and the assembled cardinals could not overcome a stalemate between Bellisomi and Mattei until March 1800. Thirty-four Cardinals were present at the start, with the late appearance in conclave on 10 December of Cardinal Franziskus Herzan von Harras, who was also the imperial plenipotentiary of Francis II. He bore the Imperial commands, the first of which was to get Cardinal Alessandro Mattei elected Pope. Strangely, by 28 December 1799 Cardinal Herzan had not yet presented his credentials as Imperial plenipotentiary to the College of Cardinals, and thus had no special status. Cardinal Carlo Bellisomi, the Bishop of Cesena, seemed a viable candidate (papabile), with some eighteen committed votes. His unpopularity among the Austrian faction, however, who preferred Cardinal Alessandro Mattei, the archbishop of Ferrara, subjected Bellisomi to the "virtual veto", since the Mattei faction had sufficient numbers to deny Bellisomi a canonically required two-thirds vote. The conclave considered a third possible candidate, Cardinal Hyacinthe Sigismond Gerdil CRSP but Austria had rejected him from before the beginning of the Conclave as too old—he was eighty-two. As the conclave was in the third month Cardinal Maury, who supported neither Bellisomi nor Mattei, suggested Gregorio Barnaba Chiaramonti, OSB Cassin., the Bishop of Imola. In the middle of February, both Herzan and Maury independently calculated that Chiaramonti had about twelve supporters. On 11 March a frank, private conversation took place between Cardinal Antonelli and Cardinal Herzan, in which each frankly admitted that the candidacies of Calcagni, Bellisomi, Gerdil, Mattei, and Valenti were failures. During the conversation Cardinal Dugnani appeared and suggested that Chiaramonti might be considered; numbers of supporters of Mattei were willing to go over to him. On 12 March the Spanish agent, Cardinal Francisco Lorenzana, received news from Madrid that he had permission to formally exclude Cardinal Mattei. It was unnecessary to do so, of course, since Bellisomi's supporters had already given him the virtual veto. On 14 March, with the support of the active and influential Conclave secretary Consalvi, Cardinal Chiaramonti was elected. Chiaramonti was, at the time, the bishop of Imola in the Subalpine Republic. He had stayed in place after the assumption of his diocese by Bonaparte's army in 1797 and famously made a speech in which he stated that good Christians could make good democrats, a speech described as "Jacobin" by Bonaparte himself. Though he could not save ecclesiastical reform and confiscation under the new rule, he did