Vatican City

From the tomb of an apostle to the world's smallest state: the long story of the popes' temporal power.

Vatican City is the smallest sovereign state on earth, a walled enclave of about 44 hectares within Rome, yet it carries one of the longest continuous histories of any place in Europe. Its story begins not with a state but with a grave: the traditional burial place of the apostle Saint Peter on the Vatican Hill, over which the emperor Constantine raised a great basilica in the fourth century, making the spot the seat of the bishops of Rome, the popes. From the eighth century the popes became temporal rulers as well as spiritual ones: the Donation of Pepin in 756 created the Papal States, territories of central Italy that the popes governed for more than a thousand years. The Renaissance papacy rebuilt Saint Peter's, commissioned the Sistine Chapel and gathered the collections that became the Vatican Museums. That temporal realm was swept away by Italian unification, when the Kingdom of Italy took Rome in 1870 and ended the popes' rule; the popes refused to recognise the new state and styled themselves 'prisoners in the Vatican', a standoff known as the Roman Question. It was resolved only on 11 February 1929, when the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and Italy created the independent State of Vatican City. Today the territory of Vatican City and the worldwide sovereign authority of the Holy See together preserve both an enormous cultural patrimony and the centre of the Roman Catholic Church.