Ebo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False Decretals
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689411
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Religious Studies of Rome
ResumoPrevious 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 constituents of the forgery complex, particularly the interpolated Hispana, may have emerged much earlier than the traditionalists expected.33 The False Decretals are another matter. There, the evidence is closely intertwined with the career of Ebo, and it points us towards a later era.Ebo of Reims and the Date of Pseudo-IsidoreIn the traditional view, the legally and politically vulnerable Frankish episcopate constituted Pseudo-Isidore's primary concern.34 Yet the forgeries also resonate with the repeated initiatives to remake the Frankish church that characterized Louis's reign from his accession to sole rule in 814. Broad sections of the forgeries align with the agenda of the great reform council held at Paris in 829, and the forgers even use texts from that council, at great risk to the verisimilitude of their product.35 Tellingly, scholars used to agree that Pseudo-Isidore also knew and drew upon the related reform council held at Aachen in 836, but there is good reason to doubt that now.36 Instead, affinities between Aachen 836 and the False Decretals seem to arise entirely from the shared aims of these legal initiatives: both the fathers at Aachen and the forgers sought to reignite reform initiatives that had run aground amidst the political turbulence of the early 830s. While the Aachen council simply reissued reform legislation from 829, the Pseudo-Isidorians thought it more effective to place key arguments from Paris 829 into the mouths of the earliest popes and Carolingian emperors.37 Scholars like Emil Seckel were inclined to dismiss the wide-ranging interests of Pseudo-Isidore as filler, included to mask or offset the largely procedural agenda of the forgers.38 Yet the breadth of Pseudo-Isidore's preoccupations demands earnest analysis, and Zechiel-Eckes's theories have fallen on welcome ears because they shift the forgery operation nearer to the great reform initiatives of Louis the Pious's later years, and make it possible to take the supposed filler more seriously.Beyond reform, Pseudo-Isidore seeks to shield bishops from accusations and trials by means of massive interventions in the arena of procedural law. These protections are present across all the forgeries, but they dominate most of all in the False Decretals and associated texts like the Capitula Angilramni.39 While the reform material has genuine antecedents and represents the aspirations of many Frankish clerics, the procedural content is highly original and even subversive. The forgeries aim to protect bishops by disrupting episcopal trials and submerging judicial process in a hopeless mess of contradictory directives, endless appeals, and impossible standards of evidence. Karl-Georg Schon has remarked that Pseudo-Isidorian prescriptions, far from amounting to a law of procedure, are in fact profoundly antiprocedural.40 The Pseudo-Isidorians wanted the Frankish episcopate to have de facto immunity, always and everywhere.This agenda likewise reflects conditions that prevailed during the reign of Louis the Pious. In the decades after 800, the cumulative effects of Carolingian reform were felt in the increasing independence and political muscle of the Frankish episcopate.41 This new prominence coincided with the uncomfortable pressures of factionalism and political decline that came with the end of Carolingian military expansion and that gained pace during Louis's reign.42 The overview of episcopal trials in the Appendix documents how the Frankish episcopate experienced these years. We know nothing of the circumstances, but directly after Charlemagne's death, the perennially unlucky Amalar, then the archbishop of Trier, found himself deposed and very possibly exiled. A few years later, the rebellion of Bernard of Italy led to the condemnation and deposition of Anselm of Milan, Wolfold of Cremona, and, most sensationally, Theodulf of Orléans, a key architect of Charlemagne's ecclesiastical and educational initiatives. In 830 the so-called loyal rebellion against Louis the Pious saw Jesse of Amiens deposed, a mere prologue to Louis's sweeping retaliation against the Frankish episcopate in 835.43 At the council of Thionville held that year, Ebo of Reims and Hildemann of Beauvais were brought to trial from prison. The former was compelled to confess, condemned, and returned to confinement. Hildemann managed to clear his name, but other bishops who had failed to appear found themselves deposed in short order. The names of these deposed include Jesse of Amiens (who had been reinstalled in the interim only to face expulsion once again), Heribald of Auxerre, Agobard of Lyons, Bartholomew of Narbonne, Bernard of Vienne, and Elias of Troyes.44 And the trials did not stop there. In 838, a rehabilitated Amalar faced trial for his allegedly heretical teachings on the Eucharist and was removed from office again. With Louis's death and the Carolingian civil war, Ebo was able to return to his position briefly in 840, but he was forced to flee in 841, and afterwards a new council reaffirmed his prior condemnation.45In the new, politically divided Carolingian world, bishops were if anything more vulnerable: the entire Breton episcopate was famously deposed in 848/9 at the behest of the Breton duke Nominoe, an action widely condemned.46 Ten years later, we encounter the fascinating case of Hermann of Nevers, whose mental health had deteriorated sufficiently to require his removal from office at the provincial synod of Sens in 858. Yet his colleagues