Ebo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False Decretals

Previous articleNext article FreeEbo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False DecretalsEric KnibbsEric KnibbsEric Knibbs is Assistant Professor of History at Williams College (email: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDespite generations of research, the date of the legal forgeries associated with Pseudo-Isidore remains a deep problem. One school of thought finds evidence in the controversies that surrounded Amalar after he became archbishop of Lyon in 835. Amalar's promotion followed the Council of Thionville that same year, where Emperor Louis the Pious avenged himself upon those bishops who had participated in the failed coup on the Rotfeld in 833. In this high drama, Louis's sons and their allies among the clergy and laity had deposed the aging emperor, compelled him to undergo public penance, and committed him to prison. Yet within months support for the rebels evaporated, and Louis returned to power. At Thionville, the greater part of the emperor's wrath accrued to Archbishop Ebo of Reims, but other rebellious clerics expected retribution as well. Among them was Archbishop Agobard of Lyon. Louis deposed him in absentia and assigned Amalar to the newly vacant see.1 Then as now, Amalar was notorious for his unusual ideas about the Roman liturgy, which he believed to be fraught with arcane allegorical significance. At Lyon he heedlessly promoted his liturgical theories to the cathedral community, and before long the Lyon deacon Florus, a committed Agobard loyalist, retaliated by raising charges of heresy.2 Florus objected to Amalar's preaching on the Eucharist, which the celebrant was supposed to break into three pieces before administering Communion. Amalar saw an allegory at the heart of this threefold fraction that, Florus argued, contradicted the Pauline doctrine of Christ's unitary and indivisible body.3 Florus moreover complained that Amalar was relentless "in advancing his inept and even blasphemous argument about the division of the holy Eucharist through the forged authority of many pontiffs."4The greater part of the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus—the so-called False Decretals—consists precisely of letters forged in the names of the earliest popes. Klaus Zechiel-Eckes has therefore argued that Florus's complaint dates the forgery initiative to the later 830s, and that Amalar was among Pseudo-Isidore's first readers. From anybody else, provocative theses of this flavor might have remained forever confined to footnotes.5 Until his untimely death in 2010, however, Zechiel-Eckes was the leading authority on Pseudo-Isidore, best known for discovering marginal notes in three ninth-century codices that reveal the forgers conducting the legal and historical research necessary for their fictions. Two of these codices hail from the monastery of Corbie, and thanks to Zechiel-Eckes scholarship now enjoys a much better idea of where and how the Pseudo-Isidorians worked. In successive publications, Zechiel-Eckes leveraged his discovery to advance a total reinterpretation of the forgeries. Previous scholars had dated most of the Pseudo-Isidorian output between 847 and 852, tracing the forgers' strident support for rank-and-file bishops to the archiepiscopate of Hincmar of Reims and to those bishops whom Hincmar alienated in the course of his domineering career. For Zechiel-Eckes, however, the False Decretals reflect the aspirations of Frankish church reformers a generation earlier. In this reading, Amalar's purported use of Pseudo-Isidore is proof, but of the incidental variety. As Zechiel-Eckes sees it, the forgers wrote to defend the bishops whom Louis the Pious deposed in 835, and none more so than Archbishop Ebo of Reims, Hincmar's controversial predecessor.6Today, nearly everybody believes that Zechiel-Eckes was right to draw the False Decretals into the world of the 830s and to align their provisions with the pontificate of Ebo rather than Hincmar. If anything, authors wonder whether his arguments go far enough.7 At the same time, very few people are certain that Amalar used or even knew of the False Decretals at all.8 Scholarship, in other words, would seem to have accepted and even extended Zechiel-Eckes's reading of the False Decretals in the absence of any hard reason to buy the redating that compels it.9 This essay holds that, in pushing the False Decretals ever earlier into the 830s, we have withdrawn them to a world where they do not belong. Ebo indeed lurks among these forgeries, but the details of his presence vindicate the traditional view of the False Decretals as a mid-century phenomenon.Competing Theories of Pseudo-IsidoreIn 1628, David Blondel proved that the ancient legal compendium associated with the mysterious canonist named