Papal States

A town given back to the apostles

formationDrafted from Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Volume I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule (590-795) (1902)

In 727 or 728, the Lombard king Liutprand seized Sutri, a fortified town on the Cassian road guarding the approach to Rome from the north. It was one small piece of a much larger Lombard advance that had already taken Ravenna and the surrounding Pentapolis from Byzantine control. Pope Gregory II, unable to meet Liutprand's army with one of his own, met it instead with money and persistent diplomacy - and it worked. Liutprand gave the town back, but not to the Byzantine officials who had governed it before his conquest. According to the papal register, he restored it "to the apostles Peter and Paul" directly.

Sutri, Italy · Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Volume I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule (590-795) (1902) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

A single town, and a question that would outlive it

Nothing about the restitution of Sutri looked, at the time, like the founding of a state. It was a modest, single-town settlement between a pope with no army and a king who had simply judged the town not worth the trouble of a fight. Later historians would nonetheless argue over exactly this transaction as the true beginning of papal temporal sovereignty - the first recorded moment a territory was handed to the papacy in its own right, rather than administered by the pope on behalf of some other recognized authority. The argument has never been fully settled, in part because Sutri itself set no durable precedent on its own: the Lombards kept pressing south, and nothing stopped a future king from seizing the same ground again whenever it suited him.

A precedent too small to hold

That is exactly what happened. Within a generation, a far more ambitious Lombard king would take not one town but the whole of the old Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna, forcing the question of papal territory onto a scale Sutri's own modest restitution had never addressed. What Sutri established, if it established anything at all, was only the idea that a Lombard king could hand papal territory back directly to the Church rather than to Constantinople - an idea the papacy itself would need a considerably more powerful ally than its own diplomacy to make stick.

A pope decides who is king

formationDrafted from Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Volume I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule (590-795) (1902)

By 751, the Frankish monarchy had been a fiction for at least a generation. Childeric III held the title of king, but every real power of government belonged to Pepin, mayor of the palace and heir to a line of mayors - his father Charles Martel and grandfather Pepin of Landen - who had run the kingdom in fact while a series of increasingly powerless Merovingians held it in name. Childeric himself is described in the sources of the age as a man "of no sense," "useless and good for nothing" - a king whose only qualification for the office was an accident of birth into an exhausted royal line.

A revolution that wanted someone else's blessing

Pepin and the Frankish nobility judged that the arrangement had become untenable, but they were cautious enough to want more than their own judgment behind deposing a reigning king - a precedent, they understood, that could just as easily be turned against whoever replaced him. Rather than act unilaterally, they sent an embassy to Rome, led by Burchard, Bishop of Würzburg, and Pepin's own chaplain Fulrad, to put a direct question to Pope Zachary: was it right that a man bearing the name of king should hold no actual royal power, while another held the power without the name?

An answer that made a mayor into a king

Zachary's ruling was unambiguous. It was better, he judged, "that he should be and should be called king who had the power of a king rather than the one who had the name without the substance" - and he ordered, by his own apostolic authority, that Pepin be made king and anointed by Boniface. The Frankish nobility acted on the ruling without delay.

Pepin was raised on a shield and acclaimed king by his own soldiers, then anointed in a solemn ceremony at Soissons in 752. Childeric was tonsured

• a mark of permanent exclusion from kingship - and confined to a monastery for the rest of his life, along with his wife and son.

Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Volume I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule (590-795) (1902) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

A debt a king would not forget

Zachary's ruling gave Pepin's own throne a legitimacy no mere acclamation by Frankish nobles could have supplied on its own - the sanction of the one authority in Latin Christendom capable of pronouncing on whether a king's deposition served God's own order rather than mere ambition. Pepin did not treat the favor as a one-time transaction. When Zachary's own successor found himself facing a Lombard army at the gates of Rome a few years later, it was to Pepin, and to the debt Zachary's ruling had created, that the papacy turned.

The Donation of Pepin

formationDrafted from Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Volume I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule (590-795) (1902)

Aistulf, king of the Lombards from 749, pursued the same expansion his predecessors had, and pursued it more aggressively. Pope Stephen II, finding diplomacy alone no match for Aistulf's own ambitions, made a decision no earlier pope had risked: he traveled north across the Alps in person, to Pepin's own court, to ask the debt Zachary's ruling had created be repaid in the coin the papacy actually needed - military force.

A promise made before a single battle was fought

At an assembly of Frankish nobles at Quierzy in 754, Pepin confirmed what he had apparently already privately undertaken to do: to make war on Aistulf and restore to the papacy the territories the Lombards had seized, above all the old Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna. Illness delayed Stephen's own return to Rome, but the promise itself, recorded afterward as a formal deed of gift, stood. What followed was not a single swift campaign but two.

