Papal states
The Pontifical States, officially the State of the Church (Italian: Stato della Chiesa), were the territories on the Italian peninsula under the direct authority of the pope from 756 to 1870. At their greatest extent, they covered the modern Italian regions of Latium, Marche, Umbria, and Emilia-Romagna. In 1861, the Papal States were reduced to Lazio and became an enclave of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was proclaimed as the new Kingdom of Italy. Between 1870 and 1929, the pope had no physical territory and the Vatican was under Italian sovereignty. Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini finally resolved the crisis and created the Vatican City State, which was awarded 44 hectares of the city of Rome, in the area of the historic papal buildings, on Vatican Hill.
History
Creation
When in the year 751 the Lombard king Astolfo seized Ravenna, thus ending the exarchate of Ravenna, the pope assumed full power of government (dicio) in the Duchy of Rome (which would become to be named as patrimonio de san Pedro), recognizing the Byzantine emperor as its sovereign. But as the duchy of Rome had been part of the exarchate, it was claimed by Astolfo. Shortly after reaching the throne, Stephen II negotiated a forty-year truce with Astolfo, but Astolfo broke it after four months, and in June 752 he claimed jurisdiction and taxes, setting out for Rome. Given this, the Pope asked the Emperor Constantine V for help, but he limited himself to sending a letter to Astolfo to restore the imperial territories that he had taken over, for which he finally decided to appeal to the King of the Franks, Pepin the Short., embarking on a trip to France. The king of the Franks sent two emissaries to the pope to escort him. On January 6, 754, Stephen II was obsequiously welcomed by Pepin at Ponthión. Esteban again pleaded with the king to eliminate the threat of the Lombards. The result of this meeting was Pepin's commitment to grant the territories conquered by the Lombards to the pope.
On July 28, 754, the pope, though ill, solemnly anointed Pepin at St. Denis near Paris, thus sealing the legitimacy of the dynasty, and conferring on the king and his followers the title of " Patricians of the Romans', which was the title used by the Byzantine exarchs. Pepin set out on his way to Italy and twice defeated King Astolfo, in August 754 and in June 756. In the peace treaty imposed on Astolfo, he had to cede twenty-two cities in perpetuity to the Church of Rome in the Pentapolis, the Aemilia, Comacchio and Narni, which were added to the Duchy of Rome. The emissaries of Emperor Constantine V offered a bribe to the Frankish king, who replied that these cities belonged to "San Pedro" and the Church of Rome. Abbot Fulrado of Saint Denis took possession of the cities and placed the keys on the altar of Saint Peter, next to the document known as Pepin's Donation in the Papal Archives. However, the pope continued to regard the emperor as formal sovereign of the territory.
However, the Lombard danger had not been definitively averted by the military actions of Pepin the Short. King Desiderio invaded the Papal States. Hadrian I, pope since 774, once again invoked the Franks at this time to grant him their protection. Charlemagne now came to his aid. The result was the restitution of the Church's assets and the unfulfilled promise to annex other territories. In any case, most of central Italy came under the administration of the popes.
The Carolingian Empire
The conquest of the Lombard kingdom by Charlemagne, son of Pepin, placed the king of the Franks on a plane of superiority and limited the territorial aspirations of the pope. Finally, Pope Leo III (795-816) broke with the Byzantine Empire and crowned Charlemagne emperor, which meant that the pope renounced the authority of the Byzantine emperor —which he had already done in public documents since 775—, which had subordinated the new emperor to the authority of the Church of Rome, but in the government of the Papal States. For Charlemagne, the imperial coronation meant recognition of his political sovereignty over Rome: the emperor was the sovereign of the Roman patrimony, while the pope was the one who governed the territory as the emperor's lieutenant. The relationship between the emperor and the pope It was established in 816 with the pactum ludivicianum, in which the territories, jurisdiction and authority of the pope were defined, free papal elections were recognized, and the intervention of the emperor at the request of the pope. >Constitutio Romana of 824 supposed the affirmation of Carolingian sovereignty in the papal territories, by which the co-emperor Lothair I (817-855) placed the political and administrative acts of the pope under imperial control with the permanent presence of two missi dominici, as well as obliging him to swear an oath of allegiance to the emperor before his consecration. His son, Emperor Louis II (844-875), clung to these prerogatives by intervening in papal elections, by exercising control over the internal politics of Rome and also in the former Exarchate of Ravenna, and by installing imperial vassals in the territory. Despite this imperial control over the pope, imperial anointing and coronation of Luis II in April 850 established a constant throughout the Middle Ages, that such rites could only be performed by the pope, and in Rome, even if he had previously been anointed king. In 855, with the abdication and death of Emperor Lothair I, Louis II, who was already King of Italy, did not obtain territories north of the Alps, and by remaining Italian sovereign, the imperial title was identified with the Italian kingdom.
