9. How the Donation of Constantine Shaped History
After it was forged, the Donation of Constantine was stashed away and forgotten for hundreds of years, until Pope Leo IX dusted it off in the mid-eleventh century, 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.
It was not until the Renaissance and the spread of secular humanism that the Donation’s authenticity was finally challenged. With the revival of classical scholarship and textual criticism, scholars took a fresh look at the document. It quickly became clear that the text could not possibly have dated to the days of Constantine the Great and Pope Sylvester I. One hint was the use of language and terms that did not exist in the fourth century, when the document was supposedly written, but that only came into use hundreds of years later. On top of that, the document contained dating errors that a person writing at the time could not possibly have made. The Popes did not officially renounce the document, but after the mid-fifteenth century, they stopped bringing up and referring to the Donation of Constantine in their Papal Bulls and pronouncements.
