Gigantic present from the grateful emperor

One of the most famous forgeries of the Dark Ages was the manuscript called the Donation of Constantine. This fake Roman imperial edict was evidently devised in the second part of the 8th century for the Pope of Rome Stephen II.

The Donation of Constantine t was used by Catholic church for centuries as the support for its territorial claims. It believed blindly in the authenticity of the famous manuscript. Only in the second part of the fifteenth century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual critique, the Church had begun to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine.

In the forgery Roman emperor Constantine allegedly grants to the Popes of Rome dominion over lands in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, the city of Rome and the entire Western Roman Empire. The manuscript tells that all these territories are presented a gift of the first Christian emperor to the pope Sylvester. All these named lands were a one gigantic "present" from the grateful emperor to the pope for instructing him in the Christian faith, baptizing him, and even miraculously curing Constantine of leprosy.

Pope Stephen II was a shrewd diplomat. He successfully used the forgery to create the foundation of the Papal States. He crossed into Gaul with this manuscript and presented a copy to the new king of Franks Pepin the Short. Pope managed to gain king’s support against Lombards who occupied former Byzantine territories in Italy and threatened to push the Pope out of Rome. In 756 Pepin and his Frankish army forced the Lombards to surrender their conquests to the pope of Rome. These lands would become the Papal States and would be the basis of the Papacy’s secular power for the next eleven centuries.