The Donation of Constantine—the most famous forgery in European history;
papal authority—since the triumph of Christianity the most perennial
question of European society; historical criticism—one of the most
comprehensive, most alluring, and most baffling enterprises of the modern
mind; Lorenzo Valla—the greatest of the professional Italian humanists;
these lines of study have converged, accidentally perhaps, to call forth
the following pages. Much of the subject matter which might properly
form their introduction I have already treated more fully in an earlier
work,[1] and a brief statement will suffice here.
The Donation of Constantine (Constitutum Constantini), written probably
not long after the middle of the eighth century, became widely known
through its incorporation in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals (about
847-853). Parts of it were included in most of the medieval collections
of canon law; Anselm’s, Deusdedit’s, and Gratian’s great work (the
Decretum, or Concordia discordantium canonum). It purports to reproduce a
legal document in which the Emperor Constantine the Great, reciting his
baptism and the cure of his leprosy at the hands of Sylvester, Bishop of
Rome 314-336, confirmed the privilege of that pontiff as head of all the
clergy and supreme over the other four patriarchates; conferred upon him
extensive imperial property in various parts of the world, especially the
imperial Lateran palace, and the imperial diadem and tiara, and other
imperial insignia; granted the Roman clergy the rank of the highest Roman
orders and their privileges; gave Sylvester and his successors freedom
in consecrating men for certain orders of the clergy; it tells how he,
Constantine, recognized the superior dignity of the Pope by holding
the bridle of his horse; grants Sylvester Rome, all of Italy, and the
western provinces, to remain forever under the control of the Roman See;
and states his own determination to retire to Byzantium in order that
the presence of an earthly emperor may not embarrass ecclesiastical
authority. This remarkable document was almost universally accepted as
genuine from the ninth to the fifteenth century.
The question of the position of the bishop of Rome in the Christian
Church lacks but a few generations of being as old as Christianity
itself. His relation to secular governments became an acute problem as
soon as the imperial government broke down in Italy, and has remained
so to the present moment. For centuries the Papacy was the strongest
institution in western Europe. While its control at any one time rested
principally on the power it actually possessed and on the ability of
its representatives, legal theories and historical documents played a
not inconsiderable part in its rise and decline. Of these documents
the Donation of Constantine was perhaps the most spectacular, even
though it was not the most important. It was cited by no less than ten
Popes of whom we know, to mention no lesser writers, in contentions
for the recognition of papal control, and contributed not a little to
the prestige of the Papacy. On the other hand, when its spuriousness
became known, the reaction against it, as in Luther’s case, contributed
powerfully to the revolt from Rome. Its century-long influence entitles
it to a respect difficult for any one who now reads it to feel. And
Valla’s discussion of it contains many interesting reflections on the
secular power of the Papacy, perhaps the most interesting expression in
this connection of fifteenth century Italian humanism.
Among the achievements of modern historical criticism Valla’s work was
a conspicuous pioneer. Its quality and its importance have often been
exaggerated, and as often underestimated. It is some satisfaction to
make it more generally available in the original text and translation,
so that the reader may judge for himself. A critical appraisal would
have to take into account that Nicholas Cusanus some seven years earlier
in his De concordantia catholica covered part of the same ground even
better than Valla did, and anticipated some of his arguments. But Valla’s
treatise is more exhaustive, is in more finished and effective literary
form, and in effect established for the world generally the proof of
the falsity of the Donation. Moreover, for the first time, he used
effectively the method of studying the usage of words in the variations
of their meaning and application, and other devices of internal criticism
which are the tools of historical criticism to-day. So, while Valla’s
little book may seem slight beside later masterpieces of investigation
and beside systematic treatises in larger fields, it is none the less a
landmark in the rise of a new science. I speak from personal experience
in adding that it is still useful in college classes in promoting respect
for, and development in, critical scholarship.
As to Valla himself the words of Erasmus will bear repetition; “Valla,
a man who with so much energy, zeal and labor, refuted the stupidities
of the barbarians, saved half-buried letters from extinction, restored
Italy to her ancient splendor of eloquence, and forced even the learned
to express themselves henceforth with more circumspection.”[2] The
Italian Renaissance is much extolled among us,—and so little known. A
short time ago diligent search revealed no copy of Valla’s works in the
United States, and many of the larger libraries had none of his separate
writings. The same is doubtless true in the case of other great names in
the Renaissance. Meanwhile, there are those whose profession it is to
teach European history and who are utterly unacquainted with medieval and
later Latin.
The best life of Valla is that by Girolamo Mancini.[3] There is no
satisfactory account of him in English.
Valla wrote his Discourse on the Forgery of the alleged Donation
of Constantine (Declamatio de falso credita et ementita donatione
Constantini, also referred to as Libellus, and Oratio) in 1440, when he
was secretary to Alfonso, king of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples. It may well
be considered as part of the campaign which that king was conducting
against Pope Eugenius IV in furtherance of his claims to Italian
territories.
There has hitherto been no satisfactory text of this treatise. The first
printed edition, that of Ulrich von Hutten, in 1517, is excessively rare,
and it, as well as its numerous reprints, is defective in places. The
same is true of the text in the collected works of Valla, the Opera,
printed at Basle, 1540, 1543 (?). The only English edition, by Thomas
Godfray (London, 1525?), is rare and of no great merit. A modern French
edition by Alcide Bonneau (La Donation de Constantin, Paris, 1879) gives
the text with a French translation and a long introduction. It is based
on the 1520 reprint of Hutten’s edition, is polemical, uncritical, and
admittedly imperfect. A modern edition with translation into Italian (La
dissertazione di Lorenzo Valla su la falsa e manzognera donazione di
Costantino tradotta in Italiano da G. Vincenti, Naples, 1895) is out of
print.
My text is based on the manuscript Codex Vaticanus 5314, dated December
7, 1451, the only complete manuscript of the treatise I have been able
to find. I have collated this with Hutten’s text as found in one of the
earliest, if not the earliest, reprint (contained in the little volume
De Donatione Constantini quid veri habeat, etc., dated 1520 in the Union
Theological Seminary library copy, but corresponding closely to the one
dated 1518 in E. Böcking’s edition of the works of Ulrich von Hutten,
vol. I, p. 18), and have occasionally used readings from Hutten’s text
or later ones, such as that of Simon Schard,[4] but in every instance I
have indicated the MS. reading. I have used uniform, current spelling and
punctuation, and have used my own judgment in paragraphing.
Preceding Valla’s treatise I reprint, with a translation, the text of
the Donation as given, with the omission of long sections, in Gratian’s
Decretum, or Concordia discordantium canonum, which was the form Valla
used and on which he based his criticism. I take it from A. Friedberg’s
edition of the Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. I, columns 342-345. The full
text of the Donation is best given by Karl Zeumer, in the Festgabe für
Rudolf von Gneist (Julius Springer, Berlin, 1888), pp. 47-59, reprinted
among other places in my Constantine the Great and Christianity, pp.
228-237. The document may be studied to advantage also in the Decretales
Pseudo-Isidorianae et Capitula Angilramni, ed. Hinschius (Leipsic, 1863).
An English translation, from Zeumer’s text, is in E. F. Henderson’s
Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, pp. 319-329.
In the translation of passages of the Donation I have, so far as
possible, used the words of Henderson’s translation. In quotations from
the Bible I have used the King James version. In translating Valla’s
quotations from the Donation I have usually, though not always, followed
him in giving words their classical and not their medieval meaning.
The Donation of Constantine grew out of the legends about Sylvester I,
Bishop of Rome, as well as out of legends about Constantine. These are
described at length in Constantine the Great and Christianity. The most
familiar form of the Sylvester-Constantine legend is that of Mombritius’
Sanctuarium, sive Vitae collectae ex codibus, Milan, _c._ 1470, vol. II,
folio 279: Paris, 1910, vol. II, pp. 508-531.
Present-day scholarship is not in entire agreement on all points
connected with the Donation of Constantine. The following summary,
however, may be hazarded. The problem of modern criticism, of course, is,
not to establish the spuriousness of the Donation,—that has long been
obvious,—but to locate the origin of the document as closely as possible.
The development of the Sylvester-Constantine legend was worked out
best by Döllinger (Papstfabeln des Mittelalters, Munich, 1863: ed.,
J. Friedrich, Stuttgart, 1890) and by Duchesne (in his edition of the
Liber Pontificalis, vol. I, 1886, pp. cvii-cxx). These have shown the
existence at Rome, as early as the last of the sixth century, of the
story which forms most of the narrative part of the Donation, and gave
the forger the whole of his background.
