Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/267

Rh VENICE. 251 sué heretics and to denounce them, not to the ecclesiastical tri- bunals, but to the doge or to the magistrates-an oath presumably administered to the secular inquisitors established in 1249. The same document contains a clause which indicates that the death- penalty threatened in 1249 had already been abrogated. It classes Cathari and usurers together: it alludes to the punishment decreed for those convicted of relapse into either sin, and shows that this was not capital, by providing that if the convict is a foreigner he shall be banished from Venice, but if a citizen he shall not be ban- ished. Yet the death-penalty seems to have been restored soon afterwards, for, in 1275, the oath of Giacomo Contarini is the same as that of 1249, with the unimportant addition that the judgment of an episcopal vicar during the vacancy of a see can be substi- tuted for that of a bishop.

As the pressure of the Inquisition extended throughout Lom- bardy and the Marches, the persecuted heretics naturally sought a refuge in Venetian territory, where supervision was so much more negligent. It was in vain that about 1286 Frà Filippo of Mantua, the Inquisitor of Treviso, was sent by Honorius IV. with a sum- mons to the republic to inscribe in its laws the constitutions against heresy of Frederic and of the popes. Although the ex- ample of the other cities of the Marca Trivigiana was urged, and Venice was repeatedly required to do the same, obedience was per- sistently refused. At length, in 1288, Nicholas IV. lost patience with this persistent contumacy. He peremptorily ordered the Signoria to adopt the imperial and papal laws, and commanded that the doge should swear not only not to impede the Inquisitor of Treviso in his duties, but to assist him. In default of obedience he threatened to proceed against the city both spiritually and temporally.

The position of the republic was already indefensible under the public law of the period. It was so administering its own laws as to afford an asylum to a class universally proscribed, and it was refusing to allow the Church to apply the only remedy deemed appropriate to this crying evil. It therefore yielded to