A siege that answered a demand

Pepin's first expedition forced Aistulf, besieged in his own capital of Pavia, to swear under oath to restore Ravenna and the other captured cities. No sooner had Pepin returned to France than Aistulf broke the oath and marched on Rome itself, besieging the city in the opening weeks of 756 and demanding, as the price of mercy, that the pope be handed over to him. Stephen's own letters to Pepin - preserved in the papal correspondence and addressed to his "most excellent sons, kings and patricians of the Romans" - describe a siege pressed hard enough that the pope warned Pepin he would answer to God himself for how vigorously he defended the cause he had already sworn to.

A conqueror who gave away what he had conquered

Pepin's second campaign broke Aistulf for good. This time, rather than return the recovered territory to its previous owner - the Byzantine Empire, which had held it before the Lombards seized it, and which still considered it rightfully its own - Pepin granted the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis outright to the papacy. The gift was Pepin's to make by right of conquest: the Byzantines had been unable or unwilling to defend the territory themselves, and it was Frankish soldiers, not Byzantine ones, who had actually taken it back from the Lombards. What had been, at Sutri thirty years earlier, the return of a single town now became the grant of an entire province - the donation that gave a bishop of Rome the standing of a sovereign ruling continuous territory in his own right, rather than merely a religious authority governing at another power's sufferance.

Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Volume I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule (590-795) (1902) · Fresco, Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome · Public domain

A crown that appeared from nowhere

expansionDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

Pepin's donation had made the papacy a sovereign of territory. It took another two generations, and a considerably more ambitious Frankish king, to make it something more: the power that could bestow the title of Roman emperor itself, extinct in the West for over three centuries.

A ceremony arranged to look accidental

Charlemagne had, by the account of his own biographer Einhard, already long consented to the idea of his own elevation to the imperial throne before his visit to Rome at Christmas 800 - the timing, not the substance, was what remained to be settled. Pope Leo III staged the actual event to look like anything but a negotiated transaction. As Charlemagne rose from prayer before the high altar of St. Peter's on Christmas Day, Leo placed a golden crown on his head without warning, and the assembled crowd, primed in advance to understand the signal, answered with an ancient acclamation revived for the occasion: "Life and victory to Charles the Most pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace-giving Emperor of the Romans."

A pope who made himself the one who mattered

The staging was deliberate, and its logic ran in the pope's own favor rather than the new emperor's. By appearing to act on sudden, divine inspiration rather than prior arrangement, Leo cast himself as the active party in the transaction - the one who conferred the office - rather than as a mere officiant crowning a candidate whose own claim needed no papal confirmation at all. Nothing about the ceremony's actual content was simple or unimposing; what made it appear so was precisely the point.

A title with no legitimate owner to answer to

Whether Charlemagne had any legal right to the title he received was, at the time, a genuinely open question - the Eastern Roman Empire still existed, ruled from Constantinople, with its own uninterrupted claim to the same Roman inheritance. The papacy's own answer was that the eastern throne, then held by a woman, Empress Irene, could be treated as vacant for these purposes. It was a convenient argument rather than a settled one, and it worked mainly because there was no power left in the West capable of contesting it. A pope who had needed a foreign king's army to become a sovereign at all had, within two generations, made himself the arbiter of who could call himself Rome's own emperor.

Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Later painting · Public domain

A mother and daughter made and unmade popes

expansionDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

The century after Charlemagne's coronation left the papacy without an emperor strong enough to protect it and without any Roman institution capable of replacing that protection. Real power passed instead to whichever noble family controlled the city's fortified households, and for the better part of two generations that family was headed by two women: Theodora, wife of the Roman aristocrat Theophylact, and her daughter Marozia.

A pope crowned by his patroness

Sergius III owed his election in 904 to Theodora's own faction, and his seven-year pontificate was remembered less for its acts of government than for the violence surrounding his rise - his predecessors Leo V and the antipope Christopher were left to perish or be murdered in confinement, and near-contemporary writers accused Sergius of an intrigue with Marozia, Theodora's daughter, that later chroniclers treated as scandal rather than fact. Whatever the truth of it, the pattern was set: the papal chair now depended on the favor of one Roman household rather than on any wider consensus, ecclesiastical or imperial.

A pope imprisoned by his own patroness's daughter

Marozia inherited her mother's influence and, in time, surpassed it. Pope John X, who owed his own elevation to Theodora's patronage, spent years maneuvering between Marozia's growing faction and an alliance with King Hugh of Provence, whom he hoped could restore a strong protector to Rome the way Charlemagne once had. Marozia answered by marrying Hugh's own rival, the Margrave of Tuscany, and turning the combined weight of both factions against the Pope. In 928, during a Roman revolt she was widely believed to have engineered, John's brother and chief military support was cut down in the Lateran itself, and the Pope was seized and thrown into the Castel Sant'Angelo, where he died the following year - by strangling or starvation, contemporary accounts disagree, though none doubted Marozia's hand in it.