The Saracen razzias on the Italian coast prompted the popes to seek protection from Emperor Louis II, and furthermore, the pontiffs needed protection from the Roman aristocracy, so the reserved task since then for the emperor it was the protection of the Roman Church. His death in 875 deprived the papacy of support, which led them to seek candidates to be crowned emperor among those who could defend him from Muslims and local lords. Even so, the papacy had to ask the Byzantines for help, so it maintained a more flexible stance with Byzantium in religious matters.
From the 10th to the 15th century
With the Carolingian Empire gone, the King of Italy, Berengar II, threatened the States of the Church. John XII requested the protection of Otto the Great, who subdued the harasser and entered Rome triumphantly. There, in St. Peter's Basilica, the pope restored imperial dignity, crowning Otto as Holy Roman Emperor on February 2, 962, while Otto, for his part, imposed the Diploma on the pope. Ottonianum, which confirmed the Pactum Ludovicianum (817) and the Constitutio romana (824).
Southern Italy was never part of the Papal States, but was subject to their vassalage during the period of Norman rule. In 1059, through the concordat of Melfi, resulting from the council held in this city, Pope Nicholas II granted Ricardo de Aversa the investiture of the principality of Capua, and Roberto Guiscardo that of the duchy of Apulia and Calabria, as well as, for a future, of the lordship of Sicily. As a counterpart to the episcopal anointing with which they were dignified, they undertook to pay allegiance to the Supreme Pontiff at all times. Roberto Guiscardo proved unstoppable in his conquests and in a few years he occupied all of Sicily, taking Palermo and Messina from the Muslims, and Bari and Brindisi directly from the Byzantines, and under his theoretical sovereignty Amalfi and Salerno. When in 1080 Gregory VII required the Norman's military assistance, he gave his apostolic approval to the conquests in exchange for a formal declaration of vassalage to the Holy See over all the territories won.
At the end of the pontificate of Innocent II, around 1143, coinciding with the municipal protest movement that spread through all the cities of Italy, the Roman Senate took over a good part of the civil power of the successors of the Apostle Peter. Innocent's successor, Lucius II, tried to restore the previous order by force of arms and attacked the Capitol at the head of an army, but the Senate inflicted a severe defeat on him. Arnaldo de Brescia took the lead in the popular revolution and the Roman senatorial. Under his leadership, the pope was asked to lay down all temporal power, and himself and the rest of the clergy to surrender their territorial possessions. Rome withdrew from civil obedience to the pope and declared itself a new republic. Frederick Barbarossa returned to Pope Adrian IV the government of the Papal States when, wishing to be crowned emperor in Rome at the hands of the pontiff, he entered the city in 1155 with a powerful army and captured and executed Arnold of Brescia. However, it was Federico himself who, for the sake of an expansionist policy that aspired to control all of Italy, years later put the successors of the Apostle Peter at serious risk of losing their possessions.
Innocent III gave a decisive boost to the consolidation and aggrandizement of the Papal States. He definitively submitted to the Roman municipal estate and deprived the senate of the city of power. He recovered full control of those territories belonging to the patrimony of Saint Peter that the emperor had handed over to Germanic leaders, expelling the usurpers from Romagna, the marquisate of Ancona, the duchy of Spoleto and the cities of Assisi and Sora. By force of arms, preceded by ecclesiastical excommunication, he seized the disputed territories that had constituted the possessions of Countess Matilde of Tuscany and that, presumably, had been bequeathed as an inheritance to the Holy See, but which remained in possession of vassals of the emperor. In this way he obtained the recognition by the cities of Tuscany of his sovereignty, and with it the north of Italy shook off Germanic rule and fell under the orbit of papal authority.
In addition, as a consequence of the crusade carried out against the Albigensians in the French South, he had obtained from Raymond VI of Tolosa the transfer of seven castles in the region of Provence, patrimony that was incorporated into that of the Church and that then, in 1274, it would be exchanged by agreement between Gregory X and King Felipe III the Bold for the county of Venasque, a region that includes the lands that extend between the Rhône, the Durance and Mount Ventoux.
