08 — Legends and Forgeries
Two great fictions grew up around Constantine’s name in the medieval West, and both bear on the history of the schism with Rome: the Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century forgery that had the emperor grant the pope imperial rule over the West, exposed by Lorenzo Valla in 1440; and the Actus Silvestri, the legend that Constantine was baptized and cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester at Rome — contradicted by the well-attested deathbed baptism at Nicomedia in 337. This section gives each its disposition: the Donation corrected as a forgery, the Sylvester baptism apocryphal.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
The Church’s veneration of the historical Constantine has to be distinguished from the legends that accreted to his name — especially where those legends were built into arguments the Orthodox Church could not receive. This section treats both with full academic sourcing and assesses them from the Orthodox side (METHODOLOGY §4.1), without anti-Roman polemic: the forgery and the legend are stated as what they are, and the persons who made and used them are treated with the sobriety the method requires.
Navigation
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-donation-of-constantine.md | The Constitutum Constantini: an 8th-century forgery; its claims; its use in the medieval papacy and in the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus; its exposure by Valla (1440), Cusa, and Pecock — a [Corrected:] disposition. |
| the-silvester-legend.md | The Actus Silvestri: the legend of Constantine’s baptism and cure by Pope Sylvester; its 5th–6th-century origin; why it is [Apocryphal:], contradicted by the documented Nicomedia baptism of 337; later Byzantine legends of Constantine. |
See Also
- The Arian Aftermath and the Deathbed Baptism — the real baptism the Sylvester legend displaced
- Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor — the forged Donation among the documents that armed the papal claim