Cardinal Lamberto left Rome with a large sum of money and several documents. Fearing that their corruption will be exposed, Keinszig, Lucchesi, and Gilday plot to murder the Pope. Gilday poisons the pontiff's tea, killing him in his sleep. The character of Lamberto and the film's depiction of the events which led to his murder are based upon one of the conspiracy theories surrounding the sudden death of the real-life Pope John Paul I, Albino Luciani. Like the Lamberto character, Luciani was discovered dead in his bed in 1978, 33 days after his election to the papacy. Various theories, such as the
Byzantine Papacy regard Pope Theodore I, who reigned from 642 to 649, as the first Eastern pope of the Byzantine papacy). Boniface III was able to obtain an imperial proclamation declaring Rome as "the head of all the churches" (reaffirming Justinian I's naming the pope "the first among all the priests"), a decree Phocas intended as much to humiliate the Patriarch of Constantinople as exalt the pope. Phocas had a gilded statue of himself erected on a monumental column in the Roman Forum only three weeks after Boniface III's consecration, and in 609 by "iussio" authorized the conversion of the Pantheon into