DONATION
119
DONATION
his head a golden crown, the emperor invested him
with the high white cap (phrygium). Constantine, the
document continues, rendered to the pope the service
of a strator, i. e. he led the horse upon which the pope
rode. Moreo\'er, the emperor makes a present to
the pope and his successors of the Lateran palace, of
Rome and the provinces, districts, and towns of Italy
and all the W estern regions {turn palatium nostrum, ut
prelatum est, quamque Roma; urbis et onmes Italim sen
occidentalium rcgionum proviticias loca et civitates).
The docmnent goes on to say that for himself the em-
peror has established in the East a new capital which
bears his name, and thither he removes his govern-
ment, since it is inconvenient that a secular emperor
have power where God has established the residence of
the head of the Christian religion. The document
concludes with maledictions against all who dare to
violate these donations and with the assurance that
the emjjeror has signed them with his own hand and
placed them on the tomb of St. Peter.
This document is without doubt a forgery, fabri- cated somewhere between the years 750 and 850. As early as the fifteenth century its falsity was known and demonstrated. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (De Concordantia Catholica, III, ii, in the Basle ed. of his Opera, 1565, I) spoke of it as a dictumen apocryphum. Some years later (1440) Lorenzo Valla (De falso cred- ita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, Mainz, 1518) proved the forgerj' with certainty. In- dependently of both his predecessors, Reginald Pe- cocke, Bishop of Chichester (1450-57), reached a simi- lar conclusion in his work, "The Repressor of over much Blaming of the Clergy", Rolls Series, II, 351- .366. Its genuinity was yet occasionally defended, and the document still further used as authentic, until Baronius in his "Annales Ecclesiastic! " (ad an. 324) admitted that the "Donatio" was a forgery, where- after it was soon universally admitted to be such. It is so clearly a fabrication that there is no reason to wonder that, with the revival of historical criticism in the fifteenth centurj', the true character of the docu- ment was at once recognized. The forger made use of various authorities, which Grauert and others (see below) have thoroughly investigated. The introduc- tion and the conclusion of the document are imitated from authentic writings of the imperial period, but formula; of other periods are also utilized. In the "Confession" of faith the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is explained at length, afterwards the Fall of man and the Incarnation of Christ. There are also reminiscences of the decrees of the Iconoclast Synod of Constantinople (754) against the veneration of images. The narrative of the conversion and heal- ing of the emperor is based on the apocrj-phal Acts of Sylvester (Acta or Gesta Sylvestri),yet all the partic- ulars of the "Donatio" narrative do not appear in the hitherto known texts of that legend. The distinctions conferred on the pope and the cardinals of the Roman Church the forger probably invented and described according to certain contemporarj' rites and the court ceremonial of the Roman and the liyzantine emperors. The author also u.sed the biogmphies cf the pcpcs in the Liber Pontificalis (q. v.), likewise eighth-century letters of the popes, especially in his account of the im- perial donations.
The authorship of this document is still wrapped in obscurity. Occasionally, but without sufficient rea- son, critics have attributed it to the author of the False Decretals (q. v.) or to some Roman ecclesiastic of the eighth centurj'. On the other hand, the time and place of its composition have lately been thor- oughly studied by numerous investigators (especially Germans), though no sure and tmiversally accepted conclusion has yet been reached. As to the place of the forgen,' Baronius (Annales, ad. an. 1081) main- tained that it was done in the East by a schismatic Greek; it is, indeed, found in Greek canonical collec-
tions. Natalis Alexander opposed this view, and it is
no longer held by any recent historian. Many of the recent critical students of the document locate its com- position at Rome and attribute the forgerj' to an eccle- siastic, their chief argument being an intrinsic one: this false document was composed in favour of the popes and of the Roman Church, therefore Rome it- self must have had the chief interest in a forgery exe- cuted for a purpose so clearly expressed. Moreover, the sources of the document are chiefly Roman. Nevertheless, the earlier view of Zaccana and others that the forgery originated in the IVankish Empire has quite recently been ably defended by Hergenrother and Grauert (see below). They call attention to the fact that the "Donatio" appears first in Prankish col- lections, i. e. m the False Decretals and in the above- mentioned St-Denis manuscript; moreover the earli- est certain quotation of it is by Prankish authors in the second half of the ninth century. Finally, this docimient was never used in the papal chancerj' until the middle of the eleventh century, nor in general is it referred to in Roman sources until the time of Otto III (9S3-1002, i. e. in case the famous "Diploma" of this emperor be authentic). The first certain use of it at Rome was by Leo IX in 1054, and it is to be noted that this pope was by birth and training a German, not an Italian. The writers mentioned have shown that the chief aim of the forgery was to prove the justice of the translutio imperii to the Franks, i. e. the transfer of the imperial title at the coronation of CTiarlemagne in 800; the forgery was, therefore, im- portant mainly for the Prankish Empire. This view is rightly tenaljle against the opinion of the majority that the forgery originated at Rome.
A still greater divergency of opinion reigns as to the time of its composition. Some have asserted (more recently Martens, Friedrich, and Bayet) that each of its two parts was fabricated at different times. Mar- tens holds that the author executed his forgery at brief intervals; that the "Constitutum" originated after 800 in connexion with a letter of Adrian I (778) to Charlemagne wherein the pope acknowledged the imperial position to which the Prankish king by his own efforts and fortune had attained. Friedrich (see below), on the contrarj', attempts to prove that the "Constitutum" was comi^osed of two really distinct parts. The gist of the first part, the so-called "Con- fessio ' ', appeared between 638 and 653, probably 638- 641, while the second, or "Donatio" proper, was writ- ten in the reign of Stephen II, between 752 and 757, by Paul, brother and successor of Pope Stephen. Ac- cording to Bayet the first part of the document was composed in the time of Paul I (757-767) ; the latter part appeared in or about the year 774. In opposi- tion to these opinions most historians maintain that the document was written at the same time and wholly by one author. But when was it written? Colom- bier decides for the reign of Pope Conon (686-687), Genelin for the beginning of the eighth century (be- fore 728). But neither of these views is supported by sufficient reasons, and both are certainly untenable. Most invcsti-atcrs accent as the earliest possible date the pontificate of Stephen II 1,752-757), thus estab- lishing a connexion between the forgerj' and the his- torical events that led to the origin of the States of the Church and the Western Empire of the Prankish kings. But in what year or period from the al)ove-mentioned pontificate of Stephen II until the reception of the "Constitutum" in the collection of the False Decre- tals (c. 840-50) was the forgery executed? Nearly every student of this intricate t|uestion maintains his own distinct view. It is necessary first to answer a preliminary question: Did Pope Adrian I in his letter to Charlemagne of the year 778 (Codex Carolinus, ed. JaffC', Ep. Ixi) exhibit a knowledge of the "Constitu- tum"? From a passage of this letter fSicut tempori- bus beati Silvestri Romani pontificis a sanctae recoida-
