Probably composed in Rome or the Frankish world during the eighth century, the Donation of Constantine falsely claimed that Emperor Constantine had granted extensive temporal authority to Pope Sylvester I. Medieval popes used the document to support political claims. Lorenzo Valla exposed its anachronistic Latin in 1440.

Dante condemned the supposed donation in the Divine Comedy, believing the gift genuine but disastrous. Valla's linguistic exposure of the forgery became a landmark of humanist philology and encouraged writers to test inherited authorities through close textual analysis.