Papal States

The Papal States ( PAY-pəl), officially the State of the Church, were a conglomeration of territories on the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope from 756 to 1870. They were among the major Italian states from the 8th century until the unification of Italy, which took place between 1859 and 1870, culminating in their incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy. The state was legally established in the 8th century when Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, gave Pope Stephen II, as a temporal sovereign, lands formerly held by Arian Christian Lombards, adding them to lands and other real estate formerly acquired and held by the bishops of Rome as landlords from the time of Constantine onward. This donation came about as part of a process whereby the popes began to turn away from the Byzantine emperors as their foremost temporal guardians for reasons such as increased imperial taxes, disagreement with respect to iconoclasm, and failure of the emperors (or their exarchs in Italy) to protect Rome and the rest of the peninsula from barbarian invasion and pillage. During the early modern period, the papal territory expanded greatly, and the pope became one of Italy's most important rulers as well as the head of Western Christianity. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio (which includes Rome), Marche, Umbria, Romagna, and portions of Emilia. The popes' reign over these lands was an exemplification of their temporal powers as secular rulers, as opposed to their ecclesiastical primacy. By 1860, much of the Papal States' territory had been conquered by the Kingdom of Sardinia and was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, except Lazio, which remained under the pope's control. In 1870, all of Lazio, including Rome, was annexed...