Prisoner Of The Vatican: The Popes' Secret Plot To Capture Rome From The New Italian State

by David I. Kertzer

Draws on previously unknown documents from the Vatican archives to detail a late-nineteenth-century plot on the part of Pope Pius IX and his successor, Leo XIII, to block the unification of Italy and to seize control of Rome and the Papal States, in a colorful history marked by such key individuals as the two pontiffs, Italy's national hero Garibaldi, King Victor Emmanuel, and France's Napoleon III.

Genres: History, Religion, Italy, Nonfiction, European History, Christianity, Catholic

357 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

David Israel Kertzer is an American anthropologist, historian, and academic, specializing in the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy. He is the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University.

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Italy’s Risorgimento had winners and losers. It may be that the Catholic Church was the biggest loser of all – or at least that is what popes Pius IX and Leo XIII thought.

David Kertzer hits it out of the park again, with a highly readable account of the low grade civil war waged by the popes against the new country of Italy. It seemed to me that the Vatican fared well with the arrangement, the revenue from their former lands (now part of the country) would be paid to it by the government and the Vatican would be its own political territory. Pius, and then Leo, wanted the lands and the “temporal” power previously held by popes. It appears that the people living in those lands, and elsewhere in Italy, wanted a secular government.

It was a what we call today a "cold war". Kertzer shows the elements of this war: international and domestic diplomacy, symbols and citizen demonstrations. The King of Italy showed willingness to bend, but as a monarchy it was under threat not just from the Vatican, but also from anti-royalists.

An important element in the survival of the new country of Italy was the turmoil elsewhere in Europe. Neither pope, Pius IX or Leo XIII, was able to significantly rouse other countries to its cause. Both popes threatened to leave Italy, but neither was able to find a solid welcome elsewhere. Both considered themselves “Prisoners” of the Vatican, and neither left it once Italy was formed.

The Epilogue draws a bead to the pains of Italy’s founding to fascism. When you understand this background, you can see how easy and advantageous it was for Mussolini to manipulate the church and the royal family. The Lateran Pacts gave the clergy almost everything they wanted but the papal lands. Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe shows the moral compromises this entailed.

While there is a lot more to explore, this book helped provide the missing pieces (in my brain) about the Risorgimento.

I highly recommend this book as well as Kertzer’s The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe and the aforementioned Mussolini book.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Working in circuitous fashion David Kertzer is producing a comprehensive history of Vatican diplomacy from the creation of the Roman Republic in 1849 ("The Pope who would be King", 2018) to the Lateran Accords of 1929 ("The Pope and Mussolini"). The "Prisoner of the Vatican" published in 2004 covers the pontificates of Pius IX (1846 to 1878) and Leo XIII (1878 to 1903). The whole of this series is much greater than the sum of its parts. Together these three works allow the reader to make sense of the Vatican's otherwise loopy foreign policy for a hundred year period from 1840 to 1940 and even more twisted relationship with the various branches of the church outside of Italy. The problem is that the titles and blurbs on the jacket consistently misrepresent what is in the individual volumes.

After losing all of his territory to the Kingdom of Italy except an enclave in Rome in 1859, Pius IX adopted a policy that would be maintained until the Lateran Accords of 1929 of waiting out the occupier. The Army of Revolutionary France had seized the Papal States in the 1790's but the Papal Sates were restored in 1814. Similarly, Garibaldi captured the Papal States in 1849 forming the Roman Republic only to see the French invade the following year and restore the territory to the Pope. Common sense seemed to indicate then that sooner or later another Catholic country would restore the Pope to this throne.

In 1870, Pius IX declared democracy, religious freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of the press to be sinful. Catholics in Italy were ordered to neither vote nor stand for election. At the same time he instructed his Cardinals in democratic countries to lobby their national governments to support the restoration of the Papal States to the Pope using the threat that if they did not do so the Catholic voters would be encouraged to support other parties. With the exception of France, this approach was generally disliked by the Cardinals who felt that it interfered with their pastoral role and was bad for the public image of the Church.

