer mattered as much. In 751, still in Zacharias’s pontificate, Ravenna was overrun by the Lombards and the exarchate went out of existence.
    Zacharias died the following year. The election of Stephen to succeed him was swift and trouble-free – except that he died within a couple of days of being installed in the papal residence of the Lateran Palace. He died before he was consecrated bishop, which meant that, according to the rules in place at the time, he was not the pope. He was therefore at first not included in o ffi cial lists of ponti ff s, but he was rehabilitated in the sixteenth century when election rather than consecration became the point at which some- one became pope, so that he became Stephen II. Which meant