Spurious / pseudonymous
9th c. · 9th c. · 7 works
The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, commonly called the False Decretals, are a sprawling collection of canon-law documents assembled in the Frankish kingdom around the middle of the ninth century, most likely between roughly 847 and 852. The compilation presents itself as the work of one "Isidore Mercator" (Isidorus Mercator, servus Christi lectori salutem), a name that prompted medieval readers to confuse the supposed author with St. Isidore of Seville. The texts purport to be a sequence of papal letters and conciliar canons reaching back from Clement I through the early eighth century. In reality the collection is one of the most ambitious and influential forgeries in the history of Western law.
The work deliberately mixes authentic material with fabrication. It draws on a genuine Spanish canonical collection, the Hispana, and embeds real conciliar decrees and authentic papal letters alongside scores of invented documents. The early papal "decretals" attributed to the martyr-popes before Nicaea are almost entirely forged, and more than ninety spurious papal letters appear across the whole collection; the notorious Donation of Constantine is included among the materials. The forgers were learned men who pieced their fabrications together mosaic-fashion from countless genuine texts, lending the counterfeits a convincing surface.
The forgers' principal aim was to strengthen the position of bishops. The fabricated decretals sought to shield bishops from secular rulers and from the encroachments of metropolitan archbishops and provincial synods, making the accusation, trial, and deposition of a bishop procedurally difficult and reserving such grave cases (causae maiores) to the judgment of Rome. By routing episcopal appeals to the papacy, the collection also tended to magnify papal authority, even if that was a means rather than the primary end. The texts arose amid the instability of the later Carolingian church, when bishops had been deposed and exiled in the upheavals following Louis the Pious.
For centuries the False Decretals were accepted as genuine and exerted enormous influence on medieval canon law, passing through later canonical collections and ultimately into Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140), which absorbed hundreds of Pseudo-Isidorian chapters into the standard textbook of church law. Their authenticity was decisively refuted in the seventeenth century by the Protestant scholar David Blondel (1628), and the remaining undetected forgeries were identified in the eighteenth century by the Catholic brothers Pietro and Girolamo Ballerini. Modern scholarship now universally regards the collection as a forgery, even as debate continues over the precise identity of its authors.
Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica — False Decretals · Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent) — False Decretals · Encyclopedia.com — False Decretals (Pseudoisidorian Forgeries)