The Papal States (756-1870)

The Papal States are the name given to the sovereign political entity whose monarch was the pope, distinct from his spiritual authority over the universal Church. In it, the pope was both the religious head of Catholicism and the civil sovereign of several million subjects: he minted coins, levied taxes, maintained an army, signed treaties, dispensed justice and appointed governors^[7].

Geographically, these territories formed a broad diagonal belt across the peninsula, from Latium (around Rome) to the Adriatic, encompassing Umbria, the Marches, and — to the north — the rich Romagna with Bologna, Ferrara and Ravenna. Added to this were, outside Italy, two French enclaves: the Comtat Venaissin, ceded to the Holy See by Philip III in 1273 (erected as a papal State in 1274), and Avignon, purchased by Clement VI in 1348, until their annexation to revolutionary France in 1791^[8].

A common anachronism must be avoided: the Papal States were not a homogeneous bloc but a mosaic of cities, fiefs and lordships with varied statuses, subject to pontifical authority to varying degrees. It is precisely this difficulty of governing a fragmented territory that explains much of their turbulent political history.

The Patrimony of Saint Peter

Before being a kingdom, pontifical sovereignty was first a landed patrimony. From the 4th century onward, after the Constantinian peace, the Church of Rome received through inheritance and donation vast estates — lands, farms, buildings — spread across Italy, Sicily, Gaul and Africa. This body of property, managed by the pontifical administration to support the clergy and feed the poor, was called the Patrimony of Saint Peter (patrimonium sancti Petri)^[9].

This patrimony was not yet a State: the pope was an owner there, not a sovereign. But in the 6th and 7th centuries, as Byzantine authority collapsed in Italy, the bishop of Rome de facto assumed civil functions — provisioning the city, defence, negotiation with invaders. Gregory the Great (590-604) already administered Rome like a true temporal chief, without bearing the title. The ground was prepared for the decisive transformation of the 8th century.

The Lombard threat and the Donation of Pepin (754-756)

In the mid-8th century, Italy tipped over. In 751, the Lombard king Aistulf seized Ravenna, the last Byzantine stronghold, and directly threatened Rome. Pope Stephen II (752-757), abandoned by Constantinople, took a momentous decision: he crossed the Alps and went in person to the king of the Franks, Pepin the Short, whom he had just anointed at Saint-Denis^[10].

Pepin, indebted to the Holy See for having legitimised his Carolingian dynasty, committed himself by a promise — the Donation of Pepin — to restore to the Roman Church the territories torn from the Byzantines. Two victorious military campaigns against the Lombards, in 754 and then in 756, enabled him to keep his word: he handed over to the pope the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis (Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Senigallia, Ancona), which were added to the Duchy of Rome^[11].

This is the birth certificate of the Papal States. For the first time, the pope became juridically the temporal sovereign of a territory, and no longer merely a landowner. The date of 756 is generally taken as that of the foundation of the pontifical State, which would last until 1870^[12].

The Donation of Charlemagne (774)

In 774, Pepin's son, Charlemagne, completed his father's work. Having definitively brought down the Lombard kingdom, he confirmed and extended his father's donation during a visit to Rome to Pope Adrian I. Charlemagne's imperial coronation by Leo III on Christmas Day 800 sealed the alliance between the papacy and the Western Empire, and placed the young pontifical State under the protection — sometimes heavy-handed — of the emperor^[13][14].

The Donation of Constantine: a forged founder

For centuries, the pontifical chancery invoked another, far older and more prestigious title to ground its temporal power: the Donation of Constantine. According to this document, the emperor Constantine, healed of leprosy and baptised by Pope Sylvester I, would out of gratitude have ceded to the papacy sovereignty over Rome, Italy and the entire West^[15].

But this document was a forgery. In 1440, the humanist Lorenzo Valla wrote his famous treatise De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (On the Donation of Constantine, Falsely Believed and Forged) and demonstrated, on historical and philological grounds, that the text could not date from the 4th century: its vulgar Latin, its anachronisms of vocabulary and institutions betray an 8th-century composition^[16][17].

