<span>August 1559. As the long  hot Italian summer draws to its close, so does the life of a rigidly  orthodox and profoundly unpopular pope. The harshly repressive papacy of  Paul IV has seen the establishing of the Roman Inquisition and the  Index of Prohibited Books, an unbending refusal to open dialogue with  Protestants, and the ghettoization of Rome's Jews. On 5 September 1559,  as the great doors of the Vatican's Sala Regia are ceremonially locked,  imprisoning for sixteen weeks the forty-seven cardinals who would choose  his successor, the future of the Catholic Church – and the whole of  Europe – hangs in the balance.<br><br>Mary Hollingsworth offers a  compelling and sedulously crafted reconstruction of the longest and most  taxing of sixteenth-century papal elections – a conclave that was  acrimonious and faction-ridden even by the exalted standards of such  disputatious gatherings. Its crisscrossing fault lines divided not only  moderates from conservatives, but also the adherents of three national  'factions' with mutually incompatible interests. France and Spain were  both looking to extend their power in Italy and beyond and had very  different ideas of who the new pope should be – as did the Italian  cardinals.</span>

Conclave 1559 PDF

The list of books you might like