Papal States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Papal States lasted more than a thousand years, from 756 to 1870, as a stretch of Italian territory ruled not by a king or an emperor but by the head of a church. At their greatest extent they covered most of what is now central Italy, including Rome, Lazio, Umbria, Marche, and the Romagna. But the story of how they came to exist, how they were governed, and how they eventually collapsed raises questions that run through centuries of European history. Why did the pope need land at all? How did a religious institution become one of the most important secular powers on the Italian peninsula? And what finally brought the whole arrangement to an end on the 20th of September 1870, when Italian troops broke through the Aurelian Walls of Rome?

• 2. From Landlord to Sovereign

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  Constantine the Great, with a law promulgated in 321, allowed the Christian Church to hold property and restored to it anything previously confiscated. The Lateran Palace passed into church hands, most probably from Constantine himself. Over the following centuries the bishops of Rome accumulated landed estates, including whole or partial latifundia, across Italy and beyond. For its first three hundred years the church had been persecuted and unable to own anything; now it became one of the largest private landowners in the peninsula.

  The fall of the Western Roman Empire changed everything about that arrangement. As central Roman authority disintegrated in the late 5th century, Italy passed under the Arian suzerainty of Odoacer in 473, and then, in 493, under Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths. The Ostrogothic kings ruled much of Italy until 554. The Roman Church submitted to their authority while asserting spiritual primacy over Christendom.

  Beginning in 535, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I launched a campaign to wrest Italy from the Ostrogoths; it continued until 554 and devastated the peninsula's political and economic structures. The Byzantines established the Exarchate of Ravenna, of which the Duchy of Rome was an administrative division. Then, in 568, the Lombards entered from the north. By the 7th century Byzantine authority was largely confined to a corridor running from Ravenna to Rome and south toward Naples.

  With Byzantine power concentrated at the northeastern end of this corridor, the pope, as the largest landowner and most prestigious figure in Italy, began by default to exercise ruling authority in the areas surrounding Rome. The Duchy of Rome became, in practice, an independent state. A climactic moment in the founding of the Papal States came with the Donation of Sutri in 728, when the Lombardic King Liutprand gave Pope Gregory II lands as part of an agreed boundary.

• 3. The Donation of Pepin

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  When the Exarchate of Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 751, the Duchy of Rome was cut off entirely from the Byzantine Empire. In that same year, Pope Zachary had Pepin the Short crowned king of the Franks in place of the powerless Merovingian figurehead Childeric III. Zachary's successor, Pope Stephen II, granted Pepin the title Patrician of the Romans.

  Pepin led a Frankish army into Italy in 754 and again in 756, defeated the Lombards, and gifted the lands that had formerly constituted the Exarchate of Ravenna to the pope. This was the act that legally established the Papal States as a territorial sovereignty rather than a landlord's estate. The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty reached its peak in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans.

  Some later sources claimed that Charlemagne, in 781, extended the regions over which the pope would be temporal sovereign to include 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. Whether or not all those territories were ever effectively held, the basic political arrangement had been set: the pope governed as a secular ruler over a recognized domain.

• 4. Avignon and Disorder

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  From 1305 to 1378 the popes lived not in Rome but 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. The city of Avignon itself and the surrounding Comtat Venaissin were added to the Papal States during this period and remained papal possessions for some four hundred years, until they were seized during the French Revolution.

  In the popes' absence, local despots filled the vacuum across the nominal Papal territories. The Pepoli took Bologna, the Ordelaffi took Forlì, the Manfredi took Faenza, and the Malatesta settled in Rimini. Each gave nominal acknowledgment to their papal overlords and were declared vicars of the Church, but real control was theirs. In Rome itself, the Orsini and the Colonna struggled for supremacy, dividing the city's rioni between them.

  Out of this aristocratic anarchy rose Cola di Rienzo, who was acclaimed Tribune of the People in 1347 and dreamed of a universal Roman democracy. He met a violent death in early October 1354, assassinated by supporters of the Colonna family. As the scholar Guido Ruggiero wrote, "even with the support of Petrarch, his return to first times and the rebirth of ancient Rome was one that would not prevail."

  The disorder that Rienzo both reflected and accelerated prompted the papacy to act. Cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz was appointed papal legate and led a mercenary army across the Papal territories. On the 29th of April 1357, at a meeting of all the Papal vicars, he promulgated the Constitutiones Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae. These Constitutiones Aegidianae replaced the mosaic of local law and accumulated traditional liberties with a uniform civil code that remained in effect until 1816.