This must be stated plainly, for it honours the intellectual rigour of the Church: Valla's demonstration — he was a Catholic cleric in the service of the King of Aragon — was accepted by ecclesiastical scholarship itself, and makes him a pioneer of modern historical criticism. The falsity of the document in no way ruins the real legitimacy of the Papal States: it rests on the authentic donation of Pepin, not on the Constantinian myth. The Church had no need of a forgery — it had a genuine title. The fresco by Raphael's workshop in the Vatican preserves the artistic memory of the legend, now received as such.

A mosaic of cities and lordships

Owning a territory is not enough: it still has to be governed. Yet from the 9th to the 14th century, the pope's authority over his States was often more theoretical than real. The great Roman families (Crescenzi, Tusculani, then Colonna and Orsini) fought over the city; the communes of Umbria and Romagna claimed their autonomy; local lords — the signori — seized the cities. The long stay of the popes at Avignon (1309-1377) further aggravated the anarchy: deprived of its sovereign, pontifical Italy fell apart^[18].

Cardinal Albornoz and the Egidian Constitutions (1357)

It was a remarkable man who saved the pontifical State from disintegration: the Spanish cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz (c. 1310-1367), former archbishop of Toledo and a man of war. Sent to Italy as legate by the Avignon pope Innocent VI in 1353, he methodically reconquered, within a few years, the rebellious cities and subdued the local tyrants^[19].

His masterpiece was juridical. On 29 April 1357, at a parliament assembled at Fano, Albornoz promulgated the Constitutiones Sanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ, which remained famous under the name of the Egidian Constitutions (from the cardinal's Latin first name, Aegidius). This six-book code organised the administration of the State coherently for the first time. In it, he divided the territory into five provinces — the Campagne and Maritime, the Patrimony of Saint Peter, the March of Ancona, the Duchy of Spoleto and Romagna — each entrusted to a governor or rector endowed with broad administrative, financial, judicial and military powers, but subordinate to the pontifical legate^[20][21].

So effective was this code that it remained the fundamental law of the Papal States until 1816 — nearly five centuries, one of the most durable constitutions in European history^[22].

The legacy of Matilda of Tuscany

The pontifical State also grew by inheritance. The powerful countess Matilda of Canossa (1046-1115), great ally of Pope Gregory VII during the Investiture Controversy, bequeathed her vast Tuscan and Emilian domains to the Holy See. Although the concrete application of this bequest was long disputed with the Empire, it provided a legal title that the popes would invoke for centuries to extend their authority toward northern Italy^[23].

Julius II, the "warrior pope"

It was in the Renaissance that the pontifical State reached its full political power. Pope Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere, 1503-1513), an energetic and bellicose figure, himself took command of his armies to reconquer the cities of Romagna that had escaped pontifical authority. A brilliant patron — he commissioned from Michelangelo the vault of the Sistine Chapel and launched the reconstruction of Saint Peter's Basilica — he was also the military restorer of the State^[24].

His motto could be that of all the pope-kings of that era: to defend the independence of the Holy See in an Italy torn between France, Spain and the Empire, a strong State was needed. This is the avowed ambiguity of the Renaissance papacy, whose artistic greatness went hand in hand with a sometimes excessive temporal engagement.

Cesare Borgia and the reconquest of Romagna

The predecessor of Julius II, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, 1492-1503), had prepared the ground through the military action of his son Cesare Borgia, who carved out of Romagna an ephemeral principality serving the Borgia house as much as the Church. Upon Alexander VI's death, Julius II recovered these conquests for the benefit of the pontifical State, transforming one family's ambition into a lasting consolidation of Saint Peter's domain^[25].

