The Forgeries Behind Papal Power: The Donation of Constantine and the False Decretals

Some Orthodox and Protestant writers say that the papacy was built on forgeries. Some Roman Catholics reply that the forgeries were exposed long ago by Catholic scholars and are irrelevant to the faith. Both replies are too quick. Two famous documents really were forged, both fed papal claims for centuries, and neither invented the bishop of Rome's ambitions from nothing.

The first is the Donation of Constantine, in which the first Christian emperor supposedly handed Pope Sylvester supremacy over the Church and rule over the West. The second is the False Decretals, a ninth-century collection of canon law stuffed with letters forged in the names of the earliest popes. This article sets out what each says, who made it, how popes and canonists used it, and what Catholic scholarship itself concedes. Then it asks what the forgeries created and what they did not. The answer has to be honest in both directions: an argument that overstates its case is a forgery of another kind.

In brief

The Donation of Constantine (the Constitutum Constantini) is a forgery of the eighth or ninth century. It gives the pope supremacy over Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Jerusalem and over all the churches in the world. Pope Leo IX quoted that very clause to the patriarch of Constantinople in 1053, on the eve of the break of 1054. Lorenzo Valla demolished it in 1440. The False Decretals contain about ninety forged papal letters, probably made at the monastery of Corbie in the 830s or 840s. They made the earliest popes teach that no council is valid without Rome's authority. The eleventh-century reform papacy brought them to Rome, and Gratian's Decretum carried them into the textbook of medieval canon law. But Rome's claims are older than either: Julius I and Leo the Great asserted them in genuine letters, and Vatican I cites none of the forged texts. The forgeries did not create the papacy's ambitions. They gave those ambitions a false antiquity, from which the Latin West learned the history of the papacy for centuries.

Thesis: The forgeries did not invent papal supremacy, but they dressed a later claim in the robes of the first centuries, and that is why the claim must be tested against the genuine witness of the undivided Church, which knew a Roman primacy of honour within the communion of bishops, never a monarchy over them.

The Donation of Constantine

What it says

Written as Constantine's own words, the document tells how Pope Sylvester baptized him and healed him of leprosy, and then rewards the see of St Peter. The pope, he decrees, "shall have the supremacy as well over the four chief seats Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Jerusalem, as also over all the churches of God in the whole world." Whoever is pontiff of Rome "shall be more exalted than, and chief over, all the priests of the whole world." Constantine then gives Sylvester the Lateran palace, the imperial insignia, and "the city of Rome and all the provinces, districts and cities of Italy or of the western regions," and moves his own capital east.¹

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1909, published with an imprimatur, calls it "without doubt a forgery, fabricated somewhere between the years 750 and 850." Where it was made is still argued: many scholars have looked to Rome, others to the Frankish kingdom, where it first appears and is first quoted.² {{very-strong: The Donation of Constantine is a forgery of the eighth or ninth century, as Catholic scholarship itself has long acknowledged.}} Our article on how historians test early Christian writings shows how it was unmasked; here the question is its use.

How it was used, and against whom

Rome was slow to use it: according to the same article, no pope did so in the ninth or tenth centuries, "not even amid the conflicts and difficulties of Nicholas I with Constantinople." Frankish writers used it first, and one of them, Aeneas, bishop of Paris, cited it in defence of the Roman primacy in a treatise against the Greeks.²

The first pope to rely on it officially was Leo IX, against the East. In 1053, after Archbishop Leo of Ohrid attacked Latin customs, Leo IX answered him and Patriarch Michael Cerularius in a long letter. So that the Greeks would not suspect Rome of defending its honour "with foolish old wives' tales," he quoted at length from "the privilege of the same Constantine," which he said had been laid on St Peter's body by the emperor's own hand (our translation). He introduced it with 2 Peter 1:16, "For we did not follow cunningly devised fables." The passage he copied out for the patriarch of Constantinople includes the clause giving Rome supremacy over the four sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople.³ In 1054 his legates laid a sentence of excommunication against the patriarch on the altar of Hagia Sophia. The Donation did not cause the schism, but it lay on the papal side of the table.

