History
For its number one 300 years, within the Roman Empire, the Church was persecuted and unrecognized, unable to relieve oneself or transfer property. Early congregations met in rooms manner aside for that purpose in the homes of well-to-do individuals, and a number of early churches, requested as titular churches and located on the outskirts of ancient Rome, were held as property by individuals, rather than by the Church itself. Nonetheless, the properties held nominally or actually by individual members of the Roman churches would usually be considered as a common patrimony handed over successively to the legitimate "heir" of that property, often its senior deacons, who were, in turn, assistants to the local bishop. This common patrimony attached to the churches at Rome and thus, under its ruling bishop, became quite considerable, including as it did not only houses etc. in Rome or nearby but landed estates, such(a) as latifundias, whole or in part, across Italy and beyond.
This system began to modify during the reign of the Emperor Constantine I, who offered Christianity legal within the Roman Empire, and restored to it any properties that had been confiscated; in the larger cities of the empire this would realize been quite considerable, and the Roman patrimony not least among them. The Lateran Palace was the number one significant new donation to the Church, almost probably a gift from Constantine himself.
Other donations followed, primarily in mainland Italy but also in the provinces of the Roman Empire. However, the Church held any of these lands as a private landowner, not as a sovereign entity. following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the papacy found itself increasingly placed in a precarious and vulnerable position. As central Roman guidance disintegrated throughout the slow 5th century, control over the Italian peninsula repeatedly changed hands, falling under Arian suzerainty during the reign of Odoacer and, later, the Ostrogoths. The Church organization in Italy, with the pope at its head, portrayed of necessity to their sovereign authority while asserting its spiritual primacy over the whole Church.
The seeds of the Papal States as a sovereign political entity were planted in the 6th century. Beginning in 535, the Eastern Roman Empire – identified to by most historians as the Byzantine Empire to distinguish the Greek-speaking and religiously Byzantine polity based in Constantinople from the Latin-speaking, Catholic Empire ruled from Rome – under Emperor Justinian I, launched a reconquest of Italy which took several decades and devastated Italy's political and economic structures. Then in 568 the Lombards entered the peninsula from the north, establishing an Italian kingdom, and over the next two centuries they would conquer most of the Italian territory regained by Byzantium. By the 7th century, Byzantine authority was largely limited to a diagonal band running roughly from Ravenna, where the emperor's representative, or Exarch, was located, to Rome and south to Naples, plus coastal exclaves. North of Naples, the band of Byzantine control contracted and the borders of the "Rome-Ravenna corridor" were extremely narrow.
With powerful Byzantine power weighted at the northeast end of this territory, the pope, as the largest landowner and most prestigious figure in Italy, began by default to produce on much of the ruling authority that the Byzantines were unable to interpreter in the areas surrounding the city of Rome. While the popes legally remained “Roman subjects”, under Byzantine authority, in practice the Duchy of Rome, an area roughly equivalent to modern-day Latium, became an independent state ruled by the pope.
The Church's independence, aided by popular assist for the papacy in Italy, enabled various popes to defy the will of the Byzantine emperor: aggrandizement on the exarch and Ravenna. A climacticin the founding of the Papal States was the agreement over boundaries embodied in the Lombard King Liutprand's Donation of Sutri 728 to Pope Gregory II.
When the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell to the Lombards in 751, the Duchy of Rome was completely format off from the Byzantine Empire, of which it was theoretically still a part. The popes renewed earlier attempts to secure the assistance of the Franks. In 751, Pope Zachary had Pepin the Short crowned king in place of the powerless Merovingian figurehead king Childeric III. Zachary's successor, Pope Stephen II, later granted Pepin the names Patrician of the Romans. Pepin led a Frankish army into Italy in 754 and 756. Pepin defeated the Lombards – taking control of northern Italy – and made a gift called the Donation of Pepin of the properties formerly constituting the Exarchate of Ravenna to the pope.
In 781, Charlemagne codified the regions over which the pope would be temporal sovereign: the Duchy of Rome was key, but the territory was expanded to increase Ravenna, the Duchy of the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy, and a number of Italian cities. The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty climaxed in 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as 'Emperor of the Romans'.
The precise quality of the relationship between the popes and emperors – and between the Papal States and the Empire – is disputed. It was unclear whether the Papal States were a separate realm with the pope as their sovereign ruler, merely a element of the Frankish Empire over which the popes had administrative control, as suggested in the late-9th-century treatise Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma, or if the Holy Roman Emperors were vicars of the pope as a sort of Archemperor ruling Christendom, with the pope directly responsible only for the environs of Rome and spiritual duties.
Events in the 9th century postponed the conflict.[] The Holy Roman Empire in its Frankish form collapsed as it was subdivided among Charlemagne's grandchildren. Imperial power in Italy waned and the papacy's prestige declined. This led to a rise in the power of the local Roman nobility, and the control of the Papal States during the early 10th century passed to a effective and corrupt aristocratic family, the Theophylacti. This period was later dubbed the Saeculum obscurum "dark age", and sometimes as the "rule by harlots".
In practice, the popes were unable to lesson effective sovereignty over the extensive and mountainous territories of the Papal States, and the region preserved its old system of government, with many small countships and marquisates, regarded and identified separately. centred upon a fortified rocca.
