[63]. See page 284.
Photius was soon afterwards deposed, but his fall did not heal the breach between the churches, for the Byzantine emperors and clergy all adhered to the statements of doctrine contained in the decree of the Synod of Constantinople. To this day they are held by the Eastern Church.
Nicolas I. was not only the pontiff who precipitated the quarrel with the Eastern Church; he will also be remembered as the protector of the injured queen Teutberga, and the chastiser of the adulterous king Lothair of Lorraine, whose fortunes we have related in another chapter.[[64]] |The False Decretals.| But he has won his greatest fame from being the first Pope who used the famous ‘Forged Decretals.’ Up to his time the collection of the letters and edicts of the bishops of Rome, which all the Church knew and used, extended no further back than those of Siricius. (A.D. 384.) But there was brought to Rome about the year 860 a collection of fifty-nine decretals, which purported to be those of the Popes of the second and third centuries, and thirty-nine more which were interpolated among the real documents extending from Siricius down to Gregory II. (384-731.) There was also in this precious collection the celebrated donation of Constantine and the acts of several councils. This wonderful series of documents, it was said, had been discovered in Spain by Riculf, archbishop of Mainz. It was at once incorporated in the authentic series of Acts of Councils, edited by the great Isidore of Seville, and the new as well as the old documents were in future called by his name.
To any one with a competent knowledge of early church history, or with a turn for textual criticism, the False Decretals would have betrayed their character at once. But these accomplishments were rare in the ninth century, and the few who could have exposed the new decretals were precisely the persons most interested in proving them to be authentic. For, as was natural considering their origin, they were full of authoritative decisions on the points in which the ninth century clergy were interested. What could be more delightful than to find St. Clement or St. Felix giving just such decisions on the questions of church lands or clerical celibacy as would have been given by the reigning pontiff? To inquire whether the Church had any lands in the first century, or whether the idea of clerical celibacy had then been broached, would have been not only impious but unwise. |Influence of the False Decretals.| So the False Decretals with all their anachronisms and confusions of persons and impossibilities of style and form were greedily swallowed by the Pope and the whole clerical body, and promptly turned into weapons of war against the civil power, the Eastern church, and any other enemy for whose discomfiture they were suited. It is impossible not to suppose that Nicolas I. knew what he was doing in accepting the Decretals: he had in his own hands the genuine decrees of the Popes from 384, preserved with care and accuracy; how was it possible that more should exist in a corner of Spain than in the papal chancery? Would the most important title-deeds of the Roman See, which proved that from the days of the apostles downward the Popes had exercised the power of legislating for the whole Western Church, have been suffered to pass into oblivion? On such points Nicolas must have had his own views: but the documents were too tempting to be neglected, and from henceforward they were freely used as a basis for the monstrous claims of the mediæval papacy.
Who forged the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals we shall never know. They were first heard of at Mainz, and it would seem that it was either at Mainz or at Rheims that they were composed. Rome, though she used them, did not have the shame of framing them. Indeed they were originally intended to serve the ends of the local bishops rather than those of the Pope. The first time that they were used in a case of importance was in 866. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, had deposed Rothad, bishop of Soissons, for incompetence. Rothad appealed to Nicolas I., on the plea that according to the Decretals the power of deposing a bishop lay with the Pope alone, and not with the archbishop. Nicolas then restored the bishop of Soissons to his see to the great wrath of Hincmar, who would have repudiated the decretals but for the unfortunate fact that he himself had used them in the previous year. He had to content himself with the cautious saying that the documents were ‘a mousetrap for archbishops’—circumposita omnibus metropolitanis muscipula—because they threw all power into the hands of the Roman pontiff.
But we must return to the secular affairs of Italy. In 853 the emperor Lewis made the first of his attempts to expel the Saracens from the peninsula; it failed owing to the slackness or treachery of the duke of Benevento, who bought a private peace for himself from the Sultan of Bari, and rejoiced to see the worst of the Moslem raids turned off against his neighbours of Salerno. Naples also long remembered the day when Mofareg forced his way to its very gates, and sat in triumph on a heap of corpses by the bank of the Sebeto, while his soldiery laid the heads of their victims at his feet.
|Success of Lewis II. over the Moors, 867-875.| Some years later Lewis began a second series of campaigns against the infidel. At first he met with many checks, but in 867 he forced the dukes of Benevento and Salerno to do him homage and to join his Lombards in the field. He took one after another many of the towns of Apulia, and at last in 868 laid siege to Bari itself. The leaguer lasted no less than three years, but while it was in progress Lewis was clearing Lucania and Calabria of the enemy. Yet as long as the sea was open Bari never failed to obtain provisions and reinforcements, and Lewis was forced to find some naval power to back him. He asked the aid of the emperor Basil the Macedonian, who had just succeeded Michael the Drunkard on the Byzantine throne. Accordingly the admiral Nicetas Oriphas swept the Adriatic with a hundred ships and drove the Moslems out of its recesses. He then blockaded Bari for a space, but soon quarrelled with Lewis and withdrew. The Sultan, however, deprived of the command of the sea, had been driven to extremity, and in February 871 the emperor succeeded—even without Byzantine aid—in storming the city. The garrison was put to the sword, all save the Sultan, whom duke Adelgis of Benevento had captured in the citadel.
Lewis now turned to seize Taranto, the last Saracen stronghold in Apulia, and spoke of completing his work by clearing Calabria and attacking Sicily. But treachery frustrated this grand and salutary scheme. |Lewis kidnapped by duke Adelgis.| While the emperor was paying a visit to Benevento, in company with his wife and daughter, the new duke Adelgis treacherously seized him and threw him into a dungeon. The traitor is said to have been persuaded by his prisoner the Sultan of Bari that the further success of Lewis would mean the annexation of all Italy to the imperial domain and the extinction of all the southern principalities of the peninsula.
But punishment was at hand. On the news of the fall of Bari the Aglabite monarch in Africa had resolved that Italy should not be lost to Islam, and had prepared a vast expedition against southern Christendom. Duke Adelgis had only kept his suzerain forty days in bonds when he heard to his dismay that 30,000 Moors under a general named Abdallah, who styled himself the Wali of Italy, had landed at Taranto. In terror at this approaching storm the duke liberated his august prisoner, after making him swear to bear no rancour for his captivity. It was felt that Lewis alone could save Italy, and the armies of the Lombards would be needed to drive out the African. Meanwhile the Wali Abdallah laid siege to Salerno, which its duke Waifer defended with great courage.