Roman Catholicism, wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky “has proclaimed a new Christ, not like the former one, but one who has been seduced by the third temptation of the devil — the temptation of the kingdoms of the world: “All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me!” This is the main reproach made by the Orthodox to the Roman Church. I find it entirely justified, and I would add that the Catholic false Christ is in fact Yahweh in disguise.

Unlike the Patriarch of Constantinople or later that of Moscow, who only claimed the “spiritual sword” (sacred authority), the medieval popes also claimed the “temporal sword” (secular power). Not only did they directly govern one of the richest principalities in Italy, but they claimed to rule over kings and emperors (read “The Failed Empire: the Medieval Origin of the European Disunion”).

To justify their project of universal monarchy, the popes employed an army of legal scholars who developed a new canon law to prevail over feudal and customary law, while using forgeries to make their new system appear to be the oldest.

The most famous medieval forgery is the “Donation of Constantine.” It was fabricated in a papal scriptorium between 750 and 850, and later included in a collection of a hundred other false decrees and synodal acts known today as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. The main purpose of these false decrees was to invent precedents for the exercise of the sovereign authority of the Bishop of Rome over the universal Church, on the one hand, and over all Western secular sovereigns, on the other. These forgeries were incorporated in the 12th century into the Decretum of Gratian which would become the basis of all canon law.

The Donation of Constantine is the centerpiece of this massive enterprise of falsification of history. It can be regarded as the Constitution that the Roman Church gave Western Europe. It probably had more political influence than any other written document in human history.

By this document, Emperor Constantine the Great, out of gratitude for having been miraculously cured of leprosy by the water of baptism, ceded “to Sylvester the universal pontiff and to all his successors until at the end of the world” all the imperial insignia — pallium, scepter, diadem, tiara, purple cloak, scarlet tunic — that is to say the totality of “the imperial greatness and the glory of our power.” Constantine also ceded to pope Sylvester “both our [Lateran] palace and the city of Rome and all the provinces, localities and cities of Italy or the western regions.” And to leave the pope full power over the West, Constantine decided to withdraw to Byzantium; “for, where the supremacy of priests and the head of the Christian religion has been established by a heavenly ruler, it is not fitting that there an earthly ruler should have jurisdiction.” On this basis, for half a millennium, the popes would claim to have received full imperial authority and the right to bestow this authority on the man of their choice, or to withdraw it from him if he falls short of their expectation. By virtue of this principle Gregory VII forced the Germanic Emperor Henry IV to humble himself before him and recognize his suzerainty at Canossa in January 1077.

Having received from Constantine full temporal power over the entire West, the popes would also strive to transform all kingdoms into papal fiefs, and their kings into vassals. In 1059 Pope Nicholas II gave southern Italy and Sicily (if he could conquer it) to the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard, on the condition that he pays homage to him. A few years later, Alexander II gave England to William of Normandy under the same condition. Then Adrian IV (1154-1159) gave Ireland as a “hereditary possession” to the King of England Henry II, because “all the islands are supposed to belong to the Roman Church under ancient law, according to the donation of Constantine, who richly endowed them.” Slowly but surely, from one coup d’état to the next, thanks to its magic weapon of excommunication, the pope became the most powerful overlord of Europe, receiving allegiance and tribute from countless kings. All that on the basis of the authority conferred to him by the false Donation of Constantine.

The forger of the Donation of Constantine was not content with asserting that the pope holds temporal supremacy over the entire West. He also gave him spiritual supremacy over the entire world, meaning, practically, over all of Eastern Christianity. Constantine the Great is made to decree that the Bishop of Rome “shall govern the four patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople, as well as all the Churches of God throughout the entire world. And the pontiff who will now preside over the destiny of the most holy Roman Church will be the highest, the head of all priests in the whole world, and all things will be regulated according to his decisions.” The Donation, of course, led to what we in the West call the Eastern Schism, but the Orthodox call the Western Schism. The pope’s claim for supremacy over other patriarchs was a betrayal of the original conciliar constitution of the Church, an attempted coup against the principle of brotherly entente that was the condition for the Holy Spirit to guide the universal Church.

While the Donation was used as a legal document by the papacy from the 11th century, its authenticity or its validity were occasionally challenged. In the year 1001, in response to a request from Pope Sylvester II to “restore” to the Holy See eight counties of Italy, Emperor Otto III denounced the “negligence and incompetence” of the pontiffs, as well as “the lies forged by themselves” written “in letters of gold” and placed “under the name of the great Constantine”. At the beginning of the 13th century, Walther von der Vogelweide, a poet close to Frederick II, did not dispute the origin of the Donation but saw it as a great misfortune, which reversed the natural order of the world and caused infinite suffering to the Europe. Frederick II had his lawyers declare it unlawful: Constantine simply had no right to make it. Innocent IV responded that, all things belonging to Christ, whom the Pope represented on earth, the Donation was only a “restitution”.

