folks, as you might know, there's a papal conclave coming up, what with the passing of Pope Francis and all that, so we decided to talk about the Medieval conclaves. now, technically, conclaves didn't begin until 1059 CE but we're not letting that stop us, we're going all the way back to The Rock himself, Peter, and talking about papal succession through the ages. mostly because, if you only start in 1059, you miss a lot of fun stuff like a barbarian king imposing a law on the Church to tell them to tone down the money spent on papal elections and something called the Pornocracy. then we get to the later Medieval and Early Modern papal conclaves, which are also fun.