alf of the 8th
century. This being granted, there is room for plentiful speculation as
to where and why it was concocted. We may still hold the opinion of
Dollinger that it was intended to impress the barbarian Pippin and
justify in his eyes the Frank intervention in favour of the pope in
Italy; or we may share the view of Loening (rejected by Brunner,
_Rechtsgeschichte_) that the forgery was a pious fraud on the part of a
cleric of the Curia, committed under Adrian I.,[4] with the idea of
giving a legal basis to territorial dominion which that pope had
succeeded in establishing in Italy. The donations of Pippin and
Charlemagne established him as sovereign _de facto_; the donation of
Constantine was to proclaim him as sovereign _de jure_. It is
significant in this connexion that it was under Adrian (c. 774) that the
papal chancery ceased to date by the regnal years of the Eastern emperor
and substituted that of the pontificate. Dollinger's view is supported
and carried a step further by H. Bohmer, who by an ingenious argument
endeavours to prove that the _Constitutum_ was forged in 753, probably
by the notary Christophorus, and was carried with him by Pope Stephen
II. to the court of Pippin, in 754, with an eye to the acquisition of
the Exarchate. In support of this argument it is to be noted that the
forged document first appears at the abbey of St Denis, where Stephen
spent the winter months of 754. E. Mayer, on the other hand, denies that
the _Constitutum_ can have been forged before the news of the
iconoclastic decrees of the council of Constantinople of 754 had reached
Rome. He lays stress on the relation of the supposed confession of faith
of Constantine, embodied in the forgery, to that issued by the emperor
Constantine V., pointing out the efforts made by the Byzantines between
756 and the synod of Gentilly in 767 to detach Pippin from the cause of
Rome and the holy images. The forgery thus had a double object: as a
weapon against Byzantine heresy and as a defence of the papal patrimony.
As the result of an exhaustive analysis of the text and of the political
and religious events of the time, Mayer comes to the conclusion that the
document was forged about 775, i.e. at the time when Charlemagne was
beginning to reverse the policy by which in 774 he had confirmed the
possession of the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento to the pope.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--See Dollinger, _Papstfabeln des Mittelalters_ (Munich,
1863; Eng