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This is the second of three articles drawing attention to major structural problems in our history of Europe in the first millennium AD. In the first article (“How fake is Roman Antiquity?”), we have argued that the forgery of ancient books during the Renaissance was more widespread than usually acknowledged, so that what we think we know about the Roman Empire — including events and individuals of central importance — rests on questionable sources. (We have not claimed that all written sources on the Roman Empire are fake.)

这是三篇文章中的第二篇，旨在关注公元一千年欧洲历史上的主要结构性问题。
在第一篇文章(“古罗马有多假?”)中，我们认为，文艺复兴时期伪造古籍的现象比人们通常认为的更为普遍，因此，我们对罗马帝国的了解——包括重要的事件和个人——都是建立在可疑的来源之上的。(我们并不是说所有关于罗马帝国的书面资料都是假的。)

We have also argued that the traditional perspective of the first millennium is distorted by a strong bias in favor of Rome, at the expense of Constantinople. The common representation of the Byzantine Empire as the final phase of the Roman Empire, whose capital had been transferred from the Latium to the Bosphorus, is today recognized as a falsification. Politically, culturally, linguistically, and religiously, Byzantium owes nothing to Rome. “Believing that their own culture was vastly superior to Rome’s, the Greeks were hardly receptive to the influence of Roman civilization,” states a recent Atlas de l’Empire Romain, mentioning only gladiator combats as a possible, yet marginal, debt.

我们还认为，第一个千年的传统观点被一种亲罗马的强烈偏见扭曲了，而君士坦丁堡则被忽视了。普遍认为拜占庭帝国是罗马帝国的最后阶段，其首都已从拉提姆转移到博斯普鲁斯海峡，今天被认为是一种伪造。在政治上、文化上、语言上和宗教上，拜占庭不欠罗马任何东西。最近的一份《罗马帝国地图集》指出，“希腊人相信他们自己的文化比罗马文化优越得多，所以很难接受罗马文明的影响，”。

The assumption that Western civilization originated in Rome, Italy relies partly on a misunderstanding of the word “Roman”. What we now call “the Byzantine Empire” (a term that only became customary in the sixteenth century) was then called Basileía tôn Rhômaíôn (the kingdom of the Romans), and for most of the first millennium, “Roman” simply meant what we understand today as “Byzantine”.

西方文明起源于意大利罗马的假设部分是基于对“罗马”这个词的误解。我们现在所说的“拜占庭帝国”(这个术语直到16世纪才成为习惯用语)当时被称为Basileía tôn Rhômaíôn(罗马人的王国)，在第一个千年的大部分时间里，“罗马”只用于指我们今天所理解的“拜占庭”。
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Our perception of Rome as the origin and center of Western civilization is also lixed to our assurance that Latin is the mother of all Romance languages. But that filiation, which became a dogma in the mid-nineteenth century, is under severe attack (we thank the commenters who directed us to this documentary and that one, to Yves Cortez’s book Le Français ne vient pas du latin, and to Mario Alinei’s work). It seems that Dante was correct when he assumed in De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1303), the first treatise on the subject, that Latin was an artificial, synthetic language created “by the common consent of many peoples” for written purposes.

我们认为罗马是西方文明的起源和中心，这也与我们确信拉丁语是所有罗曼语之母有关。但是，这种在19世纪中期成为教条的信仰，受到了严厉的攻击(我们感谢那些引导我们看这部纪录片《达契亚人和罗马尼亚人的祖先之古达契亚纪录片》和《NO VENIMOS DEL LATIN》、伊夫·科尔特斯(Yves Cortez)的书《Le franais ne vient pas du latin》和马里奥·阿里内(Mario Alinei)的作品的评论家)。但丁在《俗语论》(De vulgari eloquentia，约1303年)中假设拉丁语是一种人为的、合成的语言，是“许多民族共同同意”为书写目的而创造的，这似乎是正确的。

The distortions that produced our textbook history of the first millennium have both a geographical and a chronological dimension. The geographical distortion is part of that Eurocentrism that is now being challenged by scholars like James Morris Blaut (The Colonizer’s Model of the World, Guilford Press, 1993), John M. Hobson (The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Cambridge UP, 2004), or Jack Goody (The Theft of History, Cambridge UP, 2012). The chronological distortion, on the other hand, is not yet an issue in mainstream academia: historians simply do not question the chronological backbone of the first millennium. They don’t even ask themselves when, how and by whom it was created.

