The Donation of Constantine was a forged Roman imperial decree by which the 4th century emperor Constantine the Great supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. Though completely fabricated, the Donation was influential in the development of the medieval Roman Catholic Church and played a role in the East-West Schism between Rome and the Eastern Orthodox churches.
The Donation stated that Constantine, cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I, donated the Lateran Palace to the Pope, together with the city of Rome, the entire Western Roman Empire and various other territories. According to the Donation, the transfer was Constantine’s reward to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith, baptizing him and miraculously curing him. The Donation indicates that Constantine bestowed Sylvester with supreme temporal power over Rome, its people and lands, while Constantine retained imperial authority in the Eastern Roman Empire from the new imperial capital of Constantinople.
The Donation claims that Sylvester refused to accept this gift, but Constantine insisted, saying that imperial authority had been transferred from Rome to Constantinople, so it was no longer needed in the West. The relevant part of the document reads:
“We attribute to the See of Peter all the dignity, all the glory, all the authority of the imperial power. We have considered it opportune to bestow on the said See the imperial power in all its plentitude, extending its privileges to the imperial city of Rome and to all the provinces, districts, cities, towns and places of Italy and of the western regions; and we decree by this divinely inspired constitution that it shall be consequently perpetual.
Moreover, we decree that all the venerable brethren, subjects of our pontifical crown, shall equally enjoy the same prerogatives in their churches, towns, cities and places, both in the east and in the west.”
Modern scholars are unanimous in agreeing that the Donation of Constantine is a medieval forgery, but there was some disagreement until the 15th century as to whether it may have been a heavily modified version of an authentic document. The Catholic Church made no attempt to refute the Donation, since it bolstered the Papacy’s claims to spiritual supremacy. It was tacitly accepted as authentic until the mid-15th century, and was cited by popes up until the 16th century in support of the medieval theory of papal supremacy over temporal rulers.
The Donation further proclaimed that Constantine ceremoniously laid his crown on Sylvester’s head and that Sylvester could wear the imperial insignia and sit on the same throne the emperor did. It declared that Constantine was inferior to the Pope in status, even though he surpassed him in dignity. The emperor was said to have requested that masses in all regions of the world be held in the Pope’s name.
According to the Donation, Constantine declared all his royal prerogatives from Italy reunited to the Roman church, and asked Sylvester and the pontiffs thereafter to retain the appoints and privileges he had granted, and allowed Italy and Rome to rest under the Apostolic See of Saint Peter. He allegedly gave up all power and authority over Rome.
The Donation goes on to detail an alleged Roman custom where the people could determine whether an emperor was fit and worthy enough to rule. The pope, supposedly being the religious equivalent of an emperor, was exempted from all earthly judgements and answerable to God alone. This was used in part to justify papal supremacy due to the Pope being judged by no one on Earth.
The Donation also includes Constantine’s alleged conferral upon the Catholic Church of primacy over the four principal sees of eastern Christendom, namely Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople. The Pope was granted the power to wear imperial insignia and it proclaimed that Constantine’s donations gave the papacy precedence over all earthly ruling authorities and elevated the Pope over all other bishops, making him the most important figure in Christendom.
The document was most likely forged in the 8th century, during the pontificate of Pope Stephen II, as part of the Roman church’s efforts to achieve independence from the Byzantine Empire. The Donation bolstered a key argument in the dispute between the Papacy and Byzantine Emperors – whether or not the secular authority of the Byzantine Emperors was superior to that of the popes.
Stephen II used the Donation to convince Pepin the Short, King of the Franks and father of Charlemagne, to side with the Pope and rescue him from his Lombard foes. In return for Pepin’s support, Pope Stephen II granted Pepin the title Patrician of the Romans.
Years later, around AD 800, Charlemagne allegedly found the Donation and took it seriously. He rewarded Pope Leo III for his presumed legitimacy and allegiance to the Donation by crowning him as leader of the Holy Roman Empire, a union of church and state. The Donation thus played an integral role in the development of the early medieval Papal States that governed central Italy for centuries.
The Donation was often cited to bolster the political prestige of the Papacy, and during the 12th and 13th centuries, multiple popes used it to assert their claims of temporal power. The influential canon lawyer and theologian Gratian, teaching in Bologna around 1140, did not question the authenticity of the document, which at the time was not widely disputed.
As a result, a generation of canonists relied on the Donation while forming their views on church-state relations. Catholic historians and defenders of the Donation continued to do so into the Reformation era in works such as Caesar Baronius’ Annales Ecclesiastici (1592).
However, some had begun expressing doubts about the Donation’s legitimacy and the first refutations of it surfaced in the 14th century. In the early 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa spoke against the Donation in his Catholic Concordance, and later in the same century, Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V and Pius II came to question its authenticity.
The Donation continued to be tacitly accepted as genuine until 1440, when the Lutheran theologian Lorenzo Valla, in his dissertation De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio, proved the document was a forgery. Valla’s analysis revealed anomalies in the text and the grammar, and showed that some of the orthography was from the 8th century AD. This was the first definitive proof that the Donation was a fake.
Valla reasoned that Constantine would never have given away land that was actually still governed by Roman officials at the time the Donation was supposedly written. He also noted that the purported imperial letters from Constantine included terms and formulae that were only used at the court of Rome in the 8th century. In his book, Valla never accused the Church of forgery, but argued that the document could not possibly have been a valid Roman imperial decree from the era of Constantine.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Western Schism weakened the institutional power of the papacy and enabled critics to freely doubt the Donation’s legitimacy. Martin Luther and John Calvin accepted Valla’s analysis and denied the Donation had any validity. Subsequent popes avoided citing or relying on the Donation, and it was not explicitly rejected as false by the Catholic Church until the mid-16th century.
Cardinal Caesar Baronius affirmed the forgery in his Annales Ecclesiastici published from the 1580s-1590s, placing the time of its creation in the 750s, during the pontificate of Stephen II. He openly characterized the document as a pious forgery, crafted with good intentions by a cleric concerned for the welfare of the Church during difficult political times.
In 1606, the Catholic Encyclopedia unequivocally stated that the Donation was a fabrication and false document created in the 9th century. Modern scholars are agreed that Valla’s analysis is correct and that the Donation is a medieval forgery – one of the most famous forgeries in history. Nonetheless, the Donation of Constantine continued to have value as a political theory long after Valla proved it was a fake document.
The Donation of Constantine set forth the theory of a “just empire” controlled by the Church. This political theory asserted that the pope should have supreme control over the temporal world, being God’s representative on Earth. This principle of papal supremacy over temporal authorities remained influential in the Catholic Church for hundreds of years.
The Donation bolstered the medieval papacy and helped Pope Stephen II’s successful bid to free himself from Byzantine control by allying with the Frankish ruler Pepin. In the High Middle Ages, the Donation was often cited in support of the secular authority and temporal power of the Papacy, including the pope’s right to depose emperors.
So in summary, the Donation of Constantine was a forged Roman imperial decree, probably created in the 8th century, which proclaimed that Constantine had given secular authority over Rome and the western Empire to the Pope. Though completely false, the Donation became a powerful political tool for the medieval papacy. Lorenzo Valla definitively proved it was a forgery in the 15th century, but the document’s theory of a “just empire” under papal authority remained influential for centuries after.