From then on it grew in importance. The canonists Anselm of Lucca and Cardinal Deusdedit put it in their collections; it was added to Gratian's Decretum as a later insertion (a palea); and the encyclopedia reports that Innocent III, Gregory IX and Innocent IV "took its authority for granted."⁴

Honesty requires one more fact. The Byzantines also accepted it. The canonist Theodore Balsamon included it in his collection in the twelfth century and Matthew Blastares in the fourteenth, and Greek churchmen used it to claim the same privileges for the clergy of New Rome.² Forgeries deceived East and West alike, and the Orthodox should say so plainly. The difference lies in what each Church built on them: no Orthodox dogma was ever defined on the Donation, and its central clause, Rome's supremacy over the Eastern patriarchates, is exactly what the East never accepted.

How it fell

Nicholas of Cusa called it apocryphal. In 1440 the humanist Lorenzo Valla proved it false, showing that it was made of "contradictions, impossibilities, stupidities, barbarisms and absurdities," such as a Constantine who speaks of Constantinople as a patriarchal see before the city existed and consults his "satraps."⁵ Valla attacked the temporal power, not the papal office; he longed for the day "when the Pope is the vicar of Christ alone, and not of Caesar also!" Even so, canonists went on quoting the document as genuine through the sixteenth century, until Cardinal Baronius admitted the forgery and it was soon universally recognized as one.²

The False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore

What they are and who made them

The second forgery mattered more. Its author calls himself Isidore Mercator, hence "Pseudo-Isidore." He took a genuine Spanish collection of canons and papal letters, the Hispana, and put in front of it sixty letters attributed to the popes from Clement of Rome to Miltiades, fifty-eight of them forged. Among the genuine later letters he slipped about thirty more. In the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, "Nowadays every one agrees that these so-called papal letters are forgeries." Anachronisms abound: popes of the first three centuries quote documents of the fourth and fifth.⁶

The older standard view placed the forgery in northern France between 847 and 852. In 2000 the German historian Klaus Zechiel-Eckes published what the historian Eric Knibbs calls a "sensational discovery": evidence that the forgers worked at the Frankish monastery of Corbie. Many scholars now date the project to the 830s, in the crisis of the reign of Louis the Pious, and Zechiel-Eckes named the Corbie monk and later abbot Paschasius Radbertus as its leading figure. Knibbs cautions that "placing Pseudo-Isidore at Corbie does not demonstrate Radbertus's authorship."⁷ {{strong: Current scholarship places the making of the False Decretals at Corbie, in the 830s or 840s; the identity of the chief forger is still debated.}}

What they made the early popes say

The forgers' first concern was practical: to protect Frankish bishops from deposition by kings, rival factions and overbearing archbishops. Their method was to make the bishop of Rome the guarantor of every bishop. So the forged popes teach that accused bishops may appeal to Rome, that sentence on a bishop needs Rome's approval, and that no synod may be held without the authority of the Apostolic See. The Catholic Encyclopedia is candid about the novelty. Of the claim that the pope must authorize all councils and approve their decisions it says: "Laid down in this general and imperative manner, these claims were something new." Of the rule that bishops may be sentenced only with papal approval: "This is new legislation."⁶

One forged letter is aimed squarely at the East. In it "Pelagius II" condemns the councils of Patriarch John IV of Constantinople, declaring, in Knibbs's summary, "that synodal authority derives from Rome alone."⁷ The real Pelagius did protest John's title of "ecumenical patriarch." The forgery turned a protest into a constitution.

From Corbie to Rome to the law schools

The decretals reached Rome by about 864, when Bishop Rothad of Soissons cited them in an appeal to Pope Nicholas I, whose letter on the case of January 865 alludes to them. But according to the Catholic Encyclopedia they "took firm hold at Rome" only under Leo IX (1048-1054), who brought the collection with him from his see of Toul, and from there they flowed into the reform collections of Anselm of Lucca and Cardinal Deusdedit.⁶ Knibbs puts it plainly: the reform popes of the eleventh century "won the forgeries a permanent position in the canonical tradition."⁷