Isidorus Mercator was full of forgeries.10 Yet scholars did not begin to agree on the basic story of Pseudo-Isidore's origins until Paul Hinschius edited the Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae in 1863.11 While Hinschius's edition suffers from notorious problems, his introductory monograph on the origin, date, and purpose of Pseudo-Isidore remains among the standard literature. The views he outlines there proceeded from his pioneering survey of the manuscript evidence and so enjoyed a profound advantage over all earlier scholarship.12 In later decades, Hinschius and his legacy acquired a further edge: Emil Seckel, who went on to become the leading Pseudo-Isidorian scholar of the next generation, married his daughter. Seckel approached the faults of his father-in-law's research gently, while upholding and extending Hinschius's most decisive findings.13 When Horst Fuhrmann surveyed what was known of the influence and dissemination of Pseudo-Isidorian texts fifty years later, he worked in a world that Hinschius and Seckel had fashioned, and bequeathed their consensus to later generations.14Among other things, Hinschius and his successors wished to impose a clear chronology upon the complex and confusing textual world of Pseudo-Isidore. In the beginning, they believed, came the Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis, a subtype of the authentic Spanish legal collection known as the Collectio Hispana. Friedrich Maassen, who wrote twenty years after the appearance of Hinschius's edition, showed how the forgers corrected, revised, and very occasionally interpolated this otherwise authentic collection of church law at an early moment in their project. Only one complete manuscript of this interpolated Hispana survives; it is Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 1341, and it was copied in the middle of the ninth century at Corbie. Other copies were known in the Middle Ages but have since been lost.15After the interpolation of the Hispana, according to the traditional view, the forgers created the False Capitularies. These are a mass of 1,721 capitula, or short chapters or paragraphs, that advertise themselves as secular, royal legislation—as opposed to the church councils and papal letters collected in the Hispana.16 The material extends to around one hundred thousand words and is divided into three books and three or four appendices, known as additiones. By far the greater part of the capitula come from authentic sources, including the Vulgate, Roman law, and genuine ninth-century legislation. Occasional pieces have been interpolated or revised in ways major and minor, while others are forged in a fashion reminiscent of Pseudo-Isidorian fictions on offer elsewhere. Floating in the morass are extracts from the interpolated Hispana, which therefore must have existed, in some form, before the compilers set to work.17 The False Capitularies open with a preface in which one Benedictus Levita, or Benedict the Deacon, takes credit for the entire ensemble. This Benedict claims that he came across neglected royal Carolingian legislation, or capitularies, in the archives of the cathedral church at Mainz, which his former archbishop Riculf had deposited there. Benedict says he collected these forgotten laws to supplement the widely known capitulary collection of Ansegis of Fontanelle. He also writes in passing of Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, who he says ordered him to undertake the compilation and who "occupied the bishopric of Mainz at that time"—a strange phrase indeed, unless Benedict were writing after Otgar's death on 21 April 847.18Through the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars were inclined to take Benedict at his word, and many went so far as to posit some connection between Pseudo-Isidore and Mainz on the strength of these prefatory remarks.19 On the eve of Hinschius's edition, however, Julius Weizsäcker began to notice the deep resonance between Pseudo-Isidore's polemic and the provincial affairs of Reims.20 Benedict's claimed Mainz associations were therefore suspect in Hinschius's eyes, while for Seckel they were a deliberate fiction: "A notorious forger like Benedict is no more likely to put us onto his trail than a burglar is to leave his calling card at the scene of the crime. Mainz is not the place of origin precisely because Benedict deflects our suspicion to Mainz, to make it harder to unmask his deception."21 The only piece of Benedict's information to survive Seckel's critique unscathed was the terminus that his words supply. For Benedict, as for us, Otgar was no longer the bishop of Mainz, and the False Capitularies must therefore have received their finishing touches sometime after 847.The final stop in this traditionalist chronology, after the interpolated Hispana and False Capitularies, was