The Donation of Constantine

The Constitutum Constantini or “Donation of Constantine” — a document purporting to record Constantine’s grant to Pope Sylvester I of primacy over the other patriarchates and imperial rule over Rome and the West — is one of the most consequential forgeries in history. It was composed in the eighth century, cited by the medieval papacy and embedded in the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus, and definitively exposed as a fabrication by Lorenzo Valla in 1440. This file gives it its disposition — [Corrected:] — with full sourcing and without polemic.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Document Claimed

The Donation of Constantine (Latin Constitutum Constantini) presents itself as an edict of the Emperor Constantine, issued in gratitude after Pope Sylvester I had (in the accompanying legend) baptized him and cured him of leprosy (see The Silvester Legend). In it, the emperor purports to confer on the pope and his successors: primacy over the four great sees of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem, and over all the churches of the world; the imperial insignia and honors, including (in the legend) the offer of the diadem, which Sylvester declines; the Lateran palace; and dominion over Rome, Italy, and “the western regions” — the emperor withdrawing to the East, to his new capital, precisely so as not to infringe the earthly sovereignty he had granted the Roman see (Constitutum Constantini; text in Fuhrmann, ed., Das Constitutum Constantini, MGH Fontes iuris germanici antiqui 10, Hannover: Hahn, 1968; and see the analysis in Whitby’s and others’ surveys; ODB, s.v. “Donation of Constantine”). It is, in short, a charter for papal supremacy — spiritual over all Christendom and temporal over the West — placed in the mouth of the first Christian emperor.

Origin and Use

The document is a forgery of the eighth century, produced in the Frankish–papal orbit, most probably in the later eighth century (c. 750–800), in the era when the papacy was constructing its independence from Byzantium and its alliance with the Franks (Fuhrmann, Das Constitutum Constantini, 1968; the dating and milieu are discussed in Fried, Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007). [Corrected: the Donation of Constantine is not a genuine act of Constantine but an 8th-century fabrication. It was long treated as authentic in the medieval West; its forged character is now universally acknowledged by Catholic and Orthodox scholarship alike (Fuhrmann, 1968; Fried, 2007; and the frank acknowledgment in the Catholic reference literature).] It was drawn into the great mid-ninth-century forgery-complex of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, which transmitted it along with invented papal letters projecting later papal prerogatives back into the apostolic age, and through that corpus it entered the Roman canonical collections and was cited by popes and canonists as a genuine ancient title through the high Middle Ages (Fuhrmann, Einfluss und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen, MGH Schriften 24, Stuttgart, 1972–74; and see Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor, which treats the Donation within the documentary armament of the escalating papal claim). It figured in the papacy’s assertions of temporal authority and was invoked in disputes over the Papal States and over the relation of spiritual and secular power.

The Exposure

Doubts surfaced in the Middle Ages, but the decisive demolition came in the fifteenth century. In 1440 the humanist Lorenzo Valla, then in the service of a political opponent of the papacy, wrote his De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (“Declamation on the falsely believed and forged Donation of Constantine”), proving the document a fraud on philological and historical grounds: its Latin is that of a much later age, full of anachronistic terms and institutions unknown in the fourth century; its historical assumptions are impossible; and its whole texture betrays a medieval, not a Constantinian, hand (Lorenzo Valla, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione, 1440; ed. and trans. G. W. Bowersock, On the Donation of Constantine, I Tatti Renaissance Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Valla’s was the most famous exposure, but not the only one of the era: Nicholas of Cusa had already argued the Donation spurious in his De concordantia catholica (1433), and the English bishop Reginald Pecock independently reached the same verdict, so that the forgery was being dismantled from several directions at once in the fifteenth century (Fried, Donation of Constantine, 2007, on the sequence of exposures). Valla’s philological method — dating a document by the internal evidence of its own language — became a landmark in the birth of historical criticism, the very method the repository applies to its own sources (METHODOLOGY §3).

The Orthodox Assessment

From within the Orthodox Church the assessment is measured, and it belongs to the larger history of the schism (METHODOLOGY §4.1; and see Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor). The Donation is significant for Orthodoxy in two ways. First, it is a monument to the way the medieval papal claim was armed, on the Western side, partly by forged documents — a fact both Catholic and Orthodox scholarship now state without qualification, and which the Orthodox note not to score a point but because the honest history of the estrangement requires it: the great claims of universal papal jurisdiction were advanced, in part, on evidence later shown to be fabricated. Second, the Donation is a striking instance of the abuse of Constantine’s name — the very emperor whose actual conduct at Nicaea shows the opposite pattern, an emperor who convened the Church and honored the bishops but did not claim to define or confer the primacy the forgery puts in his mouth (see Constantine at Nicaea). The historical Constantine granted the Church property, favor, and peace; he did not grant the papacy the West, because the whole idea belongs to the eighth century and not to his. The Orthodox Church venerates the real emperor and sets the forgery firmly aside — corrected, not received. There is no cause here for anti-Roman polemic: the forgery was exposed by a Catholic humanist and is disowned by Catholic scholarship, and the Orthodox assessment simply agrees with the truth all now acknowledge.

See Also

References

  • Bowersock, G. W., ed. and trans. Lorenzo Valla: On the Donation of Constantine. I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. (Text and translation of the 1440 Declamatio.)
  • Fried, Johannes. Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini: The Misinterpretation of a Fiction and Its Original Meaning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007.
  • Fuhrmann, Horst, ed. Das Constitutum Constantini. MGH Fontes iuris germanici antiqui 10. Hannover: Hahn, 1968. (The critical edition.)
  • Fuhrmann, Horst. Einfluss und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen. 3 vols. MGH Schriften 24. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1972–74. (The Donation within the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus.)
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Donation of Constantine”).