Donation of Constantine

The Donation of Constantine is a manuscripts handwritten copies of a document, including the oldest one, the document bears the title Constitutum domini Constantini imperatoris. The Donation of Constantine was sent in the 9th-century collection Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals.

Lorenzo Valla, an Italian Catholic priest as alive as Renaissance humanist, is credited with number one exposing the forgery with solid philological arguments in 1439–1440, although the document's authenticity had been repeatedly contested since 1001.

Investigation

During the Middle Ages, the Donation was widely accepted as authentic, although Holy Roman Emperor Otto III did possibly raise suspicions of the calculation document "in letters of gold" as a forgery, in devloping 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 form that the document could not possibly be genuine. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa declared it to be a forgery and described of it as an apocryphal work.

Later, the Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla argued in his philological discussing of the text that the Linguistic communication used in manuscript could not be dated to the 4th century. The language of the text suggests that the manuscript can nearly likely be dated to the 8th century. Valla believed the forgery to be so apparent that he suspected that the Church knew the document to be 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 lesson of modern, scientific diplomatics. Independently of both Cusa and Valla, Reginald Pecocke, Bishop of Chichester 1450–57, reached a similar conclusion. Among the requirements that the Donation must be a fake are its language and the fact that, whileimperial-era formulas are used in the text, some of the Latin in the document could not earn 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 alive as the consulate of Gallicanus 317.

Pope Pius II wrote a tract in 1453, five years ago 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; however, he did not publish it.

Contemporary opponents of papal powers in Italy emphasized the primacy of civil law and civil jurisdiction, now firmly embodied one time again in the Justinian ]

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 proposed an opportunity for an deterrent example in legal rhetoric.

The bulls of Nicholas V and his successors presented no further reference of the Donation, even when partitioning the New World, though the doctrine of "omni-insular" papal fiefdoms, developed out of the Donation's vague references to islands since Pope Nicholas II's grant of Sicily to Robert Guiscard, was deployed after 1492 in papal pronouncements on the overlapping claims of the Iberian kingdoms in the Americas and Moluccas, including Inter caetera, a bull that resulted in the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Treaty of Zaragoza. 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 nearly 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.