The decisive step came around 1140 with Gratian's Decretum, the textbook of canon law in the medieval universities. Its translators at the Catholic University of America note that "Gratian used a good deal of Pseudo-Isidorian material, especially for procedural matters." Distinction 17 of the Decretum, which they call "especially important for later papal theory," teaches that general councils may be convoked only by the authority of the Apostolic See. Four of its six chapters come from the False Decretals. One of them, in the name of Pope Julius I, says: "no council has been valid, nor will one be valid, that has not been confirmed by its authority." Another, the forged Pelagius letter against Constantinople, is headed: "An assembly without the authority of the Apostolic See is not a council but a conventicle."⁸ {{very-strong: Gratian's Decretum, the standard textbook of medieval canon law, drew most of its authorities for the rule that councils need the authority of the Apostolic See from the forged decretals.}}

The exposure came slowly. Two fifteenth-century cardinals, Nicholas of Cusa and Juan de Torquemada, declared the earliest letters forgeries, and sixteenth-century scholars pressed the case. Yet "the official edition of the 'Corpus Juris', in 1580, upheld the genuineness of the false decretals." The Protestant David Blondel proved the forgery decisively in 1628, and two Catholic priests, the Ballerini brothers, identified the last forged items in the eighteenth century.⁶

What the forgeries did not create

Here the Orthodox argument must be careful, because Rome's claims are older than both documents.

About 341 Pope Julius I protested to the Eastern bishops who had deposed St Athanasius: "Are you ignorant that the custom has been for word to be written first to us, and then for a just decision to be passed from this place?" (he is speaking of Alexandria).⁹ About a century later the historian Socrates of Constantinople reported that "an ecclesiastical canon commands that the churches shall not make any ordinances against the opinion of the bishop of Rome."¹⁰ Popes Leo the Great, Gelasius and Hormisdas made strong claims in genuine letters, and the Catholic Encyclopedia argues that Nicholas I held his convictions "before he knew of the Isidorian texts."⁶

The modern dogma does not cite the forgeries either. Vatican I's constitution Pastor Aeternus (1870) defines that "the Roman church possesses a pre-eminence of ordinary power over every other church," and Vatican II repeats that the pope "has full, supreme and universal power over the Church." The footnotes of Pastor Aeternus cite Scripture, Fathers, councils and popes such as Leo the Great, Gregory the Great and Hormisdas, but no Pseudo-Isidorian decretal and not the Donation.¹¹ {{strong: Roman claims to primacy predate both forgeries, and Vatican I's definition does not cite either one.}} To say that the papacy is nothing but a forgery is therefore false, and an Orthodox Christian should not say it. On the genuine first-millennium evidence, see Did the Early Church Believe in Papal Supremacy?

What the forgeries did create

What the forgeries created was a false history. Knibbs, summarizing Clara Harder's 2014 study, says the forgers portrayed "an unusually authoritarian papacy" and tried to "project this confident and even strident institution back onto the earliest centuries of Christianity."⁷ The genuine claims of Julius or Leo were made by one great see in particular disputes, and others resisted them when they overreached. The forgeries turned them into the law of the apostolic age, taught by the martyr-popes themselves.

The Catholic Encyclopedia concedes the result: because of the forgeries, "the Middle Ages knew very little concerning the historical growth of the rights of the papacy during those first centuries."⁶ The medieval West shaped its canon law and its dealings with the East believing that the Church of the martyrs had lived under the papal monarchy of its own day. The popes who used these texts did so in good faith, as the same article insists. Good faith does not make a false foundation true.

This matters for the dogma of 1870. Pastor Aeternus says of Rome's universal power: "All this is to be found in the acts of the ecumenical councils and the sacred canons."¹¹ The genuine acts and canons of the first millennium do not say it. The sixth canon of Nicaea set Rome beside Alexandria and Antioch by ancient custom, and the twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon says the Fathers granted privileges to Old Rome "because it was the royal city" and gave "equal privileges" to New Rome.¹² For several centuries the "sacred canons" in the hands of Latin canonists did say it, because forgers had written it into them. The Patriarchate of Constantinople said as much to Pope Leo XIII in 1895: "The first seeds of these claims of a papal absolutism were scattered abroad in the pseudo-Clementines, and were cultivated, exactly at the epoch of this Nicholas, in the so-called pseudo-Isidorian decrees." It added that Rome "now acknowledges the spuriousness and forged character of those decrees on which her excessive claims are grounded."¹³ Seeds sown earlier, cultivated by the forgeries: that is what the evidence shows.