• 5. Finances and Fiscal Crisis

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  In the 17th century the Papal States faced chronic financial crisis. Revenues of just over 2 million scudi were largely consumed by debt interest, and public debt rose sharply from about 15 million scudi in the 1620s to around 50 million by the 1670s. During the famine of 1647 to 1648 an extraordinary subsidy of about 700,000 scudi was imposed. By 1676 the annual interest burden on the public debt stood at about 2.4 million scudi.

  The 18th century brought structural imbalance rather than acute crisis. In 1729 annual income was about 2.7 million scudi against roughly 2.4 million in expenditure, but tax exemptions and salary increases soon eliminated the surplus and produced a recurring annual deficit of about 120,000 scudi. Clement XII, in 1736, invested 200,000 scudi in the port of Ancona after taking out a loan of 600,000 scudi. In 1753, Benedict XIV sold rights over benefices and revenues to Spain for about 6.7 million lire in gold.

  The French invasions stripped the state of what remained. The armistice of Bologna in 1796 required payment of 21 million lire, of which only 5 million were actually paid. The Treaty of Tolentino in February 1797 imposed a further 30 million lire and required the cession of Bologna, Ferrara, and Ravenna. By 1811, government debt had reached 74 million scudi. French authorities liquidated it by suppressing religious corporations and confiscating their property.

  In the 19th century the Papal States recorded annual revenues of about 13.5 million florins, but public debt amounted to approximately 187 million florins, a sum that greatly exceeded the state's yearly income.

• 6. People, Cities, and Daily Life

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  In 1656, the first general census ordered by Pope Alexander VII recorded about 1.8 million inhabitants. By 1701 that figure had risen modestly to about 1.95 million. The pace of growth was slow, measured in a few thousand persons per year, and grain shortages and epidemics at the start of the 18th century further slowed expansion. By 1769 the population reached about 2.2 million, and by 1782 about 2.35 million.

  In the mid-19th century, Rome was by far the largest city, with about 170,000 inhabitants. Bologna came next with around 71,000, followed by Perugia with about 30,000. Ancona and Ferrara each held roughly 24,000. According to the 1853 census, 99.7 percent of the population was Catholic. Jews were the largest non-Catholic group, numbering 9,237, concentrated mainly in certain provinces including Ancona, Ferrara, and Pesaro e Urbino. The city of Rome maintained the last Jewish ghetto in Western Europe until Pope Gregory XVI's death in 1846.

  The economy in the 1850s was predominantly agrarian. Principal products included grain, olives, silk, hemp, wool, cheese, and livestock. Wool and silk textile workshops existed alongside paper mills, imitation pearl manufactures, and rope-making establishments. Railway development came relatively late. Early proposals were made in 1834 by Monsignor Gaspare Grasselini, who proposed a line connecting the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas. The Rome-Frascati railway was inaugurated in July 1856.

• 7. The Fall of Rome

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  By 1860 the Kingdom of Italy had conquered the eastern two-thirds of the Papal States. Bologna, Ferrara, Umbria, the Marches, Benevento, and Pontecorvo were all formally annexed by November of that year. A French garrison in Rome was all that kept the Italian government from seizing the city. Then, in July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and Napoleon III recalled his garrison. The collapse of the Second French Empire at the Battle of Sedan removed Rome's protector.

  King Victor Emmanuel II initially sought a peaceful transfer and proposed sending Italian troops into Rome ostensibly to protect the pope. Pius IX refused. Italy declared war on the 10th of September 1870, and the Royal Italian Army, commanded by General Raffaele Cadorna, crossed the frontier the following day. The army reached the Aurelian Walls on September 19 and placed Rome under siege.

  Pius IX ordered his forces to offer more than token resistance, specifically to demonstrate that Italy was acquiring Rome by force and not consent. The cannonade demolished a section of the 1,600-year-old Aurelian Walls and the city was captured on the 20th of September 1870. Among the Papal forces, 12 died and 47 were wounded; the Italian troops suffered 32 dead and 145 wounded. Rome and the remnants of the Papal States were then annexed to the Kingdom of Italy by plebiscite the following October.

  The papacy rejected the 1871 Law of Guarantees and refused to become an Italian subject. Instead, Pius IX confined himself to the Apostolic Palace and adjacent buildings within the Leonine City on Vatican Hill, a posture that would persist until 1929. On the 11th of February 1929, the Lateran Treaty, negotiated by Benito Mussolini and signed by both parties, created the State of the Vatican City as the sovereign territory of the Holy See. The Swiss Guard, which had served the Papal States since the Middle Ages, continues to operate at the Vatican today, long after the Palatine Guard and the Noble Guard were both disbanded in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.