Deception of the gift – Weekend – Kommersant
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The so-called “Konstantin’s gift” (Donatio Constantini) is a fabricated charter of Emperor Constantine the Great, allegedly granting the popes of Rome in Europe the fullness of supreme power, not only spiritual, but also secular. This is the most famous forgery of the Middle Ages – firstly, because it was an important argument in the long and bloody struggle for the position of the highest social authority between the state and the church. Secondly, because its exposure once became an analogue of the Copernican coup for scientific historical and philological criticism.
In 1633, the embassy of the Polish king Vladislav IV presented Pope Urban VIII with a rare gift: a Greek charter with the original text of the Gift of Constantine, found, as the Poles assured, in the treasury of the Moscow tsars during the intervention of the 1610s. The Thirty Years’ War was on; The pontiff, entangled in the web of unprecedented international alliances, just in case portrayed tender delight and kissed the kneeling great treasurer Jerzy Ossolinsky on the back of the head.
Both dad and podkarby, of course, played for the audience. There are those who to this day believe that this manuscript of the “Konstantin’s Gift”, unknown to researchers personally, is a piece of the library of Ivan the Terrible, which the Poles found in the Kremlin, but the difficulty is that no other ancient manuscripts of Moscow origin in Poland are so and did not surface: the treasury was robbed – yes. However, something else is infinitely more important. The official decree of a Roman emperor named Flavius Valerius Constantine, who ruled in the first third of the 4th century, was inevitably written in Latin – the Greek text could not be the original. Podskarbiy Ossolinsky, who studied in Paris, Padua, Bologna and many other places, and Bernini’s patron Pope Urban, the author of erudite Latin verses, could hardly have the slightest illusion on this score. And both of them knew that in any case, the arguments in favor of the falsity of the Gift had been voiced with the most unpleasant persuasiveness for a long time, almost two centuries earlier.
But even earlier, for a whole six hundred years (from the 9th century to the 15th), almost everyone really perceived Donatio Constantini as a historical and legal fact. The well-known Latin text, which has been faithfully copied countless times in collections of canon law, stated the following. Emperor Constantine de fell ill with leprosy, pagan priests offered him a bath of the blood of babies as a cure, but when unfortunate children were gathered all over Rome, Caesar heard the cries of their mothers and flatly refused to be treated with such means. After that, the apostles Peter and Paul appeared to him, who promised to reward the emperor for mercy and ordered him to turn to the then Pope Sylvester I. Sylvester told the pagan emperor about the apostles and their sermons, persuaded him to be baptized, and, of course, Constantine recovered. And in gratitude, with the approval of the Senate and the people, he showered gifts on the Roman church. The Pope of Rome received the Imperial Lateran Palace, at which a new basilica appeared (the current temple of San Giovanni in Laterano), “the pinnacle and head of all the churches of the world”; new churches were founded in Rome in honor of the apostles Peter and Paul, receiving generous land donations throughout the Mediterranean.
And most importantly: the emperor voluntarily left Rome and moved his capital to the east – because Rome, and Italy, and all the western provinces of the empire were transferred to the full disposal of the Roman high priest. As a sign of this, the latter received the imperial regalia, and the dignitaries of the papal curia received the privileges and insignia of the dignitaries of the imperial court. Moreover, the imaginary Constantine says in his letter that he did the unthinkable: during the solemn procession, he humbly walked, leading the horse on which Pope Sylvester sat by the bridle.
In all this, walking life motifs are visible (the pagan ruler is stricken with a disease, after baptism he is healed – it’s just about everyone they didn’t tell, including Prince Vladimir with the sacred Chersonese font), but this is if you look closely. On the surface, there is a constructive principle of good fiction, familiar to anyone who often resorts to deceit: in the form of persuasiveness, to supply a large lie with more or less truthful details. Constantine really benefited the Christian church. He actually built the great basilicas of Rome at public expense. Indeed, he moved the capital to the Bosphorus “New Rome”, Constantinople.
Surprisingly, at the same time, we do not know who invented the “Konstantin’s gift” on its universal scale and what exactly this forger wanted to achieve. Part of the point here is that in the early Middle Ages there was generally a somewhat special relationship with documentary truthfulness, especially when it came to church matters and hagiographic stories. Here, falsifications could arise completely not for the motives of pure self-interest or worldly malice, which we now imagine in the first place. An unknown Neoplatonist of the 6th century, who wrote a whole body of famous theological works under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, a contemporary of the Apostle Paul, what was the benefit to him personally from these treatises on the heavenly and earthly hierarchy? No benefit.
But “Konstantin’s gift” is not just a pious legend, but, as it were, a legally binding document. The assumption that the bishop of Rome is the successor of the apostle Peter, and therefore the command given to the apostle “feed my sheep” should apply to him is one thing. And quite another is the decision on the formal transfer of powers of supreme power to this bishop. Therefore, it is assumed that this document appeared when, through the efforts of the Frankish king Pepin the Short, the pontiffs had their own state, the Papal States, that is, in the VIII century: the bishop as a sovereign secular ruler was still a legal innovation, for which it was good to pick up the grounds.
