Notes and Studies |
Constantine's Donation to the ‘Bishop and Pope of the City of Rome’
The salutation urbis Romae episcopo et pape in the forged Donation of Constantine is generally supposed to mean ‘to the bishop of the city of Rome and Pope’, not ‘to the bishop and pope of the city of Rome’, on the grounds that a Western writer of the eighth century would not have added any qualifier to the term ‘Pope’. This claim is disproved by chapter 14 of the Donation, while other documents from the eighth century reserve the locution urbis Romae papa for distinguished pontiffs, especially when engaged in some extension of their prerogative. The closest parallel to urbis Romae episcopo et pape occurs in [Nennius], Historia Brittonum 50, with a change in syntactic order that entails the translation ‘bishop and pope of Rome’.