The Donation of Constantine grew out of the legends about Sylvester I, Bishop of Rome, as well as out of legends about Constantine. These are described at length in Constantine the Great and Christianity. The most familiar form of the Sylvester-Constantine legend is that of Mombritius’ Sanctuarium, sive Vitae collectae ex codibus, Milan, _c._ 1470, vol. II, folio 279: Paris, 1910, vol. II, pp. 508-531. Present-day scholarship is not in entire agreement on all points connected with the Donation of Constantine. The following summary, however, may be hazarded. The problem of modern criticism, of course, is, not to establish the spuriousness of the Donation,—that has long been obvious,—but to locate the origin of the document as closely as possible. The development of the Sylvester-Constantine legend was worked out best by Döllinger (Papstfabeln des Mittelalters, Munich, 1863: ed., J. Friedrich, Stuttgart, 1890) and by Duchesne (in his edition of the Liber Pontificalis, vol. I, 1886, pp. cvii-cxx). These have shown the existence at Rome, as early as the last of the sixth century, of the story which forms most of the narrative part of the Donation, and gave the forger the whole of his background. The earliest known manuscript of the document is in the Codex Parisiensis Lat. 2778, in the Collectio Sancti Dionysii, found in the monastery of St. Denis, in France. The collection contains documents dating from the last years of the eighth century, though it may have been put together later. The collected Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, in which the Donation was virtually published to the world, in the middle of the ninth century, also came out in France. French writers of the ninth century, also, were the first, so far as we know, to refer to the Donation. Such facts help to fix the date of the forgery, but under the circumstances they do not fix the place as France. Rather they are merely another illustration of the well-known leadership of France in learning and politics during the ninth century.