我们教科书上关于第一个千年的历史的歪曲既有地理上的，也有时间上的。地理扭曲是欧洲中心主义的一部分，现在受到了詹姆斯·莫里斯·布劳特(《殖民者的世界模型》，吉尔福德出版社，1993年)、约翰·M·霍布森(《西方文明的东方起源》，剑桥大学出版社，2004年)或杰克·古迪(《历史的盗窃》，剑桥大学出版社，2012年)等学者的挑战。
另一方面，时间上的扭曲在主流学术界还不是一个问题:历史学家根本不质疑第一个千年的时间支柱。他们甚至不问自己，它是何时、如何、由谁创造的。
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So far, we have formulated the working hypothesis that the Western Roman Empire is, to some extent, a phantom duplicate of the Eastern Roman Empire, conjured by Rome in order to steal the birthright from Constantinople, while concealing its debt to the civilization that it conspired to assassinate. The Roman Empire, in other words, was a dream rather than a memory, exactly like Solomon’s empire. But, one will instantly obxt, while archeologists have found no trace of Solomon’s empire, the vestiges of Augustus’ empire are plentiful. True, but are these vestiges really from Antiquity, and if so, why are medi vestiges nowhere to be found in Rome? If Rome was the beating heart of medi Western Christendom, it should have been busy constructing, not just restoring.

到目前为止，我们已经形成了一个有效的假设，即西罗马帝国，在某种程度上，是东罗马帝国的幻影复制品，是罗马为了窃取君士坦丁堡的长子继承权而召唤出来的，同时隐藏了它对密谋暗杀的文明的债务。
换句话说，罗马帝国是一个梦，而不是记忆，就像所罗门的帝国一样。但是，有人会立即反对，虽然考古学家没有发现所罗门帝国的痕迹，但奥古斯都帝国的遗迹却很多。没错，但这些遗迹真的来自古代吗?如果是的话，为什么在罗马找不到中世纪的遗迹呢?如果罗马是中世纪西方基督教世界跳动的心脏，它应该忙于建设，而不仅仅是修复。

The Commune of Rome was founded in 1144 as a Republic with a consul and a senate, in the wake of other Italian cities (Pise in 1085, Milano in 1097, Gene in 1099, Florence in 1100). It defined itself by the phrase senatus populusque romanus (“the Senate and the Roman people”), condensed in the acronym SPQR. Beginning in 1184 and until the early sixteenth century, the city of Rome struck coins with these letters. But, we are told, SPQR was already the mark of the first Roman Republic founded in 509 BC and, more incredibly, it was preserved by emperors, who apparently didn’t mind being thus ignored.

罗马公社成立于1144年，是一个拥有执政官和元老院的共和国，紧随其他意大利城市(1085年的皮塞，1097年的米兰，1099年的吉尼，1100年的佛罗伦萨)。它把自己定义为“元老院和罗马人民”(senatus populusque romanus)，缩写为SPQR。
从1184年开始，直到16世纪早期，罗马城用这些字母铸造硬币。但是，我们被告知，SPQR已经是公元前509年建立的第一个罗马共和国的标志，更令人难以置信的是，它被皇帝保存了下来，他们显然不介意被忽视。

As outrageous as it sounds, one cannot easily brush aside the suspicion that the ancient Roman Republic, known to us thanks to Petrarch’s “piecing together” Titus Livy’s History of Rome, is an imaginative portrait of late medi Rome in antique garb. Petrarch was part of a circle of Italian propagandists who celebrated Rome’s past glory. “His intentions,” writes French mediist Jacques Heers, “were deliberately political, and his approach was part of a real struggle.” He was “one of the most virulent writers of his time, involved in a great quarrel against the papacy of Avignon, and this relentlessness in fighting determined his cultural as well as political options.”

尽管这听起来令人难以置信，但我们不能轻易忽视这样的怀疑，即古罗马共和国——多亏了彼特拉克“拼凑”的提图斯·李维的《罗马史》，是一幅富有想象力的、中世纪晚期罗马人穿着古装的画像。彼特拉克是意大利宣传圈的一员，他们颂扬罗马过去的辉煌。“
关于他的意图，法国中世纪学者Jacques Heers写道，“是有意的政治，他的方法是真正斗争的一部分。”他是“他那个时代最恶毒的作家之一，卷入了一场反对阿维尼翁教皇的大争吵，这种无情的战斗决定了他的文化和政治选择。”

In the first article, we have questioned the obxtivity and even the probity of those humanists who claimed to resurrect the long forgotten splendor of Republican and Imperial Rome. In this second article, we turn our attention to ecclesiastical historians of earlier times, who fashioned our vision of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Their history of the Christian Church, peopled with miracle-performing holy men and diabolical heretics, is hard to connect with political history, and secular historians specialized in Late Antiquity are generally happy to leave the field to “Church historians” and teachers of faith. That is a shame, because the credibility of this literature has largely gone unchallenged.

