action. Only a centralized Church, gathered round a single head, could enable them to give practical force to their views, and for this reason, the eyes of an important section of the Bishops were very early directed towards Rome.
This tendency is strikingly shewn in the famous collection of the False Decretals which are still to a great extent an unsolved problem despite endless discussion. They were composed within Charles the Bald's dominions about the year 850 by a Frankish clerk assuming the name of Isidorus Mercator, who, in order to contribute solid support to the prerogatives of the Bishops at once against the arbitrary control of the Archbishops or metropolitans and the attacks of the civil power, did not hesitate to misattribute, to interpolate and rearrange, and thus practically to forge from beginning to end a whole series of pseudo-papal decisions. This collection clearly lays down as a principle the absolute and universal supremacy of the Chair of Peter. It makes the Pope the sovereign lawgiver without whose consent no council, not even that of a whole province, may meet or pronounce valid decrees; it makes him, at the same time, the supreme judge without whose intervention no Bishop may be deposed, who in the last resort decides not only the causes of Bishops but all "major" causes, whose decision constitutes law even before any other ecclesiastical tribunal has been previously invoked. In this manner, while the Episcopate, freed from the civil authority, is the regulating power within the borders of every State, the Pope appears as the Supreme Head of the whole of Christendom.
Such a theory harmonised too well with the aspirations of the Popes not to find an echo at Rome. They had themselves been trying for some time on parallel lines: to take advantage of the decline of the imperial power to strengthen their own authority, and to claim over the Christian world as a whole that office of supreme guardian of peace and concord which the local Episcopate had assumed for itself inside each of the Frankish kingdoms. The weakness of Louis the Pious and the conflict of interests and of political aims which characterised his reign had been singularly favourable to this project. It has been shewn in a preceding chapter[1] how in 833, when the revolt in favour of Lothar broke out, Pope Gregory IV had allowed himself to be drawn into espousing the rebel cause. Urged on by the whole of the higher Frankish clergy who, though maintaining Lothar's claims on the ground of principle, were, nevertheless, well pleased to be able to shelter themselves behind the papal authority, and, supporting themselves by various texts, pressed upon him the prerogatives attaching to the Chair of Peter, Gregory spoke as sovereign lord. In a letter couched in tart and trenchant language in which the hand of Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, may probably be traced, he resolutely put forward rights
- ↑ Chapter I. pp. 17-18.
