The Principality of Benevento was a principality in Italy created by Napoleon after he became King of Italy in 1805. Its territory mostly coincided with that of the Duchy of Benevento, a papal enclave within the Kingdom of Naples.Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London: Routledge, 1991), 72–75Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 95–98. In addition to the capital city of Benevento, it included a contado subdivided into 12 centers: Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Motta, Panelli, Pastene, Maccabei, Bagnara, Montorso, Maccoli, Perillo, Sciarra, San Leucio del Sannio, San Marco ai Monti.Giuseppe Galasso, Il Mezzogiorno nella storia d’Italia (Florence: Le Monnier, 1982), 289–292.
The principality was created by Napoleon for his chief diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. It was nominally sovereign, but the prince did have to take an oath to the king.Adam Zamoyski, Napoleon: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 413–415Philip G. Dwyer, Napoleon and Europe (London: Routledge, 2001), 83–85.
The principality was short-lived. Talleyrand was never to settle down and actually rule his new principality.Duff Cooper, Talleyrand (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), 187–189Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Talleyrand: Le prince immobile (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 312–316. In 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars, the town was ceded back to the Papal States.Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna 1814–1815 (London: Routledge, 2013), 168–170Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 401–403.
In 1860, it joined Pontecorvo, the other southern Italian papal exclave, in being united with the new Kingdom of Italy.Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 47–49Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London: Longman, 1996), 9–12.
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