Papacy not only exercised without question its official power but also moved a little in the direction of church reform. As a ruler with activity and energy in days of darkness and degradation, he regained for the Papacy something of the old international position.
This administrative tradition in papal Rome is often hidden beneath the personal energy of the greater Popes and the growing strength gradually gained by the conception of the Papacy as a whole. Already we can see the effect of the union with the Empire, and of the entanglement with political, and especially with Imperial, interests, upon which so much of later history was to turn. Already we can see the growing influence of Canon Law, beginning, it must be remembered, in outlying fields, and and then slowly centring in Rome itself. The letters of Hincmar, for instance, shew great knowledge of the older law, a constant reference to it and a grasp of its principles. The rapid spread of the False Decretals, in themselves an expression of existing tendencies rather than an impulse producing them, shew us the system in process of growth. Their rapid circulation would have been impossible had they not fitted in with the needs and aspirations of the age. They embodied the idea of the Church’s independence, and indeed of its moral sovereignty, two conceptions which, when the ecclesiastical and civil powers worked in alliance, helped to mould the Christian West into a coherent society, firmly settled in its older seats and also conquering newer lands. But when in a later day the two powers came to clash, the same conceptions made the strife more acute and carried it from the sphere of action into the region of political literature.
One significant feature of this age of preparation demands special notice. St Boniface, when he laid the foundation of Church organisation in the Teutonic lands, had built up a coherent and united Episcopate. Joined to older elements of ecclesiastical life, it became, under the weaker Carolingians, strong enough to attempt control of the crown itself. Before the Papacy could establish its own dominion, it had to subjugate the Bishops: before it could reform the Church and mould the world after its own conceptions, it had further to reform an Episcopate, which, if still powerful, had grown corrupt. Constantine had sought the alliance of the Church tor the welfare of the Empire because it was strong and united, and both its strength and unity were based upon the Episcopate. The Teutonic Emperors did the same for the same reasons, and now this Episcopate had to reconcile for itself conflicting relations with Empire and Papacy. And in establishing its complete control of the Bishops the Papacy touched and shook not only the kingly power but the lower and more local parts of a complicated political system.
