On the trail of an 18th-century master forger: New evidence discovered

A document held in Göttingen University’s Faculty of Humanities has been revealed as an 18th century forgery. The document purports to be from 1266, but mentions a church in Pisa that was not built until later. This discovery is the result of research by Dr. Boris Gübele, historian at the University of Göttingen, working with Italian researchers.

The team was looking for exhibits for the Forum Wissen, the knowledge museum of the University of Göttingen. This particular document was especially interesting because the text is not written in Latin, but in Italian, which makes it unique in the Göttingen collection.

The document mentions a married couple from Pisa who had promised their son to a religious order that is said to have owned a certain church in Pisa. However, the church was not built until the 14th century—which was clearly later. Further inconsistencies in the text finally led Gübele, a researcher in medieval and modern history at the University of Göttingen, together with Italian researchers, to the realization that the document was actually the work of the forger Domenico Cicci.

In the late 18th century, Cicci probably forged around 200 documents, all of which were supposed to date from the Middle Ages. In these, he presented his ancestors as bishops and notaries, as heirs to land and even as crusaders and knights of an order. The aim was to enable Cicci’s family to join the nobility, which he actually succeeded in doing.

“This 18th century forgery by an Italian counterfeiter almost led historians down the wrong track: it could have resulted in the church being re-dated, for instance,” says Gübele. “In fact, many of his forgeries could still be lying undetected in various archives.”