Rome, Italy · Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 3.0

A crown offered to a stepson with an axe to grind

Marozia's own power peaked with her third marriage, to Hugh of Provence himself, now King of Italy - a match that briefly promised to reunite Rome with a real royal protector, and perhaps even restore the imperial crown to her new husband. It ended instead in farce and revolution. Hugh, established in the fortress of Sant'Angelo, treated Marozia's teenage son Alberic with open contempt, forcing him to serve as his own page; when the boy spilled water while pouring a basin for the King and received a blow across the face for it, he stormed out and roused the Romans against the "Burgundian" outsider ruling them through a woman. The city rose. Hugh escaped Sant'Angelo by rope in the night and fled to Lombardy, abandoning his bride, his crown, and the imperial ambitions the marriage had carried with it. The Romans elected Alberic their own prince - and his first act was to send his mother to prison for the rest of her life.

A crown and a tiara in one family

expansionDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

Alberic ruled Rome for twenty-two years without ever taking the papal throne himself, content with the secular title of Prince and Senator of all the Romans while a sequence of compliant popes he controlled occupied the Lateran. He built a standing city militia loyal to his

own pay rather than to any noble faction, reorganized Rome's judicial courts under his personal authority, and kept both the German king Otto and the rival claims of Hugh of Provence's own family at arm's length for the whole of his reign - the longest period of stable government Rome had known in generations. On his deathbed in 954 he extracted an oath from the assembled Roman nobility and clergy that his teenage son Octavian would succeed him as prince, and, at the next vacancy, be elected pope as well.

Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Rijksmuseum · CC0

A boy who became both prince and pontiff

Octavian kept both promises: he inherited his father's secular authority immediately, and within a year of Alberic's death he was elected pope, taking the name John XII - the first Pope to change his name on election, a practice that became permanent afterward. Barely past adolescence, John governed Rome with his father's political instincts and none of his father's discipline, turning the Lateran into what one contemporary account called a court of open debauchery, while the German threat Alberic had held off for two decades grew more pressing by the year.

A privilege bought with a crown

Threatened by the ambitions of King Berengar of Italy, John did what his own predecessor John X had once tried and failed to do: he invited a foreign king to Rome as protector. Otto I of Germany crossed the Alps, and on 2 February 962 John crowned him Emperor in St Peter's - a revival of Charlemagne's title that had lain dormant for decades. In return, Otto issued a charter confirming and extending the papacy's temporal claims across a wide swath of central Italy, the document later known as the Ottonianum. But the alliance bound John as much as it protected him: the Romans and the Pope alike swore oaths of fidelity to the new Emperor, and the independence Alberic had spent his whole reign defending was folded back into imperial authority within months of the coronation that was meant to secure it.

A pope deposed, and a pope who would not stay deposed

John chafed almost immediately, intriguing with Otto's own Italian enemies behind the Emperor's back. Otto returned to Rome, convened a synod that deposed John for offenses ranging from sacrilege to simony, and installed a layman, Leo VIII, in his place - the first deposition of a pope by an emperor's own authority rather than by Roman factional violence. The arrangement did not last: once Otto withdrew, the Romans expelled his appointee and restored John, who died within months in circumstances contemporaries were happy to report as scandalous, whether by apoplexy or, as some claimed, at the hands of an outraged husband. The precedent, though, outlived both men - the German emperor, not the Roman nobility, now held the final word over who wore the tiara, a relationship of tutelage and conflict that would harden, within little more than a century, into the Investiture Controversy.

Three days in the snow

peakDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

Three centuries after Charlemagne's coronation, the relationship between pope and emperor had inverted almost entirely. Pope Gregory VII, elected in 1073, pursued a program of reform that struck directly at the practice of lay investiture - the right of kings and emperors to appoint bishops and abbots within their own territories, a practice the German king Henry IV regarded as essential to his own control over the German church and, through it, over Germany's own great territorial lords.

Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Exultet roll, southern Italy · Public domain

An excommunication answered with a council

When Gregory moved against lay investiture directly, Henry responded by convening a council of German bishops that declared Gregory deposed. Gregory's own answer went further still: he excommunicated Henry and formally released Henry's own subjects from their oath of allegiance to him - a sentence that mattered less as theology than as practical politics, since German princes already resentful of Henry's authority now had a ready pretext to abandon him. Facing rebellion at home, Henry concluded that only Gregory's own forgiveness could save his throne.

