Organizations
Papal States
Also Known As Patrimony of Saint Peter · States of the ChurchOriginal Term Stato Pontificio (Italian)
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Origin from 754
The Papal States were the territories of central Italy ruled by the pope as a temporal sovereign, conventionally dated from the grant of Pepin the Short in 756 and ending with their annexation by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. Their existence made the pope at once a bishop and a prince, with armies, taxes, courts and diplomacy, and the awkwardness of that combination was argued inside the church as much as outside it. The claim was long supported by the Donation of Constantine, a document Lorenzo Valla demonstrated in 1440 to be a forgery on the evidence of its Latin and its anachronisms. After 1870 successive popes refused to accept the loss and remained within the Vatican, a standoff known as the Roman Question, which was settled by the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and the creation of the much smaller Vatican City State.
Facts
Finances
Institutional Wealth or FinancesThe accounting historians Valerio Antonelli, Stefano Coronella, Carolyn Cordery and Roberta Verona, reconstructing the Papal States' own account books, find an average annual budget deficit of about 3,226,113 scudi across Pope Pius IX's reign from 1846 to 1870, with the shortfall in individual years ranging from 5 to 95 percent of that year's total revenue. This is a chronic deficit figure, not a total valuation of the state's revenue, assets or debt, and it comes from a modern scholarly reconstruction of the accounts rather than a contemporary published budget; the state also depended on loans from the Rothschild banking house during this period, one of which was disbursed at only 62 percent of its face value under the loan's own terms. 3 Basis of the Wealth FigureJournalistic or Scholarly Estimate 3 Financial Disclosure RegimePius IX created a governmental finance congregation in 1850 and later a Permanent Finance Committee with auditing requirements, an early attempt at standardized public accounting for the twenty papal provinces, but no independently audited annual budget of the kind a modern state publishes was produced; what survives for modern historians to reconstruct is the state's own internal account books rather than a public disclosure regime. 3 Wealth Figure As Of YearThe deficit figure is an average across the full 1846 to 1870 span of Pius IX's reign, not a single year's figure; 1870, the year the Papal States ceased to exist, is recorded here as the nearest representable endpoint. Origins
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account FoundedSourced to the subject's own accountEstablished when the Frankish king Pepin the Short donated captured Byzantine territory in central Italy to the Pope, a grant later known as the Donation of Pepin. 1 Debunked
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe Donation of Constantine, a forged document purporting to record Constantine granting the western empire's temporal authority to the pope, was long cited in support of the Papal States' own temporal claim; Lorenzo Valla's De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (On the Donation of Constantine, 1440) demonstrated it a forgery from internal evidence alone, showing its Latin belonged to a much later period than Constantine's fourth century and that it described institutions and titles that did not yet exist when it claimed to have been written. 4 Status
Legal StatusAnnexed by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. The resulting Roman Question was settled by the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which recognised the Vatican City State. 2 Current StatusDissolved in 1870 when the Kingdom of Italy annexed Rome; the Holy See's much smaller sovereign territory today is the independent Vatican City State, established by the 1929 Lateran Treaty. 2 Disputed
FounderConventionally traced to Pope Stephen II, who received a grant of central Italian territory from the Frankish king Pepin the Short, the Donation of Pepin. 1Tradition: Papal States (Wikipedia) Sourced to the subject's own accountHistorians differ on when papal temporal rule actually began: some date it to the Donation of Pepin in the 750s, others to the papacy's de facto administration of Rome and its duchy decades earlier as Byzantine authority collapsed in Italy, and the Donation of Constantine invoked at the time to justify it was later shown to be an eighth century forgery. Learn More
From Pepin's Donation to Italian Unification
The Papal States are conventionally dated from 756, when the Frankish king Pepin the Short, having defeated the Lombards on the pope's behalf, granted the reconquered territory to the papacy rather than restoring it to Byzantine rule, an act known as the Donation of Pepin. That grant made the pope a temporal ruler over central Italian territory in addition to his religious authority, a combination that persisted, with fluctuating borders, for well over a thousand years.
The arrangement created a durable structural tension that recurs throughout the period's history: the pope was simultaneously a bishop answerable to religious duties and a prince running armies, courts, taxation and diplomacy like any other Italian ruler, and this double role was argued over inside the church as much as by its rivals outside it. The territories' size and borders shifted considerably across the centuries through war, inheritance disputes and periodic loss and recovery of specific cities, but the core papal territory around Rome remained continuously under papal temporal rule until the nineteenth century.
The end came in 1870, when the Kingdom of Italy annexed Rome and the remaining papal territory as the final act of Italian unification, over the pope's explicit and unresolved objection.
The Donation of Constantine and the Roman Question
The Papal States' legal claim rested for centuries on the Donation of Constantine, a document purporting to record the emperor Constantine granting the pope authority over Rome and the western empire. It was invoked to justify papal temporal power against rival claimants for most of the medieval period, until the humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla demonstrated in 1440, through careful analysis of the document's Latin and its historical anachronisms, that it was a forgery, almost certainly produced centuries after Constantine's death. The demonstration did not end papal temporal rule, which continued on other grounds for another four hundred years, but it permanently undermined the document's credibility as a historical basis for the claim.
The loss of the states in 1870 produced a diplomatic standoff rather than a settled question: successive popes refused to accept the annexation, declined to leave the Vatican, and declared themselves prisoners within it, a position known as the Roman Question that remained formally unresolved for nearly sixty years. It was finally settled by the Lateran Treaty of 1929 between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy, which recognized papal sovereignty over a much smaller territory, Vatican City, in exchange for the papacy's formal renunciation of any claim to the former Papal States.
The current Vatican City State is therefore best understood as the settlement of a nineteenth century dispute rather than a survival of the original medieval territory.
Sources De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (On the Donation of Constantine)Lorenzo Valla with Lateran TreatyThe Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Papal States directly: "to 1870 consular relationship with the Papal States, the long gap that followed, and the establishment of full diplomatic relations on 10 January 1984 under President Reagan."
The standoff over their loss was settled by the Lateran Treaty of 1929, creating Vatican City in their place.
Belongs to Tradition
Conducted By
The pope was the temporal sovereign of the territory as well as bishop of Rome.
Related To
The Papal States were the territory the See ruled until 1870.
One of the polities the word is commonly applied to, and a case where the same person held both powers.
The Papal States are what the temporal claim looked like as an actual territory.
Sources
1. Papal States (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, WikipediaOn the Donation of Pepin and the debated dating of the Papal States' originView the Source 2. Lateran Treaty
The Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy, 1929
3. Accounting and Governance in the Final Years of the Papal States (Antonelli et al., British Accounting Review, 2021)
Valerio Antonelli, Stefano Coronella, Carolyn Cordery, Roberta Verona, British Accounting Review, vol. 53, issue 2, article 100920, 2021View the Source 4. De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (On the Donation of Constantine)
Lorenzo Valla, 1440
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