THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
livacinus of Benevento made a collection of the decretals of that pope, issued in the first eleven years of his pontificate, to 1210, based upon two earlier ones which had not been received at Bologna because they contained unauthentic documents. Innocent, sending the new work to the universities, guaranteed its fidelity to the Regesta, thus making it the first modification of canon law expressly authorized by a ay pope. This Compilatio tertia, as it is called, marks a turning-point in the history of canon law. Thq action of Honorius III., and still more of Gregory IX., shows how the development of ecclesiastical Jaw had by their time become an exclusive privilege of the pope. (3) Though written after the last-named, that which contains the decretals of the popes from Alexander III. to Innocent III. is known as Compilatio secunda from its place in the chronological order. These particular decretals had already been compiled by two Englishmen at Bologna, Gilbert and Alan, but the university had not approved their work, and it was now done over by Johannes Galensis (John the Welshman), his collection being accepted. (4) The Lateran Council of 1215 gave occasion for another compilation, known as Quarta, which included the decrees of the council and the papal pronouncements of the years following 1210. Its compiler is unknown. (5) In 1226 Honorius III. sent to Bologna a collection of his own decretals and the constitutions of Frederick II. It was accepted as Compilatio quinta, but was soon superseded, with the other four, by the official collection of Gregory IX.
In 1230 Gregory entrusted his chaplain Raymond of Penaforte with the preparation of a new collection which should reduce all that had gone before to a consistent and intelligible whole. Raymond omitted a number of sections from the older compilations in order to avoid repetitions or discrepancies, revised some older decretals to 2. Collection bring them into harmony with the of Gregory, most recent legislation, condensed some long documents, and divided others into parts which could be classified by their subjects. This compilation was sent to Bologna by the pope in 1234 as the only authorized collection. The legislative activity of the succeeding popes soon made supplements necessary, which were sent by them to the universities as separate compilations, but were intended to be added to the Gregorian collection. Thus Innocent IV in 1245 sent to Bologna and Paris a list of the initial words of his bulls, desiring that they, as well as the decrees of the Council of Lyons, should be inserted in their proper places in the decretals of Gregory IX.; thus too the decretals of Alexander IV., Urban IV., and Clement IV. were put together in special collections. Gregory X. communicated to the universities the acts of the Second Council of Lyons (1274), and the same was done with a collection of five decretals of Nicholas III.
The same reasons which had influenced Gregory IX. induced Boniface VIII. to combine all the post- Gregorian decretals with his own numerous bulls into a single whole. In his bull of publication addressed to the universities of Bologna and Paris, he emphasized the uncertainty which had prevailed
in regard to the authenticity of some decretals, to eliminate which he had had a thorough revision and verification made. He promulgated 3. Supple- the new compilation in 1298 under the ments to It. name of Liber sextus, as being a completion of the five books of the Gregorian collection. The decretals subsequently issued by Boniface himself (including the famous bull Unam sanctam) and by his successor, Benedict XL, sixteen in number, were frequently appended to the Liber sextus, though without official authority. Clement V. had the decisions of the Council of Vienne (1311) and his own decretals collected (according to the traditional system) into five books, which he promulgated in 1313, apparently under the title of Liber septimus, and sent to the University of Orleans. Then, however, he stopped its further circulation and had it revised, so that it was sent to Paris and Bologna only by his successor John XXII. in 1317. This collection ultimately became known as the Clementine Constitutions. The difference between it and the other post-Gregorian compilations was that while they had borne to a certain extent the character of exclusive codes, it did not exclude the other Extravagantes which had appeared since the Liber sextus, and that it contained, besides the canons of Vienne, nothing but Clement's own decretals.
The reason for this abandonment by Clement V and John XXII. of the system of their predecessors was the difficult situation in France, and the desire to avoid provoking a rejection of their compilation by including in it matter which was certain to excite violent opposition there. This accounts for the fact that no further official collections of decretals were published. The increasing difficulties of the papacy with the secular power and with national churches made the reception of such things problematical, at the same time that it claimed the best energies of the popes for other matters. Of collections subsequently published, though no longer by the popes themselves, with the title of Extravagantes, two have retained some importance to the present day, because of their inclusion in the Corpus juris canonici. When at the end of the fifteenth century the booksellers Gering and Remboldt in Paris undertook an edition of all the parts of the Corpus, they entrusted the editing of the Decretum, the Liber sextus, the Clementina, and the Extravagantes to Jean Chappuis, who made a new arrangement of the last-named, preserved in all subsequent editions. He divided them into two collections; the first, Extravagantes JohannisPapce XXII., contained twenty decretals of that pope, put together by himself in a chronologically consistent whole and glossed by Zenzelinus de Cassianis in 1325; the second, seventy-four (originally seventy) decretals of popes from Urban IV- (1261-64) to Sixtus IV (1471-84), known as Extravagantes communes, not because they belong to a number of popes, but because they are the commonly cited ones — though no single previous edition had contained more than thirty-three of these. In 1590> Petrus Matthseus published at Lyons a Liber Septimus containing decretals from Sixtus IV to Sixtus V. (1585-90); but this, though printed as an ap-