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Creative Pranks and Hoaxes in History

Khalid Elhassan February 2, 2020 33 min

30. Dusting Off and Weaponizing the Donation of Constantine

Constantine the Great. The Yorck Project

The Donation of Constantine was stashed away and forgotten for hundreds of years after its initial forgery. Then, in the mid-eleventh century, Pope Leo IX dusted it off and cited it as evidence to assert his authority over secular rulers.

Surprisingly, the Donation was widely accepted as authentic, and almost nobody questioned the document’s legitimacy. For centuries thereafter, the Donation of Constantine carried significant weight whenever a Pope pulled it out to figuratively wave in the face of secular rulers.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.