Christian History Home > Issue 72 > Church History's Biggest Hoax
Church History's Biggest Hoax
Renaissance scholarship proved fatal for one of the medieval papacy's favorite claims.
Peter E. Prosser | posted 10/01/2001 12:00AM
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What does the fall of Constantinople in 1453 have to do with the exposure of a famous forgery?
For a half century before Turks took the city, the capital of the eastern Roman Empire, church scholars traveled often between Constantinople and Italy. Fearing Turkish invasion, scholars brought more than 230 ancient manuscripts back to Italy, rescuing the texts from oblivion and feeding the Renaissance with "new" ideas.
The discovery of these books led to a tremendous interest in languages and historical and contextual criticism. It also fed a new interest in discovering whether ancient documents were genuine.
Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), a specialist in Latin translation and philology (the study of words), took an interest in examining ancient and modern authors and their style of writing. Thus he became, unwittingly, one of the first scholars to examine ancient documents for their authenticity.
Early in his career, Valla made a critical study of Jerome's Latin Vulgate, the official Bible of the Roman Catholic church. He raised troubling questions about some of Jerome's word choices, such as Latin paenitentia ("penance") for Greek metanoia (better rendered "repentance"). Valla essentially suggested that the Catholic church's entire system of penance and indulgences rested on a mistranslation! Later critics of that system, including Erasmus, used Valla's textual notes and praised his work.
Alfonso, king of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples, as well as a patron of scholarship, hired Valla as his secretary in 1435. Alfonso wished to expand his territory by annexing papal lands, so in addition to admiring Valla's intellect, he probably hoped to use the scholar as a secret weapon against the church.
In 1440, under the king's protection from Pope Eugenius IV, Valla wrote his most famous disputation: On the Falsely Believed and Lying Donation of Constantine. He labeled the work a "ridiculous forgery" and sneered, "A Christian man who calls himself the son of light and truth ought to be ashamed to utter things that not only are not true but are not even likely."
The Donation of Constantine granted far-reaching property and privileges to the papacy, including ecclesiastical supremacy over the sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople; oversight of lands in "Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, and Italy and the various islands"; the Lateran palace; and several items of imperial regalia. Constantine had supposedly bestowed such lavish gifts on Pope Sylvester I to thank the pope for curing his leprosy.
Almost everyone accepted the donation as valid from the ninth century to the fifteenth. Still, Valla was not the first scholar to find the story fishy. Nicholas of Cusa had exposed the falsity of the donation in 1433, but it was Valla's lucid historical and linguistic criticism that devastated the document's defense.
Valla knew his arguments would get him into trouble. Regarding the church loyalists who judged Valla's earlier work as subversive, he wrote, "How they will rage against me, and if opportunity is afforded how eagerly and how quickly they will drag me to punishment! For I am writing against not only the dead, but the living also, not this man or that, but a host, not merely private individuals, but the authorities. And what authorities! Even the supreme pontiff."
Still, Valla pressed on, determined to expose an error he judged "an enormous one, due either to supine ignorance, or to gross avarice which is the slave of idols, or to pride of empire of which cruelty is ever the companion."
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