Neither Pius IX nor Leo XIII who succeeded him could have carried less about the faithful outside of Italy. They felt that the national churches should serve Rome and that Rome need not concern itself with the problems of the national churches. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Vatican had made no move to reach any compromise with the Kingdom of Italy.

Kertzer does a superb job of restraining his personal dislike of Pius IX and Leo XIII who vigorously maintained all the medieval restrictions on Jews at a time when the constitution of Italy accorded full civil rights to Jews. His book describes a series of incidents in which the anti-clerical partisans of the Kingdom of Italy appear to gratuitously provoke the Pope. In part, Kertzer's approach is dictated by his sources. The political and intellectual class of the Kingdom really were provoking the Pope. The provocation from the Catholic side was originating at the Parish level as Italian priests often chose to insult the liberals that they encountered in their communities which is not something that would have emerged from the archives that Kertzer consulted. On balance, however, Kertzer must be considered a fair commentator rather than one who was simply presenting what his sources revealed.

The thing that seems to have riled many GR readers is that while publisher's dust-jacket promises an expose of "the Pope's secret plot to capture Rome from the new Italian state", no such plot existed and Kertzer provides no evidence to suggest that it did. My GR colleagues are quite right to be annoyed as indeed the book's contents are severely misrepresented.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nationalism, democracy, liberalism, even freedom (except for his own) were ideas that Pope Pius IX despised, at least after 1870 when the Italian Kingdom was substantially completed by the conquest of Rome. From that time he proclaimed himself to be a prisoner who could not leave the confines of a tiny region a bit larger than what is now known as Vatican City. In fact, he was a prisoner only in his own mind. The Italian government, if not the Roman people, would have loved to have him visit other sites in Rome, but like a spoiled child he insisted that he coudn’t be in a region of Italy that he didn’t rule. The government even offered a much larger microstate centered on the Vatican, but that wouldn’t do, he had to have it all.

This self-imposed imprisonment of Pius and his successors, lasting from 1870 until 1929, is Kertzer’s focus: how it was developed, maintained and ended.

I was a little surprised to learn the extent to which the Popes aggravated European diplomacy during this Vatican captivity. The only means to their desired end was to bring about a general European war to restore the Papal kingdom. So they repeatedly begged the French, Austrians and even Protestant Germans to do their fighting for them.

I was even more surprised at circumstances that resolved the situation. The Popes could not accept Italian rule of Italy until it was dominated by Fascists. Democracy was a no-no, but Fascism was fine.

This volume has left me anxious to read Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable. All the various strategies, employed by the Catholic Church to maintain or regain its grip on its vassal states in the the nineteenth century. In the beginning the Church was born out of a mission to spread christianity, a spiritual endeavour. As an organization it accumulated wealth, political power, led armies and could decide about the well being of millions. During the period of the creation of the italian state the Vatican was trying to get foreign nations to send troops to retake the papal states and Rome for the Pope. Power had become the primary consideration for the popes , religion and faith were weaponized to pursue that goal. Reading this book made me aware of the sources of permanent tensions between the Catholic Church and the state of Italy and the complex nature of this religious organization which is also a state with its own diplomatic corps.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that made me think "how on Earth could I have not known anything about this?" The book is not served well by the title which makes one think of a cheesy conspiracy novel (the subtitle on my copy is "the Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State."). I found this fascinating. There are two main (lots of others) groups of protagonists--The Pope/the "intransigents"/and the Catholic clergy and laity and the Italian nationalists/anticlerics. Italian nationalists believed that a unified Italy could not and should not exist without Rome as its capital. The Pope believed that the safety and freedom of the Church depended on it keeping its temporal power and property. The "intransigents" were those who refused any compromise with the Italian state insisting that the Italian government give the Pope and the church everything that had been taken. the anti-clerics were those who wanted to end the Church's dominance altogether. When Italian forces came into Rome, while still guaranteeing the Church income and security, the Pope saw it as an attack on the Church itself. He insisted that he was being held as a "Prisoner of the Vatican" and did not leave it for the rest of his life. Nor did subsequent popes until 1929--almost 59 years since the last Pope had left its gates.

