Die Konstantinische Schenkung und ähnliche Gaben – im Westen und im Osten Europas

Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas. 2015. Vol. 63. No. 1. P. 23–46.

In this article the author considers only imagined gifts, those that never were presented in reality but nevertheless turned to be pivotal for many rulers, seeking to legitimize their audacious political ambitions. The best examples of such imagined gifts were those values and privileges that the popes allegedly received from Constantine the Great after his conversion to Christianity. The fictitious generosity of Constantine was invented in "his" famous detailed charter forged in the 8th or 9th century. But other imagined gifts, also possessing strong legitimizing effect, used to come into being in the same way, due to equally elaborated narratives. As the principality of Moscow was striving for regional dominance in the 15th and 16th centuries, a series of influential texts were composed, describing and explaining the gifts of extraordinary political and symbolic relevance, allegedly made either to ancestors of the ruling dynasty, or to predecessors of the highest church dignitaries. The most known among those writings are the anonymous Tale of the Nowgorodian white clow and the Tale of the princes of Vladimir, as well as the Epistle on the Monomachos Crown by Spiridon-Savva. These texts claimed that the secular potentates of Moscow, as well as ecclesiastical heads of Novgorod had been presented in the past with invaluable insignia, either symbolizing the succession to the Roman emperors, or testifying the special benevolence of God. As the author finally argues, the morphology of these imagined gifts was mainly the same as of those in the Donation of Constantine: no really new regalia were created, but the ones, already existing, were vested with quite new, and nobler, significance, able to ensure a higher level of legitimacy for their possessors. Therefore the ways, how such imagined gifts used to be invented, seem to be substantially identical throughout Europe.

Ключевые слова: историческое воображение, легитимация власти, «Константинов Дар», strategies of legitimation, insignia, инсигнии, symbolic legitimation, legitimation of power, Donation of Constantine, Tale of the princes of Vladimir, Tale of the Nowgorodian white clow, Повесть о белом клобуке, Сказание о князьях Владимирских, дары, символическая легитимация, стратегии легитимации

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