held to be the False Decretals, a long series of forged letters in the names of the earliest popes. With the Decretals we come full circle, for the forgers circulated these fictions by inserting them among the genuine papal letters and conciliar material on offer in their interpolated Hispana. To this enlarged collection they attached several forged or interpolated appendices, including the Capitula Angilramni, a précis of Pseudo-Isidorian procedural provisions; and the Excerptiones de gestis Chalcedonensis concilii, a series of revised and reworked excerpts from the Council of Chalcedon. Combined, the interpolated Hispana, decretal forgeries, and appendices weigh in at over four hundred and fifty thousand words. To introduce this new and enlarged collection, the forgers provided a preface that had a fictitious canonist named Isidorus Mercator—Isidore the Merchant—take credit for the compilation.22 Unlike the interpolated Hispana or the False Capitularies, which found relatively few medieval readers, these False Decretals worked their way into every major medieval library and exercised an incalculable influence upon later medieval legal history. Today around one hundred manuscript copies are known.23The False Decretals and the False Capitularies share a great deal of material, and Hinschius was the first to analyze their relationship systematically. Crucially, he distinguished between the 1,550 capitula gathered into Benedict's first three books and his first appendices, and the 171 capitula assembled in the final appendix, known as Additio IV. Hinschius noticed that Benedict's first 1,550 chapters often seem prior to the Decretals. Authentic sources that are incorporated in tight combination or loosely summarized in the False Decretals are more clearly distinguished from one another and more closely quoted by Benedict in these chapters. Moreover, Benedictine interpolations and alterations to the authentic sources excerpted in these chapters often recur when those same sources appear in the False Decretals. For Hinschius, this meant that the decretal forgers employed the bulk of the False Capitularies as a source. Hinschius noticed that a very different relationship seems to prevail between the False Decretals and Additio IV. In these final 171 capitula, Benedict's concerns align more closely with those of the decretal forgers, and he even cites several decretal forgeries in draft. The shift is so drastic that it can prove imprecise to discuss Additio IV as an undifferentiated contingent of Benedict's collection, and subsequent references to the False Capitularies in this paper should be understood as excluding Additio IV unless otherwise specified.24 Beyond this wrinkle, Hinschius's thesis that the decretal forgers depend upon Benedict had important chronological implications. Because Hinschius and his successors noticed that the False Decretals seem to have been cited for the first time in 852, they were able to supply remarkably precise dates for the forgery operation: the False Decretals were put together after Benedict wrote his preface in 847 but before 852, while the False Capitularies were complete by 847, and the interpolated Hispana sometime earlier.25These doctrines displaced earlier theses concerning the origins of Pseudo-Isidore and relationships among the sibling forgeries. That they did not fully refute these discarded theories became clear with the work of Klaus Zechiel-Eckes and his discovery of Pseudo-Isidorian excerptors in manuscripts from the library of Corbie on the Somme. Just as the capitula of Benedict's collection reproduce, revise, and rework hundreds of genuine sources, so too are the False Decretals, for long stretches, little more than a mosaic of textual fragments gathered from hundreds of authentic patristic, biblical, and legal texts. Zechiel-Eckes found the leavings of the cut-and-paste artists responsible for this work. Three manuscripts, he showed, bear marginal notes demarcating passages in authentic Pseudo-Isidorian legal and historical sources. Each of these marked passages recurs somewhere in the forgeries, whether the False Capitularies or False Decretals or smaller, associated components, like the Chalcedon Excerpts. Two of these annotated manuscripts hail from the Corbie scriptorium, which confirmed earlier indications that the forgers used the Corbie library to build their fictions. Corbie was one of the greatest monasteries in the Carolingian empire, and it lay in the Reims province, in the diocese of Amiens. As a leading intellectual at Corbie around the time that the forgeries took shape, the famous theologian and later abbot of Corbie, Paschasius Radbertus, became Zechiel-Eckes's leading candidate for Pseudo-Isidore.26As we have seen, Zechiel-Eckes also believed that substantial portions of the decretal forgeries were drafted