Objections

"Catholic scholars exposed these forgeries, and Catholic doctrine never rested on them"

True, Catholics helped expose them, and Vatican I does not cite them. But the forgeries were no fringe text. They were in Gratian, in the official Corpus Juris of 1580, and in the hands of popes from Leo IX to Innocent IV, and the ecclesiology Vatican I defined as constant teaching was formed in a canonical tradition that for centuries took them as genuine. Once they are removed, the dogma must be weighed on the genuine evidence alone, and that evidence shows a primacy within the communion of bishops, not jurisdiction over them. On how the dogma grew, see Vatican I and Ultramontanism and Papal Infallibility: Ancient Doctrine or Later Development?

"Pseudo-Isidore wanted to protect bishops, not to exalt the pope"

This was the view of the Catholic Encyclopedia, which concluded: "Isidore or no Isidore, Gregory VII and Innocent III would not have acted otherwise than they did," and even that "in the domain of theology and canon law, Isidore's forgeries never had any serious consequences."⁶ The Catholic historian Ignaz von Döllinger, writing in 1869 as "Janus," judged the opposite: "It would be difficult to find in all history a second instance of so successful, and yet so clumsy a forgery," and "without the pseudo-Isidore there would have been no Gregory VII."¹⁴ Knibbs argues that the forgers' care for bishops and their exalted papacy cannot be separated, since for them "synodal authority flows from Rome."⁷ Whatever the forger meant, papal canonists read his work as a charter of papal power, as Gratian's Distinction 17 shows. The encyclopedia's verdict on canon law cannot survive that fact.

"This is an attack on Catholics"

It is not. The popes who used these texts were deceived, not forgers, and Roman Catholics are our fellow Christians. But papal supremacy and papal infallibility are errors, departures from the faith of the undivided Church, and the false history these forgeries created helped them take root.

What we can say confidently

• The Donation of Constantine is an eighth- or ninth-century forgery giving the pope supremacy over the Eastern patriarchates; Leo IX quoted that clause to Constantinople in 1053.
• The papal letters of the False Decretals are ninth-century Frankish forgeries, probably from Corbie.
• They gave the earliest popes rules the Catholic Encyclopedia calls "new," including papal authority over all councils.
• The eleventh-century reform papacy brought them into canon law, and Gratian's Distinction 17 draws four of its six chapters from them.
• Roman claims to primacy predate both forgeries, and Vatican I does not cite them; what the forgeries gave those claims was a false antiquity.

What remains disputed

• Where and when the Donation was written: Rome or the Frankish kingdom, and in which decade between about 750 and 850.
• The exact date of the False Decretals (the 830s or 847-852) and whether Paschasius Radbertus led the work.
• Whether the forgers' main goal was the protection of bishops or the exaltation of Rome, or both together.
• How far they shaped Nicholas I and the eleventh-century reformers, and whether the medieval papacy would have developed as it did without them (Döllinger and the Catholic Encyclopedia disagree).

Conclusion

Christ told His apostles, "The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them ... But not so among you; on the contrary, he who is greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and he who governs as he who serves" (Luke 22:25-26).¹⁵ The Donation clothed the bishop of Rome in the insignia of Caesar, and the False Decretals gave him a monarchy over councils that the martyr-popes never claimed. Leo IX offered the first to Constantinople as the opposite of "cunningly devised fables." It was one.

The Orthodox Church needs no forgeries to answer forgeries. She honours St Peter and the ancient Church of Rome and its holy bishops, and she keeps the order of the undivided Church: a primacy of honour, councils that speak for the whole Church, and no bishop who rules all the others. That order is the apostolic faith kept in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, which the Orthodox Church is (see The Apostolic Faith Once for All Delivered and Guard the Good Deposit). Roman Catholics lose nothing true by laying the forgeries down, and may find that the Church of the first millennium is still here. For the wider case, see Why Orthodoxy.

