The claim of sovereignty for Seborga was put forward in 1963 by a Seborgan former flower grower named Giorgio Carbone. He claimed to have found documents from the Vatican archives which, according to Carbone, indicated that Seborga had never been a possession of the House of Savoy and was therefore not legitimately included in the Kingdom of Italy when it was formed in 1861 during Italian unification. Carbone claimed that Seborga had existed as a sovereign state of Italy since 954, and that from 1079 it was a principality of the Holy Roman Empire. Sovereignty claims assert that Seborga was overlooked by the Congress of Vienna in its redistribution of European territories after the Napoleonic Wars.