The new History Today print edition covers a remarkably vast and sophisticated intellectual project in the 800s. The purpose must have seemed worth the effort at the time but it’s incomprehensible now. I can’t make head nor tail of the mess.
After Charlemagne died his weak son Louis couldn’t hold the factions together. The Empire was also the Church, so disputes were personal and military and theological at the same time.
This project, under the fake persona of Isidore The Merchant, aimed to retrofit ancient papal authority to favor and protect one faction. They forged decrees by former popes who had left no written record, hoping to keep their party’s bishops in office.
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Isidore tried to alter the law by severely limiting who could accuse a bishop of a crime. These regulations were placed in the mouths of the earliest popes, often being repeated across multiple letters to give the impression that they were timeless legal principles.
They were seldom assembled from scratch, but instead painstakingly assembled by gathering and modifying more than 10000 snippets of text from hundreds of sources, including the bible, the writings of church fathers, histories, secular law and authentic church law. They have aptly been described as textual mosaics.
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Sounds mighty familiar. Textual mosaics is a perfect description.
Of course retrofitting authority to defend priestly sins is pretty much the whole point of the Church. This project was unique in its methods, not its goal.
Polistra's Mill 