Lorenzo Valla

• 1. Introduction

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  Lorenzo Valla, born in Rome around 1407, did something that no one else in the Christian world had dared to do: he proved, using the tools of grammar and historical logic, that one of the most powerful legal documents in medieval Europe was a fraud. That document, the Donation of Constantine, had been used for centuries to justify the papacy's claim to rule over vast territories in the Western Roman Empire. Valla dismantled it sentence by sentence. He would later be put on trial by the Catholic Inquisition for his trouble.

  Valla was a humanist scholar, rhetorician, educator, and Catholic priest. He spent much of his working life moving between courts and universities, making enemies nearly as fast as he made arguments. Martin Luther held him in high regard. Erasmus called him the finest guide to Latin grammar available. Robert Bellarmine, a cardinal of the Roman Church, named him "Luther's precursor." For someone who died in 1457, Valla's shadow fell a very long way forward.

  What drove a priest to expose the foundations of papal power? How did a man trained in the Papal Curia end up on trial before the Inquisition? And why did a work he wrote between 1439 and 1440 only see formal publication in 1517, the same year Luther nailed his theses to a church door?

• 2. A Roman Education

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  Valla's father, Luciave della Valla, was a lawyer who worked in the Papal Curia, so the machinery of Church administration was familiar territory from childhood. The family had roots in Piacenza, though Valla himself was born in Rome. His teachers in the city included Leonardo Bruni and Giovanni Aurispa, from whom he learned Latin and Greek. Beyond those formal lessons, he is thought to have been largely self-taught.

  Bruni was a papal secretary, and Valla's uncle Melchior Scrivani held the same office. The connections were there. But Valla had a talent for friction. An early work championing the rhetorician Quintilian caused offence to Antonio Loschi, and the episode illustrated a pattern: Valla rarely chose the diplomatic path when an argument was available.

  In 1431, he was ordained as a priest. That same year, he made an attempt to secure a position as apostolic secretary in China. The bid failed despite his network of contacts. He then moved to Pavia, where he obtained a professorship of eloquence, but his tenure there was uncomfortable because he attacked the Latin style of the jurist Bartolus de Saxoferrato. After Pavia, he became itinerant, moving between universities and cities, taking short engagements and leaving controversy behind him at each stop.

• 3. The Forgery Exposed

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  Between 1439 and 1440, while working at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, Valla wrote the essay whose full Latin title translates roughly as a declamation on the falsely believed and fabricated Donation of Constantine. The document he targeted claimed that the Emperor Constantine I had granted Pope Sylvester I dominion over the entire Western Roman Empire, supposedly in gratitude for being miraculously cured of leprosy. The grant had been treated as a legal foundation for papal territorial authority for centuries.

  Valla attacked it on three separate fronts. First, he argued that Constantine could not have legally given Sylvester the powers the document described. Second, he pointed out that no contemporary evidence from the 4th century recorded such an enormous change in the administration of the Western Roman Empire, and that its absence made the claim implausible. Third, he doubted that Constantine had given the pope anything at all, suggesting the document may have confused an earlier pope.

  Then came the linguistic evidence. The document used the word "satrap," a term Valla believed Romans of Constantine's era simply would not have chosen. The quality of the Latin itself was poor for a text of such supposed importance. The document lurched between tenses, shifting from "we have proclaimed" to "we decree" in the same passages. From this Valla concluded that the Latin style dated not to the 4th century but to the 8th century, placing the forgery roughly four hundred years after the reign it claimed to document.

  From 1435 to 1445, Valla was in Alfonso's employ, and Alfonso was then locked in a territorial conflict with the Papal States under Pope Eugene IV. The political context did not escape anyone's notice. In 1444, Valla was put on trial before the Catholic Inquisition. Alfonso V intervened directly to prevent his imprisonment.

• 4. Latin as a Critical Weapon

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  Richard Claverhouse Jebb said that Valla's De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae "marked the highest level that had yet been reached in the critical study of Latin." Written around 1449, the work subjected the forms of Latin grammar and the conventions of Latin style to systematic examination. Its arguments were controversial when it appeared, but they eventually carried the day: humanistic Latin, shaped by Valla's standards, worked to purge itself of post-Classical usage.

  The Elegantiae, as it was commonly called, proved enormously popular. It was reprinted nearly sixty times between 1471 and 1536. That record of reprintings is one of the clearest measures of influence available for a Renaissance text.

  Valla's critical instincts extended to scripture itself. Studying Jerome's Latin Vulgate, the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church, he questioned the Church's entire system of penance and indulgences. His argument turned on a single word. Jerome had rendered the Greek metanoia as the Latin paenitentia, meaning penance. Valla argued that a more accurate translation would have been "repentance." The distinction mattered enormously: penance implied a formal sacramental system; repentance was an inward condition. Later critics of the Church's indulgence system, including Erasmus, praised this work. Erasmus found the Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum, Valla's notes on the New Testament, in Leuven in 1504 and published them in 1505.

• 5. The Quarrelsome Scholar

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  Older biographies of Valla describe a man who combined humanistic elegance with critical wit and what one account calls "venom." The most prominent literary dispute of his career was with Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini, which took place after Valla settled in Rome. Extreme language was employed on both sides. Bracciolini attacked Valla in an oration at the beginning of 1452, and Valla responded with the Antidotum in Pogium the same year.

  The conflict with Bracciolini was only the most visible of many. His tenure at Pavia had collapsed partly because of his contempt for the Latin style of Bartolus de Saxoferrato. His early offence against Antonio Loschi over Quintilian preceded that. His Antidotum in Facium, an invective against Bartolomeo Facio who was also a rival at Alfonso's court, contained extended criticism of Facio's and Panormita's attempts to emend the text of Livy. Valla also offered his own suggestions for improving on Petrarch's study of Livy in the same period.

  Despite the turbulence, Pope Nicholas V invited Valla to Rome in 1447. There he worked on his Repastinatio and became a papal scribe. In 1455, he was appointed a papal secretary, the same position his uncle and his teacher Bruni had held. Erasmus, writing in his De ratione studii, stated flatly that for Latin grammar, there was "no better guide than Lorenzo Valla."

• 6. Afterlife and Erasure

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  Valla died in Rome on the 1st of August 1457. He was originally buried beneath the monumental bronze Lex de imperio Vespasiani behind the altar of Saint John Lateran. His tomb and epitaph were last recorded by Seyfried Rybisch in 1570. Six years later, Pope Gregory XIII, described as a staunch believer in the Donation of Constantine, had the tomb destroyed when he removed the bronze to the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Today, a memorial to Valla stands in the Lateran in place of the original burial site.

  The essay on the Donation of Constantine was not formally published until 1517, more than seventy years after Valla wrote it. It became popular among Protestants. An English translation was produced for Thomas Cromwell in 1534. The work that had been suppressed and ignored by the Church found its largest audience precisely among those who were breaking from it.

  Collected editions of Valla's works appeared at Basel in 1540 and at Venice in 1592. The dialogue De Voluptate, written in 1431 and contrasting Stoic principles unfavourably with the ideas of Epicurus, was later revised under the title De vero bono. His Repastinatio, a reworking of logic and philosophy, went through three versions between around 1439 and 1457. The Danish rhetorician Christian Kock has argued that Valla's rhetorical theory, particularly his Epicurean approach to persuasion in De Voluptate, connects to 20th-century ordinary language philosophy, a reach across five centuries that Valla himself would probably have found worth arguing about.