Thursday, October 2, 2025

It is the 2^nd of October 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I'm your guest host, Sam Leanza Ortiz.

 

For the modern mind, the idea that a church would rule over earthly territories seems wildly foreign. I’m not talking about merely the idea of a state church, but the secular rule of a spiritual authority. It rings of biblical theocracy to us, and many of us, who hold our religious freedoms tightly in our representative governments, we just wouldn’t have it, but on the Italian peninsula, such a land existed for over one thousand years, and only came to an end fewer than two hundred years ago.

That’s right, today we’re talking about the Papal States, which came to an end on this day in 1870.

The Papal States, also known as the Republic of St. Peter, were a group of territories in the Italian peninsula that were under the direct rule of the papacy. They came into being in 756, with the donation of Pippin, which transferred Frankish lands in central Italy from the control of the Carolingian king, Pippin the Short to Pope Stephen II.

Now, around this same time, the Donation of Constantine also emerged, claiming that Constantine, back in the fourth century, granted Pope Sylvester I land and powers, spiritual and temporal.  In the fifteenth century, the Donation of Constantine was proven to be a forgery, but there was a precedent for the papacy controlling lands around Rome. After the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the pope became the de facto protector of the people of the city when secular powers had all but disappeared.

The Donation of Pippin, most certainly not a forgery, gave the sovereignty of the papacy a formal legal basis and expanded the territories under its control. The papacy had been in trouble as the Latin church was growing distant from the Byzantine Empire and the church in the East. Byzantine strongholds in Italy dwindled and the Lombards were a threat to the papacy. Peppin stepped in, defeated the Lombards, and granted the territories won over to the pope. This Carolingian alliance with the papacy was to only grow through the rest of the century, reaching its height with the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor and subsequent expansions of papal territories.

Despite the dissolution of the Carolingian empire, the Papal States remained stable until the Investiture Controversy of the twelfth century, which pitted papal interests against the Holy Roman Empire that it helped to create and sustain.

While the Investiture Controversy mostly related to relationships on the exterior of the Italian peninsula, communal governments around the Papal States were on the rise, challenging papal claims to these areas.

An alliance with the Normans, who were making gains throughout the Mediterranean, allowed them to once again weather these storms and even to grow.

The papacy understandably weakened during the departure to Avignon in the fourteenth century, and so too did its hold on Italian territories such that Rome briefly made a return to republican government before the papacy turned to Spanish military leaders who reconquered their losses.

As the schism ended and the papacy returned to Rome, we see a papacy on the defensive and offensive, with the rise of the papal “dynasties,” if you will, like the Borgias and the Medici, and of course, the “warrior pope,” Julian II. These ruthless bishops of Rome subordinated their spiritual duties to the pursuit of temporal power.

These actions were not without their temporary gain, as the Papal States reached their widest extent, “from Parma and Bologna in the north to the south and east, along the Adriatic coast, and through Umbria and Campagna, south of Rome.”  For those of you who are visual learners, this is essentially the shin beneath the knee all the way down to the high ankle of Italy.

But this worldly gain was a loss, as the church was not positioned to deal effectively with the spread of the Reformation. While Italy was relatively safe from “the German heresy,” the papacy’s divided attention delayed a formal reckoning within the church for decades. 

And for all of that loss, even the gains were short-lived. The Italian Wars with France caused trouble to the north and even in Rome itself when it was sacked in 1527. Later that century, the Spaniards started to invade the south, eating up papal gains up into Naples.

Having reached its zenith, the Papal States entered a protracted decline. The kingdoms to the north, such as Piedmont, and to the south, such as Naples, sometimes quite literally, walked all over the Papal States to carry out their business.

The once grand riches of the papacy were beginning to run dry, and Rome became a backwater for much of the early modern period, in part due to the devastations of war, famine, and plague, but also to administrative mismanagement.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Papal States entered a new crisis as the French Revolution and its aftershocks in the Napoleonic Wars rocked Europe. Several of the papal territories in the north were annexed in 1797 to establish something called the Cisalpine Republic. Going even further, the French government captured the rest of the Papal States to create a new Roman Republic.

Naturally, this was met with some resistance, and over the course of Napoleon’s rise and fall, two popes would be imprisoned by the French government.

The Papal States were restored to the pope at the Congress of Vienna, but the anticlerical wave of thinking unleashed at the revolution was the beginning of the end. In the mid-nineteenth century, a unification movement for the Italian peninsula swept south from Piedmont, annexing land into a kingdom of Italy. Most of the papal states had joined the kingdom of Italy by 1861, with the exception of papal Rome, which fell in 1870 as French troops withdrew to fight in the Franco-Prussian War.

The papacy would remain self-proclaimed “prisoners in the Vatican” until the independent state of Vatican City emerged under the Mussolini regime in 1929.

The Papal States give us one of the more direct examples of the confluence of state and spiritual power when the bishop of Rome had direct command over large swaths of territory. At its worst, this showed the excesses of an unfit clergyman, and at its best, it demonstrated the lengths to which churchmen will go to protect their flock from all manner of dangers.

Ultimately, this dramatic slice of history helps us to long for a time when the division between sacred and secular no longer exists and Christ will rule over the new heavens and the new earth.

 

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary, from Lamentations 3:

¹⁹ I remember my affliction and my wandering,
    the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰ I well remember them,
    and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹ Yet this I call to mind
    and therefore I have hope:

²² Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
    for his compassions never fail.
²³ They are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness.
²⁴ I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
    therefore I will wait for him.”

²⁵ The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
    to the one who seeks him;
²⁶ it is good to wait quietly
    for the salvation of the Lord.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 2^nd of October 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

This show has been produced by Christopher Gillespie.

This show has been written and read by Sam Leanza Ortiz, who was going to find a good jab at Dan van Voorhis, noted Rams fan, on behalf of her San Francisco-born husband, but at this point, the 49ers look like the defenses of the Papal States in 1870, so, yeah…

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.