It was an age of growing papal claims; and the claims had now found a new basis.
The promises, true and legendary, of Pippin, and the spurious donation of Constantine, had still further extension in the False Decretals. These were first used by Nicolas I., who was 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 edifice of papal assumption was to be built upon them by popes who were fired with a true zeal to reform the world, and who, not doubting their authenticity, found in them an instrument ready to their hands.