The Papal States ( PAY-pəl), officially the State of the Church, were a conglomeration of territories on the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope from 756 to 1870. They were among the major Italian states from the 8th century until the unification of Italy, which took place between 1859 and 1870, culminating in their incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy.
The state was legally established in the 8th century when Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, gave Pope Stephen II, as a temporal sovereign, lands formerly held by Arian Christian Lombards, adding them to lands and other real estate formerly acquired and held by the bishops of Rome as landlords from the time of Constantine onward. This donation came about as part of a process whereby the popes began to turn away from the Byzantine emperors as their foremost temporal guardians for reasons such as increased imperial taxes, disagreement with respect to iconoclasm, and failure of the emperors (or their exarchs in Italy) to protect Rome and the rest of the peninsula from barbarian invasion and pillage.
During the early modern period, the papal territory expanded greatly, and the pope became one of Italy's most important rulers as well as the head of Western Christianity. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio (which includes Rome), Marche, Umbria, Romagna, and portions of Emilia. The popes' reign over these lands was an exemplification of their temporal powers as secular rulers, as opposed to their ecclesiastical primacy.
By 1860, much of the Papal States' territory had been conquered by the Kingdom of Sardinia and was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, except Lazio, which remained under the pope's control. In 1870, all of Lazio, including Rome, was annexed by the Italian kingdom, which refrained from occupying the Leonine City militarily. In 1929, the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, the head of the Italian government, ended the "Prisoner in the Vatican" period by negotiating the Lateran Treaty, signed by the two parties. This treaty acknowledged the sovereignty of the Holy See over the Vatican City, a newly created city-state within Rome.
Name
The Papal States were also known as the Papal State; although the plural is usually preferred, the singular is equally correct as the polity was more than a mere personal union. The territories were referred to variously as the State(s) of the Church, the Pontifical States, the Ecclesiastical States, the Patrimony of St Peter or the Roman States (Italian: Stato Pontificio, also Stato della Chiesa, Stati della Chiesa, Stati Pontifici, and Stato Ecclesiastico; Latin: Status Pontificius, also Dicio Pontificia "papal rule"). In English they were also referred to as the Popedom.
History
Origins
For its first 300 years, within the Roman Empire, the Church was persecuted and unable to hold or transfer property. Early congregations met in rooms set aside for the purpose in the homes of wealthy adherents, and a number of titular churches located on the outskirts of Rome were held as property by individuals, rather than by any corporate body. Nonetheless, the property held nominally or actually by individual members of the Roman churches would usually be treated as a common patrimony handed over successively to the legitimate "heir" of that property, often its senior deacons, who were, in turn, assistants to the local bishop. This common patrimony became quite considerable, including as it did not only include houses etc. in Rome or nearby but also landed estates, such as latifundia, whole or in part, across Italy and beyond.
A law of Constantine the Great, promulgated in 321, allowed the Christian Church to possess property and restored to it any property formerly confiscated; in the larger cities of this empire the property restored would have been quite considerable, the Roman patrimony not least among them. The Lateran Palace was gifted to the patrimony, most probably from Constantine himself.
Other donations followed, primarily in mainland Italy but also in the provinces of the Roman Empire. However, the Roman Church held all of these lands as a private landowner, not as a sovereign entity. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the papacy found itself increasingly placed in a precarious and vulnerable position. As central Roman authority disintegrated throughout the late 5th century, control over the Italian Peninsula repeatedly changed hands, falling under the Arian suzerainty of Odoacer in 473, and in 493, Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths. The Ostrogothic kings would continue to rule much of Italy until 554. The Roman Church submitted of necessity to their sovereign authority, while asserting its spiritual primacy over the whole of Christendom.
Beginning in 535, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I launched a series of campaigns to wrest Italy from the Ostrogoths which continued until 554 and devastated Italy's political and economic structures. The Byzantines established the Exarchate of Ravenna of which the Duchy of Rome, an area roughly coterminous with modern day Lazio, was an administrative division. In 568 the Lombards entered the peninsula from the north, establishing their own Italian kingdom, and over the next two centuries would conquer most of the Italian territory recently regained by Byzantium. By the 7th century, Byzantine authority was largely limited to a diagonal band running roughly from Ravenna, where the emperor's governor, or exarch, was located, to Rome and south to Naples, plus coastal exclaves. North of Naples, the band of Byzantine control contracted, and the borders of the Rome-Ravenna corridor became extremely narrow.
With effective Byzantine power weighted at the northeast end of this territory, the pope, as the largest landowner and most prestigious figure in Italy, began by default to take on much of the ruling authority that the Byzantines were unable to exercise in the areas surrounding the city of Rome. While the popes legally remained "Roman subjects" under Byzantine authority, in practice the Duchy of Rome became an independent state.
Popular support for the popes in Italy enabled several to defy the will of the Byzantine emperor: Pope Gregory II excommunicated Emperor Leo III during the Iconoclastic Controversy. Nevertheless, the Pope and the exarch still worked together to limit the rising power of the Lombards in Italy. As Byzantine power weakened, though, the papacy assumed an ever-larger role in protecting Rome from the Lombards, but lacking direct control over sizable military assets, the pope relied mainly on diplomacy to achieve as much. In practice, these papal efforts served to focus Lombard aggrandizement on the exarch and Ravenna. A climactic moment in the founding of the Papal States was the agreement over boundaries contained in the Lombardic King Liutprand's Donation of Sutri (728) to Pope Gregory II.