在第一篇文章中，我们质疑了那些人文主义者的客观性，甚至是正直，他们声称要复兴被遗忘已久的共和帝国和罗马帝国的辉煌。在第二篇文章中，我们将把注意力转向早期的教会历史学家，他们塑造了我们对古代晚期和中世纪早期的看法。

The pontifical forgery factory
“Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature is the degree to which it was forged.” So Bert Ehrman begins his book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Throughout the first four centuries AD, he says, forgery was the rule in Christian literature, and genuine authorship the exception. Forgery was so systemic that forgeries gave rise to counterforgeries, that is, forgeries “used to counter the views of other forgeries.”[6] If forgery is part of the DNA of Christianity, we can expect it to continue throughout the Middle Ages.

教皇之赝品工厂
“可以说，早期基督教文学最显著的特点是它的伪造程度。”所以伯特·埃尔曼开始了他的书《伪造与反伪造:早期基督教论战中文学欺骗的运用》。他说，在公元前四个世纪，伪造是基督教文学的规则，而真正的作者是例外。
伪造是如此系统性，以至于伪造会引发反伪造，也就是说，伪造“被用来反驳其他伪造的观点”。如果伪造是基督教DNA的一部分，我们可以预期它将在整个中世纪继续存在。

One of the most famous medi forgeries is the “Donation of Constantine.” By this document, Emperor Constantine is supposed to have transferred his own authority over the Western regions of the Empire to Pope Sylvester. This forgery of outrageous audacity is the centerpiece of a whole collection of about a hundred counterfeit decrees and acts of Synods, attributed to the earliest popes or other Church dignitaries, and known today as the Pseudo–Isidorian Decretals. Their aim was to set forth precedents for the exercise of sovereign authority of the popes over the universal Church, as well as over kings and emperors.

中世纪最著名的赝品之一是《君士坦丁的捐赠》。根据这份文件，君士坦丁皇帝应该已经将自己对帝国西部地区的权力移交给了教皇西尔维斯特。这一令人发指的大胆伪造是大约一百份伪造的主教会议法令和行为的核心，这些法令和行为被认为是最早的教皇或其他教会显要人物伪造的，今天被称为伪伊西多里教令集。他们的目的是为教皇对普世教会以及国王和皇帝行使主权权力树立先例。

These documents were not used until the middle of the eleventh century, and it is not before the twelfth century that they were incorporated by Gratian into his Decretum, which became the basis of all canon law. Yet the scholarly consensus is that they date back from the time of Charlemagne. For that reason, Horst Fuhrmann, a specialist in medi forgeries, classifies them as “forgeries with anticipatory character,” which “have the characteristic that at the time they were written, they had hardly any effect.” According to him, these fakes had to wait, depending on the case, between 250 and 550 years before being used.

这些文件直到十一世纪中叶才被使用，直到十二世纪才被格拉提安纳入他的《法令》，成为所有教会法的基础。然而，学术界的共识是，它们可以追溯到查理曼时代。因此，中世纪赝品专家霍斯特·富尔曼(Horst Fuhrmann)将它们归类为“具有预见性的赝品”，“在它们被写出来的时候，它们几乎没有任何作用。”根据他的说法，这些赝品必须等待250到550年才能被使用，这取决于具体情况。

Heribert Illig rightly protests against this theory of forgeries allegedly written by clerics who had no immediate use of them and did not know what purpose their forgeries could serve a few centuries later. Forgeries are produced to serve a project, and they are made on demand when needed. The Donation of Constantine and other false Decretals are therefore most probably pure products of the Gregorian reform. Their “anticipatory character” is an illusion created by one of the chronological distortions that we have set out to correct.

