Donation of Constantine: The Forgery Behind Papal Power

The Donation of Constantine (in Latin, Constitutum Constantini) is the most famous forgery of the Middle Ages. It claimed to be a decree in which the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, in the early 4th century, handed Pope Sylvester I and his successors supremacy over the Church and political authority over Rome and the western half of the empire. Written in fact somewhere between about 750 and 850, it was quoted by popes, emperors and lawyers for centuries until the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla exposed it in 1440.

What the document claimed

The text is presented as a letter from Constantine himself. It begins with a long account of his conversion: struck by leprosy, the emperor refuses a pagan cure, is visited in a dream by the apostles Peter and Paul, and is healed and baptised by Pope Sylvester. This story was not invented by the forger; it came from the Acts of Sylvester (Actus Silvestri), a legendary work of the late 5th century.

In gratitude, the decree grants the pope primacy over the great sees of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Jerusalem, and over all churches in the world. It gives him the Lateran palace in Rome, the imperial insignia, including the diadem and a white headdress (the forerunner of the papal tiara), and the right to clothe his clergy like Roman senators. Finally, it hands over “the city of Rome and all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and the western regions”, while Constantine announces that he will move his own capital to Byzantium, so that an earthly emperor will not rule where the head of the Christian religion resides.

The real Constantine did found Constantinople in 330 and was baptised only on his deathbed in 337, by Eusebius of Nicomedia rather than by Sylvester. None of the grants appear in any 4th-century source.

Who forged it, and why

The author, place and date are unknown and still debated. Most scholars place the forgery between about 750 and 850. A widely held view links it to the papal court in Rome in the 750s to 770s, when the popes were breaking away from the Byzantine emperor and looking to the Frankish kings for protection against the Lombards. A grant from the first Christian emperor would have given legitimacy to papal rule over central Italy at exactly the moment when the Donation of Pepin was creating a papal territory.

Other historians, notably Johannes Fried, have argued for an origin in 9th-century Francia, perhaps in connection with church politics under Louis the Pious. What is certain is that the text was in circulation by the mid-9th century, when it was copied into the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, a large collection of genuine and forged church law compiled in Francia around 850. Through that collection it entered the mainstream of medieval canon law.

How it was used in the Middle Ages

At first the Donation was cited only occasionally. Its great career began in the 11th century, during the struggle to free the Church from lay control. In a letter of 1053 or 1054, Pope Leo IX quoted it at length to Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople, to assert Rome’s supremacy over the eastern Church, shortly before the mutual excommunications usually remembered as the East-West Schism.

Popes and their lawyers used it to support claims to temporal lordship. In the 12th century it was incorporated into Gratian’s Decretum, the standard textbook of canon law, as an addition (a palea). The English scholar John of Salisbury reported that Pope Adrian IV’s grant of Ireland to Henry II rested on the principle that all islands belonged to the Roman Church by Constantine’s gift. In the 13th century popes such as Innocent IV invoked it during their bitter conflicts with the emperor Frederick II.

Not everyone accepted its implications. In 1001 the emperor Otto III, in a charter granting lands to Pope Sylvester II, dismissed the Donation as a fabrication. Supporters of imperial power often accepted that the document was genuine but argued that Constantine had had no right to give away the empire, or that the gift had been invalid. Dante, writing in the early 14th century, lamented in the Inferno the wealth that Constantine’s “dowry” had brought the first rich pope, treating the gift as real but disastrous for the Church.

The exposure by Lorenzo Valla

Doubts grew in the 15th century, as humanist scholars developed new methods for reading ancient texts. Nicholas of Cusa, in his work On Catholic Concord (1433), observed that no early source mentioned the gift and concluded that it was apocryphal. In England, Bishop Reginald Pecock reached a similar verdict around 1450.

The decisive attack came from Lorenzo Valla (c. 1407-1457), a brilliant Latin scholar then serving King Alfonso V of Aragon, who was at odds with Pope Eugenius IV over the kingdom of Naples. In 1440 Valla wrote his Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione).

Valla combined rhetoric with philology, the historical study of language. He argued that the Latin of the decree was full of words and usages unknown in Constantine’s time, such as the term “satraps” for Roman officials. He noted that it spoke of Constantinople as a patriarchal see before the city had been founded, and that no coin, inscription or historian of the age mentioned such an enormous transfer of power. He also argued that Constantine would never have given away his empire and that Sylvester would never have accepted it. The treatise circulated in manuscript and was printed in 1517 by the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten; Martin Luther read it in 1520 and was deeply shaken.

Consequences and legacy

Valla’s treatise did not end the papacy’s political claims, but it removed one of their supports. Even so, the story remained part of papal self-image: in the 1520s Raphael’s workshop painted a grand fresco of Constantine’s gift in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. By the 16th century, however, most scholars on all sides accepted that the document was a forgery, and Catholic historians such as Cesare Baronius later conceded the point.

The Donation is now regarded as a classic case study in the history of criticism. Valla’s method of testing a text against the language, institutions and facts of the age it claims to come from became a foundation of modern historical scholarship. The papacy’s own territorial power, which the forgery had been used to bolster, lasted in Italy until 1870, as described in the history of the Papal States.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Donation created the Papal States. In reality, the popes’ territory came from Frankish grants by Pepin the Short and Charlemagne in 754-774, recorded in the history of the Frankish conquest of the Lombard kingdom. The Donation was cited later to justify and expand those holdings.

Myth: everyone in the Middle Ages believed it. Many accepted the text as authentic, but its meaning was hotly contested, and Otto III called it a fake as early as 1001.

Myth: Valla was the first to doubt it. He was the most thorough, but Nicholas of Cusa and others had already questioned it.

Timeline

• c. 750-850: The Constitutum Constantini is composed, most likely in papal or Frankish church circles.
• c. 850: The text is included in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.
• 1001: Emperor Otto III rejects the Donation as a forgery in a charter to Pope Sylvester II.
• 1053-1054: Pope Leo IX cites it in a letter to Patriarch Michael Cerularius.
• c. 1140s-1150s: The Donation is added to Gratian’s Decretum.
• 1433: Nicholas of Cusa argues that the Donation is apocryphal.
• 1440: Lorenzo Valla writes his treatise exposing the forgery.
• 1517: Ulrich von Hutten prints Valla’s work.

Why it matters

The Donation of Constantine shows how a single document could shape relations between popes, emperors and kings for some 600 years. Its exposure by Lorenzo Valla also marked a turning point in how Europeans read their past: claims rooted in ancient authority could now be tested by evidence, language and historical context.