Donation of Pepin
When the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell to the Lombards in 751, the Duchy of Rome was completely cut off from the Byzantine Empire, of which it was theoretically still a part. The popes renewed earlier attempts to secure the support of the Franks. In 751, Pope Zachary had Pepin the Short crowned king in place of the powerless Merovingian figurehead King Childeric III. Zachary's successor, Pope Stephen II, later granted Pepin the title Patrician of the Romans. Pepin led a Frankish army into Italy in 754 and 756, defeated the Lombards, thus taking control of northern Italy, and made a gift of the lands formerly constituting the Exarchate of Ravenna to the pope.
Some later claimed that in 781, Charlemagne extended the regions over which the pope would be temporal sovereign: the Duchy of Rome, Ravenna, the Duchy of the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy, and a number of Italian cities. The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty climaxed in 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne 'Emperor of the Romans'.
Relationship with the Holy Roman Empire
From the 9th century to the 12th century, the precise nature of the relationship between the popes and emperors – and between the Papal States and the Empire – was disputed. It was unclear whether the Papal States were a separate realm with the Pope as their sovereign ruler, or a part of the Frankish Empire over which the popes had administrative control, as suggested in the late-9th-century treatise Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma, or whether the Holy Roman emperors were vicars of the Pope ruling Christendom, with the Pope directly responsible only for the environs of Rome and spiritual duties.
The Holy Roman Empire in its Frankish form collapsed when it was subdivided among Charlemagne's grandchildren. Imperial power in Italy waned and the papacy's prestige declined. This led to a rise in the power of the local Roman nobility, and the control of the Papal States during the early 10th century passed to a powerful and corrupt aristocratic family, the Theophylacti. This period was later dubbed the Saeculum obscurum ("dark age"), and sometimes as the "rule by harlots".
In practice, the popes were unable to exercise effective sovereignty over the extensive and mountainous territories of the Papal States, and the region preserved its old system of government, with many small countships and marquisates, each centred upon a fortified rocca.
Over several campaigns in the mid-10th century, the German ruler Otto I conquered northern Italy; Pope John XII crowned him emperor (the first so crowned in more than forty years) and the two of them ratified the Diploma Ottonianum, by which the emperor became the guarantor of the independence of the Papal States. Yet over the next two centuries, popes and emperors squabbled over a variety of issues, and the German rulers routinely treated the Papal States as part of their realms on those occasions when they projected power into Northern and Central Italy. As the Gregorian Reform worked to free the administration of the church from imperial interference, the independence of the Papal States increased in importance. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the German emperors rarely interfered in Italian affairs. In response to the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Treaty of Venice was signed in 1177. In the treaty, the rights of the Crown in Rome and in the Patrimony of Saint Peter were left vague, while papal rights of possession, including the Prefecture of the City of Rome, were recognized but "saving all the rights of the empire". By 1300, the Papal States, along with the rest of the Italian principalities, were effectively independent.
Avignon Papacy
From 1305 to 1378, the popes lived in the papal enclave of Avignon, surrounded by Provence and under the influence of the French kings. This period was known as the "Avignonese" or "Babylonian Captivity". During this period the city of Avignon itself and the surrounding Comtat Venaissin was added to the Papal States; it remained a papal possession for some 400 years even after the popes returned to Rome, until it was seized and incorporated into the French state during the French Revolution.
During the Avignon Papacy, local despots took advantage of the absence of the popes to establish themselves in nominally papal cities: the Pepoli in Bologna, the Ordelaffi in Forlì, the Manfredi in Faenza, and the Malatesta in Rimini all gave nominal acknowledgment to their papal overlords and were declared vicars of the Church.
In Ferrara, the death of Azzo VIII d'Este without legitimate heirs (1308) encouraged Pope Clement V to bring Ferrara under his direct rule: however, it was governed by his appointed vicar, King Robert of Naples, for only nine years before the citizens recalled the Este from exile (1317). Interdiction and excommunications were in vain because in 1332, John XXII was obliged to name three Este brothers as his vicars in Ferrara.
In Rome itself, the Orsini and the Colonna struggled for supremacy, dividing the city's rioni between them. The resulting aristocratic anarchy in the city provided the setting for the fantastic dreams of universal democracy of Cola di Rienzo, who was acclaimed Tribune of the People in 1347, and met a violent death in early October 1354 as he was assassinated by supporters of the Colonna family. To many, rather than an ancient Roman tribune reborn, he had become just another tyrant using the rhetoric of Roman renewal and rebirth to mask his grab for power. As Guido Ruggiero states, "even with the support of Petrarch, his return to first times and the rebirth of ancient Rome was one that would not prevail."
The Rienzo episode engendered renewed attempts from the absentee papacy to re-establish order in the dissolving Papal States, resulting in the military progress of Cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, who was appointed papal legate, and his condottieri heading a small mercenary army. Having received the support of the archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Visconti, he defeated Giovanni di Vico, lord of Viterbo, moving against Galeotto Malatesta of Rimini and the Ordelaffi of Forlì, the Montefeltro of Urbino and the da Polenta of Ravenna, and against the cities of Senigallia and Ancona. The last holdouts against full Papal control were Giovanni Manfredi of Faenza and Francesco II Ordelaffi of Forlì. Albornoz, at the point of being recalled, in a meeting with all the Papal vicars on 29 April 1357, promulgated the Constitutiones Sanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ, which replaced the mosaic of local law and accumulated traditional 'liberties' with a uniform code of civil law. These Constitutiones Aegidianae (as they are informally known) mark a watershed in the legal history of the Papal States; they remained in effect until 1816. Pope Urban V ventured a return to Italy in 1367 that proved premature; he returned to Avignon in 1370 just before his death.