It was not until the 15th century that the fraudulent origin of the Donation began to be widely recognized, through a fairly simple critical analysis (for example, how could Constantine evoke the Patriarchate of Constantinople which did not yet exist?). And yet, no official apology was ever presented by the Vatican for this diabolical hoax. In fact, nothing changed fundamentally in the discourse and attitude of the papacy. Although unmasked as the second greatest liar on earth (the self-proclaimed “chosen people” come first), the Church later resorted to the most ridiculous claim of “papal infallibility” (1870).

The popes used Constantine’s forged signature as the basis for their theocratic project. What else did they make up under Constantine’s name? To what extent did they invent the Constantine that they needed? How much credit deserves Constantine’s biography written by the clerical historian Eusebius of Caesarea? This biography is presented by its author to have been written based on direct conversation with Constantine. Recent academic editors of this Vita Constantini admit that “it has proved extremely controversial,” with some scholars being “highly skeptical.”

Indeed, the integrity of Eusebius as a writer has often been attacked and his authorship of the VC [Vita Constantini] denied by scholars eager to discredit the value of the evidence it provides, with discussion focusing particularly on the numerous imperial documents which are cited verbatim in the work.

The Vita Constantini is believed to have been written in Greek, but it was only known until the 13th century in the Latin translation attributed to the legendary Saint Jerome, as was the same author’s Church History (the autobiography of the Church, so to speak). There is no guarantee that it was written in the East, or before the 8th century. It may be as fake as the Donation of Constantine.

Outside Eusebius’s prose, there is not a single piece of evidence that Constantine was a Christian, or even favorable to Christianity. Two panegyrics (public speeches of praise) of Constantine have been preserved and they make no mention of Christianity. Instead, one contains the account of a vision received by Constantine from the sun god Apollo, “with the sign of victory”, after which Constantine placed himself under the protection of Sol Invictus.

What “Eusebius” writes — and allegedly heard from Constantine’s mouth — about the battle of the Milvian Bridge is obviously a rewriting of that motif drawn from the imperial religion. When marching on Rome to overthrow Maxentius, Eusebius tells us, Constantine “saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, ‘By this conquer’” (I,28). The following night, Christ appeared to him in a dream to confirm the vision. Constantine immediately had his troops paint the sign on their shields — turning Christ into powerful a military god — and won the battle. Our author wants us to believe he got this story from Constantine himself:

If someone else had reported it, it would perhaps not be easy to accept; but since the victorious Emperor himself told the story to the present writer a long while after, when I was privileged with his acquaintance and company, and confirmed it with oaths, who could hesitate to believe the account, especially when the time which followed provided evidence for the truth of what he said? (I,28)

I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that a good biographer would not write like that. Only a dedicated liar would. The lie is actually proven by the fact that the arch built by Constantine to commemorate his victory over Maxentius in Rome contains numerous representations of pagan deities, and especially of the sun god Apollo, but not the slightest reference to Christ. Can there be a stronger proof that “Eusebius” invented Constantine’s encounter with Christ?

The same author has this to say about the sign adopted by Constantine as a military standard (now called the labarum):

This was something which the Emperor himself once saw fit to let me also set eyes on, God vouchsafing even this. It was constructed to the following design. A tall pole plated with gold had a transverse bar forming the shape of a cross. Up at the extreme top a wreath woven of precious stones and gold had been fastened. On it two letters, intimating by its first characters the name ‘Christ’, formed the monogram of the Saviour’s title, rho being intersected in the middle by chi. These letters the Emperor also used to wear upon his helmet in later times. (I,31)

This Chi-Rho sign is today the coat of arms of the papacy. But archeology and numismatics have proven that it predates Christianity. It is found, for example, on a drachma of Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-222 BC) — between the eagle’ legs.

The Chi-Rho even appears on a coin minted by Maxentius, whom Constantine is said to have defeated precisely by this sign. It is clear that the Chi-Rho — or chrismon or christogram — was a pre-Christian imperial symbol stolen by the Church. It is unclear, however, what it stood for before Christianity. As it is often found inside by a vegetal wreath, it may have referred to a cosmic principle associated to the resurrection of Nature at Easter time, a symbol of Anastasis. And since the Chi-Rho appears behind the head of Constantine in a mosaic in Hinton St Mary, Dorset, England (lead picture), and since Constantine liked to be portrayed with a solar or radiant crown, it is likely that Chi-Rho has a solar significance.