The maximum extension

Enlargements continued into the 17th century: annexation of Ferrara in 1598 (upon the extinction of the House of Este), of the duchy of Urbino in 1631, of the duchy of Castro in 1649. The pontifical State then reached its maximum extension, about 44,000 km², grouping most of central and eastern Italy^[26]. In the mid-19th century, it counted more than three million inhabitants — 3.13 million in the official census of 1853 — making it one of the most populous States of Italy^[27].

An elective theocracy

The Papal States presented a singularity unique in Europe: it was an elective and ecclesiastical monarchy. The sovereign did not inherit the throne and had no descendants: he was elected by the college of cardinals at the conclave, and his reign ended at his death. This absence of a dynasty ruled out the risk of hereditary succession struggles, but introduced another weakness: each pontificate could overturn the policy of the previous one, and the advanced age of the popes elected often made reigns brief.

The central government rested on the Secretary of State — a veritable prime minister — and on the Roman Curia, whose cardinal congregations administered both the universal Church and the temporal State. Key posts were held by prelates, jurist clerics forming a competent bureaucracy but cut off from part of the lay population.

Legations and delegations

In the 19th century, the territorial administration was organised into large districts. Following the reform of Pius IX in 1850, the title of legation was reserved for five large regions, governed by a cardinal-legate; the other provinces were delegations led by a prelate-delegate. The Legation of Romagna, for example, brought together Bologna, Ferrara, Forlì and Ravenna and counted in 1859 1,014,582 inhabitants, Bologna being its principal city^[28].

Lights and shadows of a government of prelates

Here the two opposite caricatures must both be avoided. The "government of priests" was long presented by anticlerical and liberal propaganda as retrograde and obscurantist; the reality is more nuanced. The Papal States maintained renowned universities (Bologna, the Sapienza of Rome), considerable charitable relief and an unequalled artistic heritage^[29].

But the shadows are real: heavy taxation, slow justice, distrust of liberal ideas and railways, exclusion of laypeople from the highest offices. In the 19th century, as Italian nationalism rose, this political gap fuelled opposition to temporal power and supplied arguments to the Risorgimento.

The First Roman Republic (1798)

The French Revolution struck the pontifical State head-on. As early as 1791, revolutionary France annexed Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin. Then, in February 1798, the French army of the Directory entered Rome, proclaimed a Roman Republic and expelled Pope Pius VI, aged 81, deported to France where he died a prisoner at Valence in 1799. The pontifical State then seemed abolished^[30].

The annexation of 1809 and the captivity of Pius VII

Restored after the election of Pius VII in 1800, the pontifical State soon came into conflict with Napoleon. The Emperor demanded that the pope close his ports to the English and join the Continental Blockade; Pius VII refused, considering that his charge as universal pastor imposed neutrality upon him between Christian nations^[31].

The rupture was brutal. On 17 May 1809, Napoleon decreed the annexation of the Papal States to the Empire, subsequently organised into the departments of the Tiber and Trasimene (senatus-consultum of 17 February 1810)^[32]. In the night of 10 to 11 June 1809, Pius VII retaliated with the bull Quum memoranda, which excommunicated the authors and accomplices of this despoliation of the Holy See, without explicitly naming the Emperor^[33].

Napoleon's response was abduction. The pope was arrested and deported: first to Savona (1809-1812), then to the château of Fontainebleau, where he arrived on 20 June 1812. Weakened, cut off from his advisers, he ended up signing under duress a Concordat of Fontainebleau (25 January 1813) which he courageously retracted two months later, on 24 March 1813^[34][35]. The steadfastness of the old, disarmed pope facing the all-powerful emperor has remained one of the great testimonies to the spiritual independence of the papacy.

The restoration of 1815

The fall of Napoleon brought justice to the Holy See. At the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), the Secretary of State, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, obtained through his diplomacy the almost complete restoration of the Papal States — with the exception of Avignon and the Comtat, definitively French. According to the dossier Aleteia devotes to the cardinal, Consalvi announced to Rome, on 12 June 1815, the scale of the success: the Holy See recovered almost all of its provinces^[36].

