(Fresco of the XIII century) Constantine I, Roman emperor who gives the primacy of the Church to his contemporary Pope Sylvester.

Only few researchers and historians could not agree that the donation of Constantine I, the document that allowed the Church of Rome for centuries to govern the population, is not the greatest forgery ever produced in the history of humanity. Especially if we consider the consequences and aftermath that the alleged authenticity of the document have brought up to the present day, or the overwhelming power of the papacy and the rise to being the most influential political body in the world.

The Donation of Constantine (Latin: Donatio Constantini) pretended to be a Roman imperial decree by which the 4th-century emperor Constantine the Great supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. Composed probably in the 8th century, it was used, especially in the 13th century, in support of claims of political authority by the papacy. Lorenzo Valla, an Italian Catholic priest and Renaissance humanist, is credited with first exposing the forgery with solid philological arguments in 1439–1440, although the document’s authenticity had been repeatedly contested since 1001.

In many of the existing manuscripts (handwritten copies of the document), including the oldest one, the document bears the title Constitutum domini Constantini imperatoris. The Donation of Constantine was included in the 9th-century Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals collection.

The text, purportedly a decree of Roman Emperor Constantine I dated 30 March, in a year mistakenly said to be both that of his fourth consulate (315) and that of the consulate of Gallicanus (317), contains a detailed profession of Christian faith and a recounting of how the emperor, seeking a cure for his leprosy, was converted and baptized by Pope Sylvester I. In gratitude, he determined to bestow on the seat of Peter “power, and dignity of glory, and vigour, and honour imperial”, and “supremacy as well over the four principal sees, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, as also over all the churches of GOD in the whole earth”. For the upkeep of the church of Saint Peter and that of Saint Paul, he gave landed estates “in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, Italy and the various islands”. To Sylvester and his successors he also granted imperial insignia, the tiara, and “the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and the western regions”.

Analysis of the historical period

During the Renaissance it could be said that cultural enlightenment promoted secular values ​​over religious ones. Mainly in northern Europe, the ideas of the Renaissance took on a religious character, merging into an almost unconscious revolution. These reformers were generally very devout, humanist men who involuntarily weakened the papacy and its theoretical bases, and in their examination of key texts (particularly the Bible) they expounded different hypotheses, at the foundation of doctrine, as untruthful. The papal infallibility and power structure of the Church were called into question during the Renaissance, which also encouraged people to question about Catholic belief, thus offering the possibility of an awaited change, something that was unthinkable in the Middle Ages. This encouraged the reformers to face abuses in the Church, and this eventually led to the schism and the end of the old idea of ​​Christianity, it is difficult to imagine that the Protestant reform without the Renaissance.

The reform was the schism that divided the Catholic Church (from ecclesiastical Latin catholicus, then ancient Greek καθολικός, katholikòs, that means “universal”) and therefore put an end to the concept of unity of Christianity. Originally it was only an attempt to reform, driven by the desire to restore the “administrators of the faith”, and put a stop to the widespread immorality and corruption of the clergy. This organ that was the Church, acted more as a political leader than a spiritual and moral, and claimed the right to govern by the edict issued directly by one of the most honored emperors in history: the Donation of Constantine. Called in Latin Constitutum Constantini this document (preserved in a copy in the Pseudo-Isidore Decretals) contained the edict, attributed to Constantine I, which stated concessions to power of the church of Rome. Used to justify the birth of the temporal power of the Roman pontiffs, and only after several centuries, when the Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla unequivocally demonstrated its non-authenticity, it is nowadays considered the most sensational forgery in history.

Origin

It has been suggested that an early draft of the Donation of Constantine was made shortly after the middle of the 8th century, in order to assist Pope Stephen II in his negotiations with Pepin the Short, who then held the position of Mayor of the Palace (i.e., the manager of the household of the Frankish king). In 754, Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps to anoint Pepin king, thereby enabling the Carolingian family to supplant the old Merovingian royal line. In return for Stephen’s support, Pepin gave the Pope the lands in Italy which the Lombards had taken from the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. These lands would become the Papal States and would be the basis of the Papacy’s temporal power for the next eleven centuries.

In one study, an attempt was made at dating the forgery to the 9th century, and placing its composition at Corbie Abbey, in northern France.

Mediaevalist Johannes Fried draws a distinction between the Donation of Constantine and an earlier, equally forged version, the Constitutum Constantini, which was included in the collection of forged documents, the False Decretals, compiled in the later half of the ninth century. Fried argues the Donation is a later expansion of the much shorter Constitutum. Christopher B. Coleman understands the mention in the Constitutum of a donation of “the western regions” to refer to Lombardy, Venetia, and Istria.

