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Review article: The Roman contexts of the ‘Donation of Constantine’

Johannes Fried’s book in some respects has the tone of a crime novel: fast-paced progression through a narrative, forensic analysis of evidence, some nefarious deceptions, and at the end a revelation cunningly plotted through a series of clues and hints. Unlike a good crime novel, though, Fried’s book cannot be called a compulsive read. His publishers have done him no favours by some exceptionally sloppy editing. Still, when a distinguished German scholar offers his work in English (in Fried’s case, a rare exception to his oeuvre otherwise) and on such a puzzle as the Donation of Constantine, Anglophone readers must rejoice. Typos notwithstanding, a fresh argument emerges with Fried’s characteristic force and clarity. Given his original, sometimes quirky, but always stimulating contributions to recent (and not so recent) historiography on earlier medieval political ideas, to the workings of memory, and to reconsideration of Carolingian entanglements with Italy, Rome and the papacy in the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, Fried is very well placed to provoke some new and lateral thinking on an old whodunnit. The prime focus of the early part of the book (pp. 1–30) is on the gifts that Emperor Constantine allegedly gave to Pope Sylvester, bishop of Rome, and the ways in which those gifts were re-presented and reworked,