Clement had died near Carpentras, about fifteen miles from Avignon, and the cardinals met in the episcopal palace of that town. The austere Gregory X. had decreed in 1274 that the cardinal electors should be walled into their chamber (or Conclave) until they had chosen a Pope, and the twenty-three princes of the Church prepared for a desperate encounter in their isolated quarters. There were six Italians, eager to tell a pitiful story of the ruin of Rome and the patrimonies because of the absence of the Pope from Italy. But there were nine Gascons--three of them nephews of Clement, all creatures of Clement--and, as two of the eight French cardinals supported the Gascons, they made a formidable majority and demanded an Avignon Pope: in fact, a Gascon Pope. Day followed day in angry discussion, and the cries of the infuriated followers of the Gascon cardinals without grew louder and louder. At last, on July 23d, there came a thundering on the doors, and the terrified cardinals, breaking through the wall, fled from the town and dispersed. For two years, to the grave scandal of Christendom, they refused to agree on a place of meeting, until at last Philip of Valois enticed them to Lyons, entrapped them into a monastery, and told them that they were prisoners until they made a Pope. Under these auspices Jacques de Cahors, Cardinal of Porto, became John XXII. He was a little, dry, bilious old man of seventy-two: but an able lawyer and administrator, and a man of wonderful vigour for his age. In his case the more careful research of modern times and the opening of the Vatican Archives have tended to give him, in some respects, a more honourable position in history than he had hitherto occupied. The reader will hardly find him morally and spiritually attractive, but he had a remarkable and powerful personality, and he achieved more than has been supposed. His "Register" in the Vatican Archives contains 65,000 letters. Most of these are very brief notes written by the Papal clerks, but there are many of interest and they enable us at times to correct the anecdotists of his age. He had virulent enemies, and they must be read with reserve.[255]