This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: With deepfakes on the rise, forgery and deception are often viewed as distinctly modern problems—a new era of misinformation made possible by artificial intelligence. One of the first alarming cases occurred at the start of the war in Ukraine, when a doctored video appeared to show President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their weapons.
Yet the impulse to deceive people by fabricating evidence far predates the digital age. In some cases, the consequences of these deceptions reverberated for centuries. As a scholar of medieval history, I'm interested in how the forerunners of today's deepfakes perplexed and captivated scholars in early modern Europe—and how they were debunked.
Searching for truth amid falsified documents is not limited to our era; a skeptical eye toward the authenticity of sources was just as important in the 15th century as it is today. Throughout the Middle Ages, at least 10 popes cited the same fraudulent claim, which asserted that Emperor Constantine I had transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I in the early 300s. Eventually referred to as the "Donation of Constantine," this forged imperial decree was used to try to justify expanding papal control throughout the Italian peninsula.
The text describes Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, falling ill with leprosy. In a dream, he was instructed to seek baptism from Sylvester, and he recovered. The story is also found in the "Acts of Sylvester," a fifth-century collection about the pope's life.
In gratitude, Constantine supposedly granted the pope and his successors "power, and dignity of glory, vigor, and imperial honor" over "the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and the western regions." The Donation also gave the church properties to control "in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, Italy and the various islands." To be clear, there are no references that even allude to the existence of this document until the eighth century. In 778, Pope Adrian I wrote to Charlemagne, king of the Franks, who was quickly gaining control over parts of Western Europe. Charlemagne's father, Pepin the Short, had granted the church sovereignty over what became known as the Papal States, a group of territories on the Italian peninsula.
According to this letter, Adrian, who hoped to assert territorial and spiritual dominion over the Franks, urged Charlemagne to offer land as well. Some scholars have argued that the letter suggests familiarity with the Donation. In 1054, as the church split into two branches—the Eastern Orthodox and Western Roman Catholic churches—Pope Leo IX wrote a letter in which he invoked the Donation by name for the first time.
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