Have you ever heard of 'The Donation of Constantine'? Probably not. I hadn't until I used my computer to find out about the word 'satrap'. I know what the word means but know nothing of its origin. But the word occurred in a couple of articles on 'The Donation of Constantine', and when I started to read I became intrigued. It appears that this document was one of the greatest forgeries of the 8th. century and affected the history of Europe for hundreds of years. And I had never heard of it. The person who forged the document could not have guessed that people would one day be burned at the stake for questioning its validity. He was probably simply a loyal servant of the pope, a scribe whose only aim was to serve the Church.
There was a legend current in the Middle Ages that said that, in 315, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great was suffering from incurable leprosy, but was miraculously cured when he was baptised by Pope Silvester, the Christian Bishop of Rome. The Donation of Constantine was allegedly an edict issued by Constantine purporting to record the grateful emperor's decision to reward the Church by donating part of his empire to it, and Constantine is credited with having decreed that "Silvester and his successors" are to rule over the city of Rome "and all the provinces, districts, and cities of Italy and the West... forever." The document goes on to say that Constantine moved out of the Lateran Palace in Rome so that Silvester could take it over, and that he himself moved the first baskets of earth from the site on the Vatican Hill where the Basilica of St. Peter was to be built. Then, since it was not appropriate for two rulers to live in the same city, he moved eastward, and set about building himself a new imperial capital in Byzantium.
This extraordinary "testament" provided successive popes with all the excuse they needed to intervene in worldly politics from the eighth century onward. No less than ten popes and their allies quoted the Donation to support their military adventures, using Constantine's alleged bequest to legitimize dubious ambition and persecution of all who seemed to threaten them. In fact, in 1300, Pope Boniface VIII, dressed in imperial armour and accompanied by cardinals wearing the scarlet of Caesar, is said to have declared in public: "I am emperor. I am Augustus." You can't get more ambitious than that. This was to prove disastrous for medieval Italy in particular; battles for power between Rome and various other ambitious states were to keep the peninsula in bloody combat for hundreds of years. Italy never recovered until, in the late l9th century, the Pope's hold on temporal politics was finally shaken off, and the reunification of Italy as a secular state could begin.
It seems strange that the Donation of Constantine was taken seriously by laymen as well as churchmen, for it contains many anachronisms. Although the first known manuscript dates from the ninth century, it was almost certainly concocted during the latter half of the eighth in an effort to prove that the pope was not only independent of any earthly emperor but also his superior. Some scholars think the Donation was dreamed up to support Pope Stephen's struggle against barbarian threats to Rome, in which he was aided by the Frankish King Pepin, Charlemagne's father, though most suspect it was drawn up in the papal chancery under an official named Christophorus. There were those who were suspicious of the document in the 10th. century, but it was generally accepted as genuine for almost 700 years. Although there were some who questioned Constantine's legal right to give away half an empire, they were regarded as being people with a grudge disputing the Pope's role in temporal affairs. Few doubted that the document itself was genuine. It wasn't until the 15th century, when two ecclesiastical scholars finally subjected the text to a thorough examination, that the great deception was discovered. Quite independently of one another, the two, one a German, Nicholas of Cusa, and the other an Italian, Lorenzo Valla, took it upon themselves to go through the Donation document with a fine tooth comb. They soon realized that it was riddled with serious errors and inconsistencies, including historical facts that could not possibly be true.
The document was supposed to have been written in AD3l5. At this time Constantine was still in Rome and had not yet founded his new capital. Yet the document has much to say about the city and the power that Constantinople had. It describes Roman officials as 'satraps', a word which, at that time, had not been coined. It also refers to the Bishop of Rome as 'pope', a title that did not come into general usage until after AD500. Constantine, moreover, is made to refer to himself as the conqueror of the Hun. This cannot be, because the Huns did not set foot in Europe until AD372, over 50 years later, and were in fact defeated by Theodoric I, King of the Visigoths, helped by the Romans under Flavius Aetius, in AD45l. And if Constantine had wanted the Church to have half his empire, surely such a momentous wish would have been mentioned again and again in contemporary records. Yet the only mention of the bequest in the 500 years since it was supposed to have happened occurs in the Donation document itself. Not even Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine's contemporary biographer, seemed to have heard of it.
Nicholas of Cusa presented his findings to the Council of Basle in November, 1433, where they were accepted without objection. It wasn't until 1440 that Lorenzo Valla produced his damning criticism of the Donation and hence, by implication, a condemnation of the Pope's right to temporal power. It so happened that Valla was in the employ of King Alfonso of Aragon at the time, and since Alfonso was locked in a bitter dispute with Rome over control of Naples, it was in his interest to find against the pope, so he may have been a bit biased. But there was no doubting the accuracy of his work. The Donation of Constantine had been, as someone once said, "the boldest and most magnificent of all forgeries". By the way, I never did find out the origin of the word 'satrap', except that it comes from French or Latin from Greek, and the Greeks got it from the Persians.
Bill Hutchings
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