Donation of Constantine
The Donation of Constantine (
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An alleged decree from Roman Emperor Constantine I, dated March 30 and not explicitly stating its year, incorrectly references the consulates of Constantine I in his fourth term (315) and Gallicanus (317).[4] Historical records confirm that these two never served as consuls together, indicating this as evidence of the document's forged nature. The forged imperial decree states that "Constantine" professes Christianity (confessio) and entitles to Pope Sylvester several imperial insignia and privileges (donatio), as well as the Lateran Palace. Rome, the rest of Italy, and the western provinces of the empire are made over to the papacy.[5]
The text recounts a narrative founded on the 5th-century Acts of Sylvester. This tale describes the sainted Pope Sylvester's rescue of the Romans from the depredations of a local dragon and the pontiff's miraculous cure of the emperor's leprosy by the sacrament of baptism.[5] The story was rehearsed by the Liber Pontificalis; by the later 8th century the dragon-slayer Sylvester and his apostolic successors were rewarded in the Donation of Constantine with temporal powers never in fact exercised by the historical Bishops of Rome under Constantine.
In his gratitude, "Constantine" determined to bestow on the seat of Peter "power, and dignity of glory, vigor, and imperial honor," and "supremacy as well over the four principal sees: Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, as also over all the churches of God in the whole earth". For the upkeep of the church of Saint Peter and that of Saint Paul, he gave landed estates "in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, Italy and the various islands". To Sylvester and his successors he also granted imperial insignia, the tiara, and "the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and the western regions".[6][7]
The Donation sought reduction in the authority of Constantinople; if Constantine had elevated Sylvester to imperial rank before the 330 inauguration of Constantinople, then Rome's patriarch had a lead of some fifteen years in the contest for primacy among the patriarchates. Implicitly, the papacy asserted its supremacy and prerogative to transfer the imperial seat; the papacy had consented to the translatio imperii to Byzantium by Constantine and it could wrest back the authority at will.[5]
Origin
It has been suggested that an early draft of the Donation of Constantine was made shortly after the middle of the 8th century, in order to assist
Another interpretation holds that the Donation was not an official forgery directed at Constantinople, but was instead a ploy in Roman ecclesiastical politics to bolster the status of the Lateran, which does have historical Constantinian connections, against the rising status of the Vatican, and it may have been composed by a Greek monk working in a Roman monastery.[5] In one study, an attempt was made at dating the forgery to the 9th century, and placing its composition at Corbie Abbey, in northern France.[11]
German medievalist
Medieval use and reception
What may perhaps be the earliest known allusion to the Donation is in a letter of 778, in which Pope Hadrian I exhorts Charlemagne – whose father, Pepin the Short, had made the Donation of Pepin granting the Popes sovereignty over the Papal States – to follow Constantine's example and endow the Roman Catholic church. Otto III's chancery denied its authenticity.[13]
The first pope to directly invoke the decree was Pope Leo IX, in a letter sent in 1054 to Michael I Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople.[2] He cited a large portion of the document, believing it genuine,[14][15] furthering the debate that would ultimately lead to the East–West Schism. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Donation was often cited in the investiture conflicts between the papacy and the secular powers in the West.[2]
The document's contents contradicted the Byzantines' notion that Constantine's translatio imperii transferred the seat of imperial authority from Rome to his foundation of Constantinople, named the "New Rome". Consequently, the Donation featured in the east–west dispute over ecclesiastical primacy between the patriarchal sees of Rome and New Rome.[5] Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida also issued a version of the document to support the papacy's claims against the eastern emperors' and patriarchs' primacy.[5]
By the 12th century the text existed in Greek translation, of which a 14th-century manuscript survives, and Byzantine writers were also using the Donation in their polemics; John Kinnamos, writing in the reign of eastern emperor Manuel I Komnenos, criticized western Staufer emperors as usurpers and denied the popes had the right to bestow the imperial office.[5] Theodore Balsamon justified Michael Cerularius's behaviour in 1054 using the Donation as a rationale for his dismissal of the papal legation and the mutual excommunications that followed.[5]
In 1248, the Chapel of St Sylvester in the Basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati was decorated with fresco showing the story of the Roman baptism and Donation of Constantine.[16]
In his
Ahi, Costantin, di quanto mal fu matre,
non la tua conversion, ma quella dote
che da te prese il primo ricco patre!
(Ah, Constantine, how much evil was born,
not from your conversion, but from that donation
that the first wealthy Pope received from you!)— Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto 19, lines 115–117.
Investigation
During the
Later, the Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla argued in his philological study of the text that the language used in manuscript could not be dated to the 4th century.[20] The language of the text suggests that the manuscript can most likely be dated to the 8th century. Valla believed the forgery to be so obvious that he suspected that the Church knew the document to be inauthentic. Valla further argued that papal usurpation of temporal power had corrupted the church, caused the wars of Italy, and reinforced the "overbearing, barbarous, tyrannical priestly domination."[20]
Independently of both Cusa and Valla, Reginald Pecocke, Bishop of Chichester (1450–57), reached a similar conclusion. Among the indications that the Donation is a forgery are its language and the fact that, while certain imperial-era formulas are used in the text, some of the Latin in the document could not have been written in the 4th century; anachronistic terms such as "fief" were used. Also, the purported date of the document is inconsistent with the content of the document itself, as it refers both to the fourth consulate of Constantine (315) as well as the consulate of Gallicanus (317).