The earliest known manuscript of the document is in the Codex Parisiensis
Lat. 2778, in the Collectio Sancti Dionysii, found in the monastery of
St. Denis, in France. The collection contains documents dating from the
last years of the eighth century, though it may have been put together
later. The collected Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, in which the Donation
was virtually published to the world, in the middle of the ninth century,
also came out in France. French writers of the ninth century, also, were
the first, so far as we know, to refer to the Donation. Such facts help
to fix the date of the forgery, but under the circumstances they do not
fix the place as France. Rather they are merely another illustration of
the well-known leadership of France in learning and politics during the
ninth century.
Linguistic peculiarities of the document have been most exhaustively
treated by one of the greatest of critical historians, Paul
Scheffer-Boichorst,[5] not to speak of briefer studies by Döllinger,
Brunner, and others. In the full text of the Donation, as for instance
the one published by Zeumer, are found many features distinctive of
Italian documents of the eighth century, and a number that apparently are
peculiar to the chancellery of Stephen II (III), Bishop of Rome 752-757,
and of Paul I (757-767), more particularly the latter. (Some of these
do not occur in the passages and the text which Valla used; that is,
in his copy of Gratian’s Decretum.) This is true in varying degrees of
particularity of the form or usage of the following words; synclitus (for
senatus) in § 15, banda (for vexillum) in § 14, censura (diploma) in §
17, constitutum (decretum) in §§ 17 and 18, retro (applied to the future)
in §§ 1 and 19, largitas (possessio) in § 13, consul and patricius (as
mere designations of rank) in § 15, vel (et) in §§ 11, 12, 13, 16, 19,
seu (et) in §§ 14 and 17, satraps (as a Roman official) in §§ 8, 11, and
19, and inluminator in § 7 in some manuscripts. The following phrases,
also, are more or less distinctive; Deo amabilis in § 1, Deo vivo qui nos
regnare precipit in § 19, uno ex eadem sancta Trinitate in § 1, principem
apostolorum vel eius vicarios firmos apud Deum adesse patronos in § 11,
pro concinnatione luminariorum in § 13, et subscriptio imperialis in §
20, propriis manibus roborantes in § 20, religiosus clericus in § 15.
The first part of § 4, Tres itaque formae ... hominem, is very similar
to part of a letter of Paul I’s in 757. In short, the language of the
Donation seems to point to the papal chancellery as the place of its
origin, and the pontificate of Paul I (757-767) as the most probable time.
That also seems to offer the situation and environment which would most
naturally call forth the document as we have it. This is well brought out
by Ludo Moritz Hartmann in his Geschichte Italiens im Mittelalter,[6]
and by Erich Caspar in his Pippin und die römische Kirche.[7] The
Papacy was then cutting loose from the Emperor at Constantinople and
ignoring his representatives in Italy, as well as developing its own
independent policy toward Italian territory, toward the Lombards,
and toward the Franks. The aim of the forger seems to have been the
characteristically medieval one of supplying documentary warrant for the
existence of the situation which had developed through a long-drawn-out
revolution, namely, the passage of imperial prerogatives and political
control in Italy from the Emperor to the Papacy. Hence, along with
general statements of papal primacy, and of gifts of property, detailed
and explicit stress is laid upon the granting of imperial honors, the
imperial palace, and imperial power to the Pope, and upon the right of
the Roman clergy to the privileges of the highest ranks of Roman society.
Legal confirmation was thus given for riding roughshod over the vestiges
and memories of the imperial régime in Italy and for looking to the
Papacy as the source of all honors and dignities. Furthermore we know
that Paul I was extremely devoted to the memory of Sylvester, and so
it may well have been under his influence that this document came into
existence with its tribute to Sylvester’s personal character and historic
significance.
* * * * *
I wish to give public expression of my thanks to Professor Deane P.
Lockwood, of Columbia University, for his kindness in reading my
translation of Valla’s treatise and the many suggestions and improvements
he indicated; to Professor J. T. Shotwell, of Columbia University, who
was largely responsible for the beginning of the whole undertaking; and
to Mr. Alexander D. Fraser, of Allegheny College, for generous assistance
in reading proof.