Papal States
The
Papal States or
State(s) of the Church (i Italian
Lo Stato Ecclesiastico,
Gli Stati della Chiesa or
Stati Pontificii,) was one of the major
historical states of Italy before the Italian peninsula was unified in 1861 by the
kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. The Papal States comprised those territories over which the
Pope was the ruler in a civil as well as a spiritual sense before
1870. This governing power is commonly called the
temporal power of the Pope, as opposed to his ecclestiastical primacy.
The plural
Papal States is usually preferred; the singular
Papal State (equally correct since it was not a mere personal union) is rather used for the modern remnant, the
Vatican City which is an enclave of the
Holy See within Italy's national capital Rome officially founded in
1929, again allowing the
Holy See the full diplomatic and practical benefits of
sovereignty.
|
Map of the Papal States. The more reddish area was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, the rest (grey) in 1870. |
The
Christian Church spent its first three centuries as an outlawed organization and was thus unable to hold or transfer property. After the ban was lifted by the Emperor
Constantine I, the Church's private property grew quickly through the donations of the pious and the wealthy; the
Lateran Palace was the first significant donation, a gift of Constantine himself. Other donations soon followed, mainly in mainland
Italy but also in the provinces, but the Church held all of these lands as a private landowner, not as a sovereign entity. When in the
fifth century the Italian peninsula passed under the control of first
Odoacer and then the
Ostrogoths, the church organization in Italy, and the bishop of
Rome as its head, submitted to their sovereign authority while beginning to assert spiritual supremacy.
The seeds of the Papal States as a sovereign political entity were planted in the
sixth century. The Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) government in
Constantinople launched a reconquest of Italy that took decades and devastated the country's political and economic structures; just as those wars wound down, the
Lombards entered the peninsula from the north and conquered much of the countryside. By the seventh century, Byzantine authority was largely limited to a diagonal band running roughly from
Ravenna, where the Emperor's representative, or
Exarch, was located, to Rome. With Byzantine power weighted at the northeast end of this territory, the Bishop of Rome, as the largest landowner and most prestigious figure in Italy, began by default to take on much of the ruling authority that Byzantines were unable to project to the area around the city of Rome. While the Bishops of Rome–now beginning to be referred to as the
Popes–remained
de jure Byzantine subjects, in practice the Duchy of Rome, an area roughly equivalent to modern-day
Latium, became an independent state ruled by the Church.
The Church's relative independence, combined with popular support for the Papacy in Italy, enabled various Popes to defy the will of the Byzantine emperor;
Pope Gregory II even excommunicated emperor
Leo III. Nevertheless the Pope and the Exarch still worked together to control the rising power of the Lombards in Italy. As Byzantine power weakened, though, the Papacy took an ever larger role in defending Rome from the Lombards, usually through
diplomacy, threats, and
bribery. In practice, the Papacy's 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 embodied in the
Lombard king
Liutprand's "Donation of
Sutri" (728) to
Pope Gregory II [
1].
When the
Exarchate 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.
Pope Stephen II acted to neutralize the Lombard threat by courting the de facto
Frankish ruler,
Pippin the Younger. Stephen gave church sanction to Pippin's desire to depose the
Merovingian figurehead
Childeric III and take the throne himself; he also granted Pippin the title
Patrician of the Romans. In return, Pippin led a Frankish army into Italy in
754 and
756. Pippin conquered much of northern Italy and made a gift (called the
Donation of Pippin) of the properties formerly constituting the Exarchate of Ravenna to the Pope. In
781,
Charlemagne codified the regions over which the Pope would be temporal sovereign: the Duchy of Rome was key, but the territory was expanded to include Ravenna, 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" ('Augustus Romanorum').
However, the precise nature of the relationship between the Popes and Emperors–and between the Papal States and the Empire–was not clear. Was the Pope a sovereign ruler of a separate realm in central Italy, or were the Papal States just a part of the Frankish Empire over which the Popes had administrative control? Events in the ninth century postponed the conflict: the Frankish Empire collapsed as it was subdivided among Charlemagne's grandchildren, and the papacy's prestige declined into the condition later dubbed the
pornocracy. 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 Lombard system of government, with many small countships and marquisates, each centered upon a fortified
rocca.
Over several campaigns in the mid-
tenth 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, which guaranteed 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 Italy. A major motivation for the
Gregorian Reform was to free the administration of the Papal States from imperial interference, and after the extirpation of the
Hohenstaufen dynasty, the German emperors rarely interfered in Italian affairs. By 1300, the Papal States, along with the rest of the Italian principalities, were effectively independent.
During the
Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly, notably under
Pope Alexander VI and
Pope Julius II. The Pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers as well as the head of the Church, signing treaties with other sovereigns and fighting wars. In practice, though, most of the Papal States was still only nominally controlled by the Pope, and much of the territory was ruled by minor princes. Control was always contested; indeed it took until the 16th century for the Pope to have any genuine control over all his territories.
From 1305 to 1378, the Popes lived in
Avignon, in what is now France, and were under the influence of the French kings. During this
Avignon Papacy, however, the Papal States in Italy remained formally under Papal control. During this period the city of Avignon itself was added to the Papal States; it remained a Papal possession even after the Popes returned to Rome, only passing back to France during the
French Revolution.
At its greatest extent in the 18th century, the Papal States included most of Central Italy–
Latium,
Umbria,
Marche and the
Legations of
Ravenna,
Ferrara and
Bologna extending north into the
Romagna. It also included the small enclaves of
Benevento and
Pontecorvo in southern Italy and the larger
Comtat Venaissin around
Avignon in southern France.
