Italian Peninsula
The Papal States ( ; ), officially the State of the Church (, ; ; also ""), were a series of territories in the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope from the 8th century until 1870. They were among the major states of Italy from roughly the 8th century until the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia unified the Italian Peninsula by conquest in a campaign virtually concluded in 1861 and definitively in 1870.