Some see it as a symbol borrowed from the cult of Mithras, closely linked to Sol Invictus. The analogies between Mithras and Jesus are so numerous that Justin and Tertullian accused Mithras of imitatio diabolica (watch this ten-minute video or this longer scholarly presentation). We also know that several Italian churches, including Saint Peter’s Basilica, were built on Mithraic crypts. Note on the frontispiece of Saint Peter’s that the P comes before the X, suggesting an acronym beginning with P. Could it be that the sign was originally a Latin short for PAX? I find it unlikely, because of its frequent association with the Greek letters α and ω.

The main point is this: we do not have a single archaeological clue that Constantine claimed or even promoted the Christian faith. And we have serious reasons to believe that Eusebius lied. We do know, however, that he had himself represented as the sun god Apollo in Rome as well as in Constantinople, where there stood a 100-feet-high column topped with a statue of himself with a radiating crown. Sol Invictus was publicly celebrated on December 25, but also every Sunday (day of the sun), by a law enacted in March 321. Since the earliest reference to December 25 as the date of Christ’s birth does not come before 354 (in the Depositio Martyrum), seventeen years after Constantine’s death, and since it was Emperor Theodosius I who in 380 banned the cult of Sol Invictus to make December 25 a Christian holiday, we have evidence that Christianity usurped elements of the cult of Sol Invictus. The evergreen wreath of Christmas is a legacy from pre-Christian times.

By the way, Theodosius was of Phoenician origin, and Phoenicians were indistinguishable from Jews (many, if not most, became Jews after the fall of Carthage). Does that point to a vengeful Phoenician-Jewish conspiracy to conquer Rome from within through Christianity, as Flavio Barbiero speculated (read “How Yahweh Conquered God”)? That may be for another article. But remember that saint Augustine was also, most probably, a Phoenician (he lived in Carthage and claimed to speak Punic), and that he wrote a eulogy of Theodosius (City of God V,26).

We know that there was a shift in religious policy after Constantine’s dynasty, when Theodosius conquered Rome. But the shift may have been much more radical than commonly assumed. The cult of Sol Invictus, which Constantine had intended to make the unifying religion of the Empire, was replaced by the cult of the Jewish Messiah Jesus and his jealous, theoclastic god. The shift may have involved a complete rewriting of recent history; Theodosius needed to claim continuity with Constantine, so he commissioned pseudo-Eusebius (who is also pseudo-Jerome) to write the official “Church History.”

The problems with Constantine’s Christian faith are numerous. Here is another clue that it is covering up something. We are told that Constantine convened and presided over the first Council of Nicaea in 325, and forced all the bishops present to sign the profession of faith drawn up on the occasion against the doctrine of Arius. But Eusebius himself also tells us that Constantine later favored Arianism and was baptized into this “heresy” by his relative Eusebius of Nicomedia, an Arianist that he had made patriarch of Constantinople. His son Constantius II followed the same creed. Is it credible that a Roman emperor of sane mind would thus revert his own policy, and destroy the unity of Church that he had just enforced? We are led to suspect that the Council of Nicaea, of which no trace survives outside Eusebius, is a fiction fabricated long after the death of Constantine. Arianism itself is a big mystery, by the way: it has left virtually no known material trace, even in Spain where it is supposed to have been the religion of the ruling Visigoths for three centuries. This is a great puzzlement for archeologists like Ralf Bockmann (“The Non-Archaeology of Arianism,” 2014), or Alexandra Chavarria Arnau (“Finding invisible Arians,” 2017), suggesting that what is presented today as a Christian heresy might have been something totally different. What exactly? It is impossible to say, apart from the fact that it resisted the claim that a man could be God.

There are so many inconsistencies in the history of Christianity up to the early sixth century, which you can read in my book Anno Domini. Some are actually hinted in casual mentions by unsuspecting scholars. Here is, for example, a remark from the editor of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (524):

What we notice in Boethius’s works — at least in those that are authentic — is the absence of any hint, no matter how distant, of the Christian religion. Judging by his written words alone, we could be led to believe that this religion had appeared on earth the previous day, and that its moral teaching and dogmas were still confined to the catacombs.

Boethius wrote the Consolation while awaiting death and is considered a Christian martyr. Does that sound plausible?

The Vita Constantini was probably written centuries after the Church History ascribed to the same author. It is fully consistent with the Donation of Constantine and may belong to the same period, and be just as fraudulent. It puts special emphasis on Constantine’s translatio of the capital of the Roman Empire from Italy to the Bosphorus, so as to leave the pope complete dominion over the entire West.

