How San Marino kept the borders of 1463 by declining to grow

What the legend of Saint Marinus claims

The state dates itself to 301. According to tradition, a Christian stonemason named Marinus left the Dalmatian island of Rab for Rimini, where the emperor Diocletian had ordered the city walls rebuilt, and then fled up Monte Titano to live as a hermit and build a small church. A landowner of Rimini called Felicissima is said to have given the mountain to the community that grew up around him. The government's own history, published by the state, adds the words credited to Marinus on his deathbed, "Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine", a grant of freedom "ab utroque homine", from both men, and reads them as a release from pope and emperor alike.

None of this was written down in Marinus's lifetime. The best known version of the Vita Sancti Marini dates from the tenth century and is kept in Paris. The historian William Miller called the accounts "a mixture of fables and miracles, but perhaps contain some grains of fact", and the date of 301 remains a tradition. The foundation tale is the basis of the state's claim to be "the world's oldest surviving republic".

The documents begin later. A monk named Eugippius recorded, in writings going back to 511, that another monk lived on the mountain. Britannica cites the Liber Pontificalis naming the Castellum Sancta Marini in 755, and the oldest document in the republic's archives, from 885, mentions the abbot of San Marino. That document is the Placito Feretrano, a hearing before an imperial envoy over land disputed between the abbot and the Bishop of Montefeltro, and the government's history records that the judge found for the abbot.

Settlement on the mountain is older. The State Museum shows the remains of a hut at Poggio Castellano from the second half of the eighth century BC, found in 1997, and a rock sanctuary at Tanaccia on Titano that was in use from the fifth century BC to the first century AD. Stone worked from the mountain turns up in Roman contexts, so the quarries the legend gives Marinus were already open.

How a monastery on Titano became a commune

By the twelfth century San Marino had become a commune ruled by its own statutes and consuls, according to Britannica. The first body of government was the Arengo, an assembly of the heads of every family. As the community grew, the Arengo became too large to meet over every decision, and the state's history dates the delegation of most of its powers to a council of sixty in the fourteenth century, drawn from landowners, townsmen and peasants.

In 1243 the first two consuls were chosen, the office that became the Captains Regent, the pair who still serve as joint heads of state. The rules of the office were written against the risk of one man keeping power. Each regent holds office for six months, either can block the other, and neither may serve again until three years have passed. At the end of the term any citizen has three days to bring a complaint against the outgoing pair before a special tribunal.

The earliest statutes date from 1263. Disputes over tribute went to court. In 1291 it appealed to the Bishop of Arezzo against contribution demands from the vicar of Montefeltro, and the jurist Palamede di Rimini found that San Marino owed nothing. In 1296 the dispute went to Pope Boniface VIII, who assigned it to an abbot; the verdict is thought to have favoured San Marino, since it paid no taxes to Montefeltro afterwards.

Between the two local powers, the Malatesta of Rimini and the Montefeltro of Urbino, San Marino took the side of Urbino, and Britannica credits the protection of the Montefeltro with keeping the Malatesta out.

Why San Marino stopped growing after the Malatesta war

For most of its early history the state was the mountain. In 1320 the community of Chiesanuova chose to join, and in 1463 San Marino entered an alliance with Pope Pius II and Federico da Montefeltro against Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. When Malatesta lost, the pope gave the republic the castles of Fiorentino, Montegiardino and Serravalle, and later that year Faetano joined of its own accord.

Nothing has been added since. The government's history puts the territory settled that year at the 61 square kilometres it still covers, and states that San Marino chose to expand no further so as to remain no threat to its neighbours. That is the republic's own reading. The borders of 1463 survived everything that followed, occupations included.

Cesare Borgia held the republic in 1503, for about six months, until the new pope Julius II intervened. On 4 June 1543 Fabiano di Monte San Savino, nephew of the later Pope Julius III, set out to take it with 500 infantry and some cavalry, and the force lost its way in fog. The Sammarinese credited Saint Quirinus, whose feast fell that day, and still mark it.

After the Papal States annexed the Duchy of Urbino in 1625, San Marino was surrounded on every side by papal territory. A treaty of protection signed with Pope Clement VIII in 1602 came into force in 1631, and the Holy See confirmed the republic's independence the same year. The protection never became papal rule in practice.

