Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals - Influence

Influence

For approximately 150 to 200 years, the forgeries met with only moderate success. Although a relatively large number of manuscripts dating from the ninth or tenth century is known—altogether about 100 more or less complete manuscripts of the False Decretals dating from the ninth to the 16th century have been preserved—the canonical collections took but little note of the False Decretals until the early 11th century.

During the 11th century, the situation changed rapidly under the impetus of the Gregorian reforms and the Investiture Controversy. Under the impetus of monastic reform movements and the efforts of some Holy Roman Emperors, a group of cardinals and a series of successive popes strove to cleanse the church of abuses and free the papacy from its Imperial patronage, which had recently freed it from the influence of the Roman nobles. The reformers' efforts soon conflicted with temporal power. The bishops of the Holy Roman Empire were crucial to the Emperor's power and were the backbone of his administrative structure. Thus, the emperors were keen to maintain their say on who was promoted bishop and who was not. This intermingling of spiritual and temporal power constituted a deadly sin in most reformers' eyes. After all, St. Peter himself had already condemned the magician Simon Magus (the "Simon" of simony), who tried to buy spiritual power.

Given this situation, the alleged letters from some of the most venerable Roman bishops fabricated by the forgers' workshop came as a godsend. The close interaction of bishops and pope was a welcome proof that the emperors' practice was in blatant contradiction with the oldest traditions of the church. Collections of canon law rediscovered the False Decretals—some were largely extracts from the forgeries. The forgers' intentions, however, were turned around. They had used Rome's power to maintain the independence of the bishops; now the texts were being used to bring the bishops under close scrutiny and to make them dependents of the Bishop of Rome.

This tendency continued to prevail until around 1140, when the learned canonist Gratian published his Concordia discordantium canonum, which increasingly replaced the older collections and was soon regarded as authoritative. Gratian, too, made use of texts from the forgers' arsenal, although, for the most part, probably in indirect ways. With Gratian's work, the immediate influence of the False Decretals had come to an end. As intended, the texts had become an important basis for procedural law, but the outcome was nearly the opposite of what the forgers had intended in the mid-ninth century. The bishops' independence was increasingly restricted by the power of the Church of Rome.

During the Middle Ages, there was little doubt as to the genuineness of the alleged papal letters, but this changed during the fifteenth century. Humanist scholars of Latin, such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, noticed bizarre anachronisms, such as the claim that the martyr-pope Clement I had founded the pre-eminence of certain local churches on the fact that the pagans had their high priests in the same localities. During the sixteenth century, Protestant ecclesiastical historians such as the Centuriatores Magdeburgienses (the Magdeburg Centuriators) criticized the forgeries in a more systematic way, although they did not yet recognize the forgeries as one whole interconnected complex. The final proof was provided by the Calvinist preacher David Blondel, who discovered that the alleged popes from the first centuries quoted extensively from authors of a much later time. In 1628, he published his findings (Pseudoisidorus et Turrianus vapulantes). Some Catholic theologians first tried to defend the genuineness of at least some of the material, but, since the nineteenth century, no serious theologian or historian has denied the falsification.