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536 operations of the Inquisition, of which the royal officials only acted as ministers. The Inquisitor Sprenger had no hesitation in alluding to the victims whom he caused to be burned - "quas incinerari fecimus." In fact, how modern is the pretension that the Church was not responsible for the atrocity is apparent when, as late as the seventeenth century, the learned Cardinal Albizio, in controverting Frà Paolo as to the control of the Inquisition by the State of Venice, had no scruple in asserting that "the inquisitors in conducting the trials, regularly came to the sentence, and if it was one of death it was immediately and necessarily put into execution by the doge and the senate."

We have already seen that the Church was responsible for the enactment of the ferocious laws punishing heresy with death, and that she intervened authoritatively to annul any secular statutes which should interfere with the prompt and effective application of the penalties. In the same way, as we have also seen, she provided against any negligence or laxity on the part of the magistrates in executing the sentences pronounced by the inquisitors. According to the universal belief of the period, this was her plainest and highest duty, and she did not shrink from it. Boniface VIII. only recorded the current practice when he embodied in the canon law the provision whereby the secular authorities were commanded to punish duly and promptly all who were handed over to them by the inquisitors, under pain of excommunication, which became heresy if endured for a twelvemonth, and the inquisitors were rigidly instructed to proceed against all magistrates who proved re-