That notion of translatio imperii is saturated with contradictions, as I have pointed out before. First, Constantine did not move his capital to the East, since he himself was from Moesia, in the Balkans. Academic historiography recognizes that Constantine had never set foot in Rome before conquering it from Maxentius. Constantine’s father Constantius was also from Moesia, as was his colleague and rival Licinius. So was his predecessor Diocletian, who lived mainly further east in Nicomedia, on the eastern bank of the Bosphorus.

Secondly, Constantine cannot have moved the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium, because Rome had already ceased to be the imperial capital before Constantine was born, being replaced by Milan in 286. By the time of Diocletian and Constantine, all of Italy had fallen into anarchy during the “Crisis of the Third Century” (235-284). Under Diocletian, Rome was already “a dead city.”

Besides, can we really believe in the transfer of an imperial capital a thousand miles away, with its high administration and senatorial nobility, leading to the metamorphosis of a Roman empire into another Roman empire with completely different language, culture, religion and political structure (read “Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History”)? And for what purpose? For Ferdinand Lot, a specialist of Late Antiquity who has thought long and hard about this question, “the founding of Constantinople is a political enigma”. In a desperate effort to make sense of it, he concludes that “Constantinople was born from the caprice of a despot prey to intense religious exaltation,” and that, through this “political madness,” “Constantine believed he was regenerating the Roman Empire,” but that, “unwittingly, he founded the Empire so rightly called ‘Byzantine’.”

Such unreasonable speculation only proves the failure of academic historiography to give credibility to a story that should be analyzed, not as serious history, but as an element of propaganda produced by the same brains as the Donation of Constantine. This paradigm of translatio imperii is probably a legend invented to mask the opposite and very real movement of translatio studii, the transfer to the West of the Greek culture preserved by Byzantium, a transfer that began before the crusades and culminated in the plunder of 1204.

When one starts questioning about Constantine and the relationship between the two Roman empires, chronological oddities appear, quickly reaching a critical mass that makes the standard narrative about ancient Rome collapse under your feet.

That narrative is based on sources that are impossible to trace before the 11th century, some of them popping up much later. It has been argued, for example, that the works of Tacitus, discovered in the 15th century by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), “betray the pen of a 15th century humanist” (Polydor Hochart).

The architecture of Rome is itself inconsistent with the narrative. “Where is the Rome of the Middle Ages,” asked British historian James Bryce, “the Rome of Alberic and Hildebrand and Rienzi? the Rome which dug the graves of so many Teutonic hosts; whither the pilgrims flocked; whence came the commands at which kings bowed? … To this question there is no answer. Rome, the mother of the arts, has scarcely a building to commemorate those times.” There may be an answer: this dark hole of the Middle Ages is an illusion. What we regard as constructions of Roman Antiquity are really from the Middle Ages, and sometimes even from the late Middle Ages.

We have always known that Roman Antiquity is, to some extent, a ghost conjured up by those who claimed to produce its “Renaissance”. But to what extent exactly? Consider that in 1144 the Commune of Rome was founded as a Republic, after Pise in 1085, Milano in 1097, Gene in 1099, Florence in 1100. Rome used the acronym SPQR on its buildings and coins, while around the same time forty-two other medieval Italian cities used the acronym SPQ followed by the initial of the city’s name: SPQP for Pisa, SPQT for Tusculum, SPQL for Lucera, etc. In 1362, the Roman poet Antonio Pucci pointed that SPQR stood for the Italian words Sanato Popolo Qumune Romano (“The Senate and People of the Commune of Rome”). These facts are not compatible with the theory that SPQR was coined in 509 BC and means Senatus Populusque Romanus. Most likely, SPQR was never used before the founding of the Commune of Rome in the twelfth century. Now what unsuspecting French scholar Robert Folz writes brings to mind an alternative interpretation:

In 1143, the Capitol became the residence of the Council of the Commune of Rome. … In an environment where the past was the object of such a passion as in Rome, any attempt at new creation had to take the aspect of a restoration of the past: the Council of the Commune was called Senate, the senatorial era was used in the dating of acts, while the sign SPQR also reappeared. It all happened as if they were returning to the tradition of republican Rome.

