The Donation of Constantine was a letter supposedly written by the Roman emperor Constantine (285-337 A.D.) to Pope Sylvester I, granting the Catholic Church ownership of vast territories within the western Roman Empire. For centuries, Popes used the Donation to legitimate the Church’s possession of the papal lands in Italy. The truth was that the Church only officially acquired the papal lands in 756 ad when King Pepin of the Frankish Empire gave them to the Church as a gift. But for almost 700 years, until 1440, the Donation was considered to be authentic. More→

Count Jean V d'Armagnac (1420-1473) was described by a contemporary as "short and stocky of stature, even pot-bellied, but gifted with great bodily strength. His neck was short, surmounted with an acne-pocked visage, with squinty eyes, crowned by a shock of red hair."

The Count fell in love with his younger sister, Isabelle, whom he affectionately called ma mia costa (my own rib). She was said to be one of the great beauties of her time. He had two sons with her, after which he sought approval from the Pope to marry her. The Pope refused.

Undeterred, the Count bribed a papal official, Antoine d'Alet, Bishop of Cambrai, to forge a papal bull allowing the marriage. A few months later, the Count and his sister had a third child together, a daughter. The three children were known as the Bastards of Armagnac. Isabelle referred to them in public as her niece and nephews, which technically they were.

When the Pope learned of what the Count had done, he excommunicated him. Eventually the Count married another woman (not related to him).

Later the Count rebelled against King Charles VII of France, who sent an army to crush him. The army killed the Count and dragged his body through the streets. They locked his wife, seven months pregnant, in a cell with her husband's dead body. Her child (the Count's one legitimate heir) was stillborn, thus ensuring the end of the House of Armagnac.

Crowland Abbey, located deep in the Lincolnshire fens of England, was once a center for medieval religious life. Today, however, it lies mostly in ruins. A few quatrefoil window carvings and undamaged statues provide a sense of the building's former glory, but the abbey itself is less well known for its artwork than it is for an outrageous historical hoax that its former inhabitants once perpetrated. More→

Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) was not himself a forger, but he was the author of an unusual theory about forgery. As librarian of the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he came to the conclusion that virtually all classical texts, and most ancient works of art, coins and inscriptions, had been forged by a group of thirteenth-century monks led by a mysterious figure whom he called Severus Archontius. The goal of this group was supposedly to "establish Atheism amongst men, by paganising all the facts of Christianity". The name Severus Archontius was probably a veiled reference to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.

Hardouin was, at the time he first proposed his theory in 1693, a highly regarded scholar. Other learned men tried to take him seriously and argued the merits of his theory with him, but as he persisted in his views, he gradually came to be seen as a pariah in the scholarly community. One contemporary described him as "very confident, arrogant, and violently addicted to hypothesis and paradox." His critics referred to his theory dismissively as "Harduinismus".

Hardouin claimed he "detected the whole fraud" by spotting a series of clues embedded in classical works, clues that included instances of poor writing as well as apparent anachronisms. He believed the thirteenth-century forgers had not only forged the core classical texts, but also a range of later references to these texts, thereby creating a vast web of mutually reinforcing deception.

A nineteenth-century historian remarked that, "The legitimate inference from his theory is that he wished to establish Romanism on the ruins of universal learning, and to reduce mankind to an implicit submission to the Popedom: for, to the obvious question, which he states himself, 'If we must not believe the Fathers, whom can we believe?' he boldly replies: 'Not the Fathers, I say, but our Holy Mother the Church of Rome.'"

Viewed in a broader context, Hardouin's theory can be seen as an extreme expression of a growing awareness amongst seventeenth-century scholars of the number of errors, exaggerations, and inventions in the historical record.

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