A king who came as a penitent

Henry crossed the Alps in the depths of winter and found Gregory taking refuge at Canossa, a castle belonging to Countess Matilda of Tuscany. For three days, Henry stood outside the fortress's inner gate wearing a penitent's shirt over his other garments, begging admission, while German bishops who had accompanied him arrived daily to pray for their own absolution alongside his. Gregory hesitated throughout, distrustful of a king's promises, until the intercession of Matilda and Henry's own mother-in-law helped move him to relent. On 28 January 1077, Gregory granted absolution - but only on terms that stripped Henry of his royal authority until a formal council could judge him, and bound him by oath to future obedience to the pope's own will.

A victory measured in more than the moment

Gregorovius, writing of the scene centuries later, ranked it among the handful of moments that most clearly displayed the papacy's own moral authority over temporal rulers - a victory won without a single soldier, achieved instead through the sheer weight of a spiritual sentence a king could not simply ignore. It did not, in the end, resolve the underlying conflict over investiture, which would continue for another half-century after both men were dead. But no single episode did more to establish, in the eyes of contemporaries and later historians alike, the principle that a pope's judgment could unmake an emperor's own authority

• not merely bless it, as Leo III had done for Charlemagne, but strip it away entirely until its holder had earned it back.

An argument that outlasted an empire

peakDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

The confrontation at Canossa settled nothing permanently between popes and emperors, and the conflict that had produced it recurred, in one form or another, for a century and a half afterward - reaching its final and most sustained expression in the long rivalry between the papacy and the Hohenstaufen dynasty, above all in the person of Frederick II.

A monarch the Church could not simply outlast

Frederick II held the imperial title alongside the kingdom of Sicily, which he had inherited and had used as a laboratory for the kind of centralized royal government no other European monarch of his era had yet attempted - a regular code of law, a check on feudal privilege, an early inclusion of townsmen in royal government. None of this innovation made him easier for the papacy to deal with. If anything, it made him more dangerous: an emperor who governed a kingdom of his own effectively enough to fund a long contest with Rome on favorable terms, rather than depending, as many of his predecessors had, on the goodwill of German princes the papacy could turn against him.

San Gimignano, Italy · Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 2.0

An empire that closed with its last strong ruler

Frederick's death in 1250 ended the contest not because either side had won a decisive battle, but because no Hohenstaufen ruler after him proved capable of sustaining it. His line's own claim to Sicily and the imperial title outlived him by only a few years in any real strength. Historians looking back on the collapse have generally credited Frederick himself with closing an entire epoch of the old German imperial idea - the notion, inherited from Charlemagne's own coronation, of a single universal Christian empire standing alongside a single universal papacy - even as he tried, in his own kingdom, to build something more like a modern centralized state instead.

A victory the papacy did not have to fight for twice

What the Hohenstaufen collapse handed the papacy was not merely victory in one contest but a free hand in Italy that no earlier pope had enjoyed for generations - a claimant line broken, its remaining heirs scattered or imprisoned, and a kingdom in the south now available to whichever new power the papacy judged fit to grant it to. That the argument between empire and papacy did not survive Frederick's own death in any form serious enough to threaten Rome again said as much about the particular strength of one Hohenstaufen ruler as it did about any lasting resolution of the underlying question. Fifty years later, it would be a French monarchy, not a German empire, that took up the same argument against papal authority - on entirely different, more explicitly national terms.

A French prince, bought and paid for

peakDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

The Hohenstaufen collapse the papacy had wanted since Frederick II's own lifetime did not complete itself automatically. Frederick's illegitimate son Manfred took the Sicilian throne regardless of the papacy's own objections, and successive popes, unable to dislodge him by excommunication or diplomacy alone, went looking for a prince willing to do by the sword what the Church's own censures could not accomplish. They found him in Charles of Anjou, brother of the King of France.

Naples, Italy · Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 4.0

A kingdom granted before it was conquered

Pope Clement IV invested Charles with the Kingdom of Sicily as a fief of the Church in June 1265, before Charles had actually won a foot of the territory - full possession was a matter still to be settled by his own army. The terms were not generous. Clement first tried to bind Charles to conditions that would have made him little more than a temporary papal vassal, and only after difficult negotiation did Charles secure more favorable ones: an indivisible, hereditary kingdom, in exchange for substantial payment and a guarantee of full clerical immunity within it. When Charles, on arriving in Rome, presumed to take up residence in the Lateran palace itself without asking leave, Clement's own rebuke was sharp and immediate - a reminder, delivered to the man the papacy had just elevated, of exactly whose authority the arrangement actually rested on.

