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The False Decretals is the name given to a celebrated collection of decretals. This collection, indeed, comprises canons of councils as well as decretals, and the decretals contained in it are not all forgeries. It is an amplification and interpolation, by means of spurious decretals, of the canonical collection in use in the Church of Spain in the 8th century, all the documents in which are perfectly authentic. With these amplifications, the collection dates from the second quarter of the 9th century. We shall give a brief account of its contents, its history and its influence on canon law.
The author assumes the name of Isidore, evidently the archbishop of Seville, who was credited with a preponderating part in the compilation of the Hispana; he takes in addition the surname of Mercator, perhaps because he has made use of two passages of Marius Mercator. Hence the custom of alluding to the author of the collection under the name of the pseudo-Isidore.
The collection itself is divided into three parts. The first, which is entirely spurious, contains, after the preface and various introductory sections, seventy letters attributed to the popes of the first three centuries, up to the council of Nicaea, i.e. up to but not including St Silvester; all these letters are a fabrication of the pseudo-Isidore, except two spurious letters of Clement, which were already known. The second part is the collection of councils, classified according to their regions, as it figures in the Hispana; most of the few spurious pieces which are added, and notably the famous Donation of Constantine, were already in existence. In the third part the author continues the series of decretals which he had interrupted at the council of Nicaea. But as the collection of authentic decretals does not begin till Siricius (385), the pseudo-Isidore first forges thirty letters, which he attributes to the popes from Silvester to Damasus; after this he includes the authentic decretals, with the intermixture of thirty-five apocryphal ones, generally given under the name of those popes who were not represented in the authentic collection, but sometimes also under the names of the others, for example, Damasus, St Leo, Vigilius and St Gregory. The series stops at St Gregory the Great (d. 604), except for one council held under the pontificate of Gregory II (715-731). The forged letters are not, for the most part, entirely composed of fresh material; the author or rather the group of authors draw their inspiration from the notices on each of the popes given in the Liber Pontificalis; he inserts whole passages from ecclesiastical writers; and he antedates the evidences of a discipline which actually existed; so it is by no means all invented. The list of authentic sources the forgers used is quite impressive: the Bible, genuine council texts, genuine decretals, Roman Law, Frankish imperial legislation, Church fathers etc.
Thus the authentic elements were calculated to serve as a passport for the forgeries, which were, moreover, quite skilfully composed. In fact, the collection thus blended was passed from hand to hand without meeting with little opposition. At most all that was asked was whether those decretals which did not appear in the Liber canonum (the collection of Dionysius Exiguus, accepted in France) had the force of law, but Pope Nicholas having answered that all the pontifical letters had the same authority (see Decr. Gra. Dist. xix. c. 1), they were henceforward accepted, and passed in turn into the later canonical collections. No doubts found an expression until the 15th century, when Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and Juan de Torquemada freely expressed their suspicions.
More than one scholar of the 16th century, George Cassander, Erasmus, and the two editors of the Decretum of Gratian, Dumoulin (d. 1568) and Le Conte (d. 1577), decisively rejected the False Decretals. This contention was again upheld, in the form of a violent polemic against the papacy, by the Centuriators of Magdeburg (Ecclesiastica historia, Basel, 1559-1574); the attempt at refiltation by the Jesuit Torres (Adversus Centur. Magdeburg. libri quinque, Florence, 1572) provoked a violent rejoinder from the Protestant minister David Blondel (Pseudo-Isidorus et Turrianus rapulantes, Geneva, 1628). Since then, the conclusion has been accepted, and all researches have been of an almost exclusively historical character. One by one the details are being precisely determined, and the question may now almost be said to be settled.
The composition of the collection was probably triggered by the dramatic events in the early 830s, when Emperor Louis the Pious was deposed by his sons only to be reinstated shortly afterwards. This political turbulences led to the exile of eminent archbishops such as Agobard of Lyons and to the summary deposition and incarceration of others such as Ebbo of Rheims. Bishops such as Jesse of Amiens and eminent monastic figures such as abbot Wala of Corbie were involved in the procedures as well. First indications of circulating false decretals can be found in indications from Florus of Lyons who speaks in 838 of "the forged authority of many papal letters" and in later comments by archbishop Hincmar of Rheims who states that he had known the False Decretals already when his nephew Hincmar of Laon (born 835/838) was still "in the womb of his mother". It is likely that the execution of such an extensive set of interwoven spurious and genuine material extended over many years. The formerly accepted date of ca. 850 probably still holds for the publication of the final versions of the False Decretals. Those must have been circulated in at least four different versions by the forgers themselves.
