Donation of Pepin (756): The Origin of the Papal States

The Donation of Pepin was the grant by which Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, handed lands in central Italy to the pope after defeating the Lombards in 756. Promised at Quierzy in 754 and carried out after two Frankish invasions of Italy, it gave the bishop of Rome rule over Ravenna and a string of cities stretching across the peninsula. It is generally regarded as the birth of the Papal States, which survived in some form until 1870.

Background: Rome between Byzantium and the Lombards

Since the Lombard invasion of Italy in 568, the peninsula had been divided between Lombard kings and dukes and the remnants of Byzantine rule. Byzantium governed its Italian lands through an exarch based at Ravenna, while Rome was nominally Byzantine but in practice increasingly run by its bishops.

Relations between Rome and Constantinople had worsened during the 8th century, over taxation and over the emperor Leo III’s policy of iconoclasm, the rejection of religious images. At the same time the Lombards grew stronger. In 751 King Aistulf captured Ravenna, ending the exarchate, and began demanding tribute from Rome. The emperor could send no army to help.

Pope Stephen II crosses the Alps

Pope Stephen II first tried diplomacy with Aistulf and appeals to Constantinople. When these failed, he did something no pope had done before: he travelled north across the Alps to seek help from the Franks. He reached Pepin at the royal estate of Ponthion on 6 January 754.

Pepin had recently taken the Frankish crown with papal approval, as told in Pepin the Short crowned king. At an assembly at Quierzy around Easter 754, he promised to restore to “St Peter” the lands the Lombards had seized. The text of this promise does not survive, but its terms were later recalled in the papal biographies. On 28 July 754 Stephen anointed Pepin and his sons at Saint-Denis and named them “patricians of the Romans”, a title that implied a duty to protect Rome.

Two campaigns against Aistulf

Many Frankish nobles were reluctant to fight in Italy, but in 754 or 755 Pepin led an army over the Alps. The Franks forced the Lombard defences at the Alpine passes near Susa and besieged Aistulf in his capital, Pavia. Aistulf agreed to hand over Ravenna and the other cities and gave hostages.

As soon as the Franks left, Aistulf broke his word. On 1 January 756 his armies began a siege of Rome, ravaging the countryside and the catacombs outside the walls. The pope sent desperate letters to Pepin, one written as if from St Peter himself. In 756 Pepin returned, again besieged Pavia, and imposed harsher terms: Aistulf had to surrender the cities, pay tribute and give up a third of his royal treasure.

The grant of 756

Pepin then made the gift. His envoy Fulrad, abbot of Saint-Denis, travelled with Lombard officials from city to city, received their keys and brought them, together with a written deed of donation, to Rome, where they were placed on the tomb of St Peter. According to the papal biography of Stephen II, the cities included Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Cesena, Senigallia, Iesi, Forlimpopoli, Forlì, Urbino, Gubbio, Comacchio and Narni, among others.

Envoys of the Byzantine emperor Constantine V asked Pepin to return Ravenna to the empire. Pepin refused, saying that he had fought for love of St Peter and the forgiveness of his sins, not to benefit Byzantium. The original deed of donation has been lost, so its exact wording and boundaries are uncertain.

Key people

• Pepin the Short (c. 714-768): king of the Franks from 751 who twice invaded Italy on the pope’s behalf.
• Pope Stephen II (pope 752-757): the first pope to cross the Alps, he secured the Frankish alliance.
• Aistulf (king 749-756): Lombard ruler who took Ravenna; he died in a hunting accident in late 756.
• Fulrad of Saint-Denis (died 784): abbot and diplomat who handed the cities to the pope.
• Desiderius (king 757-774): Aistulf’s successor, who promised further cities to win papal support but later clashed with Rome.

Consequences

The donation created a papal state with real borders, revenues and subjects, governed by the pope as a temporal ruler. It also bound the Frankish crown to the defence of Rome. When the Lombard king Desiderius threatened papal lands again, Pepin’s son Charlemagne invaded and destroyed the Lombard kingdom, as described in the conquest of the Lombard kingdom. At Easter 774 Charlemagne confirmed his father’s grant in Rome.

For Byzantium, the donation confirmed the loss of northern and central Italy. The papacy’s turn to the West culminated in the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by Pope Leo III in 800.

The Papal States expanded and contracted over the centuries, with the popes often struggling to control local lords and cities. They reached their greatest extent in the 16th century and were finally absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy: most of the territory was lost in 1860, and Rome itself fell on 20 September 1870. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 created Vatican City, the papacy’s present sovereign territory.

Papal writers later preferred to rest their claims on the Donation of Constantine, a forged decree attributed to the first Christian emperor, but the historical foundation of papal rule was Pepin’s grant.

How the papal state worked

The new territory was not a single compact block. It joined the old duchy of Rome, which the popes already controlled in practice, to the former exarchate in the north-east, linked by a narrow corridor through the Apennines. The archbishops of Ravenna, proud of their city’s imperial past, often resisted papal authority and acted with considerable independence.

The popes governed through officials drawn from the Roman clergy and aristocracy. Revenues from estates, tolls and the city itself supported the papal court, but they also made the papacy a prize for Roman noble families. In 767-768 a violent struggle over the papal election, in which a layman was briefly installed as pope, showed how control of the new state could drag the papacy into local politics.

Nor did the popes become fully sovereign at once. The Frankish kings, as patricians and later as emperors, kept rights of protection and some oversight, set out under Louis the Pious in the agreement known as the Pactum Ludovicianum of 817. The balance of power between pope and emperor would be argued over for centuries.

Myths and facts

Myth: Pepin gave the pope the city of Rome. Rome and its surrounding duchy were already under papal leadership; the donation added Ravenna and the cities of the former exarchate and the Pentapolis.

Myth: the deed of donation survives. The original document is lost. Its contents are known only from later papal sources, chiefly the Liber Pontificalis.

Timeline

• 751: Aistulf captures Ravenna, ending Byzantine rule there.
• 754, 6 January: Pope Stephen II meets Pepin at Ponthion.
• 754, around Easter: Pepin promises the lands to the papacy at Quierzy.
• 754, 28 July: Stephen II anoints Pepin and his sons at Saint-Denis.
• 754 or 755: First Frankish campaign; Aistulf besieged in Pavia and forced to promise restitution.
• 756, 1 January: Aistulf’s forces begin besieging Rome.
• 756: Second Frankish campaign; Aistulf submits and the cities are handed to the pope.
• 774, April: Charlemagne confirms the donation in Rome.

Why it matters

The Donation of Pepin turned the bishop of Rome into a territorial ruler and set the papacy on a path of political power that lasted more than a thousand years. It also sealed the alliance of the Franks and Rome that shaped the Carolingian empire and medieval Europe.