Pope Pius II wrote a tract in 1453, five years before becoming pope, to show that though the Donation was a forgery, the papacy owed its lands to Charlemagne and its powers of the keys to Peter; however, he did not publish it.[21]
Contemporary opponents of papal powers in Italy emphasized the primacy of civil law and civil jurisdiction, now firmly embodied once again in the Justinian Corpus Juris Civilis. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Cavalcanti reported that, in the very year of Valla's treatise, Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, made diplomatic overtures toward Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, proposing an alliance against the pope. In reference to the Donation, Visconti wrote: "It so happens that even if Constantine consigned to Sylvester so many and such rich gifts – which is doubtful, because such a privilege can nowhere be found – he could only have granted them for his lifetime: the empire takes precedence over any lordship."[citation needed]
Later, scholars further demonstrated that other elements, such as Sylvester's curing of Constantine, are legends which originated at a later time.
The bulls of
The Donation continued to be tacitly accepted as authentic until Caesar Baronius in his Annales Ecclesiastici (published 1588–1607) admitted that it was a forgery, after which it was almost universally accepted as such.[2] Some continued to argue for its authenticity; nearly a century after Annales Ecclesiastici, Christian Wolff still alluded to the Donation as undisputed fact.[24]
See also
- Constantinianism
- Caesaropapism
- Donation of Sutri
- Donation of Pepin
- Investiture Controversy
- Privilegium maius
- Translatio imperii
- Vatican City
- List of late imperial Roman consuls
- Legacy of the Roman Empire
- Inter caetera
- Treaty of Tordesillas and Treaty of Zaragoza
Notes
- ^ ISBN 978-1-57958-282-1.
- ^ a b c d "Donation of Constantine". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913.
- ^ Whelton, M. (1998). Two Paths: Papal Monarchy – Collegial Tradition. Salisbury, MA: Regina Orthodox Press. p. 113.
- ^ "The Donation of Constantine". Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-19-504652-6.
- ^ "The Donation of Constantine". Decretum Gratiani. Part 1, Division 96, Chapters 13–14. Quoted in: Coleman, Christopher B. (1922). Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine. New Haven: Yale University Press. (Translation of: Valla, Lorenzo (1440). Declamatio de falso credita et ementita donatione Constantini.) Hosted at the Hanover Historical Texts Project.
- ISBN 978-0-415-32505-9.
- ISBN 978-0-300-11597-0.
- ISBN 978-1-580-51229-9.
- ^ Schnürer, Gustav (1912). "States of the Church". The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company – via New Advent.
- ^ ISBN 978-3-11-018539-3.
- ISBN 978-0-7905-4212-6.
- ^ a b Monumenta Germaniae Historica. DD II 820. pp. 13–15.
- ^ Migne, Jacques-Paul (1891). Patrologia Latina. Volume 143 (cxliii). Col. 744–769.
- ^ Mansi, Giovanni Domenico. Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova Amplissima Collectio. Volume 19 (xix). Col. 635–656.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-61069-566-4.
- ^ Dante Alighieri. Inferno. Canto 19, lines 115–117.
- ISBN 0-226-80842-4.
- ISBN 0-521-40207-7.
- ^ General OneFile(subscription required)
- ^ Setz, Wolfram (1976). Lorenzo Vallas Schrift gegen die Konstantinische Schenkung. Weimar. (Translation of: Valla, Lorenzo (1440). De Falso Credita et Ementita Constantini Donatione Declamatio).
- ISBN 978-90-04-16788-9.
Further reading
- Camporeale, Salvatore I. "Lorenzo Valla's Oratio on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine: Dissent and Innovation in Early Renaissance Humanism." Journal of the History of Ideas (1996) 57#1 pp: 9-26. online
- Delph, Ronald K. "Valla Grammaticus, Agostino Steuco, and the Donation of Constantine." Journal of the History of Ideas (1996) 57#1 pp: 55–77. online
- Luis R. Donat (PhD) (2004). "Para una historia del derecho canónico-político medieval: la donación de constantino". Revista de estudios histórico-jurídicos (in Spanish) (24/2004). Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso: 337–358. from the original on August 13, 2018. Retrieved Aug 13, 2018.
- Fried, Johannes, ed. Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini: The Misinterpretation of a Fiction and Its Original Meaning (Walter de Gruyter, 2007)
- Kapsalis, Athanasius (2013). "The false-donation of Constantine". Saint Emperor Constantine and Christianity. Vol. 1. Niš: The Centre for Church Studies. pp. 91–107.
- Levine, Joseph M. "Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine." Studies in the Renaissance (1973): 118–143. in JSTOR
- McCabe, Joseph (1939). A History Of The Popes. Watts & Co.
- Nauta, Lodi (2009). In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla's Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-03269-9.
- Phillips, Walter Alison (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). pp. 408–410.
- ISBN 978-0-674-03089-3.
- Zinkeisen, F. "The Donation of Constantine as applied by the Roman Church." English Historical Review (1894) 9#36 pp: 625–632. in JSTOR
External links
- Text of the Constitutum Donatio Constantini (Latin) at The Latin Library
- Text of the Constitutum Donatio Constantini (Latin) at the Bibliotheca Augustana
- Text of the Constitutum Constantini Archived 2007-09-26 at the Wayback Machine (Latin) at The Roman Law Library
- Lorenzo Valla's Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine