A closer look
Why wait for God to grant you temporal authority when you can just forge the paperwork yourself? In the 9th century, a group of highly educated Frankish clerics realized they were losing power to secular lords. Their brilliantly corrupt solution was to write a massive collection of fake papal letters and ancient church laws, backdating them by several centuries. These forgeries 'proved' that bishops had total immunity from local kings. The scam was so impeccably executed that the Catholic Church treated the documents as genuine law for another 700 years.