The Papal States went through a difficult time again during the empire of Frederick II (1215-1251). Owner of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and incorporated into the Lombardy and Tuscany empire after the defeat of the Lombard league in 1239, Federico proposed to also annex the patrimony of San Pedro to monopolize the domain of all of Italy. He marched on Rome, from where Pope Gregory IX was forced to flee, he walked defiantly and unopposed throughout Italy, appointed his son Enzio governor of the peninsular territory and he himself set himself up as lord of the Papal States. In 1253, two years after the emperor's death, Pope Innocent IV was able to return to Rome from his French exile and resume government of the city and the rest of the ecclesiastical domains.
The Papal States could not escape the events that were taking place in convulsive Italy in the mid-14th century. Not counting the separation of some traditional fiefdoms from the Roman court, such as Sicily, now in the hands of the Crown of Aragon, or the kingdom of Naples, under the authority of the House of Anjou, the Papal State itself was in decomposition. This was evidenced by cases such as that of Giovanni di Vico, who had become lord of Viterbo after seizing an extensive territorial area belonging to the Papal States; or that of the insubordination in which the duchy of Spoleto found itself; or that of the factual independence of the Marquesate of Ancona; or that of the privatization of Fermo carried out by Gentile de Mogliano and that of Camerino by Ridolfo de Varano; or that of the open rebellion of the Malatestas; or that of Francesco degli Ordelaffi, who had taken over a large part of Romagna; or that of Montefeltro that controlled the districts of Urbino and Cagli; or that of the city of Senigallia separated from obedience to the papacy; or that of Bernardino and Guido de Polenta, who had taken over Ravenna and Cervia, respectively; or that of Giovanni and Riniero Manfredi who had done the same with Faenza; or that of Giovanni d'Ollegio who kept the city of Bologna under his possession.
A resolute and overwhelming action against all those rebels was necessary if the patrimony of San Pedro was to be reunited. Taking advantage of the presence in Avignon of the Spanish Gil de Albornoz, Archbishop of Toledo and a seasoned soldier, who had participated with the hosts of Alfonso XI of Castile in the Battle of Salado and in the siege of Algeciras, Clement VI elevated him to the cardinalate and entrusted him with the mission to recruit an army. Two years later (1353), when Innocent VI was already enthroned, carrying a bull naming him the pope's plenipotentiary legate for the Papal States, Gil de Albornoz applied himself to the entrusted mission, achieving all his objectives militarily. He recovered all the territories that had been usurped and subdued the haughty leaders of the Italian insubordination; the States of the Church returned, grouped, to the obedience of the papacy. Albornoz also drafted and put into practice the first specific legal framework for the Papal States, the Constitutiones Aegidianae (the Aegidian Constitutions – for Aegidius, that is, for Gil) which continued to function until the Lateran Pacts. (1929) founding the Vatican City.
The time of the Renaissance
At the dawn of the 16th century, papal territory expanded enormously, most notably under Popes Alexander VI and Julius II. The pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers, engaging in diplomatic and warfare dynamics with other sovereigns. However, most of the Papal States, nominally controlled by the pope, were governed in practice by petty territorial princes who disputed effective control. In fact, it took the popes the entire 16th century to directly subdue the entire state.
The singularity of Alexander VI lies in the fact that he conceived the episcopal organization as a personalist monarchy and longed for the formation of a Central Italian kingdom unrelated to the Holy See, whose crown rested on the head of one of his sons. To this end, he decided to subjugate the local tyrants, nominal vassals of Rome but who ruled their respective fiefdoms at will. With his son Juan de Borja and Cattanei, II Duke of Gandía, at the head of the papal armies, the castles of Cervetri, Anguillara, Isola and Trevignano fell, actions for which he was named Duke of Benevento and Lord of Terracina and Pontecorvo. When John was assassinated, the pope entrusted the captaincy of his armies to another of his sons: César Borgia. With French military aid, César took in 1499 the cities of Imola and Forlì, governed by Catalina Sforza, and then that of Cesena. Later he seized Rimini, ruled by Pandolfo Malatesta and Faenza, Piombino and its annexed Island of Elba, Urbino, Camerino, Città di Castello, Perugia and Fermo, and finally Senigallia. All this became the owner of the son of the successor of the Apostle Peter, whom he had named sovereign of Romagna, Marches and Umbria.