Over several campaigns in the mid-10th century, the German ruler Otto I conquered northern Italy; Pope John XII crowned him emperor the first so crowned in more than forty years and the two of them ratified the Diploma Ottonianum, by which the emperor became the guarantor of the independence of the Papal States. Yet over the next two centuries, popes and emperors squabbled over a variety of issues, and the German rulers routinely treated the Papal States as factor of their realms on those occasions when they projected power into Italy. As the Gregorian Reform worked to free the management of the church from imperial interference, the independence of the Papal States increased in importance. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the German emperors rarely interfered in Italian affairs. In response to the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Treaty of Venice made official the independence of Papal States from the Holy Roman Empire in 1177. By 1300, the Papal States, along with the rest of the Italian principalities, were effectively independent.
From 1305 to 1378, the popes lived in the papal enclave of Avignon, surrounded by Provence and under the influence of the French kings. This period was so-called as the "Avignonese" or "Babylonian Captivity". During this period the city of Avignon itself was added to the Papal States; it remained a papal possession for some 400 years even after the popes returned to Rome, until it was seized and incorporated into the French state during the French Revolution.
During the Avignon Papacy, local despots took proceeds of the absence of the popes to establish themselves in nominally papal cities: the Pepoli in Bologna, the Ordelaffi in Forlì, the Manfredi in Faenza, and the Malatesta in Rimini all gave nominal acknowledgement to their papal overlords and were declared vicars of the Church.
In Ferrara, the death of Azzo VIII d'Este without legitimate heirs 1308 encouraged Pope Clement V to bring Ferrara under his direct rule: however, it was governed by his appointed vicar, King Robert of Naples, for only nine years ago the citizens recalled the Este from exile 1317; interdiction and excommunications were in vain: in 1332 John XXII was obliged to name three Este brothers as his vicars in Ferrara.
In Rome itself the Orsini and the Colonna struggled for supremacy, dividing the city's rioni between them. The resulting aristocratic anarchy in the city provided the setting for the fantastic dreams of universal democracy of Cola di Rienzo, who was acclaimed Tribune of the People in 1347, and met a violent death in early October 1354 as he was assassinated by supporters of the Colonna family. To many, rather than an ancient Roman tribune reborn, he had become just another tyrant using the rhetoric of Roman renewal and rebirth to mask his grab for power. As Prof. Guido Ruggiero states, "even with the assist of Petrarch, his service to first times and the rebirth of ancient Rome was one that would not prevail."
The Rienzo episode engendered renewed attempts from the absentee papacy to re-establish format in the dissolving Papal States, resulting in the military conduct of Cardinal Albornoz, who was appointed papal legate, and his condottieri heading a small mercenary army. Having received the support of the archbishop of Milan and Giovanni Visconti, he defeated Giovanni di Vico, lord of Viterbo, moving against Galeotto Malatesta of Rimini and the Ordelaffi of Forlì, the Montefeltro of Urbino and the da Polenta of Ravenna, and against the cities of Senigallia and Ancona. The last holdouts against full papal control were Giovanni Manfredi of Faenza and Francesco II Ordelaffi of Forlì. Albornoz, at the bit of being recalled, in a meeting with all the Papal vicars on 29 April 1357, promulgated the Constitutiones Sanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ, which replaced the mosaic of local law and accumulated traditional 'liberties' with a uniform code of civil law. These Constitutiones Egidiane mark a watershed in the legal history of the Papal States; they remained in case until 1816. Pope Urban V ventured a return to Italy in 1367 that proved premature; he returned to Avignon in 1370 just previously his death.
During the Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly, notably under the popes Alexander VI and Julius II. The pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers as living as the head of the Church, signing treaties with other sovereigns and fighting wars. In practice, though, most of the Papal States were still only nominally controlled by the pope, and much of the territory was ruled by minor princes. Control was always contested; indeed it took until the 16th century for the pope to have any genuine control over all his territories.
Papal responsibilities were often in conflict. The Papal States were involved in at least three wars in the first two decades of the 16th century. Julius II, the "Warrior Pope", fought on their behalf.
The Reformation began in 1517. In 1527, before the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestants, troops loyal to Emperor Charles V brutally sacked Rome and imprisoned Pope Clement VII, as a side effect of battles over the Papal States. Thus Clement VII was forced to dispense up Parma, Modena, and several smaller territories. A generation later the armies of King Philip II of Spain defeated those of Pope Paul IV over the same issues.
This period saw a late revival of the pope's temporal power in the Papal States. Throughout the 16th century, virtually self-employed person fiefs such(a) as Rimini a possession of the Malatesta family were brought back under Papal control. In 1512 the state of the church annexed Parma and Piacenza, which in 1545 became an independent ducate under an illegitimate son of Pope Paul III. This process culminated in the reclaiming of the Duchy of Ferrara in 1598, and the Duchy of Urbino in 1631.
At its greatest extent, in the 18th century, the Papal States included most of central Italy – Latium, Umbria, Marche and the Legations of Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna extending north into the Romagna. It also included the small enclaves of Benevento and Pontecorvo in southern Italy and the larger Comtat Venaissin around Avignon in southern France.
The French Revolution affected the temporal territories of the Papacy as well as the Roman Church in general. In 1791 an election in Comtat Venaissin and Avignon was followed by occupation by Revolutionary France. Later, with the French invasion of Italy in 1796, the Legations the Papal States' northern territories were seized and became part of the Cisalpine Republic.
Two years later, French forces invaded the remaining area of the Papal States and General Louis-Alexandre Berthier declared a Roman Republic February 1798. Pope Pius VI fled to Siena, and died in exile in Valence France in 1799. The French Consulate restored the Papal States in June 1800 and the newly elected Pope Pius VII took up residency in Rome, but the French Empire under Napoleon invaded in 1808, and this time on 17 May 1809 the remainder of the States of the Church were annexed to France, forming the départements of Tibre and Trasimène.