During those decades plots and counter-plots multiplied with different European countries playing off the fears of the church against the fears of its allies and enemies. No one wanted to offer the Pope haven should he finally decide to leave Rome because they feared being embroiled in a war with Italy or provoking the suspicion or envy of other powers. Meanwhile, the Pope kept trying to incite war between Italy and just about anyone since he knew that if one of the countries invaded Italy, they were sure to give the Pope back the Church's land and his temporal power. He also tried to provoke the Catholic masses in the European countries to protest his situation and to put pressure on their governments.

Both sides feared the political radicals--that was the only thing they had in common. The Italian King feared the anti-clerics since many of them were anti-monarchy as well. So he walked a fine line in trying to make use of their anger towards the church.

Really interesting.

[David Eppenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful history of the Church in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After reading this book you come to understand that the Church's inability to comprehend contemporary ideas and technology is probably a matter of policy rather than profound ineptitude.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

David L. Kertzer was a well respected academic writing about the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy until 1997 when he published 'The Kidnapping of Eduardo Mortara' (if the name Mortara means nothing to you then please Goggle it. If I were to begin explaining there were be no room for my review of this book) and found himself a 'popular' historian as well (let me be clear that Mr. Kertzer always wrote with admirably before and since that book). But whether by intention or by fate the success of 'The Kidnapping of Eduardo Mortara' led Mr. Kertzer to write two further books, this one and 'The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe' dealing with Pope Pius IX the last pope to rule the Papal States before they were incorporated into united Italy under the Savoyard Monarchs.

It is likely that the idea that there might be one, let alone three, interesting and important books about the last sovereign ruler of the papal states is unimaginable to most people. Indeed the unification of Italy in the 19th is probably a period which most UK and US readers know nothing about. But it is surprising how interconnected the Papacy and Italian unification was and how relevant the failure of Pope Pius IX and his successors to engage with the changes of the 19th are relevant to how the catholic church in the 20th century has failed in its dealings Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany - about which Kertzer has also written brilliant and important books.

There are plenty of people who don't like what Kertzer has written but I have yet to read any refutation of what he says because Kertzer is one of the most knowledgeable users of the now almost completely open Vatican archives. He has demolished more myths and shibboleths about the history of the Catholic Church in the modern era than anyone else. None of his books deal with a period later than WWII but the history of the church he presents makes the scandals that overwhelmed the church at the end of 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries comprehensible.

Because I went to school in Ireland in the 1970s (and it should not be taken that what I was taught bears any relation to what history is now taught in Ireland) the unification of Italy and Germany, the 'Ausgleich' which lead to creation of Austria-Hungary, were all studied along with other national revivals that contributed to the outbreak of WWI because it was seen as a prelude to the 'rebirth' of Ireland. That the history of the Catholic Church was inextricably bound up in the unification of Italy meant that this history was not a curiosity but of obvious relevance. Of course it was only later that I came to understand that these subjects were not simply peripheral but unknown to most others.

But the mind set that created the circumstances of the 'myth' of the pope as 'prisoner of the Vatican' is essential to understanding so much of the conflict that still rages at the heart of the Catholic Church today. Pope Pius IX, a man who might not have been evil but, if you read any of Kertzer's books, comes across as a deeply unpleasant man. Yet in 2000 pope John Paul II beatified Pius IX at the same time as John XXIII (see my footnote *1 below)

The story in this book is how Pius IX refused to accept the loss of temporal power and how he and his successor, Leo XIII, tried to engineer great powers like France and Austria-Hungary intervening to 'restore' his power. Papal power was restored after Napoleon's defeat and after 1848 largely by French and Austrian troops. The problem was that not only had the situation changed but both France and Austria were understandably cautious. Pius IX had not been grateful for the help previously received (there is a great deal about this in Kertzer's 'The Pope Who Would be King).