to defend Archbishop Ebo of Reims. For Zechiel-Eckes, Pseudo-Isidore's awareness of Ebo and the political events surrounding his downfall in 835 requires an earlier date than Hinschius and his followers had favored. The older dating scheme had to fall, and with it the entire superstructure that earlier scholars had built upon its back: "It was no less a scholar than Emil Seckel who led research into error for more than a century," Zechiel-Eckes wrote. "His categorically adopted position, that the False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore should be dated after the False Capitularies of the so-called Benedictus Levita, has not been subject to critical scrutiny since 1905.... This line of argument suffers from the fact that a text-critical proof for Seckel's thesis of dependence cannot be assembled; and that the False Decretals and the False Capitularies could well have taken shape parallel to one another."27 With the False Decretals unmoored from the terminus of Benedict's preface, Zechiel-Eckes could develop a fresh approach to the problem of chronology. In addition to Amalar's purported use of forgeries to defend his liturgical theories, he alighted upon a famous exchange that took place around 870 between Hincmar of Reims and his nephew, namesake, and nemesis, Hincmar of Laon. The younger Hincmar had confronted his uncle with various excerpts from Pseudo-Isidore, and the elder Hincmar retorted that he knew the quoted passages well; indeed, he said, he had been familiar with them since before his nephew's birth. Since Hincmar of Laon was born no later than 840, Zechiel-Eckes argued that Florus and Hincmar provided mutually reinforcing evidence for an earlier Pseudo-Isidore.28In large part, this approach revives older, pre-Hinschian theories of Pseudo-Isidore's origins first proposed by the nineteenth-century legal historian Hermann Wasserschleben.29 Experts have found Zechiel-Eckes's return to these neglected arguments persuasive, such that a newer orthodoxy, albeit more nebulous and less dogmatic, has come to replace the prevailing views of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars. Pseudo-Isidore, in the eyes of recent authors, is at base a response to the crisis of the Carolingian empire that we encountered at the start of this paper: in 833, Louis the Pious was deposed by his heirs and various members of the Frankish episcopate, who objected to aspects of Louis's government and feared the exclusion of his eldest son, Lothar, from the co-emperorship. Louis eventually got his empire back, at which point he retaliated against his episcopal opponents, in particular Ebo of Reims.30 For Wasserschleben, as for Zechiel-Eckes, these are the events that put the forgery machine in gear, and they have both elaborated very specific arguments about which forged statements respond to which element of this unfolding catastrophe.31Just as the Hinschian consensus took root without incorporating or fully refuting earlier theories, Zechiel-Eckes's revolution has won widespread support without addressing the traditional approach in any comprehensive way. Many scholars have nevertheless characterized Zechiel-Eckes's arguments as a conclusive and convincing new approach to the origins of Pseudo-Isidore; the author of this paper is no exception.32 Yet I have come to believe that Zechiel-Eckes's greatest insight lay less in replacing one orthodoxy with another, than it did in revealing how fragile are the various schemes for dating and contextualizing the forgeries. Wasserschleben's readings were cast aside with minimal acknowledgment as Hinschius established what would become the new approach; and the views of Hinschius, Seckel, and Fuhrmann held sway until most of their major proponents had gone to their graves, at which point older ideas could be resurrected with relative ease.Amid all this uncertainty, Pseudo-Isidore's Reims origins have remained a lone point of agreement. This theory, pioneered by Julius Weizsäcker and elaborated by scholars from Hinschius to Fuhrmann, was proven beyond all doubt by Zechiel-Eckes and his discovery of Pseudo-Isidorian excerptors at Corbie. Among the evidence for this theory are strong clues as to the date of the forgeries. Some of these clues indeed suggest that fundamental of the forgery the interpolated Hispana, have much earlier than the The False Decretals are another the evidence is closely with the of and it us a later of Reims and the Date of Pseudo-IsidoreIn the traditional view, the and Frankish Pseudo-Isidore's Yet the forgeries also with the to the Frankish church that characterized Louis's from his to in of the forgeries align with the of the great held at in and the forgers even use texts from that at great to the of their scholars used to agree that Pseudo-Isidore also knew and upon the held at in but there is reason