How has tiny San Marino survived for 1700 years?

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This is the script for my video posted on June 12, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Tucked inside Italy is a tiny country of about 34000 people that claims to be the oldest republic on Earth. San Marino has two heads of state and more cars than people, but it has outlived the Roman Empire’s successors, the Papal States, Napoleon, Mussolini, and every modern European war, all without an army of its own. So how has the world’s oldest republic survived over 1700 years, and what does its survival depend on today?

According to tradition, San Marino was founded on 3 September in the year 301 CE by Saint Marinus, a Christian stonemason from what is now Croatia who fled Roman persecution and established a community on the slopes of Monte Titano. His last words are said to have been “I leave you free from both men,” referring of course to the Roman emperor and the pope, and that phrase became the republic’s motto. These accounts were first written down centuries after the fact, but they do a great job of articulating San Marino’s place in the world. Regardless, the earliest hard documentation of a self-governing community there dates to the year 885 and UNESCO has certified that the country has been a continuously free republic since the 13th century.

This legacy shows up in some really interesting ways. Since at least 1243, San Marino has been led by two Captains Regent, who are elected by parliament to joint six-month terms and traditionally come from rival parties so they can keep each other in check. They can’t hold any other office, and when their term ends, any citizen can file a formal complaint about their conduct. Backing all of this is a set of statutes promulgated in the year 1600, which is arguably the oldest written constitution still partly in force anywhere in the world.

In 1463, the pope granted San Marino a handful of neighboring castles after it backed him in a regional war. The borders have not changed since, not because nobody has offered but because San Marino has declined. In fact, San Marino’s defining geopolitical decision was saying no to one of these offers, but more on this in a moment. First let’s talk about the threats. San Marino sits on a highly defensible mountain, but realistically it only survived the Middle Ages intact because it was small, poor, and far from the main trade routes, which made it more expensive to conquer than it was worth. A papal warlord’s son occupied it for about six months in 1503, and a cardinal seized it briefly in 1739, but both times the republic regained its rights, in the second case because the pope himself restored them.

Then came Napoleon. In 1797, as French armies swept through Italy and dismantled states many times San Marino’s size, a Sammarinese regent named Antonio Onofri cultivated goodwill with the French. Napoleon responded by guaranteeing the republic’s independence, exempting it from taxes, sending wheat, and offering to expand its territory. San Marino declined the land because it belonged to its neighbors, and as soon as Napoleon was gone, those neighbors would remember. There’s a famous quote from Onofri that wars end but neighbors remain, and though the line itself is probably apocryphal, it does capture the logic. San Marino survived by staying too small to threaten anyone, and in 1815 the Congress of Vienna confirmed San Marino’s independence indefinitely.

In 1849, the republic sheltered Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and many hundreds of his followers while they were fleeing Austrian forces after the fall of the short-lived Roman Republic. I talked about this in my recent video on the Vatican if you’re interested. Garibaldi returned the favor a decade later by keeping San Marino out of Italian unification, and in 1862 the new Kingdom of Italy signed a Convention of Friendship with the country that created a formal customs union. The basic trade was autonomy in exchange for accepting that San Marino’s economy would live inside Italy’s, and this remains in place today.

Some lists of WWI belligerents include San Marino, but this was wartime propaganda and the country was officially neutral despite reports it had declared war on Austria-Hungary. The same thing happened during WWII, when reports claimed San Marino had declared war on the United Kingdom, and the government had to formally tell Britain it had done no such thing. Despite being governed by its own fascist party for two decades and being completely surrounded by Mussolini’s Italy, San Marino was staunchly neutral during both wars, and by 1944 the country actually housed about 100000 refugees when its own population was only around 15000.

Neutrality didn’t fully protect San Marino, unfortunately. In 1944, the British bombed the country based on faulty intelligence that Germany was moving weapons through its rail line. German forces occupied the country that September, and the British fought a three-day battle to push them out. Britain eventually paid San Marino compensation without ever admitting liability, and the railway to Rimini was never rebuilt, which is part of why San Marino now has about 1.6 cars per person, the highest rate on Earth.

In 1945, San Marino became the first state in the world to democratically elect a Communist-led government, which held power for 12 years during the height of the Cold War. The revolution was modest and in fact a little silly. The government nationalized a total of three drugstores, and when the coalition lost its majority the opposition set up a rival government in an abandoned factory near the border. Italy sealed the frontier, both sides formed militias, and after a three-week standoff the communists conceded without a single person killed.

Today, the country’s dependency on Italy is understandably heavy. Italy provides defense, power, and most of San Marino’s trade. The country uses the euro under a special monetary agreement, but it isn’t an EU member. In the 20th century, San Marino built a Switzerland-style banking secrecy hub, but after 2008, Italian and OECD pressure forced it to abolish anonymous companies and banking secrecy. Which brings us to the present drama. San Marino has negotiated an Association agreement with the EU that would give it near-complete access to the single market. This would be the most comprehensive deal the EU has ever made with a non-member. But as of June 2026 it remains unsigned, because Bulgaria is blocking it over about 15m euros belonging to a Bulgarian investor that are frozen in the banking system.

For 1700 years, San Marino has survived by being useful, unthreatening, neutral, and deliberately small, trading pieces of economic sovereignty to whoever happened to hold power around it in exchange for being left alone. The new Association Agreement is just the modern version of the same bargain. But the fact of the matter is that the republic that once only had to manage one pope or one emperor now finds its future hostage to the domestic politics of 27 separate countries in the EU.

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