The Kingdom of Sardinia was created in 1720 when Victor Amadeus II, ruler of the Duchy of Savoy, exchanged his earlier claim to the Kingdom of Sicily for sovereignty over the island of Sardinia, joining it to his existing mainland territories of Savoy and Piedmont under a single crown governed from Turin. Although the island of Sardinia gave the kingdom its royal title, the state's real political and economic center of gravity lay in Piedmont on the Italian mainland, and the House of Savoy used its royal status and Piedmontese administrative strength to become the leading Italian state of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a period of French annexation during the Napoleonic Wars, the kingdom was restored and enlarged in 1815 to include the former Republic of Genoa, and under King Victor Emmanuel II and his prime minister Camillo Cavour it led the political and military campaign known as the Risorgimento that unified the Italian peninsula. The Kingdom of Sardinia formally ceased to exist in 1861 when Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy, and the Sardinian state was effectively transformed into the new Kingdom of Italy.
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