The object which the forger had in view is stated in his preface; the reform of the canon law, or rather its better application. But, again, in what particular respects he wishes it to be reformed can be best deduced from a certain preponderant idea, which make themselves felt in the apocryphal documents. He constantly harps upon accusations brought against bishops and the way they were judged; his wish is to prevent them from being unjustly accused, deposed or deprived of their sees; to this end he multiplies the safeguards of procedure, and secures the right of appeal to the pope and the possibility of restoring bishops to their sees. His object, too, was to protect the property, as well as the persons, of the clergy against the encroachments of the temporal power. In the second place, Isidore wishes to increase the strength and cohesion of the, churches; he tries to give absolute stability to the diocese and the ecclesiastical province; he reinforces the rights of the bishop and his comprovincials, while he initiates a campaign against the chorepiscopi; finally, as the keystone of the arch he places the papacy.
The name of Isidore usurped by the author at first led to the supposition that the False Decretals originated in Spain; this opinion no longer meets with any support; it is enough Nationto point out that there is no Spanish manuscript of the nitty of collection, at least until the 13th century. In the 16th century the Protestants, who wished to represent the forgeries in the light of an attempt in favour of the papacy, ascribed the origin of the False Decretals to Rome, but neither the manuscript tradition nor the facts confirm this view, which is nowadays entirely abandoned. Everybody is agreed in placing the origin of the False Decretals within the Frankish empire.
Within these limits, three different theories have successively arisen: At first it was thought that Isidore's domicile could be fixed in the province of Mainz, it is now about one hundred fifty years ago that the balance of opinion was turned in favour of the province of Reims; and after the lapse of another twenty years, several authors have suggested the province of Tours (P Fournier, Etude sur les Fausses Decrétales). In favour of Mainz, especial stress was laid on the fact that it was the country of Benedictus Levita, the compiler of the False Capitularies, to which the False Decretals are closely related. But Benedict, the deacon of Otgar of Mainz, is as much of a hypothetical personage as Isidorus Mercator; moreover, in the middle of the 9th century the condition of the province of Mainz was not disturbed, nor were the chorepiscopi menaced.
In favour of Reims, it has been pointed out that it was there that the first judicial use of the False Decretals is recorded, in the trials of Rothad, bishop of Soissons (d. 869), and of Hincmar the younger; bishop of Laon (d. c. 882); and an epplication of the axiom has been attempted: Is fecit cui prodest. But both these trials took place later than 852, at which date the existence of the collection is an established fact; the texts of it were used, but they were in existence before. Between 847 and 852, the province of Reims was disturbed by another affair, that of the clergy ordained by Ebbo at the time of his short restoration to the see of Reims, in 840-841; these clerics, Vulfadus (afterwards archbishop of Bourges), and a few others, had been suspended by Hincmar on his election in 845. But the affair of Ebbos clergy did not become critical till the council of Soissons in 853; up till then the clergy had, so far as we know, produced no documents, and the citations from the False Decretals made in their later writings do not prove that they had forged them. Moreover, Hincmar would not have cited the forged letters of the popes in 852; above all, this theory would not explain the chief preoccupation of the forger, which is to protect bishops against unjust judgments and depositions. We must, then, look for conditions in which the bishops were concerned. It is precisely this which has suggested the province of Tours.
Brittany, which was dependent on the province of Tours, had just for a time recovered its independence, thanks to its duke Nomino. The struggle between the two nationalities, the Celt and the Frank, found a reflexion in the sphere of religion. The Breton bishops were for the most part abbots of monasteries, who had but little consideration for the territorial limits of the civitates; and many of the religious usages of the Bretons differed profoundly from those of the Franks. Charlemagne had divided up the Breton dioceses and established in them Frankish bishops. Nomino hastened to depose the four Frankish bishops, after wringing from them by force confessions of simony; he then established a metropolitan. see at Dol. Hence arose incessant complaints on the part of the dispossessed bishops, of the metropolitan of Tours, and his suffragans, notably those of Angers and Le Mans, which were more exposed than the others to the incursions of the Bretons; and this gave rise to numerous papal letters, and all this throughout a period of thirty years. There were requests that the bishops should be judged according to the rules, protests against the interlopers, demands for the restoration of the bishops to their sees. These circumstances fall in perfectly with the questions about which, as we have pointed out, the pseudo-Isidore was mainly concerned: the judgment of bishops, and the stability of the ecclesiastical organizations.
All these discussions, however, have been made obsolete by the recent detection of several manuscripts from the monastic library of Corbie, which were beyond any doubt used by the forgers as can be shown by characteristic marks with in these manuscripts themselves corresponding exactly to genuine sequences incorporated in the spurious decretals. It is certain therefore that the forgers' workshop was located in the monastery of Corbie (diocese of Amiens, Northern France). The forgers' activities extended at least into the late 850s as a manuscript written not before 858 con be shown to be a product of the workshop itself (Yale University Beinecke Library 442). Two more manuscripts from Corbie written in third quarter of the ninth century are apparently final versions of the False Decretals and of another closely related forgery, the so-called Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis. And a third manuscript from Corbie (Berlin Deutsche Staatsbibliothek Hamilton 132) contains drafts as well as final versions of certain spurious papal letters.
