The Donation of Constantine served to justify Papal temporal authority over Western Europe for centuries, until Lorenzo Valla proved that it was a fraud. No one likes a revisionist historian.

Links:
Tomb of Lorenzo Valla
Valla’s refutation of the Donation of Constantine

Sources:
Blum, Paul Richard. Philosophers of the Renaissance
Blum, Paul Richard. Philosophy of Religion in the Renaissance. Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology. Farnham, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Ltd, 2010. CUA Press, 2010.
Celenza, Christopher S. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Valla, Lorenzo, and Renaissance Society of America. The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine. Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts 1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Renaissance Society of America, 1993.

Image: Fresco of Donation of Constantine

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#284 – Lorenzo Valla and the Donation of Constantine”