ABSTRACT
The church–state question has been a part of Christian history from the legalization of the new religion in the fourth century through the current debates about how governments should deal with human embryos and same-sex relationships. This chapter focuses on a particular set of documents from Carolingian France that has proved very influential from the ninth century up until modern times. Sometimes these documents supported the position of individual church leaders, sometimes that of secular rulers, and quite inadvertently, these documents became the backbone of the papacy's claims of universal supremacy and temporal sovereignty. Both the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals and the Donation of Constantine crop up regularly in the debates about the limits of imperial and papal sovereignty. After all, the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals were mainly concerned with establishing that it was the bishop of Rome who could judge in major cases against the higher clergy, and in the post-Reformation Catholic Church there were few serious challenges to papal supremacy.