The finest hour of the “Konstantin’s gift” in any case came later – when the Holy Roman Empire appeared and the monarch again appeared in the West, bearing the imperial title. The popes enthusiastically acknowledged the existence of this monarch, but made it clear in every possible way that it was the Roman high priest who crowned the Roman emperor, ceding some of his own prerogatives to him, and therefore the only true source of legitimacy of imperial power was in Rome. Emperors, starting from the 10th century, were the further, the less happy about this and fought in every possible way for the fullness of their own authority.
As soon as another strife began over the boundaries of the powers of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities (whether with the emperor or with the king, like the French Philip the Handsome), the “Konstantin gift” inevitably surfaced sooner or later. The popes, appealing to him, did not exactly demand land and crowns for themselves throughout Western Europe, of course. But the position of the supreme arbiter in secular matters and the right to dispose of the highest church positions (and church possessions) in all states were demanded to be reserved. The secular rulers (or rather, the canonists who took their side) tried to put forward counterarguments from both piety and jurisprudence – Constantine, they say, simply did not have the right to alienate in favor of anyone that which is an integral attribute of God-established earthly power. When there were a lot of subtle, when passionate remarks on both sides, it never occurred to anyone to deny the very authenticity of the Konstantinov act for the time being. Even those who condemned the corruption of the modern papacy and advocated for the “poor church” – from the Albigensians to the Franciscans of the first call – rather complained that the emperor made such a decision, and Pope Sylvester agreed with him: after that, they say, in the history of Christianity everything went the wrong way. Well, like Dante in the Divine Comedy: “O Constantine, what misfortune to the world / Your coming was fraught not with the truth, / And this gift is yours to the shepherd and the clergy!”
In the 15th century, when the prestige of the papacy fell terribly, everything changed. First, the beacon of universal learning, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, stated in plain text that the Gift of Konstantin could be a fake – since no evidence of its existence before the 8th century could be found. And then, in 1440, the great humanist Lorenzo Valla came out with a treatise eloquently entitled “Discourse on the forgery of the so-called Constantine gift.”
This fine reading is a hybrid of caustic journalism and brilliant learning, dressed in the pompous garb of Ciceronian eloquence, but extremely intelligible. Valla also goes over the previous general arguments of a moral and legal nature, not stinting on rhetorical devices, but then moves on to heavy artillery, which the disputants did not have before. If Pope Sylvester I really accepted all the imperial provinces of the West under his guardianship as a secular monarch, then there must have been some formal procedures in this regard? And that means declarative inscriptions all over Europe? And, most likely, this should also have been reflected on the coins? But, Valla rightly triumphs, there is none of this – no evidence in other sources, no ancient coins minted in the name of the pontiff as the successor of the Caesars.
And what’s more: having analyzed in detail the language of the imaginary “Gift” (where unthinkable “satraps” appear as the highest officials of Rome, and this is just one example), Valla elegantly proves that this is barbaric Latin, strewn with anachronisms and misunderstood realities, and not Latin of the Late Antique Imperial Chancellery. “This is not the speech of Constantine, but the speech of some stupid cleric who does not know what to say, nor how to say it. Fattened and obese, with a head flushed with wine vapours, he spews these judgments and these words, which turn not against anyone else, but against himself. Written in a quarrelsome way – and yet this ruthless text has become fundamental for dispassionate science: the methods of historical and philological criticism of sources are already evident here.
Another thing is that it is difficult to recognize Valla as completely impartial – at the time when he wrote his “Discourse …”, he served as secretary to the Neapolitan king Alphonse of Aragon. And the kings of Naples and Sicily had their own scores with Rome: they were considered vassals of the Roman popes. If the “Gift” turned out to be a fake, then the vassalage also disappeared, and the annual procedure that unnerved the Neapolitan monarchs disappeared: the king (most often his deputy) handed the pope a white mare in the form of tribute. And, if in a good way, it was also necessary to accompany the pontiff, humbly holding the horse by the bridle – just as Emperor Constantine did.
It is not without reason that this is similar to the pre-Petrine “donkey procession”, when on Palm Sunday the tsar led the horse on which the patriarch sat – it was at the suggestion of the “Konstantin’s Gift”, which actually got into Greek translations in Rus’, this ceremonial appeared. Moreover, the famous Latin fake brought to life a domestic phenomenon, the “Tale of the White Hood” of the 16th century, which claimed that Constantine the Great handed a white hood to Pope Sylvester as a distinction, which then passed to the orthodox patriarchs of Constantinople, and then miraculously became privilege of the Novgorod rulers. So both the white cockle of the present Patriarch of Moscow and the white klobuks of the Russian metropolitans in some way go back precisely to the false “Gift”.
As for the first Rome, and not the third, it, albeit muffled, terribly slowly and reluctantly, admitted the falsity of the Gift of Konstantin. One great abuse has thus ceased, but another has not gone anywhere—the one to which the church owes no longer to the counterfeit, but to the quite historical beneficences of the real Constantine the Great. The subjugation of a person’s conscience to anyone’s state power, armed not with persuasion, but with punitive means, became a misfortune much more fatal than a fabricated imperial charter.
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