COUNT PALATINE (OF THE SACRED PALACE). - An honorary title with which popes, emperors and sovereigns honored meritorious persons. This title traced its origin to an office of great importance held by a high official at the court of the sovereign. From the Carolingian age onward, the various heads of the civil and military administration of the kingdom were comites palatii; at first they were removable at the sovereign's pleasure; then, as they too became feudatories thanks to the fief annexed to their office, they turned this office into a hereditary one, just like the major fiefs. Such counts palatine are found at the courts of Germany, Italy, England, Poland, Hungary.
With the passage of time and the changing of curial institutions, this office was reduced in importance until in the Renaissance it became a purely honorary title, which was distributed with a certain liberality, and it had certain privileges annexed to it, such as that of conferring the degree of doctor, creating notaries, legitimating bastards, giving laurel crowns to poets, ennobling commoners, granting coats of arms, authorizing adoptions and emancipations, granting letters of benefices, etc. This title then, having become quite common, was somewhat debased.
Pius IV created the knights of the Order of St. John in the Lateran, commonly called Knights "più partecipanti", who were also counts of the Lateran Hall, a title that was confused with that of count palatine. This chivalric Order fell into disuse after the death of its founder.
Until shortly after 1800 the popes used to create counts palatine of the conclavists of cardinals, the noble pages who had assisted them in the solemn cavalcade of possession and, until Pius VI, their intimate and noble familiars.
The knights of the Golden Spur were also counts palatine, but first Pius VII (1815) and then Gregory XVI with the apostolic letters of 31 Oct. 1841, and subsequently Pius X with a brief of 7 Feb. 1905, revoked every noble privilege annexed to this chivalric Order.
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Guglielmo Felici