Page:The Net of Faith.pdf/153

61 It was often quoted by popes and papal partisans in their subsequent struggles for temporal power. For seven hundred years it was believed to be authentic, even though there were men who wished it were a forgery, which Nicholas of Cusa had suspected, but the honor of discovering their falsehood was left to Lorenzo Valla, the famous Italian humanist, who showed in a scathing work of 1440,, that its Latin

The second part consists of papal decrees of the period between Sylvester I ( 314–336) and Gregory II ( 715–731) of which 39 are spurious, and of the acts of several councils which are quite unauthentic. It opens with the Donation of Constantine, the most famous of all these forgeries, parts of which was quoted in the text above.

., I, p.43* , chaps. XIV,XV,XVI–XXIII, p.99*, p.117*, n.9 (the Waldensian version),

Rinaldi records ( IX, p.145), that Emperor Sigismund of the Constance Council fame, was crowned Emperor by Pope Eugenius IV only after he had re-confirmed and ratified the Donation of Constantine.

Nicholas of Cusa,, A.D.1435,. Girolamo Mancini,, Firenze, 1891, pp.145ff). Another clergyman who doubted the authenticity of these documents was Reginald Pecock, the Bishop of St.Asaph, who wrote in 1444 (reprinted in London in 1860,. p.350–366); . also Marsilius of Padua,, dictio II, cap.11; Dante: , III, 10.

1405–1457. Of course, Valla had immediately many enemies who wrote against his discoveries, but in vain (e.g. Antonio Cortesi di Pavia,, etc.). It is significant, however, that Valla's discovery was reluctantly recognized as valid by the Church of Rome only 430 years later, on September 20, 1870! (Cf. Mancini,, p. 157).