The "Donation of Pippin" in 756 provided a legal basis for the erection of the Papal States, which extended papal temporal rule beyond the traditional diocese of Rome.

In 751 the Lombards under their king Aistulf had conquered the Exarchate of Ravenna, the main seat of Byzantine government in Italy, whose Patriarch held territorial power as the representative of the Eastern Roman emperor, independent of the Pope. The Lombard Duke of Spoleto and the Lombard kings posed a threat to Roman territory and Aistulf demanded tribute from the able diplomat, Pope Zacharias, who had successfully temporized with his predecessors. Zacharius died in March 752, and after the brief pontificate of Stephen II (a matter of three days in March 752), the eventual successor, Pope Stephen III, went to meet Pippin at Quiercy-sur-Loire in 753, the first time a pope had crossed into Gaul, taking with him the recent forgery, the "Donation of Constantine," which purported to justify the bishop of Rome's territorial powers. There he presented a copy to the new king of the Franks, Pippin, who had been crowned at Soissons with Zacharias' blessing. At Quiercy the Frankish nobles finally gave their consent to a campaign in Lombardy. Roman Catholic tradition asserts that then and there Pepin executed in writing a promise to give to the Church certain territories that were not yet in fact in Pippin's control to give. No actual document has been preserved, but later 8th century sources quote from it.

Stephen now anointed Pippin at Saint-Denis in a memorable ceremony that was recalled in coronation rites of French kings to the end of the ancien regime.

In return, in 756, Pippin and his Frankish army forced the last Lombard king to surrender his conquests, and Pippin officially conferred the territories belonging to Ravenna upon the pope, laying the "Donation of Pepin" upon the tomb of Saint Peter, according to traditional later accounts. The gift included Lombard conquests in the Romagna and in the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, the Pentapolis in the Marche (the "five cities" of Rimini, Ancona, Fano, Pesaro, and Senigallia ). which for the first time made the pope a temporal ruler over a strip of territory that extended diagonally across Italy from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic. Over these extensive and mountainous territories the medieval popes were unable to exercise effective sovereignty, under the pressures of the times, and the new Papal States preserved their old Lombard heritage of many small counties and marquisates each centered upon a fortified rocca.

Pippin confirmed his Donation in Rome in 756, and in 774 Charlemagne confirmed the donation of his father.

External links

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Papal States, section 3: Collapse of the Byzantine Power in Central Italy
• Medieval Sourcebook: Annals of Lorsch