Valla’s Discourse
De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (1440)
Lorenzo Valla — humanist, papal secretary within seven years of writing this
Impatient, precise, and certain that a lie told in bad Latin can be caught by anyone willing to read carefully.
- Catch rate
- 49 / 255
- Base research
- 300
- Stat total
- 360
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
A pamphlet, not a treatise. It makes its case once, hard, and stops.
A lawyer’s cross-examination of a document: every clause asked whether it could have been written when it says it was.
The method is checkable by anyone who knows the languages, which is why it held. Valla’s enemies attacked his manners, not his philology.
It circulated in manuscript for decades, then Hutten printed it in 1518 and Luther read it and was, he said, appalled it had taken so long.
Cited for this book
Valla wrote it in the service of Alfonso of Aragon, who was at war with the pope — the motive was real and the argument was still sound. He showed the Donation used words and assumed institutions that belonged to a later age, and he did it as a man who would shortly be a secretary in the Roman curia himself. The same ad fontes method — go to the sources, in their own languages — is what Erasmus turned on the Greek New Testament in 1516. A tool, and the church was better for both uses of it.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 36 | Anachronism Is Evidence | History | Argument | 78 | 100% | 15 |
| 38 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 40 | The Tool Serves the Church | History | Argument | 82 | 100% | 15 |
| 42 | Read It In Its Own Century | History | Argument | 95 | 100% | 5 |