Although the new Italian state was very keen to come accommodation with the Pope (and it will probably surprise many how much what the Lateran Treaty of 1929 granted was already on offer in 1870) the Pope refused to discuss anything except the restoration of the papal states and declared himself a 'prisoner' in the Vatican. It was completely untrue. He was a prisoner of his own arrogance.

I am not sure that I have done this wonderful book justice. It isn't popular history but it is well written and readable in academic history. It is also one of the few up-to-date books in English on the Catholic Church and Italy in the 19th century. The roots of so much of today are in the past and even English speaking catholics in the UK, USA and even Ireland don't realise this.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough.





*1 Beatification is one step below sainthood. John XXIII was the pope who called Vatican II into existence and the changes and reforms of Vatican II finally discarded most, but not all, the trappings of the 'unchanging' but really sclerotic catholic church as handed down since Pius IX.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book very interesting and informative about the creation of the Italian State, and its struggle with the Popes who still wanted temporal power over Rome and the Papal States. The book primarily deals with the long reigns of Pius IX and Leo XIII. At the end I wanted more, and expected more on the Papacy leading up to the Lateran Pacts (discussed in an Epilogue). Kertzer's subsequent book on the Popes and Mussolini will I hope cover the rest of the story.

I must say, however, that the title massively oversells the book. There was no "secret plot" as far as I can tell from the book. For this reason below, I reduced my review from 4 to 3 stars. This may not be entirely fair (it could be due to the publisher, not the author) but so be it. Instead of a "secret plot," the Popes openly refused to recognize the Italian state, declared themselves "prisoners of the Vatican," and appealed to foreign powers to restore Rome and the Papal states to them. Leo XIII also threatened repeatedly to leave Rome for foreign shores, but never did. That is it. The Epilogue makes some interesting observations that the Church ultimately prevailed over the founders of the Italian state.

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book because it was not like reading a text book, it was interesting! Non-fiction can be tedious to read (dry) at times, so generally I take what I can from them and don’t worry about the parts my brain doesn't want to absorb – no matter how interesting it may be. In this case, I feel like I absorbed much more than I discarded.

I've been to Italy quite a few times, so I really enjoyed putting “Umberto” “Emmanuelle” “Cavour” “Garibaldi” “XX September” into context. I've seen the names and dates in a zillion piazzas and monuments and street names and metro stops, so it’s nice to learn a little more about them. We’ll see how much I retained next time I am in Italy! Will I think: “I know that name! but why?” or will I turn my husband and bore him with all the details I leaned?

I was dissapointed that the Lateran Treaty was just a blip in the epilogue, I think that ties in rather significantly with this slice of Italian history so I'm surprised the author didn't elaborate a bit more.

[David R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kertzer's narrative has a melodramatic title, but it is a good read. The story concerns the obstinate refusal of a series of Popes to accept a new political reality on the ground in Italy in the late 19th Century. The characters are given real depth and we are left with little questions about Italian politics of the time. I wish the book had given more credence to the strengths of some of these Popes as leaders of the church instead of merely political actors.

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was a boy I read the classical Italian children’s book “Cuore” by Edmondo de Amicis. It is a series of stories told by a XIX century schoolboy and his set of friends. There’s good boys and bad boys, and supportive teachers who help them cope with adolescence. What there wasn’t was priests. I found that surprising, this being XIX century Italy and all. Kertzer’s Prisoner of the Vatican explains why. It also explains many things about Italy. It explains the difficulty it had coming together as a state, its enduring weakness compared to neighbors which as France and Germany. Its lesser legitimacy in the eyes of some of its citizens. The greater scope for illegality vis a vis other rich countries. It explains how Mussolini came to power. It also explains the links between Vatican finances and illegality.

