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The Papal States (/ ˈ p eɪ p ə l / PAY-pəl; Italian: Stato Pontificio; Latin: Dicio Pontificia), officially the State of the Church, [7] were a conglomeration of territories on the Italian peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the Pope from 756 to 1870. [8]
The government would supply a permanent annual fund for the pope and the cardinals, equal to the amount currently assigned to them by the budget of the pontifical state, and would assume all Papal civil servants and soldiers onto the state payroll, with full pensions as long as they were Italian.
This territory would become the basis for the Papal States, over which the popes ruled until the Papal States were incorporated into the new Kingdom of Italy in 1870. For the next eleven centuries, the story of Rome would be almost synonymous with the story of the papacy.
The four original legations were joined into the legation of the Romagne. In 1859, the Kingdom of Sardinia invaded the Papal State and set up a military government, the United Provinces of Central Italy, that included the Romagne. Following a plebiscite, the Romagne were formally annexed to Sardinia in 1860.
All the other Italian states remained independent, with the most powerful being the Venetian Republic, the Medici's Duchy of Tuscany, the Savoyard state, the Republic of Genoa, and the Papal States. The Gonzaga in Mantua, the Este in Modena and Ferrara and the Farnese in Parma and Piacenza continued to be important dynasties.
The council was convoked by Pope Pius IX on 29 June 1868, under the rising threat of the Kingdom of Italy encroaching on the Papal States. It opened on 8 December 1869 and was adjourned on 20 September 1870 after the Italian Capture of Rome. Its best-known decision is its definition of papal infallibility. [1] [2]
The Papal States ceased to exist following the capture of Rome in 1870 by the Royal Italian Army, after which its remaining territories were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 later established the Vatican City , a small city-state where the Holy See currently exercises temporal powers.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire, also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome, was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided among several successor polities.