Coat of Arms of The State of Vatican City - Origins and Background

Origins and Background

Heraldry (the profession, study, or art of creating, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms) developed in the Middle Ages, beginning in the late 11th century, originally as a personal system of badges of the warrior classes and as insignia on seals to identify documents. These early seals bore a likeness of the owner with the shield and heraldic insignia included. The Church likewise identified the origin and ownership of documents and buildings with seals, which were typically a pointed oval called a vesica to distinguish from round seals in non-religious use. Heraldry in Italy was not codified until the 18th century and, because of the large number of Italian states, not evenly. Papal "heraldry" is not an adequate term to cover the subject as seen in the light of the rules in force since the 15th century in western and northern European heraldry. Heraldic attributes being generally of a military nature, "ecclesiastical heraldry" may not be an accurate term except for the escutcheon, which shed its military character and took on purely decorative forms. This explains why "ecclesiastical heraldry" had its beginnings only at the end of the 13th century, when lay heraldry was already flourishing and near codification. In discussing the history of the development of papal insignia, the article on heraldry in Philippe Levillain's The Papacy: Gaius-Proxies therefore prefers to put the term "heraldry" in quotes, while the term is quite freely used by other authors.