The basis of the government was written down in this period. The Statutes took effect on 1 September 1600, and they are the oldest part of what is counted as San Marino's constitution. Whether they amount to one depends on the definition. The political scientist Jorri Duursma holds that "San Marino does not have an official constitution as such", and that the first legal documents naming the state's institutions were the Statutes of 1600.

How a papal legate seized the republic

Britannica dates the decline of the republic to the eighteenth century, under rule by an oligarchy and repeated attempts to fold it into the Papal States.

On 17 October 1739 Cardinal Giulio Alberoni, the papal legate of Ravenna, occupied the country with troops, imposed a new constitution and tried to make the Sammarinese submit to papal government. He was backing a group of local rebels and may have acted against the wishes of Pope Clement XII. The Sammarinese refused to cooperate and sent clandestine appeals to Rome. On 5 February 1740, three and a half months after the occupation began, the pope restored the republic's independence. The date is the feast of Saint Agatha, who became one of its patron saints.

Why the regents turned down Napoleon

The French campaign in Italy put San Marino on the line between Napoleon's new states and its long protector, the papacy. On 5 February 1797 a letter from General Louis Alexandre Berthier ordered the regents to arrest Vincenzo Ferretti, the Bishop of Rimini, who had fled into the republic, and threatened French troops if they refused. The government answered that it would do all it could. The bishop crossed the border and escaped.

One of the regents, Antonio Onofri, then won the regard of Napoleon, who wrote to Gaspard Monge, the French government's commissary for the sciences and arts in Italy, promising to guarantee the republic and to extend its territory as it needed. The state's history says Monge carried the offer to Titano in person and that it reached as far as the sea. The regents accepted the friendship and declined the land. Napoleon exempted San Marino's citizens from taxation and ordered them 1,000 quintals of wheat and four cannons; the cannons were never brought in.

Two explanations of the refusal are on record. Wikipedia's account says the regents feared retaliation from other states once the French were gone. The government's own history has Onofri declaring that San Marino was content with its borders and that more land could one day cost it its independence, and argues that the refusal saved the republic in 1815, because it did not look like a beneficiary of Napoleon's seizures. The Congress of Vienna confirmed San Marino's independence in 1815, after the Treaty of Tolentino had recognised it in 1797.

How San Marino outlasted the unification of Italy

Two more attempts to put the republic under papal rule failed, in 1825 and 1853. The government's history adds that papal and Austrian troops planned an occupation in 1854 and that Napoleon III let Pope Pius IX know an attack would be taken as an affront to France.

In 1849, after the fall of the Roman Republic, Giuseppe Garibaldi reached San Marino with what was left of his force. The number is disputed: 250 followers in Wikipedia's account, 1,500 men in the government's history. His wife Anita died near Comacchio before the refuge was reached. The government's history names Domenico Maria Belzoppi as the regent who negotiated with the Austrians to keep their troops off the territory while letting Garibaldi disband his legion on the steps of the old church and slip away. Garibaldi later promised to respect San Marino's wish to stay out of a united Italy, and in 1860 pressed Victor Emmanuel II to call off a planned annexation.

In the spring of 1861 the government wrote to Abraham Lincoln offering honorary citizenship. Lincoln accepted and replied, with his Secretary of State William H. Seward, that San Marino showed that "government founded on republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring."

The new kingdom settled the question by treaty. The Convention of Friendship and Good Neighbourliness was signed at Turin on 22 March 1862 and revised in 1872. Under its terms San Marino agreed to grow no tobacco and to open no gambling houses that could compete with Italian monopolies, and received in return the right to move goods through Italian ports without duty. In March 1877 a postal agreement let the republic issue its own stamps, which carried the Three Towers and became a source of revenue.

The late nineteenth century was also when the Sammarinese began to leave. A rising birth rate and the gap between farming and industry sent people first to seasonal work in Tuscany, Rome, Genoa and Trieste, and then, as whole families, to the United States, Argentina and Uruguay. The emigration lasted into the 1970s.

