Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/132

 ,^g FRANCE. cient help to Eobert, whom God had gifted with especial grace in these matters, and Eobert himself was honored with a special papal commission empowering him to act throughout the whole of France. The pope moreover, spurred him on with exhortations to spare no labor in the work, and not to shrink from martyrdom if necessary for the salvation of souls.* This was pouring oil upon the flames. Robert's untempered fanaticism had required no stimulus, and now it raged beyond all bounds The kingdom, by Gregory's thoughtless zeal, was delivered up to one who was little better than a madman. Supported by the piety of St. Louis, the prelates were obMged to aid him and carry out his behests, and for several years he traversed the prov- inces of Flanders, Champagne, Burgundy, and France with none to curb or oppose him. The crazy ardor of such a man was not hke- ly to be discriminating or to require much proof of guilt. Those whom he designated as heretics had the alternative of abjuration with perpetual imprisonment or of the stake-varied occasionally with burial alive. In one term of two or three months he is said to have thus despatched about fifty unfortunates of either sex, and the whole number of his victims during his unchecked career of several years must have been large. The terror spread by his ar- bitrary and pitiless proceedings rendered him formidable to high and low aUke, until at length the evident confounding of the in- nocent with the guilty raised a clamor to which even Gregory IX. was forced to listen. An investigation was held in 1238 which exposed his misdeeds, though not before he had time, m 1239, to burn a number of heretics at MontmoriUon in Vienne, and twenty- seven or, according to other accounts, one hundred and eighty-three, at Mont -Wimer— the original seat of Catharism m the eleventh century-where, at this holocaust pleasing to God, there were pres- ent the King of Navarre with a crowd of prelates and nobles and a multitude wildly estimated at seven hundred thousand souls. Robert's commission was withdrawn, and he expiated his insane cruelties in perpetu al prison. The case^ yugM to have proved, like • Greg PP IX. Bull. Olim, 4 Feb. 1284 ; Ejusd. Bull. Dudum, 21 Aug. 1235 ; Ejusd. Bull. ««0 inter cruras, 22 Aug. 1235 ; Ejusd. Bull. Dudum. 23 Aug. 1235 CRipoll I 80-1) -Potthast No. 9386.-Chron. breve Lobiens. ann. 1235 (Marteue Thes. IIL 1427).-D. Bouquet, XXII. 570.-Chron. Rim6e de PhiUppe Mousket, V. 28871-29025. — Alboric. Trium Font. ann. 1235.