to doubt that between and the False Decretals seem to from the of these legal both the at and the forgers to that had the political of the early While the from the Pseudo-Isidorians thought it more to place arguments from into the of the earliest and Carolingian like Emil Seckel were inclined to the of Pseudo-Isidore as to or the procedural of the Yet the of Pseudo-Isidore's and Zechiel-Eckes's theories have on because they shift the forgery to the great of Louis the later and make it to take the supposed more Pseudo-Isidore to bishops from and by of in the of procedural These are across all the forgeries, but they most of all in the False Decretals and associated texts like the Capitula While the material has genuine and the aspirations of many Frankish the procedural is and even The forgeries to bishops by episcopal and in a of and of has that Pseudo-Isidorian far from to a law of are in fact The Pseudo-Isidorians the Frankish to have de and that the of Louis the In the after the of Carolingian were in the and political of the Frankish This new with the of and political that came with the of Carolingian and that Louis's The of episcopal in the how the Frankish these of the but after the the archbishop of found himself deposed and very few years later, the of of led to the and of of of most of a of and In the so-called against Louis the Pious saw of a to Louis's against the Frankish in At the of Thionville held that year, Ebo of Reims and of were to from prison. The former was compelled to and returned to to clear his but other bishops who had failed to appear found themselves deposed in short The names of these deposed of had been in the only to of Agobard of of of and of the did not stop there. In a Amalar for his on the Eucharist and was from With Louis's death and the Carolingian Ebo was able to return to his in 840, but he was to in and a new his prior the divided Carolingian bishops were more the entire was deposed in at the of the an widely years later, we the of Hermann of had to his from at the provincial of in Yet his for some an ancient in the of that papal for the of The of a Pseudo-Isidorian The year, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims had use of several False Decretals and capitula from Benedict for the first the of their to influence Pseudo-Isidore, forgeries had by to Pseudo-Isidore did not for To Ebo in the forgeries, we must what set from the legal that his and for Pseudo-Isidore's to these the Pseudo-Isidorians do not with to their than anything, they would to from or to their To they all of to their they open all for Some of this material would have but none of it to Ebo important of the Pseudo-Isidorian polemic moreover to bishops from the of their and therefore cannot be about the archbishop of Reims, at Other Pseudo-Isidorian like the of or by bishops from beyond province, prove The archbishop of Reims was at Thionville by bishops from across the empire, but so were and of Amiens. When Pseudo-Isidore and he is addressing the that had to be employed against bishops in his He is very far from Ebo or even are nevertheless when the and we can that Pseudo-Isidore to in three legal doctrine to the forgeries, known to as the that are only for Ebo and his of decretal forgery in the of against in that with the events surrounding four to ancient legal to episcopal with arguments to later career. from a collection of incidental to a these provisions a mutually that to the of Ebo and his while for use against at Reims. The details of this prove that it cannot In its it is also to the False Decretals. are on offer in Benedict's Capitularies, but the in all its and in one even the False Capitularies on specific and the the coup against Louis the Pious in the early months of many bishops followed to in Ebo is to have his and to another province, where he thought he could for a while and what the most course of might of and of "in church he was and Louis had him to at Louis also of who was to the at Ebo and were to at Thionville from their the year, in of the other bishops in Pseudo-Isidore's world are to have their or been before their is therefore that Pseudo-Isidore should a collection of provisions precisely these came to these the or the of in Roman procedural law, are that the can to or on the of some beyond the of the the Pseudo-Isidorians knew and used of Roman law, their procedural are not for within any of Roman procedural Pseudo-Isidorian provisions on indeed an for they the of any bishop who has been from his and to his and the of his who have these must be in advance of any legal Pseudo-Isidore, like an in the legal to the of their the Pseudo-Isidorians their from the of authentic sources. The first is a from the as by and by from the of and with the the the forgers and with their

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