Though the False Decretals were composed in order to enforce the rights of the papacy, some popes made use of the False Decretals to support their rights. It is certain that in 864 Rothad of Soissons took with him to Rome, if not the collection, at least important extracts from the pseudo-Isidore, possibly the archetype of the so-called "short version" of the False Decretals; M. Fournier has pointed out in the letters of the pope of that time, a literary influence, which is shown in. the choice of expressions and metaphors, notably in those passages relating to the restitutio spolii; but he concludes by affirming that the ideas and acts of Nicholas were not modified by the new collection: even before 864 he acted in affairs concerning bishops, e.g. in the case of the Breton bishops or the adversaries of Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, exactly as he acted later; all that can be said is that the False Decretals, though not expressly cited by the pope, led him to accentuate still further the arguments which he drew from the dectees of his predecessors, notably with regard to the exceptio - spolii. In the papal letters of the end of the 9th and the whole of the 10th century, only two or three insignificant citations of the pseudo-Isidore have been pointed out; the use of the pseudo-Isidorian forged documents did not become prevalent at Rome till about the middle of the 11th century, in consequence of the circulation of the canonical collections in which they figured; but nobody then thought of casting any doubts on the authenticity of those documents. One thing only is established, and this may be said to have been the real effect of the False Decretals, namely, the powerful impulse which they gave in the Frankish territories to the movement towards centralization round the see of Rome and the legal obstacles which they opposed to unjust proceedings against the bishops.
Bibliography
The best edition is that of P Hinschius, Decretales pseudo-Isidorianae et capitula Angitramni (Leipzig, 1863). In it the authentic texts are printed in two columns, the forgeries across the whole width of the page; an important preface of ccxxviii. pages contains, besides the classification of the manuscripts, a profound study of the sources and other questions bearing on the collection. After the works cited above, the following dissertations should be noted:
- Placing the origin of the False Decretals at Rome is
- A Theiner, De pseudo-Isidoriana canonum collectione (Breslau, 1827)
- at Mainz
- the brothers Ballerini, De antiquis collectionibus et collectoribus canonum, iii. (S. Leonis opera, t. iii
- Migne, Patrologia Lat. t. 56)
- Blascus, De coll. canonum Isidori Mercatoris (Naples, 1760)
- Wasserschleben, Beiträge zur Geschichte der falschen Dekretalen (Breslau, 1844)
- in the province of Reims
- Weizsacker, Die pseudoisidorianische Frage, in the Histor. Zeitschrift of Sybel (1860)
- Hinschius, Preface, p. ccviii
- Adolphe Tardif, Histoire des sources du droit canonique (Paris, 1887)
- Schneider, Die Lehre die Kirchenrechtsquellen (Regensburg, 1892). An excellent sum of the question
- seems more favourable to Le Mans
- the article of the Kirchenlexicon of Wetzer and Welte (2nd ed.)
- F Lot, Etudes sur le régne de Hugues Capet (Paris, 1903)
- Lesne, La Hilrarchie ipisco pale en Gaule et Geemanie (Paris, 1905)
- for the province of Tours and Le Mans
- B Simson, Die Entstehung dee pseudoisidor. Fälschungen in L Mans (Leipzig; 1886. It is he who pointed out the connection with the forgeries of Le Mans)
- especially Paul Fourniet, La Question des fausses decrétales, in the Nouveile Revue historique de droit français et étranger (1887, 1888)
- in the Congrés internet. des savants cathol. t. ii
- Etude sur les fausses decrétales, in Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique de Louvain (1906, 1907).
Corbie as the forgers' workshop was established by K. Zechiel-Eckes in a series of studies culminating in Auf Pseudoisidors Spur. Oder: Versuch einen dichten Schleier zu lüften", Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Studien und Texte 31, 2002, p. 1 sqq.
A masterful study on the False Decretals is H. Fuhrmann, Einfluss und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Faelschungen von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neuere Zeit. 3 vols. Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica 24, 1-3, 1972-74.
Fuhrmann has also established that the Decretals were circulated in different versions from the outset:
H. Fuhrmann, Reflections on the principles of editing texts. The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals as an example, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, New Series 11, 1981, p. 1 sqq.
The above quoted edition by Paul Hinschius has met with much criticism as the choice of manuscripts Hinschius made for his edition was based on serious paleographical errors. For the "genuine" parts of the False Decretals Hinschius simply reprinted an edition of the Collectio Hispana from the early 1800s, the text of which is very different from what is found in the Pseudo-Isidorian manuscript tradition. A new edition is in progress at http://www.pseudoisidor.de where so far Part I and Part II of the False Decretals can be found.
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
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