DONATION OF CONSTANTINE

DONATION OF CONSTANTINE. This document dates from the late eighth century. It was probably composed at either the papal chancery or, perhaps, the abbey of St. Denis near Paris; and purports to be a letter of the Emperor Constantine to Pope Silvester acknowledging the papacy’s (q.v.) universal ecclesiastical primacy, granting the pope and his successors temporal authority over the west half of the Roman Empire (q.v.). Likely the result, and retroactive justification, of Pope Stephen II’s alliance with the Frankish kingdom of Pippin I in 754, the Donation also served to justify what medieval canonists would later call the translation of empire (translatio imperii) from Byzantium to Charlemagne (qq.v.) in the year 800. It was referenced first in 1054 to legitimize papal claims in a letter from Pope Leo IX to Patriarch Michael Cerularius. The document was thus important in providing a legal rationale for the great papal theocracy of the High Middle Ages, e.g., the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1215). Finally, it also appears to have entered the ecclesiastico-political bloodstream of Russia at just about the time when it had been discredited in Western Europe (ca. 1490) via the “Tale of the White Cowl” and the city of Novgorod, at that time one of the few Russian cities with extensive contacts with the West. The “Tale,” a variant of the Donation, contributed significantly to the later mythos of Moscow as the “Third Rome.”