赫里伯特·伊利格正确地抗议了这种伪造的理论，据称是由神职人员写的，他们没有立即使用它们，也不知道他们的伪造在几个世纪后会有什么目的。赝品是为一个项目服务的，在需要的时候是按需制作的。因此，君士坦丁的捐赠和其他虚假的法令很可能是格里高利改革的纯粹产物。他们的“预见性”是一种错觉，是由我们着手纠正的一种时间扭曲所造成的。

The Gregorian reform, which started with the accession of Pope Leo IX in 1049, was a continuation of the monastic revival launched by the powerful Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, which a century after its foundation in 910 had developed a network of more than a thousand monasteries all over Europe. The Gregorian reform can be conceived as a monkish coup over Europe, in the sense that celibate monks, who used to live at the margin of society, progressively took the leadership over it.

格里高利改革始于1049年教皇利奥九世即位，是强大的克吕尼本笃会修道院(Benedictine Abbey of Cluny)发起的修道复兴的延续。本笃会修道院于910年成立，一个世纪后，在欧洲发展了一个由一千多座修道院组成的网络。格列高利改革可以被看作是一场僧侣对欧洲的政变，从某种意义上说，曾经生活在社会边缘的独身僧侣逐渐掌握了社会的领导权。

It is worth insisting on the revolutionary character of the Gregorian reform. It was, wrote Marc Bloch in Feudal Society, “an extraordinarily powerful movement from which, without exaggeration, may be dated the definite formation of Latin Christianity.” More recently, Robert I. Moore wrote in The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215: “The ‘reform’ which was embodied in the Gregorian program was nothing less than a project to divide the world, both people and property, into two distinct and autonomous realms, not geographically by socially.”

格里高利改革的革命性是值得坚持的。马克·布洛赫在《封建社会》一书中写道，“这是一场非常强大的运动，毫不夸张地说，可以将其确定为拉丁基督教的形成。” 最近，罗伯特··摩尔在《第一次欧洲革命》(970-1215)中写道:“格里高利计划所体现的‘改革’，无非是一项将世界(包括人和财产)划分为两个截然不同的自治领域的计划，而不是按地理位置和社会划分的。”

The reform triumphed at the Fourth Lateran Council convoked by Innocent III in 1215. The world created by Lateran IV was “an entirely different world — a world pervaded and increasingly moulded by the well-drilled piety and obedience associated with the traditional vision of ‘the age of faith’, or medi Christianity.” Yet in a sense, Lateran IV was only a beginning: in 1234, Innocent III’s cousin Gregory IX instituted the Inquisition, but the great period of witch-hunting — the last battle against paganism — was still two centuries away.

改革在1215年英诺森三世召集的第四次拉特兰会议上取得了胜利。拉特兰四世创造的世界是“一个完全不同的世界——一个充斥着虔诚和服从的世界，这种虔诚和服从与传统的‘信仰时代’或中世纪基督教的愿景有关。”然而从某种意义上说，拉特兰四世只是一个开始:1234年，英诺森三世的堂兄格列高利九世建立了宗教裁判所，但伟大的猎巫时期这一与异教的最后一场战斗——仍然是两个世纪之后的事情。

In his book Law and Revolution, the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard UP, 1983), Harold Berman also insists on the revolutionary character of the Gregorian reform, by which “the clergy became the first translocal, transtribal, transfeudal, transnational class in Europe to achieve political and legal unity.” “To speak of revolutionary change within the Church of Rome is, of course, to challenge the orthodox (though not the Eastern Orthodox) view that the structure of the Roman Catholic Church is the result of a gradual elaboration of elements that had been present from very early times.

哈罗德·伯曼在其著作《法律与革命，西方法律传统的形成》(Harvard UP, 1983)中也坚持格里高利改革的革命性，“神职人员成为欧洲第一个实现政治和法律统一的跨地方、跨部落、跨封建、跨国阶级”。”“谈到罗马教会内部的革命性变化，当然是在挑战正统(虽然不是东正教)的观点，即罗马天主教会的结构是很早以前就存在的元素逐渐细化的结果。

This was, indeed, the official view of the Catholic Reformers of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries: they were only going back, they said, to an earlier tradition that had been betrayed by their immediate predecessors.” The Reformers, in other words, established a new world order under the pretense of restoring an ancient world order. They created a new past in order to control the future.