hesitated, for some remembered having seen an ancient decretal, in the name of Pope Melchiades, that required papal approval for the deposition of bishops. The Melchiades text is, of course, a Pseudo-Isidorian forgery. The previous year, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims had made unambiguous use of several False Decretals and capitula from Benedict for the first time. Episcopal trials continued, though Hermann's case marks the end of their opportunity to influence Pseudo-Isidore, whose forgeries had by then begun to circulate.47Clearly, Pseudo-Isidore did not want for trials. To find Ebo in the forgeries, we must identify what set Ebo's case apart from the legal difficulties that his contemporaries faced and search for Pseudo-Isidore's responses to these unique circumstances. Unfortunately, the Pseudo-Isidorians do not cooperate with attempts to historicize their agenda. More than anything, they would prefer to prevent trials from happening or to render their verdicts completely reversible. To prevent trials, they exclude all manner of potential accusers; to undermine their verdicts, they open all possible avenues for appeal.48 Some of this abundant material would obviously have helped Ebo, but none of it applies to Ebo exclusively. An important subset of the Pseudo-Isidorian polemic moreover aims to shield suffragan bishops from the intrusion of their metropolitans and therefore cannot be about Ebo, the archbishop of Reims, at all.49 Other classic Pseudo-Isidorian inventions, like the prohibition of peregrina iudicia, or judgment by bishops from beyond one's home province, prove similarly unhelpful. The archbishop of Reims was tried at Thionville by bishops from across the empire, but so were Theodulf, Wolfold, Anselm, and Jesse of Amiens. When Pseudo-Isidore discusses accusations, appeals, and peregrina iudicia, he is addressing the procedures that had tended to be employed against bishops in his world. He is very far from defending Ebo specifically, or even primarily.There are nevertheless moments when the veil slips, and we can say that Pseudo-Isidore speaks directly to Ebo's situation in three matters. A legal doctrine pervasive to the forgeries, known to canonists as the exceptio spolii, prohibits pretrial circumstances that are recorded only for Ebo and his fellow accused, Hildemann of Beauvais. A decretal forgery in the name of Pope Alexander I, meanwhile, rails against coerced confessions in terms that recall, with remarkable specificity, the events surrounding Ebo's condemnation. Finally, four pseudonymous decretals struggle to dismantle ancient legal obstacles to episcopal translation, with arguments calibrated to address Ebo's later career. Far from being a collection of incidental scraps thrown to a troubled prelate, these provisions constitute a mutually supportive program that aims to protect the interests of Ebo and his associates, while providing ammunition for use against Ebo's successor, Hincmar, at Reims. The details of this program prove that it cannot predate 845. In its totality, it is also exclusive to the False Decretals. Building blocks are on offer in Benedict's Capitularies, but assembling the system in all its particulars required retooling, and in one case perhaps even overruling, the False Capitularies on specific points.Ebo and the exceptio spoliiAfter the coup against Louis the Pious collapsed in the early months of 834, many rebel bishops followed Lothar to exile in northern Italy. Ebo is said to have left his archdiocese and "taken flight to another province, where he thought he could … hide for a while and observe … what the most beneficial course of action might be." Before long, Rothad of Soissons and Erchenrad of Paris, "in whose church he was hiding," apprehended him, and Louis had him remanded to custody at Fulda.50 Louis also arrested Hildemann of Beauvais, who was entrusted to the monks at Saint-Vaast. Ebo and Hildemann were then brought to trial at Thionville from their monastic prisons the following year, in 835.None of the other bishops tried in Pseudo-Isidore's world are said to have fled their dioceses or been imprisoned before their trials. It is therefore highly significant that Pseudo-Isidore should outline a collection of provisions prohibiting precisely these circumstances. Later canonists came to call these the exceptio spolii, or the exception of despoliation. Exceptions, in Roman procedural law, are pleas that the defendant can raise to avoid or delay trial on the basis of some supervening circumstance beyond the bare facts of the plaintiff's charge. Though the Pseudo-Isidorians knew and used elements of Roman law, their procedural interventions are not intended for deployment within any kind of explicitly Roman procedural context. Nevertheless, Pseudo-Isidorian provisions on clerical despoliation indeed resemble an exception, for they prohibit the trial of any bishop who has been driven from his see and denied access to his possessions and the resources of his diocese. Accused prelates who have suffered these adversities must be reinstated in advance of any legal proceeding.Before Pseudo-Isidore, nothing like an exceptio spolii existed anywhere in the Western legal tradition.51 Perhaps to mask the novelty of their invention, the Pseudo-Isidorians extrapolated their invention from the vocabulary of two authentic sources. The first is a passage from the sixth-century Historia tripartita as commissioned by Cassiodorus and compiled by Epiphanius from the Greek histories of Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, and Theodoret.52 Together with the Liber pontificalis, the Historia tripartita assisted the forgers again and again with their pseudohisto
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