Definition of "principalities" [principalities]

• Plural form of principality. (noun)

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• "Formal _protests_ against the despotism of the papal church were formulated by the representatives of certain German principalities and other delegates at a diet or general council held at Spires A.D. 1529; and the reformers were thenceforth known as _Protestants_."
• "Throughout these Italian wars, the popes were constantly intriguing and struggling to save their temporalities, expel the foreigners from Italy, or obtain principalities for their nephews."
• "Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to 'powers' and 'principalities' -- spiritual and terrestrial -- alien to God."