How the Arengo ended government by co-optation

Inside the republic, the state's history describes the Principal and Sovereign Council as renewing itself by co-optation, with sitting councillors choosing their successors. On 25 March 1906 the heads of family were called to an Arengo in the parish church. Of 1,477 heads of family, 805 attended, and the government's history gives the vote for an elected council as 802 of 805. A second vote on 5 May settled the first electoral law, and the first political elections in the republic's history followed on 10 June 1906, with the vote limited to men.

San Marino stayed neutral when Italy entered the First World War in May 1915. Italy suspected the republic's new radiotelegraph station could serve Austrian spies, tried to post a detachment of Carabinieri there, and cut the telephone lines when San Marino refused. Two groups of ten volunteers went to the Italian front anyway, one to fight and one to run a Red Cross field hospital, and that hospital led Austria-Hungary to suspend diplomatic relations. On 16 August 1916 an earthquake centred on Rimini brought down several houses in Serravalle.

The 1920s followed Italy's course. In June 1921 local leftists killed Carlo Bosi, an Italian doctor and Fascist sympathiser, in Serravalle, and the government asked Italy for 30 Carabinieri. The Sammarinese Fascist Party, founded in 1922, governed from 1923 to 1943. The same years brought the 31.5 kilometre electric railway to Rimini, opened in 1932 and paid for largely by Italy, according to the government's history.

What the Second World War did to San Marino

The Fascist government collapsed on 28 July 1943, three days after the fall of Mussolini's regime in Italy, and the new government declared neutrality. The party returned on 1 April 1944 and kept it.

On 26 June 1944 Allied bombers struck San Marino in four waves, in the belief that German forces were using it to store supplies and ammunition. The government's history attributes the raid to the Royal Air Force and records 63 civilian deaths. The government declared the same day that there were no military installations on its soil. Smaller raids went on until 29 August, damaging the city centre and the railway.

On 27 July 1944 a German commander from Forlì delivered a letter saying San Marino's sovereignty could not be respected if troops needed to pass through. On 31 July the government sent protests to Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Hitler and to Mussolini, and a delegation that met Mussolini came away with a promise to intercede.

When the front reached the Gothic Line in September 1944, San Marino took in more than 100,000 civilians. The resident population it took them into is given as about 15,000 in Wikipedia's account and 12,000 in the government's history. Refugees sheltered in houses, churches and the tunnels of the bombed railway. German forces entered on 13 September, Allied and German troops fought across the territory from 17 to 20 September, and the Allies stayed for two months before leaving.

How San Marino joined the international institutions

A coalition of the Sammarinese Communist Party and the Sammarinese Socialist Party governed from 1945 until 1957, having come to power by election. It fell in the Rovereta affair of 1957, when the opposition set up a provisional government in a factory building at Rovereta on the Italian border; the state's history says the republic came close to civil war. The Rimini to San Marino highway opened in 1965 with the Italian president Giuseppe Saragat present. Women gained the vote in 1960 by one account, and in two stages, partly in 1959 and fully in 1964, by the government's.

On 8 July 1974 the Great and General Council passed Law No. 59, the Declaration of Citizens' Rights, which states its intention of "rejecting fascism and any totalitarian concept of the State". One clause provides that, save for exceptions set by statute, judges cannot be San Marinese citizens.

San Marino joined the Council of Europe in 1988 and chaired it in the first half of 1990. The Communist Party dissolved in 1990 and became the Sammarinese Democratic Progressive Party, swapping the hammer and sickle for a Picasso dove. The republic entered the United Nations on 2 March 1992. In 2002 it signed an agreement with the OECD on banking and tax transparency and replaced the lira with the euro, The government's history dates its turn to financial transparency, including the end of banking secrecy, from 2008.

On 7 July 2008 UNESCO inscribed the Historic Centre and Mount Titano, 55 hectares, as "an exceptional testimony of the establishment of a representative democracy based on civic autonomy and self-governance". The same text records that the walls and the historic centre went through intensive restoration and reconstruction between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, a "medievalisation" it treats as part of the site's history.

The negotiations for an association agreement with the European Union closed in December 2023, according to the government's history, and on 16 July 2026 the Council of the European Union authorised its signature with San Marino and Andorra. The agreement brings San Marino into the single market without membership, the arrangement its own history compares to the Turin convention of 1862.