The pontifical State then entered its final phase — which would also be the most dramatic.

The end of the Papal States was not a sudden collapse, but an amputation in stages, spread over nearly eighty years, from the annexation of Avignon by revolutionary France to the capture of Rome. The following timeline summarises the great upheavals.

Pius IX, from liberalism to the Roman Republic of 1849

Elected in 1846, Pius IX at first passed for a liberal and patriotic pope: he amnestied political prisoners, granted a constitution, and aroused the enthusiasm of Italian nationalists. But the Revolution of 1848 caught up with him. On 15 November 1848, his minister Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated; under pressure from the riot, the pope fled in disguise and took refuge at Gaeta, in the Kingdom of Naples^[37].

At Rome, the revolutionaries proclaimed in February 1849 the Second Roman Republic, governed by a triumvirate dominated by Giuseppe Mazzini, and defended militarily by Garibaldi. Pius IX then appealed to the Catholic powers. France — though republican — sent an expeditionary corps commanded by General Oudinot, which landed at Civitavecchia on 25 April 1849, besieged Rome and, after hard resistance, brought down the Republic on 3 July 1849^[38]. Pius IX returned, but transformed: henceforth hostile to liberalism, he would become the pope of the Syllabus (1864) and of the First Vatican Council (1869-1870).

The amputation of 1859-1860

The creation of a unified Kingdom of Italy, under the impetus of the Piedmont of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II, doomed the Papal States. After the war of 1859, the northern legations — Romagna, then soon Umbria and the Marches — voted by plebiscite for reunion with the Kingdom of Sardinia. To join the north and south of Italy, only the pope's States remained to be crossed^[39].

The pontifical army, hastily reconstituted, was commanded by the French general Louis de Lamoricière and counted volunteers from all over Europe — future Papal Zouaves, among them many Frenchmen and Belgians who had come to defend the pope out of religious conviction. On 18 September 1860, at the Battle of Castelfidardo (in the Marches), these troops were crushed by the Piedmontese army. The Marches and Umbria were annexed; the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed on 17 March 1861. The Papal States were henceforth reduced to Latium alone around Rome, and survived only thanks to the French garrison that Napoleon III maintained to protect the pope^[40].

The breach of Porta Pia (20 September 1870)

The denouement came from war. In July 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out: Napoleon III immediately recalled his garrison from Rome, leaving the pope unprotected. The Italian army seized the opportunity. On 20 September 1870, in the morning, after several hours of bombardment begun at dawn, the Italian artillery opened a breach in the ancient wall at Porta Pia, northeast of Rome^[41].

Pius IX had ordered only a symbolic resistance. Cardinal Antonelli, Secretary of State, transmitted to the commander of the pontifical troops, General Kanzler, the instruction to limit himself to a defence of honour and then capitulate, in order to avoid a hopeless battle (paraphrase; the exact wording of the instruction could not be verified)^[42]. After the death of 49 Italian soldiers and 19 pontifical soldiers, the white flag was raised. Rome voted its reunion with the Kingdom of Italy in the plebiscite of 2 October 1870, then was formally annexed by the royal decree of 9 October 1870 (no. 5903), and became in 1871 the capital of unified Italy. The temporal power of the popes, eleven centuries old, came to an end^[43][44].

The "prisoner of the Vatican" and the non possumus

Pius IX refused to recognise the annexation. He no longer left the Vatican enclosure, proclaimed himself a "prisoner" and excommunicated the usurpers. His attitude is summed up in a formula borrowed from the Acts of the Apostles, the non possumus — "we cannot" — by which he signified that no human authority could compel him to surrender what he considered the patrimony of the universal Church^[45].

This resistance, which may seem uncompromising, obeyed a precise logic: by refusing all accommodation, the pope intended never to legitimise the despoliation, and to keep alive the claim to the independence of the Holy See.

