Pope John Paul II Cardinals would be the ones who would give him most support at his eventual election to the papacy In August 1978, following the death of Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Wojtyła voted in the papal conclave, which elected Pope John Paul I. John Paul I died after only 33 days as pope, triggering another conclave. The second conclave of 1978 started on 14 October, ten days after the funeral. It was split between two strong candidates for the papacy: Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, the conservative Archbishop of Genoa, and the liberal Archbishop of Florence, Giovanni Cardinal Benelli, a close friend of John
Avignon Papacy influence by the French throne up to 1378. Such partisanship of the papacy was one of the reasons for the dropping esteem for the institution, which in turn was one of the reasons for the schism from 1378–1417. In the period of the Schism, the power struggle in the papacy became a battlefield of the major powers, with France supporting the Pope in Avignon and England supporting the Pope in Rome. At the end of the century, still in the state of schism, the papacy had lost most of its direct political power, and the nation states of France and