In a Word: The Key to a Conclave

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Last week, it took only two days for 133 cardinals to elect Robert Prevost as the new pope, now known as Pope Leo XIV. This, of course, is old news — an oxymoron if ever there was one.

This being a fortnightly column, I had hoped the conclave would last a bit longer so that my etymological dive into the word conclave would still be current. Only recently did I take a look at the normal length of conclaves: 20th-century conclaves have lasted on average only three days. I should have known.

This is a far cry from the earliest conclaves, though, and their lack of expediency plays an important part in how the word conclave came to be.

During the first half of the 1200s, the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire often found themselves at odds. I won’t tease out the politics and intrigue — there’s enough there for a multivolume history — but just as one example: Frederick II, king of Germany from 1212 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 until his death in 1250, was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX in 1227, had his excommunication absolved in 1230, and then was excommunicated again in 1239.

Gregory IX died in 1241, at a time when Frederick’s soldiers were encamped outside Rome and threatening the Papal States. Two of the Church’s 12 cardinals were even being held prisoner by Holy Roman forces. A new pope needed to be elected, so the ruler of Rome — perhaps for protection, perhaps to encourage focus — locked the remaining 10 cardinals in a dilapidated palace to make the decision.

That they were locked in made this the first conclave, though it wouldn’t have been called that at the time. The con- is the assimilated form of the Latinate prefix com- “with, together”; it’s in a lot of English words, including conceal, conceive, and convince. The second half of conclave comes from the Latin clavis “key,” which also gives us musical clefs, the clavichord (a precursor to the piano), and the clavicle (the collar bone, literally “small key”).

The word conclave, then, indicates that they were kept together by key — they were locked in.

Even under these conditions, it took this 10-person assembly of cardinals two months to elect Goffredo Castiglioni, who took the name Celestine IV … though he died 17 days later, before coronation.

Conflict continued not only with Frederick but with the nobles of Italy. In 1257, Rome was ruled too dangerous a place, and the papal residence was moved 90 miles north to Viterbo (where it would remain until 1281).

In 1268, Pope Clement IV died. Nineteen of the 20 cardinal electors made the journey to Viterbo to elect a new pope, but they weren’t immune to the politics around them. They were deadlocked about who should wear the miter. The citizens of Viterbo were fed up. To “encourage” the cardinals to compromise and elect a new pope, Raniero Gatti, the captain of the people of Viterbo, locked (from the outside) the cardinal electors in the papal palace, and also limited their rations to primarily bread and water.

After all this, they still didn’t come to an agreement until September 1271 — more than three years without a pontiff. The result of this longest of all conclaves was that Teobaldo Visconti became Gregory X.

Visconti was a compromise candidate who was not only not a cardinal or a bishop, but he wasn’t even a member of the priesthood. When he learned he had been elected pope, he was on a crusade in Palestine. Gregory X would go on to institutionalize the conclave for the election of future popes.

As you might guess, conclaves generally moved more quickly after that.

After a while, the sense of conclave expanded from the ecclesiastical to the mundane, so that any private or secretive gathering of people can be referred to as a conclave.