Transcript

A document that changed the world: Constitutum Constantini, in English the Donation of Constantine, of uncertain origin, largely based on the Actus Silvestri around 750

How do you know if something is real, or not? If you were looking at a fake driver’s license or contract, or for that matter a $20 bill, would you be able to tell?

For most of us, in most situations, we don't look all that hard at these things; unless you're a border guard, you see a passport and assume it’s valid. Unless you’re a college registrar, you see a transcript and assume it’s good. Sure, you know there are ways to figure this out, devices that can be used, like watermarks, holograms, seals, and whatever, but by and large, nobody pays attention. We just sort of give them the benefit of the doubt, take them for granted, take them...on faith.

For one document, though, “taking it on faith” had profound implications for that faith, for the people who profess it and for the rest of the Western world, because any faith in that document was misplaced.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School. Whatever this thing is and whoever wrote it and when and why and how, all of which is unclear and in dispute, it worked. The Donation of Constantine is often cited as the most famous forgery in history, and if it’s a bit off the radar now, that’s not for the lack of impact it had for several centuries and even to today. As the name suggests, it’s written in the name of the Emperor Constantine in 313, who upon his baptism, recovery from leprosy, and conversion to Christianity, sees the light. In return, he grants the pope, then Sylvester I, and all his successors, quite the prize package: primacy over the Eastern churches, a number of properties including the Lateran Palace, still to this day the seat of the papal cathedra, imperial dignity and insignia, a jeweled tiara. Moreover, the pope is given domain over Rome “and all the provinces, districts and cities of Italy or of the western regions”. Finally, because the pope and the papacy are now so exalted, the emperor declares he is no longer worthy to remain in Rome, so he will vacate his imperial seat to the yet-to-be-built Constantinople. To make it all official, the document says the decree is irrevocable, “uninjured and unshaken until the end of the world”, and anyone doubting its validity is subject to eternal damnation. It ends with a statement that the decree was personally placed by the emperor above the body of St. Peter, and then given to the pope. As thank-you gifts go, this is right up there.

While it’s an impressive gesture, it’s also a fake; a forgery, in fact, derived largely from a 5th century biography of Pope Sylvester. It may be that the decree was first used in 754 by Pope Stephen II to strengthen his hand in dealing with King Pepin in a mutually beneficial deal that wound up with Pepin establishing the Carolingian dynasty and the pope ruling much of central Italy for a millennium or so. As a result, suspicion is placed on Stephen’s court or chancery as the source of the forgery for that purpose, which gives us a rough creation date of 750, as Gregorian church music is on the rise, the Tang dynasty is falling in China and the Abbasid dynasty is forming in the Middle East. Later popes, including Leo IX in the 11th century, drew on the Donation for a variety of purposes, and the Bishop of Paris wrote in 869 that a copy could be found in almost every church in Gaul.

There are a number of competing theories as to when and where it was created, and a number of potential goals cited for it: supporting Stephen and his Carolingian ambitions, yes, but perhaps also adding a devotional veneer to a political history and philosophy of the way in which Rome ascended, and thus maintaining the continued subjugation of Constantinople.

At least one pope, Otto III, at the turn of the second millennium, declared it a fraud, but that didn’t take. It wasn’t until the rise of more sophisticated techniques of documentary validation and textual criticism centuries later that it was conclusively demonstrated to be forged, most notably and forceably by Lorenzo Valla in 1440, though his work took decades to be printed and widely disseminated, and for his troubles it got placed on the Church’s index of prohibited works in 1559. The Church itself didn’t admit it was faked until the 19th century. By that point, of course, the deed was done and far too late to be undone. The pope ruled chunks of Italy for centuries, doled out parcels in the New World as he saw fit during the Age of Exploration, and has sat in Rome, more or less, ever since.

Forgery is, and was, a crime. It’s a felony under current federal law, which lists a couple of dozen different flavors, mostly regarding securities and financial papers, but also contracts, powers of attorney, money orders, postage stamps, departmental seals, ship’s papers and even coins. Most of these will get you 10-25; forging a penny or nickel, though, only 3, but seriously, why bother?

Legally, “forgery” is the “act of fraudulently making a false document or altering a real one, to be used as if genuine” and necessarily requires the intent to deceive. So something faked or invented or copied isn’t necessarily a problem, if you don’t try to pass it off as something it isn’t. In Colonial America, a forger could wind up in the pillory or with an F branded on his cheek; medieval punishments could include fines, mutilation or even death, as forgery of a royal document could be treated as a form of treason against the crown.

In ordinary language, we might say that a forgery creates a document that isn’t what it purports to be, or even more simply, not what it says it is. It makes a document lie. So what sets apart a forgery from a copy, or reproduction, or facsimile is the intent to make it lie, and be believed. Lots of this is penny-ante stuff, the ubiquitous fake ID, for example, though forgeries of art or manuscripts can fetch a pretty penny of their own. A newly “discovered” Emily Dickinson poem was sold by Sotheby’s auction house in 1997 for over $20,000; it was later found to be the product of well-known forger Mark Hofmann, who specialized in faking things about the history of the Latter Day Saints church, and who, when the authorities and experts started to close in, started making car bombs to bump them off. He plead guilty to 2 counts of murder in 1988.

In the early Middle Ages, forgeries, of a sort, were common, in no small part because life was hard and documentation uncertain, so things like land titles were created to represent a reality everybody knew but nobody had yet written down. Eventually, the need to determine true from false documents increased, so a practice now known as “diplomatics” arose, which used a number of characteristics of documents to determine their validity: the materials they were made from, the language used, the styles of writing, abbreviations, seals, forms and contents, dates and how they’re represented, and so on. These aren’t exclusive to medieval parchment or vellum; for over a decade, work to adopt old techniques and create new ones has been pursued in the guise of digital diplomatics.

And it’s worth saying that forgery, good forgery at least, is a creative act, an art in its own way. Counterfeiting attempts to make an undetectable copy of a genuine thing; forgery, though, often makes something new, invents something plausible and acceptable, and eventually, with the passage of enough time, becomes an object of interest in itself.

Of course, the most successful forgeries are the ones we don’t know about. There must be untold numbers of documents of all kinds in libraries, museums, bank vaults, corporate archives, and shoe boxes around the world, waiting to be discovered and exposed, or perhaps not, lying through their carefully constructed teeth, doing their fraudulent thing, waiting for someone to come along and see them for what they truly are, and what they aren’t.

References:

18 U. S. Code, Chapter 25—“Counterfeiting and Forgery”
diplomatics (study of documents). (n.d.). Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved May 19, 2014, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/164633/diplomatics


Fastiggi, R. L. (2010). New Catholic encyclopedia. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning; Washington, D.C.: In association with Catholic University of America.


Garner, B. A., & Black, H. C. (2010). Black’s law dictionary. St. Paul, Minn.: West Group.


Guyotjeannin, O. (2002). Donation of Constantine. In The Papacy: An Encyclopedia. Routledge.


Hiatt, A. (2004). The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-century England. University of Toronto Press.

Levinson, D. (2002). Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment. SAGE.
Medieval Sourcebook: The Donation of Constantine (c. 750-800). (n.d.). Retrieved May 17, 2014, from http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/donatconst.asp


Press, A. (1997, August 29). `Original’ Dickinson poem is another Hofmann forgery. DeseretNews.com. Retrieved May 19, 2014, from http://www.deseretnews.com/article/579889/Original-Dickinson-poem-is-another-Hofmann-forgery.html?pg=all