The chapter examines recent historiography on the Papal States and considers the different stages of its territorial formation, from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic era. Throughout the early modern period, the Papal States maintained their composite nature; characterized by territories with strong traditions of local government, extensive feudal powers, and by the inheritance of duchies that had belonged to dynasties that had become extinct, as happened in the cases of Ferrara and Urbino. These characteristics of the papal dominions strongly determined the nature of Roman government in the localities. Control of law and order and the financial administration, themselves synonyms of “good government,” and determining factors in maintaining the consent of those under papal authority, received expression in the adaptation of norms and practices to local conditions, as can be seen in the dense correspondence between the relevant Roman Congregations and the local officers, governors, and legates.

Nepotism is a way to organize ecclesiastical power relations, in particular those of the papacy, under the conditions of celibacy on the basis of family relations. In the long run, however, the micro-policy of family was replaced by the micro-policy of bureaucracy, the cardinal-nephew by the secretary of state. But for more than a thousand years, family networks were the most reliable foundation of papal domination. On the other hand, therefore, massive maintenance of the pope’s family interest was a necessary consequence. For some time between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman nepotism even became an established quasi-institution, halfway between loosely structured family network and neutral Church bureaucracy. The papal system of government was stabilized through circular dependency of electors and elected heads, of cardinals and popes.