Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/266

 250 "ALY. led the expedition up the Brenta which captured Padua. Yet the republic made no haste to join in the movement for the extermi- nation of heresy so energetically pushed by Gregory IX. and his successors. The Constitutions of Frederic II. were never inscribed in its statute-books. In 1229 the official oath of the Doge Giaoopo Tiepoli, which, as is customary, contains the criminal code of the day embodies no allusion to heresy or its suppression, and the same is true of the criminal statute of 1232 published by the same doge. It was about this time that the Inquisition was developed with all the aggressive energy of which Gregory IX. was capable, but it found no foothold in Venice. Yet the duty to punish heresy was at length recognized, though the civil authorities would abate no jot of their right to control the administration of justice in spiritual as well as in temporal matters. The official oath taken in 1240 by the Doge Marino Morosini contains a promise that cer- tain upright and discreet and Catholic men shall be appointed, with the advice of the Council, to inquire after heretics. All heretics, moreover, who shall be delivered to the secular arm by the Archbishop of Grado or other bishops of the Venetian terri- tories shall be duly burned, under the advice of the Council, or of a majority of its members. Thus a kind of secular Inquisition was established to search after heretics. The ancient jurisdiction of the episcopal courts was alone recognized, but the judgment of the bishops was subject to revision by the Council before the death-penalty could be inflicted.f This could by no means be satisfactory to the papacy, and when the death of Frederic II. led to an immediate effort to ex- tend the Inquisition through the territories hitherto closed to it, Venice was not forgotten. By a bull of June 11, 1251, Innocent IV ordered the Frati Vicenzo of Milan, and Giovanni of Vercelli, to proceed to Venice and persecute heretics there with the same iiowers as those exercised by inquisitors elsewhere in Lombardy. Whether the good friars made the attempt to exercise these pow- ers is questionable ; if they did so, their ill-success is unquestion- able. There is a document of 1256 which contains an oath to pur- t Archivici Generale di Venezia, Codice ex Brera, No. 277, Carte 5.
 * Sarpi, Discorso (Opcre, Ed. Helmstadt, IV. 20).