Piedmont-Sardinia (1879: Agreement)

The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (Italian:Regno di Piemonte-Sardinia), commonly known as Piedmont-Sardinia is a country located in south-central Europe.It is bordered to the north by Switzerland, to the south by the Mediterrean Sea, to the east by the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Duchy of Parma and the United States of Greater Austria and to the west by France.

The Kingdom of Sardinia was formed by Pope Boniface VIII from a papal claim to the islands of Corsica and Sardinia in 1297 and bestowed, as a vassal of the Holy See, on James II of Aragon. It was not until 1324 that James launched a military campaign to take control of his kingdom, and not until 1410 that the last native resisters fell. In 1416 the first of a long line of viceorys was appointed, and in 1420 the last competing claim to the island was bought out. From 1516 the Aragonese and by extension the Sardinian crown were in personal union with the Kingdom of Castile and thus formed a part of the much larger Spanish Empire. During this period the Spanish language was introduced for administration.

In 1713, following the War of the Spanish Succession, the Kingdom of Sardinia was ceded to the Habsburgs by the Treaty of Utrecht, effectively a consolation prize for the loss of their Spanish kingdoms. By the same treaty Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, received the Kingdom of Sicily, supplying him with coveted royal rank. By 1720 the balance of power had shifted yet again and the House of Savoy was forced to exchange Sicily with the Habsburgs for Sardinia (Treaty of The Hague). When the French Revolutionary Wars forced the king to abandon his mainland possessions in 1798, he ruled from Cagliari until the Congress of Vienna (1815) restored and enlarged his other states.

Between 1815 and 1847 the Kingdom of Sardinia, or Piedmont–Sardinia, as the states ruled by the king were collectively known, was gradually centralised, a process culminating in the Perfect Fusion of 1847, when the ancient laws of Sardinia were replaced by the modern laws already governing Piedmont. All the Savoyard states were integrated as a constitutional monarchy in 1848, with the Statuto Albertino serving as their constitution and Turin as the capital. In the ensuing Risorgimento, a movement for Italian unification, the Kingdom of Sardinia, now a unified state, took a leading role. In 1861 the kingdom, having annexed almost all the rest of Italy, was transformed into the new Kingdom of Italy, which took on its international obligations and its constitution.

After the World War II, the Kingdom of Italy was divided, and various pre-unification states recovered independence,including the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.