pope from 858 to 867.
During his pontificate the collection of Church laws, with the canons
of the Oecumenical Councils, the letters of the most important bishops
and the like, with the ecclesiastical laws of the {195} emperors, which
were practically becoming a _corpus juris canonici_, received a notable
addition. The genuine decretals of the popes begin with Siricius
(384-98); but there now (between 840 and 860) appeared fifty-nine more,
professing to date from the second and third centuries, and also
thirty-nine became interpolated among the genuine documents, which
ranged from 386 to 731. These were put forth by a skilful forger as
the collection of Isidore of Seville, and they were incorporated in the
authentic collection made by him. A most remarkable series of
documents was this, in every point supporting the claims now put forth
by the Roman See to political as well as ecclesiastical supremacy,
deciding questions of discipline and right such as were then vexed, and
supplying a veritable armoury for the advocates of papal claims to rule
everywhere, over all persons, and in all causes. The forged decretals,
now known as the pseudo-Isidorian, had their origin among the Franks,
and showed the aims and the needs of the Frankish reformers. They set
forth three great objects--"freedom from the secular power,
establishment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy with a firm discipline,
and centralisation of organisation upon which all could depend." [1]
They represented, in fact, a scheme of reform and the way in which a
somewhat unscrupulous reformer imagined it could best be carried out.
Probably the forged decretals were concocted at Rheims, or possibly at
Mainz, and they were first used in a critical case in 866, when a
bishop of Soissons, deposed by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, appealed
to the pope on the ground that the power of deposition by the decretals
belonged to him alone. It is difficult {196} to believe that when
Nicolas I. accepted them he was not aware that they were not the
genuine writings of the popes whose work they professed to be: he can
hardly have thought that Spain (where it was said that they had been
discovered) was more likely to have kept papal documents safely than
the Roman Chancery itself. Their importance was, however, not evident
at first. In the ninth and tenth centuries comparatively little was
made of them. It was in the eleventh and the centuries which followed
that a gigantic ed