The Donation of Constantine

This 13th-century fresco illustrates the most influential forgery in history: _The Donation of Constantine_. See the dude in the gold dress with the red beard handing over what looks like a puffy triangle to the larger but thin Santa Claus-guy? That’s supposed to be the Emperor Constantine (4th century) giving Pope Sylvester the right to be the leader of Christendom, which is straight out of _The Donation of Constantine_ and 100% not what actually happened.

The document claims that, because Pope Sylvester cured the Emperor Constantine of leprosy, the Roman ruler would donate to the Papacy in Rome supremacy “over all the Churches of God in the whole world” as well as oodles of estates across the Mediterranean, as well as “the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and the western regions”.

These are big claims, and people believed them to be true. But they really never were. For instance, the document uses the word “Constantinople” at a time when that city was known as “Byzantium”. In fact, it was likely written in the mid-8th century and not in 315 as it claims. But it was called on by Pope Leo IX to rally arguments against the authority of the Byzantine Emperor in 1054, contributing to the acrimony and eventual split between the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholicism. Later, _The Donation of Constantine_ was used by the Papacy to make claims of power over Western Europe and particularly the Italian Peninsula. Even Dante believed the forgery to be a factual account.

It took until Italian Renaissance scholars like Lorenzo Valla (early 1500s) to prove the document was a fake — he used tools like vocabulary analysis to show that the language couldn’t have come from the earlier era. Also, Pope Sylvester never cured Constantine of leprosy. Valla’s rigorous scholarship made his demonstration of the forgery one of the most important documents in the history of linguistics.