Applying his linguistic expertise, Valla achieved major scholarly breakthroughs, especially in the field of sniffing out fakes, such as those bogus texts from Alexandria. He had already demonstrated, in 1440, that a document called the Donation of Constantine, allegedly composed by the emperor who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, was in fact a clever forgery. In the donation, Constantine supposedly transferred power over the western provinces of the empire, including Italy, to the Church. The document’s exposure as a forgery was a calamitous blow to the Vatican’s prestige.
