PSEUDO-ISODORIAN DECRETALS, The, Sylvester Hassell The popes strove continually to decrease the power of the emperors and the Bishops, and to increase their own power. The feuds attending the dissolution of the Charlemagne monarchy favored these attempts. The ungodly ambition of the popes was further and very greatly favored by the Pseudo-Isodorian Decretals—the grandest forgery of ancient or modern times; a compilation made about 850 by some Frankish ecclesiastic, from the Bible, from his own inventions, from patristic, monkish, papal, legal and historical writers (thirty-five, or one third, of the Decretals, in reference to the acts of the first pretended popes, being the compiler’s invention), for the purpose of advancing the claims of sacerdotalism, sacramentalism and papalism—to legitimate the authority of the priesthood, to make the church independent of secular control, and to vindicate the claims of Rome. “Upon these spurious decretals,” says Hallam, “was built the great fabric of papal supremacy over the different national churches—a fabric which has stood after its foundation crumbled beneath it; for no one has pretended to deny, for the last two centuries, that the imposture is too palpable for any but the most ignorant ages to credit.” The forgery is detected by the glaring anachronisms and monstrous ignorance of history; and yet the hypocritical sanctimoniousness of Rome pervades the work, “the whole being composed with an air of profound piety and reverence, a specious purity, and occasional beauty, in the moral and religious tone,” says Milman. Nowhere was the work better known to have been a forgery than in Rome, and yet Pope Nicholas I. (858-869) and his successors unblushingly appealed to these fabrications to sustain their unparalleled pretensions to universal supremacy. (Hassell’s History pg 423)