One of the reasons that there were historically so many machinations around the election of the Pope was that the Pope was not only a spiritual leader but a temporal ruler as well. The Pope was the monarch of the Papal States in central Italy (along with a number of other territories throughout Europe that changed hands more frequently). So it was a position of immense political power and wealth.

Starting in the 18th century the Papal States began to be chipped away by European powers, and this culminated in Pope Pius IX losing all control political control of the Papal States in 1870 to the Kingdom of Italy. Since then the papacy's temporal power has been limited to the Vatican City, along with the moral weight of the position.