Lateran Pacts: Treaty, Financial Convention and Concordat between the Holy See and Italy, 11 February 1929

The Lateran Pacts are the actual 1929 treaty, financial convention and concordat concluded between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy, resolving the Roman Question and establishing Vatican City as a sovereign state. As the diplomatic instrument itself, agreed and signed by both parties, it is the primary and authoritative source for the pacts' own actual legal terms. Its limit is exactly that it is the instrument itself rather than independent historical analysis, so it tells a reader precisely what the two parties agreed to but says nothing on its own about the political negotiations that preceded it, the domestic reception in Italy or the pacts' longer term significance for church state relations, all of which need a historian's independent account of the surrounding events rather than the treaty text alone.