A Single Document Created One of the World’s Greatest Empires. It Was a Forgery.

4 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:During the eighth or ninth century, someone fabricated a document recounting how Emperor Constantine had given land to Pope Sylvester out of gratitude for his conversion to Christianity.Doubts had sprung up over the centuries, but Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla delivered the decisive blow by spotting Latin anachronisms in the Donation of Constantine.The original author of the document remains unknown, but it probably originated in Frankish lands as a way to legitimize the Roman church gaining more territory.Deepfakes might be a phenomenon of the 21st century, but forgery has been a thing for centuries longer. There were people dipping their quills into inkwells and forging documents long before large language models were generating eerily realistic celebrity photos. Sometime in the Middle Ages, an anonymous forger produced a document in which Emperor Constantine handed Pope Sylvester I dominion over Rome, Italy, and the entire Western empire. It was fake news.The Donation of Constantine might be one of the most infamous medieval forgeries ever. Emerging in the eighth or ninth century, the text, which supposedly recounts events from the fourth century, opens with a redemption arc. Emperor Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, is grievously ill with leprosy—a label that, in those days, covered just about any rash. He dreams that the Apostles Peter and Paul instruct him to seek baptism from Pope Sylvester. Following the baptism, the Roman emperor is cured, and in gratitude, he relinquishes power over the Western half of the Church and gives it to Pope Sylvester. That baptism story comes from the Acts of St. Sylvester, a text later immortalized in paint: Renaissance frescoes show Constantine presenting the pope with a crown symbolizing his newly granted territories.DEA PICTURE LIBRARY//Getty ImagesConstantine offering St. Sylvester the tiara, the symbol of temporal power, detail from the Legend of Constantine and St. Sylvester, 1246, from the Chapel of St. Sylvester, Church of the Four Holy Crowned Ones, Rome.It should be no surprise that the text was invoked whenever the Roman Church ran up against a rival, or during its long struggle with the Eastern Church. The forgery worked because it exaggerated something real rather than fabricating it out of whole cloth. Constantine, the first Roman emperor to declare himself Christian, was an energetic patron who gave the Church wealth, buildings, and standing. While Constantine’s motives are still debated by historians, the effects of his actions were very clear. He gave the Catholic Church unprecedented power. So a decree in which he supposedly handed over an empire to the Church was merely the same story enlarged. But the Donation of Constantine (Donatio Constantini in the original Latin) was a hoax, and a conspicuously misplaced one. No Roman original exists. Instead, the oldest surviving copies are in ninth-century Frankish manuscripts—a strange place for a Roman emperor’s decree to turn up.The Donatio Constantini went unquestioned for hundreds of years. It was convenient to reach for if a Pope wanted to reassert the authority of the Church, and no fewer than 10 Pontiffs are known to have invoked the document to keep expanding their domain throughout the Italian peninsula and beyond. The document was irresistible to any pope defending his territory, because it granted everything at once: Rome, all of Italy, and supremacy over churches stretching from Greece to Judea to Africa. The first known use came in 778, when Pope Adrian I tried to coerce Charlemagne to cede land to the Church and seems to have alluded to the Donation in making his case. Later popes grew bolder. By the schism of 1054, Leo IX was citing the document openly, wielding it against Constantinople as proof of Roman primacy.It was 15th -century Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla who finally exposed the document as a fraud. Scattered objections had surfaced before him, though rarely the kind that stuck. Dante grumbled in the Inferno that “evil was born from that donation,” but his quarrel was with the gift’s consequences, not its authenticity. The German cleric Nicholas of Cusa went further in 1433, arguing on scholarly grounds that the text was fabricated, but his efforts garnered little attention. Valla made the case inescapable, pointing to Latin words that postdated Constantine by centuries and turning a technical observation into a public indictment. Valla’s Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine was written in 1440, when he was secretary to King Alfonso of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily, who was resisting Pope Eugenius IV’s attempt to claim more Italian territories. Only fragmented versions of that text survive.Valla had made it scathingly clear that the Donation was a dishonest power grab, and corroboration came quickly. Within a decade, Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, rejected the document’s authenticity in The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy. The more telling concession arrived much later, when Cardinal Cesare Baronio—the Church’s own historian—acknowledged the forgery in his Annales Ecclesiastici at the close of the 16th century. Once Rome stopped defending it, the question was settled. What never got settled was who wrote it.Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.