Another way to look at it is: It all happened as if they were inventing the tradition of republican Rome while claiming to revive it. This was common practice, in a world where antiquity meant prestige and prestige meant power. When the cities of Reims and Trier were competing for the honor of crowning emperor Otto the Great, Reims came up with the claim of having been founded by Remus, and Trier responded by claiming to have been founded by Trebeta, a contemporary of Abraham. Both produced texts to back their claim. Some medieval Roman patriots had the motive, means and opportunity to fabricate their city’s antiquity. Petrarch (1304-1374), who “discovered” Cicero and simultaneously became a Ciceronian, was part of a circle of Italian propagandists who celebrated Rome’s past glory. “His intentions,” writes French medievalist Jacques Heers, “were deliberately political.” He was “one of the most virulent writers of his time, involved in a great quarrel against the papacy of Avignon,” doing his utmost to bring it back to Rome.”

These are bold hypotheses. But if we have learned one thing during the last 20 years, it is that history is often a lie, sometimes a very big lie. The history of Rome was written in the context of its competition with Constantinople: it is comparable to Jacob’s lie in order to get his father’s blessing a cheat Esau of his birthright. The question I have raised here are legitimate. Those who are interested might enjoy my book Anno Domini. It raises more questions than it gives answers.

But one thing seems pretty sure: the Empire of Lies has a long, very long history of lies behind it. The false Donation of Constantine and the false biography of Constantine are its original sin.

Notes

Feodor Dostoievsky, The Diary of a Writer, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919, “March 1876”, p. 255.

In the words of chronicler John of Salisbury, quoted in I. S. Robinson, The Papacy 1073-1198, Cambridge UP, 1993, p. 310-311.

Diploma n° 389 in the Monumenta Germaniae, Diplomata regum et imperatorum Germaniae, II, p. 819, quoted by Robert Folz, L’idée d’empire en Occident du V^e au XIV^e siècle, Aubier, 1953, p. 202 ; Robert Folz, Le Souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans l’Empire germanique médiéval, Les Belles Lettres, 1950, p. 85.

Johannes Fried, “Donation of Constantine” and “Constitutum Constantini”, De Gruyter, 2007, p. 7.

Domenico Maffei, “The forged donation of Constantine in medieval and early modern legal thought,” Fundamina (a Journal of Legal History), number 3, 1997, pp. 1-23, on https://archive.org/details/the-forged-donation-of-constantine.

Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, translated with introduction and commentary by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, Clarendon, 1999, on p. 1.

Eusebius, Life of Constantine, translated with introduction and commentary by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, Clarendon Press, 1999, p. 81.

Eusebius, Life of Constantine, translated with introduction and commentary by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, Clarendon Press, 1999, p. 81.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AncientCoins/comments/17evfa0/%C3%A6_triobol_of_ptolemy_iii_euergetes_246222_bc/ and https://www.cointalk.com/threads/the-chi-rho-monogram-challenge.350188/

Whether this mosaic portrays Christ or Constantine is debated. If it portrayed Christ, it would be the earliest representation of Christ known, and it would be completely unlike any other.

Flavio Barbiero, The Secret Society of Moses: The Mosaic Bloodline and a Conspiracy Spanning Three Millennia, Inner Traditions, 2010, pp. 156-165.

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk4EL_oaB-E

On the theoclastic nature of the Hebrew god, read Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, Stanford University Press, 2009.

Ralf Bockmann, “The Non-Archaeology of Arianism – What Comparing Cases in Carthage, Haidra and Ravenna can tell us about ‘Arian’ Churches” in Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed, ed. Gudo M. Berndt and Roland Steinacher, Ashgate, 2014; Alexandra Chavarria Arnau, “Finding invisible Arians: An archaeological perspective on churches, baptism and religious competition in 6th century Spain”, 2017, also available on the Internet.

Foreword to Louis Judicis de Mirandol’s edition, Boèce, La consolation philosophique (1861), p. xxvi.

Ferdinand Lot, La Fin du monde antique (1927), Albin Michel, 1989, p. 29.

Ferdinand Lot, La Fin du monde antique, op. cit., p. 33.

Ferdinand Lot, La Fin du monde antique, op. cit., pp. 47-52.

Polydor Hochart, De l’authenticité des Annales et des Histoires de Tacite, 1890, on archive.org, pp. viii-ix.

Viscount James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (1864), on www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44101

Antonio Pucci [1362], Libro di varie storie (a cura di Alberto Varvaro, AAPalermo, s. IV, vol. XVI, parte II, fasc. II, 1957) [anno accademico 1955-56], pp. 136-137, mentioned in it.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR

Robert Folz, L’Idée d’Empire en Occident du V^e au XIV^e siècle, Aubier, 1953, p. 107.

Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders (German edition 1984), trans. Patrick Geary, University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 9.

Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Âge, une imposture, Perrin, 1992, pp. 55-58.