The story begins with hopes. The hopes of youthful and charismatic pope Pius IX who, after centuries of struggle between the Church and modernity, took some steps to bring it into the XIX century. It was not to be. Pius was also the sovereign of a small, province sized government, the Papal States, the last remnant of the pretended Donation of Constantine, centering on Rome, the Eternal City. The Italian population, not barring Rome, was in a revolutionary ferment subsequent to the creation of various liberal states in Italy during the Napoleonic era. These nationalistic hopes coalesced around the the Savoy dynasty in Piedmont, in the North, but they reached all the way down to Sicily. Pius’s Papal States where in the way. The pope was chased out of his dominion during the 1848 revolutions and he returned at the back of a French army. Afterwards, his temporal domain shrank as the Italian state advanced and he only kept Rome because he had a French army to support him. When the French faced the Germans in Sedan in 1870, and lost, France was embroiled in chaos that culminated with the Commune and the massacre of thousands of revolutionaries by the army and the conservatives, to prevent another 1793. So the French withdrew and Pius was left by himself.

Thus, on September 20, 1870 the Italian army took Rome and pope Pius declared himself a prisoner of the Vatican. Thus began the Roman question, a thorny dilemma that beleaguered Popes and Italian leaders for nearly 60 years: how to ensure the Pope and the Church his autonomy as spiritual leader while taking away his physical kingdom and thus his independence. The first impact was financial: the Pope lost the taxes on the Papal States and thus depended entirely on donations and some assets that hadn’t been confiscated. The Secretary of State, cardinal Antonelli, who wasn’t even a priest and apparently lacked a sterling character, obtained financing from dubious sources, much of which seems to have vanished into his own capacious pockets. The Pope refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Italian state. He refused to bless civic events and to allow his bishops and priests to participate in civic life. He forbade Catholics to vote or to run for office, effectively giving power to anticlerical “liberals”, in fact religion-hating patriotic conservatives. He delegitimized the Italian state and encouraged marginality. This call was particularly successful in the South, which was subject to military occupation because elites still pined after the exiled Bourbon king. Italy’s birth was hard. There was no common language (the Piedmont rulers spoke French and each region had its own language, which wasn’t a dialect of standard Italian, but rather a direct descendant of Latin, as acceptable as the Florentine dialect that became the standard). The Church, which could have provided a sense of commonality, rejected the new state and refused to engage with it.

This explains why in the book Cuore the hero is a teacher from a state-run school and there are no priests nor any religious references: because it is a patriotic book and the clergy were, at that time, antipatriotic. It also explains how Mussolini came to power. By not engaging with the state, Catholics ceded the representation of the lower classes to socialists and anarchists. Only in 1919 Pope Benedict XV (who also figures in this book as a young man) allowed the creation of a Catholic party (the Partito Popolare, by the talented organizer Don Luigi Sturzo), and by then it was too late: the Liberals were sinking into senectude after 50 years of power: their leader Giolitti was in his 80s, the emerging force were the Socialists and the Fascists were at the door. The Gordian knot of the Roman Question was cut in 1929 by Mussolini, who had no scruples and knew that the best possible partner would be the Vatican. Similar “National-Catholic” forces were tapped by Franco and the falangists during the Civil War and afterwards. So the legitimacy the Church withdrew from a flawed but mostly democratic state, it then lavished on a violent dictatorship that would lead Italy into disaster.

Although one may hardly accuse Kertzer of sympathy towards the Church, this book is exceptionally well researched, it is full of primary sources and it shows a learned and astute historical approach. It does lag at times, when it shows in excruciating detail the manifold attempts of the Popes to hurt the international relations of the Italian state (the Pope was in league with the French republicans, who were much more to the left than the Italian government he decried as Godless) and the constant attempts to flee abroad with the intent of provoking an international conflict that would bring the Italian state down and allow the papacy to reestablish control over Rome and its surroundings. Not a pretty story. In fact, Leo XIII sought support against a Catholic king (the government was anticlerical, that is true) from Republican France and Protestant Germany!

