Constantine donation

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Depiction of the Donation of Constantine on a fresco from 1246, New Year's Eve chapel at the Basilica of Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome

The term of the Constantinian donation ( Latin Constitutum Constantini or Donatio Constantini ad Silvestrem I papam ) refers to a forged document dated by science to around the year 800 , which was allegedly issued by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in 315/317 has been. In it Pope Silvester I (pontiff from 314-335) and all his successors usque in finem saeculi , ie until the end of time, a spiritual , but at the same time politically effective supremacy over Rome , Italy , the entire western half of the Roman Empire The rich , but also the entire earth, was transferred by donation. The “donation of Emperor Constantine” in 1440 by the humanist Lorenzo Valla was proven to be a forgery .

The popes used the charter to establish their supremacy in Christianity and territorial claims. After evidence of forgery in the 15th century, this fact has been generally accepted since it was published in Cardinal Caesar Baronius' Annales Ecclesiastici (published 1588–1607).

content

The name of the falsification used in the sources is Constitutum Constantini (determination of Constantine). The document consists of two equal parts, a Confessio (creed) and a Donatio (donation). The common name Konstantinische Donation derives from the donation part. There are well over 300 manuscripts of the Creed (Confessio) in Latin, Greek, Syrian and Armenian versions as well as in other vernacular versions.

The Confessio part says that Emperor Constantine, as a persecutor of Christians, was attacked by leprosy towards the end of his life . The Roman pagan Capitoline priests advise him "to bathe in the blood of innocent children, but he is pityed by the complaint of the mothers and sends mothers and children home". As if as a reward, in a nightly dream he is referred by the apostles Peter and Paul, who appear to him, to Pope Silvester I , who can help him. New Year's Eve is hidden from the persecution of Christians on Mount Soracte . Constantine has New Year's Eve brought in, "who heals him with a baptismal bath". (In reality, Constantine was only baptized on his deathbed by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia .) Tradition has it that he was the first emperor to act as a Christian. After the healing, Constantine confesses the Christian trinitarian faith and insists that with Peter, New Year's Eve was also given the power to bind and release .

Out of gratitude, it is explained in the second part, Constantine gave the Roman bishop priority over all other churches, ie over the patriarchates of Constantinople , Antioch , Alexandria and Jerusalem . In addition, the Pope was given the imperial insignia and privileges (the diadem , the purple cloak, the scepter and the right of procession). Eventually he was given control of all of Italy and the whole of the West. Constantine also leaves the Lateran Palace to him and, as a sign of submission, performs the strator service , ie the ritual service of a groom by leading the papal horse. Constantine moves his seat of government from Rome to Constantinople in the eastern part of the empire, while New Year's Eve takes control of the west (the west).

The forged document thus justifies the claim of the Roman church to land and the authority to direct all other local churches and gives the Pope a rank that is comparable to the imperial.

Effect in the Middle Ages

The Constantinian donation may have played a role as early as the 750s, when Pope Stephan II pressed himself against the Frankish King Pippin III from the Longobards . turned and he assured the Pope in the context of the Pippin donation the rule over Lombard areas in central Italy, partially transferred and thus expanded the territorial basis of the Papal States. However, some researchers believe that the forgery was only made in the late 8th century or at the beginning of the 9th.

The earliest references to the donation can be found in the Chronicle of Ado von Vienne and Aeneas von Paris (each around 870). Further verifiable references can be found in the De Ordine Palatii des Hinkmar von Reims from the year 882 and in a document from Pope Benedict VII to a Spanish recipient from April 979. The latter is based in detail on the text of the Constantinian donation in the poetic formula . However, the excerpt was legally irrelevant and purely diplomatic jewelry.

A manuscript from the 10th century in Bamberg today gives us a special version of the Constitutum Constatini, in which a direct signature (confirmation) by Otto I is formulated. The imperial court, however, saw through this parchment, submitted by a deacon named Johannes, as a forgery and was therefore not confirmed by Otto. In 1001 an imperial diploma from his grandson Otto III referred to this forgery . The half-Greek had flatly rejected the authenticity of the Constitutum with reference to John's forgery and in keeping with the Greek tradition. Shortly afterwards, the 21-year-old emperor died an unnatural death.

The Constitutum is presented with full force in the great dispute between the Ecumenical Patriarch Michael Kerullarios and Pope Leo IX. or his representative and envoy, Cardinal Humbert von Silva Candida (1053/1054), who had traveled to Constantinople . The dispute between East and West initially concerned liturgical questions and the use of leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist. But soon the problem of the primacy of the Roman bishop came to the fore, and Humbert quoted the text of the Constitutum in the Roman-Petrine sense: first he rearranged the order of the patriarchal seats, placing Constantinople at the end - apparently with degrading intent -: Rome , Alexandria and after the small patriarchate of Jerusalem the great Constantinople. That it was a question of hierarchy becomes clear when the Patriarch Michael Kerullarios put on imperial insignia, corresponding to the emblems that were given to Pope Silvester and his successors by Constantine. The dispute, which escalated ever higher, ended with a mutual curse of the two churches in 1054, which was viewed by the West as a schism , for which (only) Western religious historians coined the term Eastern Schism and which continues to this day more or less.

From the middle of the 11th century until the late Middle Ages, the popes regularly invoked the Constantinian donation, both to justify territorial claims and in conflict with the patriarchs of Constantinople. By the 11th century at the latest, the Constantine donation became an integral part of canon law. The evidence of the forgery around 1440 initially did not change this. The reason for this is the medieval understanding of law: In the case of documents, it was the (plausible) content that mattered, not the origin. Counterfeiting was not uncommon and was usually fully incorporated into the law.

