What did the Catholic Church receive by the donation of Pepin?
A bunch of heartache and trouble:The "Donation of Pepin" which was a grant of territory in Italy made by Pepin III the Short, to Pope Stephen II. Pepin's donation had its origins in the promise first made in 754 that he would donate territory in Italy to the pontiff in return for papal approval of the deposition of the last Merovingian king of the Franks and recognition of the Carolingian Dynasty. The actual grant itself was comprised of Rome and the surrounding territories that had been former holdings of the Byzantines in Italy. They lay the foundation for the Papal States. (Extracted from OSV's Encyclopedia of Catholic History - Revised, by Matthew Bunson, D.Min, c 1995, 2004 by Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., Huntington, Indiana)The actual land included in that donation was based on the "Donation of Constantine," a forgery written in the fifth century.from History of the Catholic Church from the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium, by James Hitchcock, Imprimatur: The Most Reverend Edward Rice, © 2012 by Ignatius Press, San FranciscoThe Donation of Constantine: Pepin also confirmed the pope's claim to certain Italian territories, based on a document from the papal archives called the Donation of Constantine, which purportedly showed that, when the first Christian emperor moved to the East, he ceded all political authority in the West to the pope. The papacy also relied on a collection of documents later called the False Decretals-purportedly compiled by St. Isidore, the scholarly bishop of Seville (d. 636) but actually compiled 250 years later-containing alleged papal decrees from the fourth century that also showed that the popes possessed temporal power. (In premodern times, forgery was not considered as serious an offense as it later became. It was employed by people who thought that the forged document expressed a truth, even if it was not literal historical truth.)Ironically, the "donation of Pepin" had a negative effect on the Church, in that the pope's position as a secular lord plunged the papacy even more deeply into the morass of Italian politics and made the office extremely attractive in worldly terms, helping to corrupt papal politics for the next three centuries.