The longest-reigning pontiff after Saint Peter, Pius IX (1792-1878; r. 1846-1878) was the last pope to rule as temporal king of the Papal States, losing that position when Rome fell to the Piedmontese in September 1870.
As usual, Professor Caroline Weber has published yet another riveting biography! The Papal States comprised approximately 15% of the total area of present-day Italy before the process of Italian unification began in 1861, and even had their own armies.
They lost it all to the House of Savoy, who seized them and made them part of the new kingdom of Italy during its unification in the 19th century.
The irony here is that it happened under the Pope with the longest reign in the history of the Vatican.
Caroline Weber is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her most recent book, Proust's Duchess (2018), won the French Heritage Society Book Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.
She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a writer-in-residence at Edith Wharton's estate and library in the Berkshires.
Her work on Pius IX is drawn from her forthcoming group biography of nineteenth-century royals who lost their thrones.