Neither Pius IX not Leo XIII (a pope with remarkably good press among progressives because of his 1893 encyclical Rerum Novarum) come out particularly well in this story: irritating, unrealistic, contradictory, one must see that they were in an impossible situation, as absolute spiritual monarchs who yet were physically subject to a hostile government. In fact prime minister Crispi offered the papacy a better deal than Mussolini in 1929. Crispi offered them the Leonine City, which is larger than the Vatican state. But Mussolini sweetened the deal with an indemnification for lost assets and income that served as the seed for the IOR, the official name of the Vatican Bank, a story that began in darkness and corruption and there it remains until today.

The book also deals with some spiritual issues, such as the unfinished Vatican I Council (which the church fathers abandoned when the city was invaded by the Italian forces) that proclaimed the papal infallibility doctrine (it shows in passing that this was approved by Italian bishops who, collectively, represented much less people than German and other bishops who opposed it). The book also refers to an alleged conspiracy by intransigent clerics and their followers to murder Church moderates and mentions several supposed victims of poisoning. This brings us into the territory of Umberto Eco’s Cemetery of Prague, one of his lesser works but as amusing as all his fiction. In fact, the whole book is full of conspiracies but real and imagined, rather like in Eco’s Number Zero. So truth is stranger than fiction.

Overall Kertzer has plumbed depths not explored before in English. He deserves credit for this.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a few chapters that could have been condensed and combined...but in the end, this is a fascinating in-depth look at an event where the circumstances aren't as well known as everyone might believe them to be. If you're looking for a book that definitely shows one of the breaks between the ancient world and the modern, then this is your read.

[Sarah Bringhurst Familia · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuele, and the rest fashioned the state of Italy out of an assortment of kingdoms and duchies on the peninsula, the Papal States (ruled by the Catholic Church) were among the annexed territories. For the next several decades, the Pope schemed and intrigued against the newly united Kingdom of Italy to regain his lost "temporal" power. His most potent weapon was his oft-repeated threat to exile himself from Rome, with the intent of soon returning at the head of a victorious foreign army. This book tells the story of the Pope's efforts, in often excruciating detail. Kertzer sticks to his copious historical documents, rarely intruding on the story with much analysis or context, both of which I would have appreciated a bit more of. His final thesis is presented only in a few short pages of Epilogue. Perhaps if the Pope had actually managed to carry off one of these dastardly plots (rather than just endlessly vacillating about them), Kertzer's story would have been improved. This book seemed a lot longer than 300 pages, but if you have an absolute fascination with the Papacy, Italian unification, or Rome, you might find it worth the slog.

[Dan Agbese · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read. I could not stop reading from the first page to the very last page. Fascinating, absorbing and outstandingly informative. I now know something about the popes and the Italians and the world they collectively shaped. The book is almost everything I have always thought of the Roman Catholic Church.and it’s power. Not exactly positive.
I wish I could give it ten stars.

[Susan Weintrob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a fan of this author having read an earlier histor of Edgardo Martara kidnapping from his Jewish parents by the Vatican, hidden away for years and ordained as a priest. Created an international outrage and also added to the doing away with the absolute power of the papacy, including over the Jews. This current book is also an eye opener and his research and analysis are superb.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

An unnecessary book with great bias.

[Steve Schmitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally, I finished, and now I know a lot more about Italy's history than I ever thought I would. I picked up this book because the title sounded interesting, and being a former Catholic I thought I would enjoy getting to learn a little more about the papacy and it's history. Surprisingly, I did enjoy it. I learned a lot about when the popes decided they were infallible. I learned a lot about how the popes thought they needed to rule Rome not only spiritually but civically. I learned a lot about how politics and religions have basically always played a game of cat and mouse, with both of them taking turns as the predator and they prey.