A battle that ended the argument by force

Charles met Manfred's army at Benevento on 26 February 1266. The battle turned on infantry tactics as much as cavalry: French foot soldiers, riding pillion behind their own knights, dismounted to finish off unhorsed German men-at-arms with clubs, a brutal equalizer against Manfred's heavier cavalry. When his own Italian feudal levies broke and fled, Manfred called for his helmet, and when its ornamental eagle fell to the ground as he put it on, he is said to have taken the omen for what it plainly seemed to mean, remarking "Ecce, Signum Domini" before riding to his own death rather than fleeing. His naked body was found among the slain two days later, identified by men who had known him in life, and buried without the rites of the Church whose armies had just killed him.

A dispatch written the same night

Charles wrote to the pope from his own camp at Benevento the night of the battle, before he even knew for certain whether Manfred had died, survived, or fled: a report of overwhelming victory, prisoners taken, and a promise that once "the root of the evil" was fully cleared from Sicily, he would restore the kingdom to its proper vassalage under the Church. It was, in its own way, as clear a statement as any of what the whole campaign had actually been for. The papacy had spent two generations trying to remove one imperial dynasty from southern Italy by every means short of outright war; Charles of Anjou, financed, invested and legitimized entirely by Rome, had just finished the job those two generations of popes could not complete on their own.

Seventy years in someone else's country

contractionDrafted from Love), The Popes at Avignon, 1305-1378 (1963)

Pope Clement V, elected in 1305, never set foot in Rome at all during his own pontificate. The reasons had less to do with Rome's own condition, though it was genuinely poor and turbulent at the time, than with the pressure Clement faced from Philip the Fair of France - pressure that included a demand for a posthumous heresy trial of Clement's own predecessor, Boniface VIII, and the mass arrest of the Knights Templar in October 1307, an affair the papacy could not simply ignore or outrun.

A relocation chosen for what it was not

Facing the opening of a general council that would need to settle the Templar affair, and unwilling to leave Philip in uncontested control of the political situation while he traveled to Italy, Clement moved his court to Avignon in 1308, entering the city itself in March 1309. The location was chosen deliberately: close enough to France for easy communication, but not itself French territory, since Avignon sat within the Comtat-Venaissin, already a possession of the Holy See, and its nominal overlords - the Angevin princes of Naples - were themselves papal vassals with every reason to defer to Rome rather than press their own claim. It offered, on paper, everything Rome currently could not: a peaceful refuge with genuine guarantees of independence.

A stay that kept not becoming permanent

Nothing about Clement's own arrangements suggested he expected to stay. He lived simply in a Dominican convent, brought only the necessary administrative registers from Italy, and left the greater part of the papal treasure behind at the church of St. Francis in Assisi. But each of his successors found their own reasons not to leave: further legal entanglements, the ongoing war between France and England, and simply the accumulated inertia of an administration that had, by degrees, built itself a permanent home in a city that was never supposed to be one.

Avignon, France · Love), The Popes at Avignon, 1305-1378 (1963) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Two attempts, one that failed and one that mostly succeeded

Urban V judged conditions favorable enough in the 1360s to attempt an actual return to Rome, only to be driven back to Avignon by hostility from his own Roman subjects - proof that the city's own instability, not merely French pressure, had helped keep the papacy away for as long as it had. It was Gregory XI who finally judged the risk worth taking again, over the protests of Roman factions who plotted against the foreign clergy filling his own court and, by some accounts, against Gregory's own life. He returned to Rome and died there in 1378 - ending the Avignon papacy after nearly seventy years, but not the crisis it had helped store up. Within months of his death, a disputed election would split Latin Christendom between rival popes for another four decades, a schism whose roots reached directly back to the same relocation that had, for two generations, put the bishop of Rome anywhere but Rome itself.

One church, three popes

contractionDrafted from Creighton, A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, Vol. I: The Great Schism, The Council of Constance, 1378-1418 (1882)

Gregory XI's death in Rome in 1378, only months after he had ended the Avignon papacy, left the cardinals to elect a successor under conditions no conclave had faced before. A Roman mob, remembering the wealth and patronage the papal court had carried away to France for two generations, surrounded the conclave chanting "Romano, Romano, lo volemo, lo Papa" - a Roman, we want a Roman for Pope - and broke open the bell tower of St Peter's to summon a larger crowd as the vote approached.