这确实是11世纪末12世纪初天主教改革者的官方观点:他们说，他们只是回到了更早的传统，而他们的前任背叛了这个传统。换句话说，改革家们在恢复古代世界秩序的幌子下建立了一个新的世界秩序。他们创造了一个新的过去来控制未来。

For that, they employed an army of legists who elaborated a new canonical legal system to supersede customary feudal laws, and made their new legal system appear as the oldest by producing forgeries on a massive scale. Besides the Pseudo–Isidorian Decretals and the false Donation of Constantine, they crafted the Symmachian forgeries, destined to produce legal precedents to immune the pope from criticism. One of these documents, the Silvestri constitutum, contains the legend of Pope Sylvester 1st curing Constantine the Great of leprosy with the waters of baptism, and receiving in gratitude Constantine’s imperial insignia and the city of Rome.

为此，他们雇佣了一大批法学家，他们精心制定了一套新的规范法律体系，以取代传统的封建法律，并通过大规模伪造，使他们的新法律体系看起来是最古老的。除了伪《伊西多里敕令》和虚假的《君士坦丁的捐赠》外，他们还制作了西马基亚的伪造品，注定要制造法律先例，使教皇免受批评。
其中一份文件《西尔维斯特宪法》记载了教皇西尔维斯特一世用洗礼水治愈了君士坦丁大帝的麻风病，并感激地接受了君士坦丁的帝国徽章和罗马城。

Charlemagne’s father was also made to contribute with the false Donation of Pepin. It is now admitted that the vast majority of legal documents supposedly established before the ninth century are clerical forgeries. According to French historian Laurent Morelle, “two thirds of the acts entitled in the name of the Merovingian kings (481-751) have been identified as false or falsified.” It is very likely that the real proportion is much higher, and that many documents which are still deemed authentic are forgeries: for instance, it is our view that the wording of the foundation charter of the Abbey of Cluny, by which its founder William I (the Pious) renounced all control over it, cannot possibly have been dictated or endorsed by a medi duke of Aquitaine (virtually a king).

查理曼的父亲也被迫扣以“丕平献土”的故事。现在人们承认，绝大多数被认为是在9世纪以前制定的法律文件都是文书伪造的。根据法国历史学家洛朗·莫雷勒的说法，“以墨洛温王朝国王(481-751)的名义命名的行为中，有三分之二被认定为虚假或伪造的。”
很可能，真正的（伪造的）比例要高得多，而且，许多仍被认为是真实的文件其实是伪造的。例如，我们认为，克吕尼修道院的建立宪章的措辞不可能是由中世纪的阿基坦公爵(实际上是国王)口授或批准的，它的创始人威廉一世(虔诚者)放弃了对它的所有控制。

These fake documents served the popes on several fronts. They were used in their power struggle against the German emperors, by backing up their extravagant claim that the pope could depose emperors. They were also powerful weapons in the geopolitical war waged against the Byzantine church and empire. By bestowing on the papacy “supremacy over the four principal sees, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople, as also over all the churches of God in the whole earth,” the false Donation of Constantine justified Rome’s claim for precedence over Constantinople, which led to the Great Schism of 1054 and ultimately the sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1205. By a cruel irony, the spuriousness of the Donation of Constantine was exposed in 1430, after it had served its purpose. By then, the Eastern Empire had lost all its territories and was reduced to a depopulated city besieged by the Ottomans.

这些假文件在几个方面为教皇服务。他们在与德意志皇帝的权力斗争中被利用，通过支持教皇可以废黜皇帝的奢侈主张。在对抗拜占庭教会和帝国的地缘政治战争中，它们也是强有力的武器。
虚假的《君士坦丁的捐赠》，通过赋予教皇“凌驾于亚历山大、安提俄克、耶路撒冷和君士坦丁堡四个主要地区，以及整个地球上所有上帝的教会之上”的权力，证明了罗马对君士坦丁堡的优先地位，这导致了1054年的大分裂，最终在1205年被拉丁人洗劫了君士坦丁堡

It is little known, but of great importance for understanding medi times, when ethnicity played a major part in politics, that the Gregorian reformers were Franks, even before Bruno of Egisheim-Dagsburg gave the first impulse as pope Leo IX. That is why Orthodox theologian John Romanides blames the Franks for having destroyed the unity of Christendom with ethnic and geopolitical motivations. In Byzantine chronicles, “Latin” and “Frank” are synonymous.

很少有人知道，但对于理解种族在中世纪的政治中起着重要作用的是，格里高利的改革者是法兰克人，甚至早在埃格什海姆-达格斯堡的布鲁诺作为教皇利奥九世第一次推动改革之前，这一点非常重要。
（未完待续）