The French Revolution proved as disastrous for the temporal territories of the Papacy as it was for the Catholic Church in general. In
1791 the Comtat Venaissin and Avignon were annexed by France. Later, with the French invasion of Italy in
1796, the Legations were seized and became part of the revolutionary
Cisalpine Republic. Two years later, the Papal States as a whole were invaded by French forces, who declared a
Roman Republic.
Pope Pius VI died in exile in France in
1799. The Papal States were restored in June of
1800 and
Pope Pius VII returned, but the French again invaded in
1808, and this time the remainder of the States of the Church were annexed to France, forming the
départements of
Tibre and
Trasimène.
With the fall of the Napoleonic system in
1814, the Papal States were restored. From 1814 until the death of
Pope Gregory XVI in
1846, the Popes followed a harshly
reactionary policy in the Papal States. For instance, the city of Rome maintained the last
Jewish ghetto in Western Europe. There were hopes that this would change when
Pope Pius IX was elected to succeed Gregory and began to introduce liberal reforms.
Italian
nationalism had been stoked during the Napoleonic period but dashed by the settlement of the
Congress of Vienna (1814-15), which left Italy divided and largely under Habsburg
Austrian domination. In
1848, nationalist and liberal revolutions began to break out across Europe; in
1849, a
Roman Republic was declared and the Pope fled the city.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, recently elected president of the newly declared
French Second Republic, saw an opportunity to assuage conservative Catholic opinion in France, and in cooperation with Austria sent troops to restore Papal rule in Rome. After some hard fighting (in which
Giuseppe Garibaldi distinguished himself on the Italian side), Pius was returned to Rome, and repenting of his previous liberal tendencies pursued a harsh, conservative policy even more repressive than that of his predecessors.
In the years that followed, Italian nationalists–both those who wished to unify the country under the
Kingdom of Sardinia and its ruling
House of Savoy and those who favored a republican solution–saw the Papal States as the chief obstacle to Italian unity. Louis Napoleon, who had now seized control of France as
Emperor Napoleon III, tried to play a double game, simultaneously forming an alliance with Sardinia and playing on his famous uncle's nationalist credentials on the one hand and maintaining French troops in Rome to protect the Pope's rights on the other.
After the
Austro-Sardinian War, much of northern Italy was unified under the House of Savoy's government; in the aftermath, Garibaldi led a revolution that overthrow the
Bourbon monarchy in the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Afraid that Garibaldi would set up a republican government in the south, the Sardinians petitioned Napoleon for permission to send troops through the Papal States to gain control of the Two Sicilies, which was granted on the condition that Rome was left undisturbed. In
1860, with much of the region already in rebellion against Papal rule, Sardinia conquered the eastern two-thirds of the Papal States and cemented its hold on the south. Bologna, Ferrara, Umbria, the Marches, Benevento and Pontecorvo were all formally annexed by November of the same year, and a unified Kingdom of
Italy was declared. The Papal States were reduced to
Latium, the immediate neighborhood of Rome.
Many Italians still believed that Rome ought by right to be the capital of the new state. The opportunity to eliminate the last vestige of the Papal States came at the beginning of September
1870, when, in the aftermath of France's disastrous defeat at the
Battle of Sedan, the French garrison in Rome was withdrawn to defend France against the
Prussians. On
September 10, Italy declared war on the Papal States, and on
September 20 Italian forces reached Rome. Though everyone involved knew that the Pope's tiny army was incapable of defending the city, Pius ordered it to put up at least a token resistance to emphasize that Italy was acquiring Rome by force and not consent. After a cannonade of three hours, the Italians entered Rome and the Papal States ceased to exist.
This event, described in Italian history books as a liberation, was taken very bitterly by the Pope. The Italian government had offered to allow the Pope to retain control of the
Leonine City on the west bank of the
Tiber, but Pius rejected the overture. Early the following year, the capital of Italy was moved from Florence to Rome. The Pope, whose previous residence, the
Quirinal Palace, had become the royal palace of the Kings of Italy, withdrew in protest into the Vatican, where he lived as a
self-proclaimed "prisoner", refusing to leave or to set foot in
St. Peter's Square, and forbidding (
Non Expedit) Catholics on pain of
excommunication to participate in elections in the new Italian state.
However the new Italian control of Rome did not wither, nor did the Catholic world come to the Pope's aid, as Pius IX had expected. In the
1920s, the papacy renounced the bulk of the Papal States and signed the
Lateran Treaty (or Concordat with Rome) of
1929, which created the
State of the Vatican City, forming the sovereign territory of the
Holy See (which is also a subject under international law in its own right). Vatican City can be seen as the modern descendent of the Papal States.
*As the
plural name Papal State
s indicates, the various regional components, usually former independent states, retained their identity under papal rule. The papal 'state' was represented in each(?) province by a governor, either styled
papal legate, as in the former principality of
Benevento, or
Bologna,
Romagna, and the
March of Ancona; or
papal delegate, as in the former duchy of
Pontecorvo.
*The police force, known as
sbirri ('cop' in modern Italian), was stationed in private houses (normally a practice of military occupation) and enforced order quite rigorously
*For the defence of the states an international Catholic volunteer corps, called
zouaves after a kind of French colonial native Algerian infantry, and imitating their uniform type, was created.
*
WorldStatesmen- Italy *
WHKMLA Historical atlas - here the page offering numerous links to maps of/containing Italy*
Donation of Constantine*
Italian unification*
Vatican City*
Prisoner in the Vatican*
Avignon Papacy*
Holy Roman Empire
