Donation of Constantine

A 13th C. fresco of Sylvester and Constantine, showing the purported Donation. Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome

The Donation of Constantine (Latin, Donatio Constantini)^[1] is a forged Roman imperial decree by which the emperor Constantine I supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. During the Middle Ages, the document was often cited in support of the Roman Church's claims to spiritual^{[citation needed]} and temporal authority. Italian Catholic priest and humanist Lorenzo Valla is credited with first exposing the forgery with solid philological arguments in 1439-1440,^[2] although doubts on the document's authenticity had already been cast by this time. Scholars have since dated the forgery between the eighth and ninth centuries.

The text and its content

Inserted among the twelfth-century compilation known as the Decretum Gratiani, the document is included among the texts of the False Decretals of Isidore, although it is commonly held not to be one of Isidore's own forgeries.

Purportedly issued by the fourth century Roman Emperor Constantine I, the Donation grants Pope Sylvester I and his successors, as inheritors of St. Peter, dominion over lands in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, and Africa as well as the city of Rome with Italy and the entire Western Roman Empire, while Constantine would retain imperial authority in the Eastern Roman Empire from his new imperial capital of Constantinople. The text claims that the Donation was Constantine's gift to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith, baptizing him, and miraculously curing him of leprosy.

Medieval use and reception

The earliest possible allusion to the Donatio is in a letter in which Pope Hadrian I exhorts Charlemagne to follow Constantine's example and endow the Roman church. It was clearly a defense of papal interests, perhaps against the claims of either the Byzantine Empire or those of Charlemagne himself, who soon assumed the former imperial dignity in the West and with it the title "Emperor of the Romans".

In 1054 Pope Leo IX sent a letter to Michael Cærularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, that cited a large portion of the Donation of Constantine, believing it genuine.^[3] The official status of this letter is acknowledged in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 5, entry on Donation of Constantine, page 120:

"The first pope who used it in an official act and relied upon it was Leo IX; in a letter of 1054 to Michael Cærularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, he cites the "Donatio" to show that the Holy See possessed both an earthly and a heavenly imperium, the royal priesthood."^[4]

Leo IX assured the Patriarch that the donation was completely genuine, not a fable or old wives' tale, so only the apostolic successor to Peter possessed that primacy and was the rightful head of all the Church. The Patriarch rejected the claims of papal primacy, and subsequently the Catholic Church was split in two in the Great East-West Schism of 1054.

The poet Dante Alighieri held the Donation to be the root of papal worldliness in his Divine Comedy.

Investigation

Workshop of Raphael, The Donation of Constantine. Stanze di Raffaello, Vatican City.

As we have seen, 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.^[5] It was not until the mid 15th century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual criticism, that humanists, and eventually the bureaucracy of the Church, began to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa declared it to be a forgery^[6][7] and spoke of it as an apocryphal work. Later the Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla in De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (1440, ed. Mainz, 1518), proved the forgery with certainty. 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 fourth 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 to show that though the Donation was a forgery, the Church owed its lands to Charlemagne and its powers of the keys to Peter; he did not publish it, however.^[8] The Vatican essentially ignored Valla: however, though 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 placed on the list of banned books in the mid-sixteenth century. The Donatio continued to be tacitly accepted as authentic until Caesar Baronius in his "Annales Ecclesiastici" (published 1588-1607) admitted that the Donatio was a forgery, and eventually the church conceded its illegitimacy,^[4] though not without some late defenders: Zinkeisen asserted that the decision of Baronius against its authenticity had "hushed its defenders", but H.C. Lea pointed out, "Error is not so easily silenced".^[9] Nearly a century after Baronius, Christian Wolff still alluded to the Donatio as undisputed fact.^[10]

More recently, scholars have further demonstrated that other elements, such as Sylvester's curing of Constantine, are legends which originated at a later time. Its recent editor^[11] has affirmed that at the time of the composition of Valla's work, Constantine's alleged "donation" was no longer a matter of contemporary relevance in political theory and that, rather, it furnished the theme for a brilliant exercise in legal rhetoric.

Contemporary opponents of papal powers in the Peninsula 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 in common defence against the Pope, as sovereign lord of the Marche, where Francesco Sforza was currently protected by papal sovereignty, in which Visconti used the words "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."

Valla's refutation was taken up vehemently by scholars of the Protestant Reformation, such as Ulrich von Hutten and Martin Luther.

Origin

It has been suggested that an early draft was made shortly after the middle of the 8th century in order to assist Pope Stephen II in his negotiations with Pepin the Short, the Frankish Mayor of the Palace. 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 apparently gave the Pope the lands in Italy which the Lombards had taken from the Byzantine Empire. These lands would become the Papal States and would be the basis of the Papacy's temporal power for the next eleven centuries.

More recently, an attempt was made at dating the forgery to the 9th century and placing its composition at Corbie Abbey, in northern France.^[12]

Further reading

• McCabe, Joseph, A History Of The Popes, (Watts & Co, 1939). Book by an anti-Catholic ex-priest.

References

• Lorenzo Valla, Treatise on the Donation of Constantine (1440). online edition

See also

Catholicism portal

• Pontifex Maximus
• Donation of Sutri
• Donation of Pepin
• Papal States
• Vatican City
• List of late imperial Roman consuls

Notes

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Donation of Constantine

• Text of the Constitutum Donatio Constantini (Latin) at The Latin Library
• Text of the Constitutum Constantini (Latin) at The Roman Law Library
• Lorenzo Valla's Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine
•  "Donation of Constantine". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913.