The history of San Marino

San Marino is a republic of about 34,000 people on the slopes of Monte Titano, a limestone ridge in the Apennines some ten kilometres from the Adriatic coast at Rimini, entirely surrounded by Italy. It traces its origins to a Christian hermit community said to have been founded in 301, and it claims to be the oldest surviving republic in the world. A self-governing hill town of the Middle Ages, it outlasted the lords of Romagna, the popes, Napoleon and the unification of Italy, and kept institutions whose roots go back to the thirteenth century, including its two Captains Regent elected every six months. Today it is a wealthy state that uses the euro and is drawing closer to the European Union without joining it.

In Roman times the land around Monte Titano lay in the hinterland of Ariminum, modern Rimini, a Roman colony founded in 268 BCE at the end of the road from Rome. According to tradition, a Christian stonemason named Marinus came from the island of Rab on the Dalmatian coast, in today's Croatia, to work on the walls of Rimini under the emperor Diocletian. To escape persecution he withdrew to the mountain, built a chapel and lived as a hermit, and a landowner of Rimini, Felicissima, is said to have left the mountain to his small community. The traditional date of the founding is 301, and the feast of Saint Marinus on 3 September is the national holiday.

These stories were written down centuries later, and historians treat them as legend with perhaps some kernel of fact. The earliest firm evidence of a monastic community on Titano comes from the sixth century, when the monk Eugippius mentioned a monk living there. In the early Middle Ages the area passed from the Roman Empire to the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines and the Lombards, and then into the lands claimed by the popes.

Like many Italian hill towns, San Marino developed into a self-governing commune. Its first government was the Arengo, an assembly of the heads of each family. As the community grew, power passed to a Grand and General Council, which on 12 December 1243 elected two consuls to serve for six months, an office that later became the Captains Regent. The six-month term has never changed. The earliest written statutes also date from the thirteenth century.

The commune's main struggle was to avoid being absorbed by its powerful neighbours, the lords of Montefeltro to the south and the Malatesta of Rimini. In the 1290s it won legal rulings that it owed no taxes to Montefeltro. In 1463 San Marino sided with Pope Pius II against Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, and after Malatesta's defeat the pope rewarded it with the castles of Fiorentino, Montegiardino and Serravalle; Faetano joined of its own accord the same year. Its borders, enclosing about 61 square kilometres, have not changed since.

During the Renaissance the independence of San Marino was twice in danger. In 1503 Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, occupied it during his campaign to build a state in Romagna, but his rule collapsed after his father's death a few months later. In June 1543 a surprise attack by several hundred soldiers failed when they lost their way in a thick fog, an escape credited to Saint Quirinus, whose feast fell that day.

On 1 September 1600 the republic adopted new Statutes, the Leges Statutae, which named the Grand and General Council as the supreme authority of the state. They remain at the core of its constitution and are often described as the oldest written governing documents still in force. When the Duchy of Urbino passed to the Papal States in 1631, San Marino became an enclave entirely surrounded by papal territory, and it placed itself under the protection of the pope, while keeping its own government.

The protector proved a threat in 1739, when Cardinal Giulio Alberoni, the papal legate in Ravenna, occupied the republic with troops on 17 October and imposed a new constitution. The citizens appealed to Pope Clement XII, who restored their independence on 5 February 1740, the feast of Saint Agatha, who became a patron saint of the republic.

The French invasion of Italy in 1796 and 1797 placed San Marino between the papal lands and the new republics created by Napoleon. One of its regents, Antonio Onofri, won the general's goodwill. Napoleon promised to protect its independence and even offered to enlarge its territory. The regents declined, fearing that taking land from their neighbours would cost them later. The Congress of Vienna recognised its independence in 1815.

During the struggle for the unification of Italy, the republic sheltered refugees. In 1849, after the fall of the short-lived Roman Republic, Giuseppe Garibaldi retreated into San Marino with his wife Anita and a remnant of his followers. Garibaldi later supported San Marino's wish to stay out of the new Italian kingdom, and in 1862 the two states signed a Convention of Friendship confirming its independence. In 1861 the republic made Abraham Lincoln an honorary citizen, and Lincoln replied that it showed that republican government could be "secure and enduring". San Marino abolished the death penalty in 1865, and from 1877 it issued its own postage stamps, which became an important source of income.

By the late nineteenth century the republic was governed by a council that renewed itself by co-option and was dominated by a few families. Poverty drove many Sammarinese to emigrate. On 25 March 1906 the Arengo of family heads met again and voted for an elected council, and the first elections were held that June.

In World War I San Marino stayed neutral, which strained relations with Italy. Postwar unemployment and unrest helped the Sammarinese Fascist Party, modelled on Benito Mussolini's movement, to take power in 1923. In the 1930s its government built a railway to Rimini that opened the country to tourism; the party fell in July 1943 and briefly returned in April 1944. In World War II San Marino declared itself neutral, but in June 1944 Royal Air Force bombers attacked it, killing 63 people, in the mistaken belief that German forces were using it. As the front reached the Gothic Line, the republic sheltered around 100,000 refugees, many times its own population of about 15,000. German troops entered in September 1944 and were driven out in the Battle of San Marino on 17 to 20 September by Allied forces, chiefly the 4th Indian Division, which then occupied the country for about two months.

In 1945 a coalition of Communists and Socialists, the Committee of Freedom, won the election, making San Marino one of the first places where a Communist-led government came to power through a free vote, and the only one in Western Europe. During the Cold War the United States and Italy put economic pressure on it. The coalition held office until 1957, when defections after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution cost it its majority. In the crisis known as the Rovereta affair, the opposition formed a provisional government backed by Italy in the village of Rovereta, and both sides raised armed men before the left gave way after 22 days. The Christian Democrats then dominated Sammarinese politics for decades.

Women won the vote in 1960 and the right to hold public office in 1973, and in 1981 Maria Lea Pedini became the first woman Captain Regent. Tourism, manufacturing and banking made San Marino prosperous. It joined the Council of Europe in 1988 and the United Nations in 1992, and the Communist Party transformed itself into a democratic left party in 1990.

San Marino adopted the euro in 2002 in place of its own lira, which had been tied to the Italian one, and it has had a customs union with the European Union since 1991. From 2002, under international pressure, it agreed to greater transparency in banking and tax matters. In 2008 the historic centre and Monte Titano, with the three towers on its summit, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. A 2013 referendum on applying to join the EU won a narrow majority of votes cast but failed to reach the required turnout. A referendum in September 2021 legalised abortion, and in 2022 Paolo Rondelli became one of the Captains Regent, the first openly gay head of state in the world.

After more than a decade of negotiations, San Marino and Andorra signed an association agreement with the European Union in Brussels on 19 October 2026, giving them access to the EU single market without membership. It still requires ratification by the European Parliament and by San Marino's own Grand and General Council.