In the Middle Ages, apart from Otto III. only heretics and individual opponents of the papacy in Italy rejected the Donation of Constantine. Despite the grave conflicts between the papacy and the empire and its disputes with the French and English kings, none of these rulers tried to dispute the authenticity of the document. However, for various reasons, allegations of counterfeiting continued to arise. They could be caused by the sometimes misleading classification in the pseudo-idoric decretals , one of the most widespread canon law books in the early Middle Ages . The Constitutum Constantini is there according to a letter from the predecessor Pope of Silvester Melchiades (310-314) and after a treatise on the Council of Nicaea (325), which already speaks precisely of the act of gift of Constantine on New Year's Eve. This gave Roman circles the idea to see a forgery in the Donation of Constantine. It is a lie and a heretical fable, about which "even the shopkeepers and market women talked openly in Rome" - this is how Friedrich Barbarossa was reported when he ascended the throne in 1152. A Roman freedom movement wanted to reverse all donations to Pope New Year's Eve in the middle of the 12th century. Bernhard von Clairvaux expressed doubts about the Konstantischen donation and criticized the fact that with it the poison penetrated the clergy in the form of pomp and pomp.

Proof of forgery

Only two scholars of the 15th century, first the German theologian and philosopher Nikolaus von Kues in De Concordantia Catholica in 1433 and then the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla around 1440 , proved that the donation was a forgery. Valla showed with linguistic arguments that the Latin of the document shows features that rule out the emergence in the early 4th century. In addition, the name Constantinople is mentioned in the document , although the city was still called Byzantion or Nova Roma at the time of the alleged exhibition (315/317) .

It was not until the Reformation that Valla's knowledge became known to wider circles. The imperial knight Ulrich von Hutten reissued De donatione Constantini from 1521 in his uncompromising fight against Pope Vallas . Since the early 17th century, the Catholic Church took the view that the document was forged, but that Constantine had really given it and that the forgery was committed by the Greeks, i.e. not in the service of the papacy. It was only in the 19th century that the Catholic scholar Ignaz Döllinger proved that the claim of Greek origin and subsequent translation into Latin is unfounded. The Vatican had discovered the forgery in the same century and recognized that the claim to secular power could not be justified by a gift from the Roman emperor.

literature

  • Johannes Fried : Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini. The Misinterpretation of a Fiction and its original Meaning . De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-018539-3 , ( Millennium Studies 3).
  • Johannes Fried: The Constantine Donation . In: Johannes Fried, Olaf B. Rader (ed.): The world of the Middle Ages. Places of remembrance from a millennium . CH Beck, Munich 2011, pp. 295-311.
  • Horst Fuhrmann : Constantine donation and occidental empire . In: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages (DA) 22, 1966, pp. 63–178
  • Horst Fuhrmann: Donation from Constantine . In: Lexikon des Mittelalters Volume 5, Sp. 1385-1387.
  • Horst Fuhrmann: Constitutum Constantini . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie 8, 1981, pp. 196-202.
  • The Constitutum Constantini (Donation of Constantine) . Text output. Published by Horst Fuhrmann. Hahn, Hanover 1968, ( Monumenta Germaniae historica Leges 8; Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum separatim editi 10).
  • Nicolas Huyghebaert: Une légende de fondation: le Constitutum Constantini . In: Le Moyen Âge 85, 1979, ISSN  0027-2841 , pp. 177-209.
  • Daniel ED Müller: "Magna Charta of All Claims of the Papacy"? The Impact of the Constitutum Constantini on the Argument in Favor of the Papal Primacy . In: Roman quarterly for Christian antiquity and church history 114 (2019), pp. 80–116.
  • Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele: "Defecit Ecclesia": Studies on the idea of ​​decay in the view of church history in the Middle Ages (= publications by the Institute for European History Mainz , Volume 213: Department for Western Religious History). von Zabern, Mainz 2006, ISBN 978-3-8053-3647-5 (Habilitation thesis Universität Mainz 2006, 408 pages).
  • Wolfram Setz : Lorenzo Valla's writing against the Constantinian donation. For interpretation and history of effects = De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (= library of the German historical institute in Rome 44). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1975, ISBN 3-484-80063-1 (dissertation University of Tübingen 1971, 197, 50 pages).
  • Kurt Zeillinger: Otto III. and the Donation of Constantine. A contribution to the interpretation of the diploma of Emperor Otto III. for Pope New Year II (DO III. 389) . In: Forgeries in the Middle Ages . International Congress of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich, 16. – 19. September 1986. Part 2: Forged legal texts, the punished forger . Hahn, Hannover 1988, ISBN 3-7752-5157-X , ( Writings of Monumenta Germaniae historica 33, 2), pp. 509-536.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ http://12koerbe.de/arche/const.htm
  2. ↑ Nadine Wendland: Gibbon, the church historiography and the religious philosophy of the Enlightenment . S. 194 f .
  3. ↑ Horst Fuhrmann : The Konstantinische Donation - About the meaning and effect of a famous forgery ; from zur debate issue 4, 2007; Catholic Academy in Bavaria
  4. ↑ See Johannes Fried: Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini. Berlin et al. 2007, p. 47.
  5. ^ See Hinkmar, De ordine palatii , ed. and over. v. Thomas Gross and Rudolf Schiesser, Hannover 1980 (MGH, Fontes iuris germanicis antiqui, III), p. 57 and note 106
  6. ↑ Jürgen Miethke: The “Constantine Donation” in the medieval discussion