Notes

1. The Donation of Constantine, trans. Ernest F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (London: George Bell, 1910), pp. 319-329, from Zeumer's edition (Berlin, 1888), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/donatconst.asp.
2. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Donation of Constantine," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1909), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05118a.htm.
3. Pope Leo IX, letter to Michael Cerularius and Leo of Ohrid, chapters 13-14, Latin text in Cornelius Will, ed., Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae Graecae et Latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig and Marburg, 1861), pp. 65-85, https://archive.org/details/Will1861ActaEtScripta. Quotations are our translation. Will dates the letter to 1053; the Catholic Encyclopedia (note 2) gives 1054. Will's introduction also describes Leo of Ohrid's letter and the legates' excommunication in Hagia Sophia. Scripture as in note 15.
4. Kirsch, "Donation of Constantine" (note 2), on Anselm of Lucca, Deusdedit, Gratian's palea and the later popes.
5. Lorenzo Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, trans. Christopher B. Coleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), Hanover Historical Texts Project, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/vallapart1.html and https://history.hanover.edu/texts/vallapart2.html. Nicholas of Cusa: Kirsch (note 2).
6. Louis Saltet, "False Decretals," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1909), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05773a.htm.
7. Eric Knibbs, review of Clara Harder, Pseudoisidor und das Papsttum (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014), The Medieval Review 15.08.44 (2015), https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/download/19714/25799. Zechiel-Eckes's key articles, as Knibbs cites them: "Verecundus oder Pseudoisidor?," Deutsches Archiv 56 (2000), 413-446; "Ein Blick in Pseudoisidors Werkstatt," Francia 28 (2001), 37-90.
8. Gratian, The Treatise on Laws (Decretum DD. 1-20), trans. Augustine Thompson and James Gordley, introduction by Katherine Christensen (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), introduction and Distinction 17, with source notes 283-292 (chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5 from the Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae; chapter 4 from Pelagius I; chapter 6 from Ennodius).
9. Pope Julius I, letter to the Eusebians, in St Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos 35, trans. M. Atkinson and Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 vol. 4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/28081.htm.
10. Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 2.8, trans. A. C. Zenos, NPNF2 vol. 2, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26012.htm.
11. First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus (1870), chapter 3 and its notes (37-60 on this page), in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum20.htm; Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 22, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html.
12. Council of Nicaea (325), canon 6; Council of Chalcedon (451), canon 28; trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm and https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3811.htm.
13. Patriarch Anthimos VII and the Holy Synod of Constantinople, Reply to the Papal Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Reunion (1895), sections 17-18, Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1895orthodoxencyclical.asp.
14. Janus [Ignaz von Döllinger], The Pope and the Council, authorized translation from the German (London: Rivingtons, 1869), pp. 94-95 and the section on Gregory VII, https://archive.org/details/india.history.resource.73139. On Döllinger's authorship and his excommunication in 1871: P. M. Baumgarten, "Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05094a.htm.
15. Scripture is quoted from the New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982), checked at https://www.biblegateway.com/.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• The Donation of Constantine. Trans. Ernest F. Henderson. Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages. London: George Bell, 1910.
• Leo IX. Letter to Michael Cerularius and Leo of Ohrid. In Cornelius Will, ed., Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae Graecae et Latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant. Leipzig and Marburg, 1861.
• Gratian. The Treatise on Laws (Decretum DD. 1-20). Trans. Augustine Thompson and James Gordley. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993.
• Valla, Lorenzo. Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine. Trans. Christopher B. Coleman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Athanasius. Apologia contra Arianos (with the letter of Julius I). NPNF2 vol. 4.
• Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History. NPNF2 vol. 2.
• Canons of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451). Trans. Henry Percival. NPNF2 vol. 14.
• Patriarchate of Constantinople. Reply to the Papal Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Reunion. 1895.

Other scholarship

• Knibbs, Eric. Review of Clara Harder, Pseudoisidor und das Papsttum. The Medieval Review 15.08.44 (2015).
• Zechiel-Eckes, Klaus. "Verecundus oder Pseudoisidor?" Deutsches Archiv 56 (2000); "Ein Blick in Pseudoisidors Werkstatt." Francia 28 (2001). Cited through Knibbs.
• Janus [Ignaz von Döllinger]. The Pope and the Council. London: Rivingtons, 1869.

Sources from the tradition being discussed

• Kirsch, Johann Peter. "Donation of Constantine." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5. 1909.
• Saltet, Louis. "False Decretals." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5. 1909.
• Baumgarten, P. M. "Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5. 1909.
• First Vatican Council. Pastor Aeternus. 1870. In Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils.
• Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium. 1964.