PAPAL STATES

also called Church States, Italian Stati Pontifici or Stati della Chiesa territories of central Italy over which the pope had sovereignty from 756 to 1870. Included were the modern Italian regions of Lazio (Latium), Umbria, Marche, and part of Emilia-Romagna, although the extent of the territory, along with the degree of papal control, varied over the centuries. As early as the 4th century, the popes had acquired considerable property around Rome (called the Patrimony of St. Peter). From the 5th century, with the breakdown of Roman imperial authority in the West, the popes' influence in central Italy increased as the people of the area relied on them for protection against the barbarian invasions. When the Lombards threatened to take over the whole peninsula in the 750s, Pope Stephen II (or III) appealed for aid to the Frankish ruler Pippin III the Short. On intervening, Pippin restored the lands of central Italy to the Roman see, ignoring the claim of the Byzantine (East Roman) Empire to sovereignty there. This Donation of Pippin (754) provided the basis for the papal claim to temporal power, while by the Treaty of Pavia (756) the Lombard king Aistulf ceded territory in northern and central Italy. The pope consequently became ruler of the area around Ravenna, the Pentapolis (along the Adriatic Sea from Rimini to Ancona), and the Roman region. By alliance with the Normans in the late 11th century, the duchy of Benevento was acquired in 1077. Through the Middle Ages the popes were able to maintain their sovereignty over this territory despite the rise of local feudal lords in the 9th and 10th centuries and, more important, despite a clash with the German Holy Roman emperors that lasted from the Investiture Controversy of the mid-11th century until the 14th century. Relations with the emperors were exacerbated by controversy over the lands of the countess Matilda of Tuscany, which she had initially donated (1102) to the papacy but finally left (1111) to the emperor Henry V. But papal sovereignty was more nominal than real. The rise of commune governments, especially in the Romagna, weakened the popes' authority. With the transfer of the papal residence from Rome to Avignon (130977), local independence prevailed in the Papal States, a situation that continued through the end of the Western Schism in 1417. Many towns nominally held as vicariates granted by the pope were in fact ruled by local families. From the mid-15th century the Renaissance popes sought to reestablish papal authority in central Italy. Under Julius II (pope from 1503 to 1513), the states reached their definitive boundaries, stretching from Parma and Bologna in the north, along the Adriatic coast, through Umbria, to the Campagna, south of Rome. These popes, however, failed in their attempt to make the papacy a force in international politics, and, by the end of the 16th century, the papal territory was merely one of a number of petty Italian states. In the 17th and 18th centuries the trend toward centralization at the expense of local independence, begun by the Renaissance popes, continued, although the clerical-run government made little progress in improving the backward economic condition of the Papal States. When the French, under Napoleon, secured domination of the Italian peninsula in the late 1790s, the states were taken from the pope in 179899 (to be included in the Cisalpine and Roman republics) and again in 180809 (to be included in the Italian kingdom and the French empire). Liberal ideas introduced into the Papal States during the French Revolution continued to play a role there after the restoration of the states to the pope by the Congress of Vienna (1815). In opposition to unenlightened clerical rule, revolts occurred in the states in 183031 and again in 1849, when another short-lived Roman Republic was established. In the course of the Risorgimento (movement for Italian unification during the 19th century), the existence of the Papal States proved an obstacle to national union both because they divided Italy in two and because foreign powers intervened to protect papal independence. Annexation of the Papal States to the new Italian nation, however, was eventually achieved. After Austria's defeat in 1859, the papal territories of Emilia, Umbria, and Marche voted to join the Italian kingdom. With the withdrawal of French troops from Rome in 1870, the remaining papal territorythe area around Romewas taken by Italian forces, and Rome was made the capital of Italy. The popes refused to recognize the loss of their temporal power and remained prisoners in the Vatican. The question of the pope's relation to the Italian state was unsettled until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 set up an independent Vatican city-state.