The Donation of Pepin Founds the Papal States
A forged Roman document and a Frankish king's gratitude give the pope his own kingdom in central Italy
Quick facts
- Pledge at Quierzy
- 754 CE
- Donation formalized
- 756 CE
- Frankish king
- Pepin the Short (r. 751-768 CE)
- Papal States end
- 1870, absorbed into unified Italy
What happened
When the Lombard king Aistulf seized Ravenna and threatened Rome in 751 CE, Pope Stephen II lost the Byzantine protection Rome had relied on and traveled to Francia to appeal to Pepin the Short, the Frankish king. Pepin had already pledged at Quierzy in 754 CE to hand over lands he intended to take from the Lombards, and after defeating Aistulf, Pepin formalized the transfer in 756 CE in the grant known as the Donation of Pepin. According to World History Encyclopedia, the forged Donation of Constantine, which claimed the Roman emperor Constantine had granted the pope supreme authority over the Western Empire, was almost certainly used to help persuade the illiterate Pepin to hand over the conquered territory as church property rather than as a simple gift. The transfer created the Papal States, a band of territory across central Italy under direct papal rule, later expanded by Charlemagne in 781 CE to include Ravenna, the Pentapolis, and parts of Tuscany.
Why it matters
The Donation of Pepin gave the papacy a temporal kingdom of its own, not just spiritual authority, and the Papal States remained a political entity ruled directly by the pope until Italian unification absorbed Rome in 1870, more than eleven centuries later. It also entangled the papacy directly in Italian territorial politics for the whole of that period, making the pope one more secular ruler on the peninsula alongside kings, dukes, and city republics.
How we know
The Donation of Pepin and the pope's appeal to the Franks are documented in the contemporary papal biographical collection the Liber Pontificalis, and the text of the earlier forged Donation of Constantine survives and was proven a forgery during the Renaissance by the scholar Lorenzo Valla.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Donation of Constantine · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Fordham University, Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Medieval Sourcebook: The Donation of Constantine (c.750-800) · Primary source (author-declared)sourcebooks.fordham.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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