An election made twice, under two different pressures

The cardinals elected the Archbishop of Bari, who took the name Urban VI - not a Roman, but at least an Italian, which the terrified conclave judged near enough to satisfy the crowd outside. In the chaos of breaking away from the mob, one cardinal blurted out that the elderly Roman Cardinal Tebaldeschi was pope instead, and the crowd very nearly tore the real Urban's hiding place apart searching for him before the truth got out. Urban's own behavior in office - harsh, suspicious, and soon openly abusive toward the cardinals who had elected him - drove most of the same College to flee Rome within months and declare, from the safety of Fondi, that his election had been made under duress and was therefore void. In September they elected one of their own number, Robert of Geneva, who took the name Clement VII and established a rival court at Avignon. Neither pope would yield, and for the first time Latin Christendom had two claimants to the papal throne at once, each with his own college of cardinals, each excommunicating the other.

Creighton, A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, Vol. I: The Great Schism, The Council of Constance, 1378-1418 (1882) · Richental, Chronicle of the Council of Constance · Public domain

A council that solved nothing by adding a third

Thirty years of divided allegiance, competing taxation, and failed diplomacy followed before a general council of the Church, meeting at Pisa in 1409, took the drastic step of trying both reigning claimants for schism and heresy and formally deposing them, to the pealing of church bells relayed from village to village across Italy within hours. The council then elected its own pope, Peter Philargi, a monk of obscure Cretan birth who took the name Alexander V. It was a council without an army: neither of the deposed popes recognized the sentence or stepped down, and Christendom now had three popes simultaneously claiming the tiara instead of two, each still commanding the loyalty of different kingdoms and universities. Alexander himself died within a year, succeeded at Pisa by Baldassare Cossa as John XXIII - the line that eventually convened the far larger Council of Constance in 1414, which finally secured the resignation or deposition of all three claimants and elected a single, uncontested pope, Martin V, in 1417 - closing a schism that had run for nearly four decades and restoring, for the first time since Gregory XI's death, one Church with one head.

A pope heading a military expedition

contractionDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

Julius II was elected in 1503 on the ruins of Cesare Borgia's failed attempt to carve a private state out of the Romagna for himself, and he drew the obvious lesson from it: the territory Borgia had briefly assembled by force could belong to the Papacy outright, if the Papacy itself were willing to take the field. In August 1506, at the age of sixty-four, Julius left Rome at the head of a small armed column of his own, and Italy watched in open astonishment at the unheard-of spectacle of a reigning pope personally leading a military campaign.

Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Raphael and workshop · Public domain

A tyrant who surrendered without a fight

His first target, the mercenary captain Giampaolo Baglioni, who ruled Perugia as an outright tyranny, lost his nerve entirely at the Pope's approach and surrendered the city without a battle - so thoroughly overawed that Julius entered under arms with his own troops left behind him, an arrogance Baglioni never punished. From Perugia the column pressed on toward Bologna, where the Bentivoglio family had ruled for generations from one of the finest palaces in Italy; confronted with the Pope's advancing army, the Bentivogli fled and Bologna too fell under direct papal government - two of the Papal States' most substantial cities absorbed by intimidation rather than siege.

A war won and a cardinal murdered by the Pope's own nephew

The wider war against Venice and then France that followed proved far costlier. Julius formed and broke alliances in rapid succession - the League of Cambray against Venice, then the Holy League against France - losing Bologna to a French-backed revolt in 1511 before recovering it the following year. The recovery came soured by scandal: the Pope's own nephew, the young Duke of Urbino, blamed the papal legate Cardinal Alidosi for the city's loss, and when the two met by chance in a street at Ravenna, the Duke dragged the cardinal from his mule and stabbed him to death in public. Julius, informed of the murder of a prince of the Church by his own family, was inconsolable - he wept and cried out like a man struck, and left Ravenna within two hours, lying prostrate in his litter the whole way to Rimini. Bologna itself remained lost for months afterward, recovered only once the French position in Italy collapsed under the weight of the wider coalition Julius had assembled against it.

What the wars actually built

By his death in February 1513, Julius had accomplished, through outright warfare, what centuries of diplomacy and donation had only partially secured: a Papal States that governed Rome, the Romagna, and the cities of Umbria as a direct, continuous territorial bloc rather than a patchwork of nominal overlordships contested by local tyrants. The nickname that stuck to him - il Papa terribile, the terrible or fearsome Pope - reflected a reign remembered as much for the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the rebuilding of St Peter's as for the sight of the Vicar of Christ riding at the head of an army through the Romagna's winter mud.

A ladder against the wall

contractionDrafted from Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894)

By the spring of 1527 an army of some twenty thousand Spanish and German troops under Charles, Duke of Bourbon, unpaid for months and half-mutinous, had marched south through a wavering Italy with no clear objective except plunder. Bourbon, a French prince serving the Emperor Charles V after his own falling-out with the French crown, no longer fully controlled the men he nominally commanded; many of the Germans among them were Lutheran mercenaries who regarded a sack of the papal city as something close to a holy errand. On 6 May they reached the walls of the Leonine district around the Vatican.

Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894) · Sixteenth-century painting · Public domain

A fog the attackers called providence

The assault began without proper siege equipment - the imperial troops scaled the walls on ladders hastily improvised from vineyard stakes, under cover of a thick morning mist rolling off the Tiber that blinded the defenders' gunners and, in the soldiers' own telling afterward, felt like the hand of heaven clearing their path. Bourbon himself, seeing the first assault waves thrown back, dismounted, seized a ladder, planted it against the wall, and was climbing it when a shot struck him in the stomach; he died within hours, his last words a cry of "To Rome! To Rome!" His death did nothing to stop his army - if anything it removed the last figure capable of restraining it, and within three hours the Borgo had fallen, at a cost of some three thousand Roman dead against only four hundred imperial.

A pope smuggled across a bridge under a borrowed cloak

Clement VII was at prayer in the Vatican when the walls gave way; by the time the enemy broke into St Peter's itself, cutting down the Swiss Guard almost within his sight, he had no time left to do anything but flee along the fortified passage connecting the Vatican to the Castel Sant'Angelo. A companion threw an episcopal mantle over him so he would not be recognized crossing the exposed wooden bridge, where a single Lutheran soldier's shot could have ended the papacy on the spot. More than three thousand people crowded onto that same bridge behind him - cardinals, ambassadors, merchants, women and children - trampling each other in the crush before the drawbridge could be raised; one elderly cardinal was hauled through a window on a rope, another pulled up in a basket. Thirteen cardinals reached the fortress in time. Behind them, the city Bourbon's army now controlled without any commander left to check it was given over to weeks of looting, ransom, and killing that shocked even contemporaries hardened to the routine violence of Italian warfare - the "Sacco di Roma" that Clement, besieged in his own fortress for the better part of a year afterward, would spend the rest of his pontificate trying to live down.

Taken out of Rome by a locked door

contractionDrafted from (trans.), Historical Memoirs of Cardinal Pacca, Prime Minister to Pius VII (1850)

Pius VII spent much of his pontificate resisting Napoleon's demands that the Papal States join his Continental blockade against Britain and submit to French military occupation. When persuasion failed, the Pope's Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacca, drafted a bull of excommunication against "the authors and abettors of the violence and usurpation" being carried out against the Holy See - not naming Napoleon directly, but leaving no doubt of its target - which Pius, after hesitating over its strength, ordered posted at the doors of Rome's great basilicas after sunset on 10 June 1809. Napoleon's answer came within weeks.

An escalade before dawn

On the night of 5 July, cavalry picquets quietly sealed every street leading to the Quirinal Palace while infantry closed in around it, and at first light gendarmes, police, and a handful of Roman collaborators stormed the building by scaling ladders raised against its walls, their axes breaking down door after door as they advanced toward the papal apartments. Pacca, who had promised to wake the Pope at the first sign of danger, found him already dressed in full episcopal robes by the time the last door gave way. Pius rose from his chair to stand at the center of the room, a cardinal at each shoulder, and waited in silence as General Radet entered at the head of the assault party.

A refusal answered with an abduction

Radet, visibly shaken, told the Pope he had "a painful and disagreeable duty" - to convey the Emperor's demand that His Holiness renounce the temporal sovereignty of Rome and the Papal States, or else be removed to a destination of Napoleon's choosing. Pius answered him plainly: he had no power to surrender what was not his own to give away, being merely the administrator of the Holy See's temporal dominion, not its owner. Within the hour he and Pacca were hurried down the palace stairs, through a cortile crowded with troops, and into a closed carriage whose blinds had already been nailed shut; a gendarme locked both doors from the outside before the horses moved off. Rather than driving directly across the city, Radet took a circling route along the outer walls to avoid any crowd that might have gathered, passing cavalry patrols with drawn sabres at every junction before the carriage finally left Rome through the Porta del Popolo, where relay horses were already waiting.

A dominion in name only, for five years

Pius spent the years that followed shuttled between successive places of confinement - Savona on the Ligurian coast, and later Fontainebleau itself, within sight of Napoleon's own court - while the Papal States were formally annexed to the French Empire and Rome declared its second city after Paris. Only Napoleon's own collapse in 1814 freed him to return, restoring a temporal sovereignty that had existed, for five years, only as a claim a captive pope refused to renounce even when he had no territory left to rule.

