The Anachronistic Words

Lorenzo Valla and the Forgery of the Donation of Constantine

Inside the royal chancery of Castel Nuovo in Naples in 1440, humanist Lorenzo Valla examined a Latin parchment charter that had shaped European geopolitics for six hundred years. While the armies of Pope Eugenius IV and King Alfonso V of Aragon fought for southern Italy, Valla audited the Constitutum Constantini, known as the Donation of Constantine. The document purported to be an imperial decree issued on March 30, 315 CE, under Emperor Constantine the Great and the consul Gallicanus. According to its text, Pope Sylvester I had cured Constantine of leprosy in Rome. In gratitude, the emperor handed over his imperial crown, purple cloak, and temporal jurisdiction over Rome, Italy, and the entire western Roman Empire to the bishop of Rome forever.

Throughout the Middle Ages, canon lawyers incorporated the Donation into Gratian's twelfth-century Decretum. Popes cited it to claim feudal supremacy over European kings. Earlier critics, including Otto of Freising and Nicholas of Cusa, had questioned whether any Roman emperor would voluntarily strip his dynasty of half the world. They also wondered why fourth-century chroniclers like Eusebius never mentioned the transfer. Yet political skepticism could not overturn a sealed charter in court. Serving as royal secretary to King Alfonso, Valla saw that the charter could be demolished from within. Instead of debating theology, he audited the physical medium of the document: its Latin grammar, institutional titles, and historical vocabulary.

Born in Rome to a family of curial lawyers, Valla had spent years compiling his six-volume Elegantiae linguae Latinae. That empirical survey compared classical Latin syntax against medieval scholastic usage. Valla recognized that human language is not a static code. It mutates continuously over time, acquiring loanwords, shifting idioms, and coining terms tied to specific offices. A genuine constitution drafted in 315 CE had to obey the linguistic and administrative boundary conditions of the early fourth century. Any word, title, or biblical citation that originated centuries later acted like a radioactive isotope proving the text was composed after that date.

In his 1440 treatise De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, Valla dissected the charter sentence by sentence. First, he noted its complete absence from fourth-century records. No gold or bronze copy existed, no Roman senate decree ratified the partition, and Roman consuls continued ruling Italy under Constantine's sons without interruption. Second, Valla cataloged dozens of linguistic anachronisms embedded in the forger's prose:

• - *The Unbuilt Capital (Constantinopolis)*: The charter granted authority over the patriarchal sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople. Valla pointed out that in 315 CE, the city on the Bosporus was still a Greek town named Byzantium. Constantine did not decide to rebuild it until 324 CE. He did not dedicate it as Constantinople until May 11, 330 CE, fifteen years after the charter's date.
• - *The Persian Officials (Satrapae)*: Opening its imperial salutation, the decree addressed the empire's satraps alongside the Roman senate. Valla demonstrated that no Roman emperor or legal digest ever called provincial governors satraps. That Persian title was borrowed by a medieval cleric reading the Latin Vulgate books of Daniel and Maccabees.
• - *The Cloth Crown (Diadema vs. Corona): The forger wrote that Constantine placed a diadem of pure gold and precious stones upon Pope Sylvester's head. Valla proved from classical coins that in fourth-century Latin, a diadema was never a solid metal crown (corona*). It was a silk or linen headband fastened around the forehead.
• - Clerical Vestments and Barbarisms: The text granted Roman clergy the right to wear linen horse-cloths (mappulae) and ecclesiastical sandals (campagi). It also filled its sentences with eighth-century Frankish chancery barbarisms such as condecet and citations from St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate Bible, translated in the 380s CE.

By cross-referencing these vocabulary strata, Valla pinned the forgery to the eighth century. Around 754 CE, clerics in the papal chancery fabricated the charter to persuade the Frankish king Pepin the Short to hand central Italy over to the papacy. Modern palaeographers have confirmed Valla's window, tracing the earliest surviving copy (BnF Latin 2777) to the Frankish abbey of Saint-Denis. After Ulrich von Hutten printed Valla's treatise in 1517, philological anachronism became the standard forensic test for historical documents.