The medieval world had its own ‘deepfakes’ – church officials cited a fake imperial decree for centuries

A fresco in the San Silvestro Chapel of Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome depicts Constantine the Great offering a crown to Pope Sylvester I. Unknown medieval artist in Rome via Wikimedia Commons

With deepfakes on the rise, forgery and deception are often viewed as distinctly modern problems – a new era of misinformation made possible by artificial intelligence. One of the first alarming cases occurred at the start of the war in Ukraine when a doctored video appeared to show President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their weapons.

Yet the impulse to deceive people by fabricating evidence far predates the digital age. And in some cases, the consequences of these deceptions set off enormous ramifications for centuries thereafter.