The effort of Pope Julius II (1503-1513) consisted in returning to the Church the possessions that the de Borgia or Borgia had appropriated. In some cases he got it easily; in others, by force of arms. Perugia and Bologna were reintegrated into the Papal States in this way in 1506. Venice threatened to compete with the Holy See for dominance in Italy; To head off this danger, Julius II formed the League of Cambrai with the intervention of France, Spain, the Holy Empire, Hungary, Savoy, Florence and Mantua. Venice could not resist such a powerful enemy and was defeated at the Battle of Agnadello in 1509, leaving the pope without a rival. With the help of Spain, he tried to get rid of the presence on Italian soil of the French, owners of Genoa and Milan. He succeeded after a hard fight, but what he would never achieve was to free Italy from Spanish rule, which would last intensely and for a long time, especially during the reigns of Carlos I and Felipe II, although they never increased their possessions at the expense of the Papal States. On the contrary, Felipe II, although against his wishes, did not prevent Pope Clement VIII from annexing the Duchy of Ferrara to the assets of the Church on January 29, 1598. The territorial expansion would continue in later years, with the annexation of the Duchy of Urbino, in 1631 and the Duchy of Castro, in 1649.
Revolutionary movements
The Venetian County and Avignon belonged to the Papal States, forming an enclave on French soil. These possessions were confiscated during the French Revolution, under Pope Pius VI (1775-1799).
The Napoleonic invasion of Italy in 1797 meant the loss of Bologna, Ferrara and Forlì, annexed to the Cisalpine Republic and also did not stop at the gates of Rome: a year later French troops entered the city. United with the French, the Italian revolutionaries demanded that the pope renounce his temporal sovereignty. On March 7, 1798, the First Roman Republic was declared and the pope was arrested and deported to France. Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to regularize relations with the Church, which was reflected in the Concordat that France and the Holy See signed in 1801. The pope – Pius VII was then – returned to Rome, from where he returned to Paris to crown Napoleon emperor. in 1804. But the pope soon became a hindrance to the emperor's plans, in November 1807 French troops occupied Urbino, Macerata, Fermo and Spoleto. On July 6, 1809, he seized the Papal States, incorporated them into the French Empire, and held Pius VII as a prisoner in Savona. After Napoleon's defeats, the pope was able to recover his possessions in 1814; At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the survival of the Papal States within the new European order was recognized, although with a slight territorial reduction (Occhiobello, Canaro, Ariano nel Polesine and Corbola) of 370 square kilometers that went to the Austrian Empire; Venaissin County remained in the hands of France.
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The French revolutionary spirit also spread to Italy. In 1831, the same year that Gregory XVI was appointed Pope, an uprising broke out in Modena, followed by another in Reggio and shortly after in Bologna, where the episcopal flag was lowered and the tricolor hoisted in its place. In a matter of weeks, all the Papal States were burned at the revolutionary stake and a provisional government was proclaimed. The "State of the United Provinces" of central Italy was created around the March. Gregory XVI did not have sufficient military personnel to contain a movement of those proportions; he needed foreign help, which this time came from Austria. In February 1831, Austrian troops entered Bologna, forcing the departure of the "Provisional Government", which took refuge in Ancona; In two months the rebellion was temporarily put down. With real urgency, representatives of Austria, Russia, England, France and Prussia, the five great powers of the day, met in Rome to analyze the situation and prepare an opinion on the reforms that, in their opinion, were necessary to introduce in the administration of the Papal states. Not all the suggestions made in this sense were accepted by Gregory XVI, but enough so that the changes in matters of justice, administration, finances and others were palpable.
Despite this, these small achievements were not enough to satisfy the demands of the hot-headed revolutionaries. At the end of that same year, 1831, the rebellion spread again through the States of the Church. The Austrian troops, whose presence was a guarantee of stability and order, had returned to their bases of origin; It was necessary to request his intervention again, which General Radetzky solicitously carried out. United his forces with those of the Pope, it was an easy task to take Cesena and Bologna, centers of revolutionary protest. France, for its part, deployed some detachments in Italy and occupied Ancona, which was evicted in 1838. After a few years of calm, revolutionary agitation made itself felt in 1843 in Romagna and Umbria. In 1845 rebel forces seized the city of Rimini. They could have been expelled but not reduced, so that, although they left Rimini, they brought the revolution to Tuscany.
