This article is still a draft with much more to be done including looking for primary sources.
Eastern Orthodox are often quick to point out the Donation of Constantine is a forgery, although ignoring the similar methods were used to declare the same about the beloved Corpus of Dionysius the Areopagite aka Pseudo-Dionysius. Regardless, the Byzantine Church did consider the Donation of Constantine valid for a long time and even quoted it and argued from it, generally internally in Constantinople or to justify Constantinople's patriarchal grandeur.
The Donation of Constantine reached the peak of its popularity in Byzantium during the period after 1204, when it became well known to a wide array of churchmen ranging from canonists and compilers of legal manuscripts to bishops and patriarchs of Constantinople....Two or possibly three of these versions were produced during the late Byzantine period. The textual history of the Greek versions demonstrates by itself a contemporary fascination with this “document,” which was thought to have been issued by the... founder of Constantinople.
The Donation mattered for the late Byzantine church from both a constitutional and an ideological point of view. The range of its discussion and application broadened in this period. The Donation fueled the rhetoric of politically assertive high ecclesiastics, something which we can only suppose for earlier times, and inspired churchmen to adopt from the West the ceremony of groom service, which in Byzantium was to render honor to the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. The general tendency of the legal and ceremonial uses of the Donation in the period was toward enhancing the powers of the patriarch of Constantinople vis-à-vis imperial authority and the episcopal hierarchy. Thus, the predominant domestic application of the Donation corresponded to the centralization of the Byzantine church under the patriarchate of Constantinople in the course of the fourteenth century. The use of the Donation was one of the ideological expressions and underpinnings of this historical process--"Church and Society in Late Byzantium," The Donation of Constantine and the Church in Late Byzantium, DIMITER G. ANGELOV, page 125
see Emperor and Priest The Imperial Office in Byzantium By Gilbert Dagron · 2003
The Russian Orthodox church at times used, and even incorporated the Donation of Constantine into Canon Law long after it was abandoned by the Latin Church!
The struggle between Nikon and the Tsar is well recorded... Of great significance for this study, however, is the manner in which Nikon chose to counter the influence of the Monastyrskii prikaz and the renewed drive toward secularization; for once again, in a desperate moment, the Russian Church relied upon the Donation of Constantine for its defense. It was at this time that the Donation was incorporated into the canon law of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Although Nikon's predecessor in the Patriarchate had sponsored a new edition of the Russian book of canon law (Kormchaia) in 1651, Nikon called for a revision of the canons in 1653, in order to include in the Kormchaia materials favorable to his stand in the coming contest with the government. The result was canonization of the entire body of ideological writings that the Church had used to defend its possessions since the pronouncements of the council of 1503. In his additions to the canon law the patriarch included an account of how the Roman Church had fallen into heresy and thereby offended God, the doctrine of the "Third Rome" (as this notion had been expressed to Tsar Fedor by the first Russian Patriarch, Philaret), and the Donation of Constantine. These pieces thus formed an ideological and historical whole, for, taken together, these passages demonstrated the chain of events by which the possessions granted Pope Sylvester by Constantine had passed to Russia and were now under the protection of the office filled by Nikon....
Donation of Constantine became something of a canonical law in force for the Russian Church until the days of Peter the Great. In 1700, on the very eve of Peter's Church reforms, the last patriarch of Tsarist Russia, Adrian, when summoned before a court of the nobility to testify concerning the right of the Church to maintain independent ecclesiastical courts and large landed estates, adduced as part of his rejoinder several lengthy excerpts from the Donation. Even at this late date, more than two and a half centuries after its refutation in the West, the Donation retained sufficient authority to ensure that church property remained inviolate. Only after Adrian's death did Peter force his will upon the Church.--The Donation of Constantine in Medieval Russia Author(s): Joseph L. Wieczynski Source: The Catholic Historical Review , Jul., 1969, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Jul., 1969), pp. 159-172
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