In the year 754, fearing for the survival of Rome and the Holy See, Pope Stephen III 752-57 journeyed over the Alps to France. There he implored King Pepin of the Franks to come to his aid. Pepin and his vaunted legions quickly crushed the Lombard threat.

Peace restored, the king then granted the Church a wide swatch of central Italy to serve as a buffer zone against such threats in the future.

This territory, covering 17,000 square miles, stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Tyrrhenian and included Latium, Umbria, the Marches, Emilia and Romagna.

Originally referred to as the “Donation of Pepin,” the area came to be known as the Papal States. For the next 11 centuries, the reigning pope was also the reigning king of these regions.

Then in the mid-19th century, a movement aimed at the unification of Italy gained momentum. Spearheaded by the triumvirate of Cavour the statesman, Mazzini the thinker, and Garibaldi the soldier, Il Risorgimento swept through the boot-shaped peninsula until all that remained to be annexed was the Pope’s domain.

However, Pope Pius IX (1846-78) remained intransigent in his opposition to surrendering papal control over to unified Italy.

On Sept. 20, 1870 unification forces stormed the gates of Rome, overwhelming the small papal army. Seeing the futility of it all, Pius ordered his valiant soldiers to concede.

Throughout the rest of that fateful autumn, developments broke fast and furiously. Principal among them was the abolition of the Papal States and the temporal power of the popes. All that was left to the Church territorially was a tiny 108-acre enclave, a walled-in city within a walled-in city, the Vatican.

Behind the soaring Leonine walls, baked brown by thousands of Roman sunrises, Pius IX permanently retreated, bitterly and sadly styling himself, the “prisoner of the Vatican.” He would not exit this place until carried out in death, to be entombed in the ancient church of San Lorenzo out on the consular Via Tiburtina, in February 1878.

His successor, Leo XIII (1878-1903), continued the papal boycott of the newly unified Italy. Moments after his election, Leo made his first appearance on the interior balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, symbolically turning his back on Rome, capital of the new Italian state.

Throughout his long pontificate, Leo also shut himself up in the Vatican.

Even the gregarious, people-loving Pius X (1903-14), who longed to go out into the streets and squares of his diocese to mingle with his spiritual flock, felt obliged to maintain Pius IX’s “prisoner” policy. So too did Benedict XV (1914-22).

Upon election to the Chair of Peter on Feb. 6, 1922, however, Pius XI at once sent a signal to the state that he wished to resolve its estrangement from the Church.

He did this by making his first appearance on the exterior balcony of St. Peter’s looking out over Rome.

For the next several years both sides exchanged “feelers” regarding the possibility of reaching an accord. At last, on Feb. 11, 1929 Cardinal Gasparri, representing the pope and Benito Mussolini, representing the king, in the presence of their entourages at the Lateran Palace, affixed their signatures to a peace pact which would be called the Lateran Treaty.

The “Roman Question,” as the dispute was known, was now resolved.

According to the agreement the government of Italy would henceforth recognize Vatican City as an independent state and the pope as its sovereign ruler.

With the stroke of a pen, the Supreme Pontiff of the Church of Rome was no longer seen as the “prisoner of the Vatican.”

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