Talk:1513 papal conclave

Mathematics
Reading the mathematician's input: Basically it appears to assume a pool of candidates that are all equally bad. As soon as you suppose one candidate is noticeably worst among the pool of people likely to have no support, probabilities based on random selection between candidates goes right out the window (the mathematics would be based on an assumption that did not apply); the question becomes one of how developed the tactical voting strategies were. Were the cardinals well aware that voting for a poor candidate was a good way to conceal individual preferences? - this sounds quite likely. Were they aware that they risked all voting for the same candidate? Possibly not. If papal selection history didn't record one poor candidate getting as many as 7 or 8 votes, these religious specialists may not have had the background to be aware of the danger. So they *could* all vote for one "clearly worst" candidate. (Game theory & voting strategies are areas that have received attention and development mostly in the last century.) - Rachel Barker —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.53.226.17 (talk) 06:34, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for keeping this on the talk page instead of in the article. Note that Lo Bello's assumptions are made clear in the article, and it is for the reader to determine whether they follow from Pirie's account. Unless this can be cited to some other reliable source, it constitutes original research and is unsuitable for Wikipedia. Savidan 07:29, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Lo Bello is clearly speculating, not on the basis of what he knows about the actual cardinals and the actual voting, but on the basis of a number of hypotheses, made so that he can have input numbers. This has no bearing on the Conclave and how it actually worked. The anecdote itself, in Pirie, is of doubtful authority.  The judgment appears to be her own, unsupported by other documentation.


 * The actual vote, according to Ludwig Pastor (p. 21 in the English translation) were Serra 14 (not 13), Grosso della Rovere 8, Accolti 7, Bacosz 7, Fieschi 6, Finale 6, and Grimani 2. It will be noticed that the number of votes is larger than the number of Cardinals. That is because it was a preferential ballot, in which a cardinal could vote for several candidates. Pirie doesn't know this, and Lo Bello's analysis doesn't allow for it.  They are both very wrong.  Why should this be in the text, if it is demonstrably wrong and based on wrong assumptions of the so-called authorities??? --Vicedomino (talk) 09:39, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Based on the problems listed above, and having given plenty of time for refutation or repair, I have deleted the following from the article:

Mathematical evaluation
Anthony Lo Bello of Allegheny College tested the ex ante probability of Pirie's account, assuming that the cardinals assumed that all but a handful of the assembled twenty-five cardinals were not among the papabili, and thus were not perceived as being able to receive the requisite seventeen votes, and that only a smaller number of these, m, had absolutely no supporters. Lo Bello further assumes that r cardinals participated in the strategy that Pirie outlines and calculates the probabilities for 17 ≤ r ≤ 25, using factorials. The probability of Pirie's account occurring in terms of r and m was:


 * $$\frac{m(m+r-14)!r!}{(r-13)!(m+r-1)!}$$

and the probability of a candidate receiving seventeen votes was


 * $$\frac{m(m+r-18)!r!}{(r-17)!(m+r-1)!}.$$

Lo Bello concludes that the probability of Pirie's account is < 1% for reasonable values of r and m, and that, were Pirie's account to be correct, the "shock" of the cardinals was misjudged because the probability of actually electing a pope with this method was far less, < 0.1%. This mathematical proof demolishes Pirie's notions.

It must be observed that Lo Bello has made several assumptions for the sake of input numbers, without authority or proof.

--Vicedomino (talk) 06:18, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

Use of Trollope
The person who originally introduced material from Trollope into the text misunderstood and misparaphrased what Trollope actually said about what went on in the meetings before the Scrutiny began. It was not the Cardinals who demanded 1000 ducats each from the new Pope, but the Conclavists who demanded 1000 ducats from the Conclavist of the new Pope, in lieu of the traditional sacking of the property of the new Pope. Trollope himself (as a Protestant unfamiliar with and unsympathetic to the customs of the Roman Church) alleges that there was some hanky-panky afoot that caused the Cardinal Camerlengo and the Cardinals Aragon and Farnese to poke into every nook and cranny in the conclave area. In fact, this was a traditional ceremony (see Papebroch, p. 149), where the Camerlengo and two cardinals chosen for the purpose made the rounds of the Conclave to ensure that no unauthorized persons were present before the Conclave was ceremonially sealed. This occurs in a chapter that Trollope has disrespectfully entitled, "Noble boys at play". --Vicedomino (talk) 08:48, 11 April 2016 (UTC)