preVatican

PreVatican is a neologism used in speculative history and religious studies to denote the period preceding the establishment of the modern Vatican as a distinctly sovereign city-state. The term is not official within church historiography and lacks a fixed chronological boundary. In broad usage, preVatican can refer to times before the papacy acquired substantial temporal power, or to the era before the 1929 Lateran Treaty and the creation of Vatican City, depending on the context.

As a research and narrative concept, preVatican is employed mainly in alternative histories, worldbuilding, and discussions about the relationship between religious authority and political power. Some writers use it to imagine a world where the Holy See never asserted territorial sovereignty, while others reserve it for the period of the early church when ecclesiastical leadership existed without a centralized urban seat.

Impact and debates: The term is criticized for being imprecise and potentially anachronistic because ecclesiastical authority and political sovereignty developed along different lines across regions. Proponents argue that preVatican provides a useful shorthand for analyzing church-state relations before modern state structures.

See also: Papacy, Papal States, Vatican City, Lateran Treaty, Early Church.