This book was a lot though. It was slow in places, it was drawn out in places, and it gave so many facts with names and dates that its hard to remember who is who at times. Still, the main figures from Pope Pius IX and Leo XIII to the Italian Kings and Prime Ministers are easy to remember and follow. If only they didn't have dozens of people behind the scenes pulling strings. Those are the folks who made a lot of the actual decisions and who's names are largely lost to history.

After reading this I don't have any desire to read more about Italy's history, but it is good to know how they got to the republic that they are today. There is no monarchy anymore and even though that's what they wanted in 1860, today they are more than happy to celebrate the Pope as their only true sovereign. It's a weird turn of events that could happen elsewhere and might already have started.

[Bob H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work continues a story Mr. Kertzer began in a later work, The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe. Here, in 1870, Pope Pius IX, no longer ruler of the Papal States, is self-confined inside the Vatican, amid a secular, newly-unified Italy. The book is intriguing, unexpectedly so, for the new Kingdom of Italy is somewhat fragile and the papacy, under Pius IX and his successor Leo XIII, are plotting to restore papal rule over central Italy or otherwise break the new kingdom, either by refusing to officially recognize the new state, or by removing the papacy somewhere else, or by trying to trigger a war between Italy and France or Austria, or by making overtures to Kaiser Wilhelm II, of all people.

All this intrigue goes on year after year through the end of the 19th Century, in a Rome whose people can be surprisingly anti-clerical -- Kertzer devotes a chapter to a controversial and provocative statue of the martyred philosopher Giordano Bruno, erected in 1889 on the site of his execution by the papacy. Those readers who visited Rome and saw this brooding statue in the Campo dei Fiori might not realize that the statue itself was a historical event in its own right.

Highly recommend.

[Ernie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched book on Pope Pius IX and Leo XIII struggle against the new Italian State of the 19th and early 20th century. It does get a little bogged down with details but it never was boring to me. Towards the end it briefly touches on Mussolini and the church, which was really interesting but it was more of a preview for other books. I wasn’t planning on reading another book on this topic but might have to change that.

[Lorraine Tosiello · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exhaustive and engrossing review of the machinations of two Popes, and the Kings, Emperors and Prime Minsters they played against one another, in their (failed) attempt to reverse the course of history during the Italian Unification. Using archives from the Vatican which had been sealed for 100 years, Kertzer takes no sides in the discussion, revealing the subterfuge and motivations on all sides.

[Jay Phillippi · Rating 3 out of 5]

An in-depth look at a crucial time in the history of both the church in Rome and the Italian state. A pope and a king caught by forces they did not understand and in a conflict neither wanted. An interesting read.

[Måns Sunesson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative and interesting read about a neglected and somewhat overlooked part of Italian and European history. Even though I had some prior knowledge of the topic, most of the book's content was new to me. A great read!

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a slog, since it depends so heavily on details of newspaper accounts and diplomatic correspondence, but a thoroughly engaging story of the fight between the Kingdom of Italy and the Bishop of Rome.

[Mark Jr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

He did his homework, and his writing style is totally fine; but the story didn't live up to the dramatic promise. The arc of it all was obvious once the conflict was set up. And I'll confess I had trouble following all the many Italian and other European details. I simply didn't enjoy this book.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a remarkable eye-opener as to how I had under-appreciated both the position of the Vatican and Papal States during Italy's unification, and the consequences it had on Italians' recognition of national history.

[Anjalica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not what I expected. Allot of history. This book has allot of information and it was a worth read.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed history, it explains a lot I never knew about my Italian Catholic heritage, and why I never knew it.

[ಥ_ಥ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written. The Catholic Church has an insane history.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than I expected. Tracks on a little bit but valuable insight and actually readable.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was really interesting and it definitely changed my understanding of Italy and the Vatican.