The refused Law of Guarantees (1871)

To settle the situation, the Italian Parliament voted on 13 May 1871 a Law of Guarantees, intended to fix the pope's status unilaterally: inviolability of his person, free exercise of his ministry, use of the Vatican and Lateran palaces, and an annual endowment of 3.225 million lire^[46][47].

Pius IX rejected this law outright in the encyclical Ubi nos (15 May 1871) and refused to touch the endowment. A law granted by the occupying State, revocable at any moment, could not in his eyes replace a true sovereignty. As pontifical doctrine would sum it up, the pope could not appear as the mere "chaplain of the King of Italy": his spiritual independence required a guarantee that did not depend on the goodwill of a government^[48].

The Lateran Agreements (1929) and Vatican City

The Roman Question remained open for nearly sixty years, under four pontificates. It was resolved only in 1929. On 11 February 1929, at the Lateran Palace, the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri, in the name of Pope Pius XI, and Benito Mussolini, head of the Italian government, signed the Lateran Agreements, ratified on 7 June 1929^[49][50].

These agreements comprise three texts: a political treaty closing the Roman Question and creating the Vatican City State; a financial convention compensating the Holy See for the loss of the former States; and a concordat regulating the place of the Church in Italy. The pope officially renounced all claims to the former Papal States; in exchange, Italy recognised the full sovereignty of the Holy See over the 44 hectares of Vatican City^[51][52].

The solution shows great wisdom: no longer a great kingdom, but a tiny and symbolic territory, just enough for the pope to be the subject of no State. Territorial sovereignty is no longer an end in itself: it becomes the minimal guarantor of spiritual freedom.

The argument of spiritual independence

The deep reason for temporal power is not worldly ambition, but independence. To govern the universal Church freely, the pope must be the subject of no prince. If he were a citizen of a State, his spiritual decisions might be perceived as dictated by that government. The possession of his own territory guaranteed that the successor of Peter was, temporally, answerable to no one.

It is this thesis that Leo XIII defended with the greatest clarity after 1870: in his encyclical Inscrutabili Dei consilio (21 April 1878, § 12), he maintained that this sovereignty is necessary to protect and preserve the full liberty of the spiritual power, and that it is an established fact that, when the temporal sovereignty of the Apostolic See is in question, the cause of the public good and of the well-being of all human society is also at stake (paraphrase; original English text in the note)^[53].

This doctrine explains why Pius IX and his successors obstinately refused the Law of Guarantees: a freedom conceded by another is not freedom. A proper sovereignty was needed, however reduced to the extreme.

A providential reading of the loss

There remains a paradox that Catholic tradition has pondered: the loss of the Papal States, experienced as a tragedy in 1870, ultimately served the spiritual mission of the papacy. Delivered from the burden of administering three million subjects, maintaining an army and conducting the diplomacy of an Italian prince, the contemporary papacy has recovered a universal moral authority that no pope-king of the 18th century had known.

Vatican City State, born in 1929, embodies this balance: enough sovereignty to guarantee independence, not enough to make the pope one political actor among others. The debate remains open among historians and theologians — Leo XIII asked in 1878 that the Roman Pontiff be restored to the condition in which God's design had placed him^[54] — but many see in the solution of 1929 the happy outcome of a long trial: what force had torn away, Providence converted into liberation.

Eleven centuries after the Donation of Pepin, the pope is no longer the sovereign of an earthly kingdom. But it is perhaps because he ceased to be a temporal prince that he has become, in the eyes of the world, the moral conscience listened to beyond borders.

• The Avignon Papacy (1309-1377) — the seven popes, the palace and Cardinal Albornoz, reconqueror of the Papal States.
• The Decadence of the Borgia Popes — Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia and the Renaissance papacy.
• The Christian Renaissance — Julius II, Michelangelo, Raphael and pontifical patronage.
• The Coronation of Charlemagne — the alliance between the papacy and the Western Empire.
• The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) — interrupted by the capture of Rome, it defined pontifical infallibility.
• The Catholic Counter-Reformation — the government of the Church after the Council of Trent.