Vatican City

Epic card · No. 3234

Vatican City, officially the Vatican City State, is a landlocked sovereign city-state in Southern Europe. Ruled by the pope, it is an enclave within the city of Rome, Italy, and serves as the administrative center of the Catholic Church. Vatican City is governed by the Holy See, the episcopal see of the Diocese of Rome and central authority of the church worldwide, which is itself a sovereign entity under international law. Catholic theology holds that Saint Peter, an apostle of Jesus considered the first pope, was crucified on Vatican Hill in Rome during the 1st century AD. The Holy See first exercised temporal power over the Papal States, which formed on the Italian Peninsula with the donation of Frankish territory in 756. The pope returned to Rome at the end of the Avignon Papacy in 1377. Italian unification concluded with the capture of Rome by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, after which the pope declared himself a "prisoner in the Vatican". The Roman question was settled in 1929 with...

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