Over the course of the 8th century, Rome finally became what papal apologists (medieval and modern) claimed it had been centuries earlier: an effectively autonomous polity ruled by popes and administered by bureaucrats and functionaries employed by the Church. After a lengthy gestation period stretching back into the 7th century, this papal “Republic of the Romans” (respublica Romanorum) matured in the second half of the 8th, under Frankish protection, and flourished into the later 9th. It comprised the city itself and a surrounding territory, roughly coextensive with the modern region of Lazio, that fell under direct Roman jurisdiction. During the century and more of the papal Republic’s apogee, the popes claimed, and flaunted, privileges and prerogatives previously reserved to Romano-Byzantine emperors, becoming in the process the first sovereign rulers to reside stably in Rome since the 5th-century emperors. Only at this point does it finally become proper to speak of a ‘papal’ Rome where the Church, led by the popes, was the dominant force in shaping the cityscape (Fig. 4.1).