This furnished needful instances of the deposition and excommunication of kings, and proved that they had always been subordinate to the popes.

The decretal letters of the popes were put on a par with Scripture.

At length it came to be received, throughout the West, that the popes had been, from the beginning of Christianity, legislators for the whole Church.

As absolute sovereigns in later times cannot endure representative assemblies, so the papacy, when it wished to become absolute, found that the synods of particular national churches must be put an end to, and those only under the immediate control of the pontiff permitted.

This, in itself, constituted a great revolution.
Another fiction concocted in Rome in the eighth century led to important consequences.