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I suggest you read Johannes Fried, “Donation of Constantine” and “Constitutum Constantini”, (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2007). He explains that the vocabulary shows that the author of the forgery “lacked any intimate knowledge of the Roman Church and had no feeling for Roman sentiments”. So, you were saying?

Not sure anyone knows who the authors were, I was more concerned with the Romanists using forgeries to further themselves.

Did Rome know they were forgeries? Deception or ignorance?

There are many eminent Roman Catholic historians who have testified to that fact as well as to the importance of the forgeries, especially those of Pseudo-Isidore. One such historian is Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger. He was the most renowned Roman Catholic historian of the last century, who taught Church history for 47 years as a Roman Catholic. He makes these important comments:

In the middle of the ninth century—about 845—there arose the huge fabrication of the Isidorian decretals...About a hundred pretended decrees of the earliest Popes, together with certain spurious writings of other Church dignitaries and acts of Synods, were then fabricated in the west of Gaul, and eagerly seized upon Pope Nicholas I at Rome, to be used as genuine documents in support of the new claims put forward by himself and his successors.

That the pseudo–Isidorian principles eventually revolutionized the whole constitution of the Church, and introduced a new system in place of the old—on that point there can be no controversy among candid historians. The most potent instrument of the new Papal system was Gratian’s Decretum, which issued about the middle of the twelfth century from the first school of Law in Europe, the juristic teacher of the whole of Western Christendom, Bologna. In this work the Isidorian forgeries were combined with those of the other Gregorian (Gregory VII) writers...and with Gratia’s own additions. His work displaced all the older collections of canon law, and became the manual and repertory, not for canonists only, but for the scholastic theologians, who, for the most part, derived all their knowledge of Fathers and Councils from it. No book has ever come near it in its influence in the Church, although there is scarcely another so chokeful of gross errors, both intentional and unintentional (Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, The Pope and the Council (Boston: Roberts, 1870), pp. 76-77, 79, 115-116). http://www.christiantruth.com/articles/forgeries.html

“Did Rome know they were forgeries?”

Do you have even a single shred of evidence that they did know the Donation of Constantine was a forgery when the document first showed up? I doubt you do, because no historian has ever found any.

“Deception or ignorance?”

Ignorance. As is clear with the Donation of Constantine, the papal court did not know it was a forgery in the decades and even first centuries after it appeared. Then, because of its great age, it was assumed to be genuine.