(trans.), Historical Memoirs of Cardinal Pacca, Prime Minister to Pius VII (1850) · Jacques-Louis David · Public domain

A nest of vipers

endDrafted from Garofalo, California Italian Studies (2024)

By 1870, the papacy governed only a fraction of the territory it had once held, and the Kingdom of Italy - unified around the House of Savoy over the previous decade - had made clear for years that its own national project would remain incomplete without Rome as its capital. What had held the Italian army back was less papal strength than French protection: a French garrison had guarded Rome against Italian annexation since 1849. The collapse of the French Empire at Sedan in September 1870 removed that protection overnight.

A last appeal, and a furious reply

King Victor Emmanuel II authorized the invasion on 6 September 1870, but still sent Count Gustavo Ponza di San Martino to Pius IX two days later with a proposed settlement - occupation "to protect the pontiff" rather than outright conquest. Pius IX's reception of the count was, by a contemporary account, openly hostile: he flung the king's own letter onto a piece of furniture and denounced the Italian government as "a nest of vipers, whitened tombs, and lacking in faith," before declaring, more composed, that the Italians would never enter Rome. His own written reply to the king was scarcely gentler in substance, if more restrained in language - a refusal to accept any of the proposed terms, delivered alongside a prayer that God grant the king deliverance from the dangers his own actions invited.

A battle both sides tried to keep symbolic

Italian troops crossed the frontier on 11 September, facing papal forces under General Hermann Kanzler that were outnumbered roughly five to one.

Pius IX, unwilling to see the Church's own cause stained by real bloodshed but equally unwilling to surrender without any resistance at all, ordered Kanzler to offer only a token defense - enough to establish that force, not consent, had taken the city, but no more than that. On 19 September, with Italian guns already massing outside the walls, the pope made his own instructions explicit: resistance should amount to a protest against the violence being done, "and nothing more."

Rome, Italy · Garofalo, California Italian Studies (2024) · Contemporary photograph · Public domain

Five hours, sixty-nine dead, and a wall breached at Porta Pia

The final assault began before dawn on 20 September. Two divisions staged diversionary attacks while the real breach was concentrated at the Porta Pia and Porta Salara, on the northern wall. The battle lasted five hours rather than the token exchange either side had originally anticipated, in part because not every general held to the planned restraint - one Italian commander shelled areas near a different gate without authorization, putting civilians directly at risk. When the guns fell silent, sixty-nine men were dead and a further hundred and ninety-two wounded, on both sides combined. Italian troops entered Rome through the breach that same day, and the eleven centuries of papal temporal rule that had begun with a Frankish king's donation of a conquered Byzantine province ended in an Italian one.

A prisoner for fifty-nine years

afterlifeDrafted from Garofalo, California Italian Studies (2024)

Pius IX never accepted the loss of Rome as final. He refused to recognize the Kingdom of Italy's own authority over the city, refused to leave the Vatican in protest, and styled himself, for the rest of his reign, a prisoner within it - a posture every one of his successors maintained for the following six decades, refusing to set foot outside Vatican territory or to acknowledge the Italian state that had taken the papacy's own former territory by force.

Garofalo, California Italian Studies (2024) · Library of Congress · Public domain

A question Italy's own leaders had already tried to answer

Camillo Cavour, Italy's own architect of unification, had anticipated the difficulty years before Rome actually fell, framing the relationship he hoped to establish as "Libera Chiesa in libero Stato" - a free Church in a free State, each independent of the other's own authority. Cavour did not live to see whether the formula could actually work in practice; he died in 1861, nine years before Italian troops entered Rome at all. What his own successors inherited instead was six decades of open hostility between the Italian state and a papacy that considered itself robbed of sovereign territory rather than merely relieved of a political burden.

A treaty that finally settled what a battle could not

Resolution came only in 1929, under circumstances neither Cavour nor Pius IX could have anticipated. Benito Mussolini's fascist government, seeking the legitimacy that reconciliation with the Church could offer his own regime, negotiated the Lateran Treaty, signed 11 February 1929 and ratified that June - ending fifty-nine years of open conflict between Italian state and papacy by ceding the papacy sovereign authority over a small, newly defined Vatican City, a fraction of a square mile in the heart of Rome itself, in exchange for the papacy's own formal recognition of the Kingdom of Italy and its capital.

A day the country that won chose to forget

What is notable, looking back, is how little either side ultimately wished to commemorate the conquest that had made the treaty necessary in the first place. Rome's capture was declared a national holiday in Italy in 1895, then quietly abolished in 1930 - the year after the Lateran Treaty itself, once the political reconciliation the holiday's own anniversary might have complicated was finally secured. A conquest that had taken five hours and cost sixty-nine lives, and that had opened six decades of open constitutional crisis between a modern Italian state and the oldest continuously governed territory in Europe, ended not commemorated by the victors but folded quietly into an arrangement that suited both sides better left unremembered.