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By Root 1423 0

nineteenth century. Monarchs viewed the pope as the preeminent spiritual leader and a fellow sovereign. The papacy had a court with cardinals, bishops, and other officials in the retinue of papal advisers, girded by wealthy aristocrats, the “black Romans” who had financial interests in the city governed by the pope. The Papal Court relied on income from the Papal States, a fiefdom dating to the eighth century that stretched from Rome up the middle of the peninsula in a sinuous northwestern curl. Clerical overseers often shared power with local gentry. Seasonal day laborers worked many of the lands; a sharecropping belt ran from the edge of Tuscany down into Umbria.16 Estates near Bologna, in the north, threw off profits from silk and tobacco; farther south, in the area around Rome, half of the population lived at the edge of destitution. Hierarchs censored the press and hired thugs to intimidate rebellious workers in quelling unrest.17 Charles Dickens, on an 1844 trip to Rome, took chilly note of the “broken temples; broken tombs. A desert of decay, somber and desolate beyond all expression.”18

To the south, Naples was ruled by a corrupt Bourbon king backed by a ruthless army. After an 1851 trip the British politician William Gladstone called the Naples monarchy “the negation of God erected into a system of government.” Gladstone’s comments had an impact on public opinion. The New York Daily Times denounced the king of Naples as “murder enthroned and crowned, the incarnated evil … the foulest and fiercest misrule that ever trampled a nation to dust.”19 America had trading ties with the Papal States, but only a vice-consul in Rome in 1847. Congress balked at formal ties with a religious state.20

In the north, Piedmont was ruled by Victor Emmanuel II, a soldier-king of reformist bent who was edging into an alliance with the prime minister of Sardinia, Count Camillo Cavour. The political architect for a united Italy, Cavour was pushing for a national currency. But integrating the monetary systems turned on geopolitical unity. In Sicily the charismatic warrior Giuseppe Garibaldi was leading forces to fight for Il Risorgimento, the unification of Italy. With troops at opposite ends of the peninsula pushing inward, the Papal States, an antique of sagging feudalism, kept losing money.

In 1832 the Rothschild bank of Paris had extended a loan to keep the papacy afloat. “Prohibited by law from owning land and kept out of the trades controlled by the guilds, the Jews found in finance and money-lending the only economic path to prosperity open to them,” writes historian David I. Kertzer.21 The Rothschilds wanted Jews freed from ghettos. In Pio Nono, they sized up a reformer they hoped would ease the harsh treatment of Jews.

The Venetian Republic had confined Jews to a ghetto in 1517. In 1555 Paul IV ordered Jewish segregation in cities he ruled. “For an extreme ascetic like him,” explains historian James Carroll, “there was only one thing to do, which was to impose order in every way he could … Oppose Protestants outside the Church, impose discipline within the Church. But especially, convert the Jews.”22

In 1848 Pio Nono agreed to a Papal States constitution with an elected chamber. But when Austrian forces headed south to seize a swath of the Italian peninsula, the pope, hoping to avoid war with a Catholic country, admonished people to be loyal to their princes. Garibaldi and others assembled an army to fight for a unified Italy. The economy heaved; the pope’s prime minister was stabbed to death. As Garibaldi’s troops captured Rome, the pope escaped in disguise as an ordinary priest, by carriage, to Gaeta, a fortress near Naples.

Pio Nono’s hostility to Risorgimento was a huge roadblock to an Italian resolution. The peninsula was riven by dialects and area conflicts such that a national identity like France’s was a distant goal. Regional leaders wanted to unite behind the pope as a spiritual sovereign, with governing power in a prime minister and a parliament. Demanding that Rome be his to govern, Pio Nono slammed negotiations