Medieval use and reception

What may perhaps be the earliest known allusion to the Donation is in a letter of 778, in which Pope Hadrian I exhorts Charlemagne, whose father, Pepin the Younger, had made the Donation of Pepin granting the Popes sovereignty over the Papal States, to follow Constantine’s example and endow the Roman Catholic church.

The first pope to directly invoke the decree was Pope Leo IX, in a letter sent in 1054 to Michael I Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople. He cited a large portion of the document, believing it genuine, furthering the debate that would ultimately lead to the East–West Schism. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Donation was often cited in the investiture conflicts between the papacy and the secular powers in the West.

Few centuries later in his De Monarchia, Dante Alighieri, although he did not consider the Constitutum Constantini false (in his time the falsity had not yet been demonstrated), denied its legal value, since with it the emperor had caused damage to the Roman Empire, thus fulfilling an act contrary to its institutional duties. In fact, the poet claimed that neither had Constantine the right to donate to third parties the territories belonging to the Empire, nor could a pope understand them among his possessions, as he would be contravening the New Testament precepts regarding the obligation of poverty for the Church, but at most, could have accepted the gift as a usufructuary. Basically, Dante judged the donation as an invalid act, criticizing the Church for having taken it as legal proof of its temporal power.

(Ita) Ahi, Costantin, di quanto mal fu matre, / non la tua conversion, ma quella dote / che da te prese il primo ricco patre!
(Eng) Ah, Constantine, how much evil was born, / not from your conversion, but from that donation / that the first wealthy Pope received from you!
(Divine Comedy, Inferno XIX, 115-117)

The truth always resurfaces

During the Middle Ages, the Donation was widely accepted as authentic, although the Emperor Otto III did possibly raise suspicions of the document “in letters of gold” as a forgery, in making a gift to the See of Rome. It was not until the mid-15th century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual criticism, that humanists, and eventually the papal bureaucracy, began to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa declared it to be a forgery and spoke of it as an apocryphal work.

Later, the Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla argued in his philological study of the text that the language used in manuscript could not be dated to the 4th century. The language of the text suggests that the manuscript can most likely be dated to the 8th century. Valla believed the forgery to be so obvious that he leaned toward believing that the Church had knowledge that the document was inauthentic. Valla further argued that papal usurpation of temporal power had corrupted the church, caused the wars of Italy, and reinforced the “overbearing, barbarous, tyrannical priestly domination.”

This was the first instance of modern, scientific diplomatics. Independently of both Cusa and Valla, Reginald Pecocke, Bishop of Chichester (1450–57), reached a similar conclusion. Among the indications that the Donation must be a fake are its language and the fact that, while certain imperial-era formulas are used in the text, some of the Latin in the document could not have been written in the 4th century; anachronistic terms such as “fief” were used. Also, the purported date of the document is inconsistent with the content of the document itself, as it refers both to the fourth consulate of Constantine (315) as well as the consulate of Gallicanus (317).

Pope Pius II wrote a tract in 1453, five years before becoming Pope, to show that, though the Donation was a forgery, the papacy owed its lands to Charlemagne and its powers of the keys to Peter; he did not publish it, however.

Contemporary opponents of papal powers in Italy emphasized the primacy of civil law and civil jurisdiction, now firmly embodied once again in the Justinian Corpus Juris Civilis. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Cavalcanti reported that, in the very year of Valla’s treatise, Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, made diplomatic overtures toward Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, proposing an alliance against the Pope. In reference to the Donation, Visconti wrote: “It so happens that even if Constantine consigned to Sylvester so many and such rich gifts – which is doubtful, because such a privilege can nowhere be found – he could only have granted them for his lifetime: the Empire takes precedence over any lordship.”

Later, scholars further demonstrated that other elements, such as Sylvester’s curing of Constantine, are legends which originated at a later time. Wolfram Setz, a recent editor of Valla’s work, has affirmed that at the time of Valla’s refutation, Constantine’s alleged “donation” was no longer a matter of contemporary relevance in political theory and that it simply provided an opportunity for an exercise in legal rhetoric.

The bulls of Nicholas V and his successors made no further mention of the Donation, even when partitioning the New World. Valla’s treatise was taken up vehemently by writers of the Protestant Reformation, such as Ulrich von Hutten and Martin Luther, causing the treatise to be placed on the index of banned books in the mid-16th century. The Donation continued to be tacitly accepted as authentic until Caesar Baronius in his “Annales Ecclesiastici” (published 1588–1607) admitted that it was a forgery, after which it was almost universally accepted as such. Some continued to argue for its authenticity; nearly a century after “Annales Ecclesiastici”, Christian Wolff still alluded to the Donation as undisputed fact.

“Sacrosancta Lateranensis ecclesia omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput” (“Most Holy Lateran Church, of all the churches in the city and the world, the mother and head.”) Inscription on the façade of the Basilica of St. John Lateran (Rome).

