So, dumb question: what exactly is a Papal State?
Basically large chunks of central Italy, where the Papacy ruled as a “secular” authority, collecting taxes, maintaining an army, etc. - Vatican City is the modern day remnant.
Thanks, Tamerlane!
With that established, are there candidates for worse-governed states in 16th-century Europe? UDS suggested Ireland, under British rule. Any others?
Well, in 1557, Spain was the first country to declare bankruptcy. It did it again in 1560, 1575, and 1596. In 1598, the mentally retarded Tsar of Russia died without an heir, setting off a 15 year civil war and leading to a Polish invasion. In Scotland, the reformation led to a situation where the majority of the Scottish Calvinist lords rebelled against the Catholic queen, leading to her overthrow. In Munster, radical Anabaptists siezed the city from the archbishop and ruled for 18 months, in a fairly insane, reign of terror manner (the city’s ruler, who claimed to be the messiah, publicly beheaded one of his sixteen wives himself in the marketplace.), and Germany in general was in the middle of religious war and rebellion.
Compared to that, the Papal States weren’t that badly governed. They were in some wars, and Rome itself was sacked by the Holy Roman Empire in 1527, doing massive damage, but other than that, not really.
Oh, that’s just one of those euphemisms Commies use – like, “Papal’s Democratic Popular Republican State of Tyrannistan.”
a better question is, how well governed was the rest of Italy in 18th and 19th centuries? Italy remained a very poor place even into 1950s, e.g. as reflected by Arthur Miller’s “View from the Bridge” about illegal Italian immigrants. In Sicily and southern Italy 19th century governance governance must have been so stellar that the mafia ran the place until Mussolini (maybe even until today, depends on who you ask).
Well, we’re talking about the 16th Century – tail end of the Italian Renaissance, when Italy, at least to the north of the Papal States, had some rich and thriving states. How well-governed those were is a more complicated question – the republics were often turbulent and the principalities were often oppressive – Machiavelli mostly just described what he saw.
That part was officially under Spanish rule (Kingdom of Aragon-Dos Sicilias) since before the Renaissance until the time Italy got unified. It’s one of the reasons there are so many Italian lastnames in Argentina: lots of people fleeing the unification headed there.
So many of the problems there were part of the problems of “Spain”, which had quite a few as has been pointed out. Same lousy rulers doing their best to ignore local traditions and laws, for starters.
Machiavelli on ecclesiastical principalities (such as the Papal States):
Well, no doubt this Machiavelli was yet another RCC-bashing Protestant. 
Close, but not quite. It was lost in the War of the Spanish Succession by 1720 and regained ( minus Sardinia ) in the War of Polish Succession about 14 years later. However the lines were split - as a result of the 1738 Treaty of Vienna the crowns of Naples and Sicily ( and later the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ) were to be separate from the crown of Spain. So it was abdicated by Charles VII in 1759 when he became Charles III of Spain in favor of his younger son Ferdinand and was subsequently ( Napoleon aside ) ruled by a cadet branch of the Bourbons until it was conquered in 1861 and merged into Italy.
Appreciate the correction, thanks. But you speak of “the crowns of Naples and Sicily (and later the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies)” as if they’re different things. What little I scrounged on the subject equates “Two Sicilies” to “Naples and Sicily”. The two areas got acquired at different times, but so were the other bits and pieces that made up Aragon-Two Sicilies. Is that correct, and your “later” refers to the two acquisitions being merged into a single domain, or is there a geographical difference as well as a political one between “Two Sicilies” and “Naples and Sicily”?
Yeah, they’re essentially identical, just different names.
The Two Sicilies ultimately have their origins all the way back to the Sicilan Vespers in 1282, when the Aragonese first became entangled in Italian politics and were basically offered the island of Sicily by anti-French rebels. So the kingdom in Sicily became de facto divided in two - the Aragonese on the island and the Angevins on the mainland and the claims remained unsettled until 1373. But even after that both states simultaneously held the identical title of “King of Sicily” - the “Kingdom of Naples” was initially just a shorthand for the mainland half. These two halves were then ( after numerous wars and assorted vissicitudes ) finally definitively reunited under Spanish rule in 1559, but as distinct crowns - i.e. Naples( also called the Kingdon of peninsular Sicily )/Sicily ( “Naples” ) and island Sicily/Sicily (“Sicily” ). Just as, for example, the Kingdom of Aragon actually also included at times the seperate titles of the Kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia, Majorca and Sardina and Corsica.
So in 1816, in the wake of the re-aquisition of his terriories from Napoleon’s puppet regime, Ferdinand, formerly ‘King of Naples and Sicily’, combined the two titles into one and became ‘King of the Two Sicilies’. This also conveniently allowed him to abolish the former consitutions and write a new one for his “new” kingdom.
And none of the above ever formally included Sardinia, though it is often so represented on historical maps under Spanish rule. As above it was techically a seperate kingdom as well and had never been part of the original medieval Kingdom of Sicily as created by the de’Hauteville dynasty.
I’m flashing on “Duke Pasquale’s Ring,” one of Avram Davidson’s stories of The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, set in The Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania (modeled on the Austro-Hungarian Empire) during the 19th Century. A main character is D. Cosimo Damiano, former tutor of Eszterhazy in calligraphy, Italian and advanced algebra. Cosimo, a poor and well-bred and very eccentric old gentleman, descended from the fourth marriage-bed of one Duke Pasquale, is unshakeably convinced that he is the rightful King of the Single Sicily – which, in his view, reverted to the status of an independent kingdom after Naples became part of the new Kingdom of Italy.
And all this includes several centuries when “Spain” was a personal union between the Crowns of Aragon, Castille and Navarre. This place ain’t a country, it’s a puzzle box!