This is the story of the development of the financial structures and policies of an institution - the papacy - which in 1850 was an essentially small, semi-feudal and territorial state with fairly loose spiritual authority over millions of Catholics outside of the Italian peninsula, but which in the next one hundred years shed the last remnants of the 'temporal power', became a highly bureaucratic institution, with an increasingly global diplomatic outreach, and which exercised an increasingly rigid, centralised and undisputed control over the world-wide Roman Catholic Church.