1730 conclave
election of Pope Clement XII
The 1730 papal conclave was called upon the death of Pope Benedict XIII. It began on 5 March 1730 and ended on 12 July that year with the election of Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini as Pope Clement XII.
Background
Pope Benedict XIII died on February 21, 1730, at the age of eighty-one. The conclave which followed is considered to be the longest and most corrupt of the 18th century. The conclave opened on March 5 with thirty cardinals, but the numbers increased as more began to arrive. None of the Portuguese Cardinals were in attendance, apparently due to friction between Rome and Lisbon. There were fifty-six cardinals present. At some point in the four-month long ordeal, at least half of them had been proposed as candidates for election.
Factions
One voting bloc was made up of twelve cardinals who had been appointed by Benedict XIII, but this group had no clear leader. A second group was made up of cardinals appointed by Pope Alexander VIII. Politically, they were allied with the French party, which represented the interests of Louis XV.
The Imperial party were all subjects of the Holy Roman Emperor. This group included Cardinal Gianantonio Davia, a former papal nuncio to Vienna under salary from the imperial court. The Spanish party suffered from internal dissension, but was broadly allied with the Emperor.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2601104. Authority coordinates are 41.906, 12.456. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1730.
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This entry incorporates text from “1730 conclave” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.