Papal States / Holy See

The territory the popes ruled as monarchs for over a thousand years, held on the strength of a document that was a forgery, and reduced in 1870 to a walled enclave that is still a country. The states originated in the eighth century when the Frankish king Pepin took land in central Italy from the Lombards and gave it to the papacy, and the claim was justified by the Donation of Constantine, purporting to record the emperor's gift of the western empire to the pope - proved a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century on linguistic grounds, in one of the founding demonstrations of textual criticism. The practical argument for the territory was better than the documentary one: a pope without land would be the subject of whichever ruler held Rome. Holding it made the papacy a player in Italian politics, with armies, taxes and the problems of any small state, and the tension between the spiritual office and the temporal one runs through the whole medieval church. Popes fought emperors over the appointment of bishops, excommunicated them, and were driven out of Rome repeatedly by their own nobility. From 1309 to 1377 the papacy sat at Avignon under French influence, and the attempt to end that produced two and then three rival popes at once; the Avignon papacy lasted 68 years and the schism that followed almost 40. Renaissance popes ran the states as dynastic principalities, and Rome's rebuilding was funded partly by indulgences - fundraising that helped provoke the Reformation. The territory ran across central Italy from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic, with Bologna, Ravenna and Ancona among its major cities. Popes held it from 756 onwards. The modern difficulty was that the same person was head of a government and head of a universal church, so every administrative grievance became a religious one. Napoleon annexed the states twice and twice they were restored. After 1815 they were among the worst-governed territories in Italy: clerics held the senior offices, lay participation was minimal, and the regime was maintained after 1849 only by a French garrison. Pius IX began as a reformer, fled a revolution in 1848, and returned an implacable conservative, issuing the Syllabus of Errors and convening the council that defined papal infallibility. Italian troops entered Rome in 1870 when the French garrison left for a war at home, and the temporal power ended; the territory had already been reduced to Rome and its surroundings in 1860, when the states held around three million people. Successive popes refused to accept the loss and stayed inside the Vatican, describing themselves as prisoners, for 59 years. The Lateran Treaty with Mussolini in 1929 settled it and created Vatican City, which covers 0.44 square kilometres and is the smallest state in the world. The Holy See remains a sovereign entity in international law, maintains diplomatic relations with more than 180 countries and holds observer status at the United Nations. Rome was the capital and the Quirinal the papal residence.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history