Читать книгу Crises in the History of the Papacy. Lives and Legacy of the Most Influential Popes Who Shaped the Development & History of Church онлайн

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In a famous passage, which has inspired a small library of controversial writing, this writer of the life of Hadrian in the Liber Pontificalis affirms that Charlemagne assigned to St. Peter and his successors for ever the greater part of Italy: in modern terms, the whole of Italy except Lombardy in the north, which was left to the Lombards, and Naples and Calabria in the south, where the Greeks still lingered. The duchies of Beneventum and Spoleto, the provinces of Venetia and Istria, and the island of Corsica, which were not at the disposal of Charlemagne, are expressly included; and it is said that one copy of the deed, signed by Charlemagne and his nobles and bishops, was put into the tomb of St. Peter, and another copy was taken to France. This is the basis of the claim of later Popes to the greater part of Italy.

But the suspicions of historians are naturally awakened when they learn that both copies of this priceless document have disappeared: that the only description of its terms is this passage of the Liber Pontificalis, which was presumably written in the Papal chancellery: and that the art of forging documents was extensively cultivated in the eighth century. The famous "Donation of Constantine," a document which makes the first Christian Emperor, when he leaves Rome, entrust the whole Western Empire to Pope Silvester, is a flagrant forgery of the time; indeed, most historians now conclude that it was fabricated at Rome during the Pontificate of Hadrian. Certainly the Pope seems to refer to it when, in 777, he writes to Charlemagne: "Just as in the time of the Blessed Silvester, Bishop of Rome, the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church was elevated and exalted by the most pious Emperor Constantine the Great, of holy memory, and he deigned to bestow on it power in these western regions."120