Page:A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages-Volume I .pdf/207

Rh sade, while plenary indulgence was offered to all who would serve. Vainly did Louis Coeur-de-Lion, with his father's sanction, and accompanied by the Cardinal-Legate Bertrand, lead a gallant army of pilgrims which numbered in its ranks no less than thirty-three counts and twenty bishops. They penetrated, indeed, to Toulouse, but the third siege of the unyielding city was no more successful than its predecessors, and Louis was obliged to withdraw ingloriously, having accomplished nothing but the massacre of Marmande, where five thousand souls were put to the sword, without distinction of age or sex. Indeed, the pitiless cruelty and brutal licentiousness habitual among the Crusaders, who spared no man in their wrath, and no woman in their lust, aided no little in inflaming the resistance to foreign domination. One by one the strongholds still held by the French were wrested from their grasp, and but very few of the invaders founded families who kept their place among the gentry of the land. In 1220 a new legate, Conrad, tried the experiment of founding a military order under the name of the Knights of the Faith of Jesus Christ, but it proved useless. Equally vain was the papal sentence of excommunication and exheredation fulminated in 1221 ; and when, in the same year, Louis undertook a new crusade and received from Honorius a twentieth of the Church revenues to defray the expenses, he turned the army thus raised against the Enghsh possessions and captured La Rochelle, in spite of the protests of king and pope.

Early in 1222, Amauri, reduced to desperation, offered to Philip Augustus all his possessions and claims, urging Honorius to support the proposal. The pope welcomed it as the only feasible mode of accomplishing the result for which years of effort had been fruitlessly spent, and he wrote to the king. May 14, representing that in this way alone could the Church be saved. The heretics who had hid themselves in caverns and mountain fastnesses where French