8. It Was Not Until the Renaissance That People Finally Got Around to Pointing Out the Fact That the Donation of Constantine Was a Crude Forgery
After the document detailing the Donation of Constantine was forged, it was stashed away and forgotten for hundreds of years. Then, in the mid-eleventh century, Pope Leo IX dusted it off, and cited it as evidence to assert his authority over secular rulers. Surprisingly, the Donation was widely accepted as authentic, and few questioned the document’s legitimacy. For centuries thereafter, the Donation 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 people got around to pointing out the fact that the Donation was a crude forgery.
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 back then, but only came into use hundreds of years later. Additionally, 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 from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, they stopped referencing it in their Bulls and pronouncements.