vince her that she was obliged in conscience to make so extensive an abdication or restitution.

We cannot suppose that such a man as Gregory VII. would consciously take part in these fabrications, but, in his unlimited credulity and eager desire for territory and dominion, he appealed to the first forged document that came to hand as a solid proof. Thus, in 1081, he affirmed that, according to the documents preserved in the archives of St. Peter's, Charles the Great had made the whole of Gaul tributary to the Roman Church, and given to her all Saxony.1 A document forged at Rome in the tenth or eleventh century is undoubtedly referred to, which may be found in Torrigio.2 Charles there calls himself Emperor in the year 797, and his kingdoms are Francia, Aquitania, and Gaul; Alcuin is his Chancellor, and each of his kingdoms is to pay an annual tribute of 400 pounds to Rome.

We have put forward these facts about the deeds of gift, because they set in a clear light the line habitually followed at Rome from the sixth to the twelfth century, 1 Ep. viii. 23.

2 Le Grotte Vaticane (Roma, 1639), pp. 505-510. As Acts of the Martyrs had been fabricated there earlier, so, from the tenth century, false documents were fabricated wholesale at Rome, as the monographs about particular Roman churches prove. So the first document of 570 Marini quotes (Papiri Diplom., Roma, 1805) is an invention. See Jaffé, Regesta, p. 936.

and because their authors are undoubtedly the very persons chargeable with the fictions undertaken in the interests of ecclesiastical supremacy. We shall now

continue our enumeration and examination of the forgeries by which the whole constitution of the Church was gradually changed.

The pseudo-Isidorian forgery of the middle of the ninth century has been already mentioned. Rome, as we have seen, had no part in that, though she afterwards took full advantage of it for extending her power, the substance of these forgeries being incorporated into the canonical collections of the Gregorian party.

The most potent instrument of the new Papal system was Gratian's Decretum, which issued about the middle of the twelfth century from the first school of Law in Europe, the juristic teacher of the whole of Western Christendom, Bologna. In this work the Isidorian forgeries were combined with those of the Gregorian writers, Deusdedit, Anselm, Gregory of Pavia, and with Gratian's own additions. His work displaced all the older collections of canon law, and became the manual and repertory, not for canonists only, but for the scholastic theologians, who, for the most part, derived all their knowledge of Fathers and Councils from it.

No book has ever come near it in its influence in the Church, although there is scarcely another so chokefull of gross errors, both intentional and unintentional. Not only Anselm, Deusdedit, and Cardinal Gregory, whose works had little circulation, but also the German Burkard (or his assistant, the Abbot Olbert) had pioneered the way for Gratian. Burkard had not only made copious use of the Isidorian fictions in his Collection, compiled between 1012 and 1024, but had also ascribed the ecclesiastical decisions in the capitularies to various Popes, so that from the middle of the eleventh century the erroneous notion took rise that the free determinations of Frankish Synods in the ninth century were the autocratic commands of Popes. All these fabrications -the rich harvest of three centuries-Gratian inserted in good faith into his collection, but he also added, knowingly and deliberately, a number of fresh corruptions, all in the spirit and interest of the Papal system.

It may be shown by certain examples, going deep into the development of the new Church system, how Gratian the Italian forwarded by his own interpolations the grand national scheme of making the whole Christian world, in a certain sense, the domain of the Italian clergy, through the Papacy. The German and

West Frankish bishops had already bowed to the Isidorian decretals. Their influence is shown in the decisions of the German National Synod at Tribur in 895. We may see here how deeply the pseudo-Isidore, with the imperial dignity of his Popes, and their dictatorial commands, had penetrated into the very lifeblood of the German hierarchy. It came to this, that the bishops had bound themselves most closely to King Arnulf, who was present, and took a prominent part in the Synod, and that he, desiring the imperial crown, which had already once allured him into Italy, could only obtain it by the favour of Pope Formosus. So they decided that, though the yoke of Rome should become intolerable, it ought to be borne with pious resignation.

How often has this saying been repeated since! It was ascribed to Charles the Great, just as Constantine is affirmed to have called the Pope a God. And since Gratian adopted it as a capitulary of Charles, and stamped it as a universal canon,1 it became the current view up to the time of the Council of Constance, albeit sometimes contradicted in act, that it is a duty to endure the unendurable if Rome imposes it.

The corruption of the thirty-sixth canon of the

1 Dist. 19. c. 3.

Ecumenical Council of 692 is Gratian's own doing.1 It renewed the canon of Chalcedon (451), which gave the Patriarch of New Rome, or Constantinople, equal rights with the Roman Patriarch. Gratian, by a change of two words, gives it a precisely opposite sense, and suppresses the reference to the canon of Chalcedon. He also reduces the five Patriarchs to four; for the ancient equality of position of the Roman bishop and the four chief bishops of the East was now to disappear, though even the Gregorians, as, e.g., Anselm, had treated him as one of the Patriarchs.2 There was no longer any room for the patriarchal dignity of the Roman See; he who had drawn to himself every conceivable right in the Church could hardly exercise a particular patriarchal power in one portion of it. The plenary powers of the Pope were become a mare magnum, within which there could be no sea or lake of special privileges. This showed itself conspicuously in reference to the provinces of Eastern Illyricum,-Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus,

3

1 Dist. 22. 6. The Roman correctors have substituted "nec non" for Gratian's fabrication of "non tamen," which was left for 400 years.

2 Anselm and Deusdedit set aside the famous decree of Nicolas II., giving the German Emperor the right of confirming Papal elections, on the ground that one patriarch, the Roman, could not annul the decision of five patriarchs at Constantinople.

3 The numberless privileges accorded by Popes to the Mendicant Orders were afterwards called a mare magnum."

K