Italian unification and end of the Papal States
The revolutionary winds that were blowing strongly throughout Italy led to driving currents of national unity. The Sardinian-Piedmontese King Carlos Alberto assumed the initiatives in favor of such unity and declared war on Austria. Pope Pius IX did not want to join the cause, an attitude that the Roman people did not forgive him. The rebellion broke out and Pius IX had to flee Rome in November 1848. The temporal power of the pope was abolished and the Second Roman Republic was proclaimed. A military contingent contributed by various Catholic nations was organized, and on April 12, 1850, the successor of the Apostle Peter returned to Rome, the ephemeral republic abolished. In the summer of 1859 some cities of Romagna rose up against the authority of the Pope and adopted the plebiscitary resolution to annex to Piedmont, which took effect in March 1860. That same year, Víctor Manuel formally requested that the Pope hand over of Umbria and Marches, which Pius IX refused to do. Piedmontese troops faced those of the Pope, who were defeated at Castelfidardo (September 18) and Ancona (September 30). The Church found itself dispossessed of those regions which, together with Tuscany, Parma and Modena —these of their own free will expressed through plebiscites—, were annexed to the growing kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (November 1860), which passed into called the Kingdom of Northern Italy. The Papal States were definitively dismembered and reduced to the city of Rome and its surroundings, where the Pope, under the protection of French troops, continued for the moment to exercise his declined civil authority.
In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out and the French Emperor Napoleon III needed to have all the military assets, including the garrison units in Rome. Italy was an ally of Prussia in this contest, so it had the approval of the Chancellor of Germany Otto von Bismarck to act without qualms against the possessions of the pro-French pontiff. Pius IX raised eight thousand soldiers in a desperate attempt to resist, but the insufficient episcopal army could not contain the Italian divisions that marched on Rome. On September 20, 1870, they entered the capital of the kingdom of Italy, in whose Quirinal palace King Victor Manuel II established his court. On September 20, 1900, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the occupation of Rome, the Papal States were dissolved.
Since the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Pius IX was involved in the historical maelstrom that meant the process of unification of Italy. This necessarily implied the end of the Papal States, to which Pius IX tenaciously opposed. Pope Pius IX declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican when the episcopal reign in Rome was forcibly ended. The Papal States were incorporated into the new Kingdom of unified Italy, under King Victor Emmanuel II. The city of Rome became its capital.
On February 11, 1929, Pius XI and Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Pacts, by virtue of which the Church recognized Italy as a sovereign State, and the latter did the same with the City of the Vatican, a small independent territory of 44 hectares under the jurisdiction of the papacy.
Territorial organization
From the Restoration and until the capture of Rome, the Papal States were administratively divided into 17 apostolic delegations, territorial circumscriptions established by Pius VII on July 6, 1816:
- Rome region
- Delegation of Bologna
- Ferrara Delegation
- Delegation of Forli
- Ravena Delegation
- Delegation of Urbino and Pesaro
- Delegation of Macerata
- Delegation of Ancona
- Delegation of Fermo
- Delegation of Ascoli
- Delegation of Camerino
- Delegation of Perugia
- Spoleto delegation
- Delegation of Rieti
- Delegation of Frisione
- Delegation of Benevento
- Delegation of Viterbo
- Delegation of Civitavecchia
Flags in chronological order
Normal use between 928-1803
Normal use between 1803-1825
Normal use between 1825-1849
Flag of the Roman Republic in 1849
Normal use between 1849-1870
Normal use between 1862-1870
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Armed Forces
Based on a generic consideration, it can be affirmed that the State of the Church has tried to defend material goods and their religious autonomy, resorting, in the first instance, to religious power, especially that of excommunication, or more rarely that of interdict, but when this was not enough, he also made use of weapons.
Army
The Army of the State of the Church or Army of the Papal State was the army at the service of the papacy. Established from the Middle Ages, it was dissolved in 1870 with the capture of Rome and the unification of Italy.
Navy
The papal army had a presence since the Middle Ages. However, it was never of considerable strength nor did it equal the naval power of other Italian states. This naval papal force was maintained until the incorporation of the Papal States into the Kingdom of Italy.
Battle Standard
Naval teaching
Contenido relacionado
Navarre (disambiguation)
1030s
880s