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Pope Pius VII (Italian: Pio VII; born Barnaba Niccolò Maria Luigi Chiaramonti; [a] 14 August 1742 – 20 August 1823) was head of the Catholic Church from 14 March 1800 to his death in August 1823. He ruled the Papal States from June 1800 to 17 May 1809 and again from 1814 to his death.
Aug 16, 2024 · Pius VII was an Italian pope from 1800 to 1823, whose dramatic conflicts with Napoleon led to a restoration of the church after the armies of the French Revolution had devastated the papacy under Pius VI. He became a Benedictine at Cesena in 1758 and was made cardinal and bishop of Imola, Papal.
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Pope Pius VI died in captivity, while his successor Pope Pius VII was held hostage for five years.
Between the hours of 2 and 3 on the morning of July 6, 1809, French troops under the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte scaled the walls of the gardens of the Quirinal Palace in Rome and penetrated into the part of the palace occupied by papal servants. After an hour of violent skirmishes with the Swiss guards, they arrested Pope Pius VII, spiriting him away in the night to Savona, near Genoa. He would not return to Rome for another five years.
The kidnapping was the climax of the combative relationship between the global leader of the Catholic Church and the brash Emperor. From the beginning of Pius VII’s papacy in 1800 to the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the two men were continually at loggerheads, with the French military leader regularly infuriated by the pope’s refusal to meet his demands.
Napoleon's Bloodless Coup
But it wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened: in 1796, during the French Revolutionary Wars, Napoleon's troops had invaded Rome and taken the previous pontiff, Pope Pius VI, as a prisoner to France, where he died in 1799. The following year, after the papal seat sat vacant for six months, cardinal Chiaramonti was elected to the papacy, taking the name Pius VII. But because the French had seized the papal tiaras when they had arrested Pius VI, the new pope was crowned on 21 March 1800 with a papier-mâché tiara.
Despite his desire to control Europe without rival, Napoleon understood that he needed to reach an accommodation with the all-powerful Catholic Church. In long negotiations eight years before his kidnapping, Pius VII eventually signed the Concordat of 1801, which recognized that the Church was ‘the religion of the great majority of the French people’, but simultaneously limited the size of the French clergy and bound its members tightly to the French state, which would henceforth pay their salaries. The agreement strictly constrained the pope’s authority in France, and approved of the Revolutionary government’s selling off of the Catholic Church’s vast landholdings in France.
Explore the extraordinary life and times of Napoleon Bonaparte, the great military genius who took France to unprecedented heights of power, and then brought it to its knees when his ego spun out of control.
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Pope Pius VII, born Barnaba Niccolò Maria Luigi Chiaramonti in 1742, he was the 251st leader of the Catholic Church and the seventh among that lot to take the name “Pius.” He ascended to the papacy in a tumultuous period marked by the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
PIUS VII, POPE. Pontificate: March 14, 1800, to Aug. 20, 1823; b. Barnaba Chiaramonti, Cesena (Emilia), Italy, Aug. 14, 1742. PREPAPAL CAREER. He was from an old aristocratic family with a tradition of culture. Among his ancestors were the astronomer Scipione, famous for discussing with Galileo the nature of comets; jurists; and physicians of ...
Reigned 1800-1823. Pius VII, POPE (BARNABA CHIARAMONTI), b. at Cesena in the Pontifical States, August 14, 1740; elected at Venice March 14, 1800; d. August 20, 1823. His father was Count Scipione Chiaramonti, and his mother, of the noble house of Ghini, was a lady of rare piety who in 1763 entered a convent of Carmelites at Fano.
Pius VII. 251st Pope of the Catholic Church.
