It is in this period, however, that there begins the process of documentary fraud by which the Church, wielding the power of the pen, gradually circumvented that of the sword. Centuries before, the Roman see had made use of forged documents in its disputes with Constantinople; and the Greeks of the day declared such forgeries to be a special Roman industry. As a matter of fact, most of the early ecclesiastical forgeries had been of eastern origin: for instance, the so-called Apostles' Creed and the Apostolical Constitutions. Of these the first grew up fortuitously in the third century, and received its name after it won currency. Only in the later middle ages was it adopted by the Latin Church. The Constitutions again were a deliberate compilation; and the Roman Church had invented nothing on the same scale. But in the ninth century there was trumped-up among the Frankish bishops, under the name of Isidore (ostensibly the popular encyclopedist of Seville, d. 636), a collection of professedly ancient but really spurious papal decretals, partly proceeding on previous practice, but greatly developing it as regarded the local independence of bishops and their right of appeal to Rome. The original motive of the fraud was local episcopal interest, the bishops having endless causes of grievance against their archbishops, kings, and lay lords. But Pope Nicholas I (858-67) adroitly adopted the forged decretals, professing to have had ancient copies of them, and thenceforth they were made the basis of the papal claims wherever political circumstances gave a good opportunity. The bishops, being thus delivered over to the papacy, lost much more than they gained. A common use now made of the growing papal power was to give monasteries an exemption from the local bishop's rule; and as the monks in general at this period had a higher character for sanctity that the bishops, who were often extremely unreverend, local sympathy was apt to go with the former, and with the pope, whose distant misdeeds were little known to the laity.