When power wears out the Spirit: the Temporal power

The Church for centuries has justified its political power (or temporal in which the popes were the heirs of the Roman emperors) thanks to the Donation of Constantine.
According to this document the story begins when the emperor contracted leprosy, but after being baptized by Pope Sylvester, he miraculously recovered. Constantine converted to Christianity and recognized the city of Rome and the West to the Pope, moving the seat of imperial power to Constantinople (now Istanbul). From this moment on, the popes considered their temporal power legitimate and claiming to have authority even over the sovereigns of the West.

After having shown that the “Donation” could not have been written at the time of Constantine, in 313, but some centuries later, probably composed at the time of Pope Stephen II (second half of the eighth century) to justify the creation of the State of the church. Conceived on the occasion of the coronation of Charlemagne (800) as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and for centuries everyone, including even the opponents of the temporal power of the popes, believed it to be authentic.

4 other very important falsifications known to history

Conclusions

The donation of Constantine, although used illegally as an original document, made possible the development of the primordial Christian Church in Italy. It should be remembered that during the political/social confusion that invested Rome with the consequent collapse of the Empire, the Church was the only organ in support of the people, and greatest aid for the poor, the needy, and all the less privileged classes who found comfort in the Holy Scriptures. Saint Benedict of Norcia was the first who had the prophetic vision of a community not only of spiritual development, but also of social growth, and is still recognized as the patron saint of Europe. This false therefore has, despite everything, helped the believers in GOD of the origins to be strengthened, but, only afterwards, it has succeeded in generating much more damages in comparison to the benefits that it would have had to bring. Power, this feeling always against GOD and against faith, has succeeded in insinuating into the Churches and into the hearts of the weaker clerics, giving an authority impossible to manage even for the most zealous of believers. Even the first Biblical king Saul, David (2Sam 11) and Salmon (1 Kings 11) sinned in old age, precisely because of the enormous power that caused their hearts to deviate.

Certainly nothing and no one will ever be able to influence the course of history since, although GOD gives us free will, either because of a man or a woman, or through a false document, or even an entire community of faithful or nation, nothing and no one will ever be able to modify the Plan of GOD which has as its ultimate goal the saving of all the just.

Bibliography

• Camporeale, Salvatore I. “Lorenzo Valla’s Oratio on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine: Dissent and Innovation in Early Renaissance Humanism.” Journal of the History of Ideas (1996) 57#1 pp: 9-26. online
• Delph, Ronald K. “Valla Grammaticus, Agostino Steuco, and the Donation of Constantine.” Journal of the History of Ideas (1996) 57#1 pp: 55-77. online
• Fried, Johannes, ed. Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini: The Misinterpretation of a Fiction and Its Original Meaning (Walter de Gruyter, 2007)
• Levine, Joseph M. “Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine.” Studies in the Renaissance (1973): 118-143. in JSTOR
• McCabe, Joseph (1939). A History Of The Popes. Watts & Co.
• Valla, Lorenzo. On the donation of Constantine (Harvard University Press, 2007), translation by G. W. Bowersock of 1440 version
• La falsa Donazione di Costantino, Discorso di Lorenzo Valla sulla Donazione di Costantino da falsari spacciata per vera e con menzogna sostenuta per vera, a cura di Gabriele Pepe, Ponte alle Grazie, Firenze 1992 – TEA 1994
• Ed. critica del Constitutum di H. Fuhrman, Das Constitutum Constantini (Konstantinische Schenkung) (Hannover, 1968: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui 10), accessibile online, privo di introduzione, apparato critico e indici, sul portale di diritto romano dell’università di Grenoble. Traduzione inglese online su Medieval Sourcebook.
• Ed. critica dell’opuscolo di Lorenzo Valla di W. Setz, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (Weimar, 1976: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 10). Il testo di una precedente edizione è accessibile online con traduzione inglese del 1922 sul sito del Historical Texts Project dell’Università di Hanover, via Bibliotheca Augustana (Augsburg). Traduzioni italiane di Gabriele Pepe (Milano, 1952: Universale Economica Feltrinelli 132) e, più recentemente, O. Pugliese (Milano, 1994: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, L, 876).
• Traduzione italiana della Donazione di Costantino online su Artblog.
• W. Levison, Konstantinische Schenkung und Silvester-Legende, in Miscellanea Franz Ehrle II (Roma, 1924: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Studi e testi 38), pp. 158–247.
• D. Maffei, La donazione di Costantino nei giuristi medievali, (Milano, 1964).
• F. Chabod, Lezioni di metodo storico, a cura di L. Firpo), Roma-Bari, 1969 (e succ. ristampe).
• G. M. Vian, La donazione di Costantino, Bologna, 2004.