Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/300

 284 I'T^^Y- was no Inquisition at hand to perform the duty. In the proceed- ings against Luther there is no trace of its intervention. The buU Exswrge Domine, June 15, 1520, contains no allusion to his doc- trines having been examined by it; when they were publicly con- demned, June 12, 1521, the ceremony was performed by the Bishop of Ascoli, Auditor of the Kota, and Silvestro Prierias, Master of the Sacred Palace, while the sentence which consigned his effigy and his books to the flames was pronounced by Fra Cipriano, professor in the College of Sacred Theology. It was perhaps the most mo- mentous auto defS that has ever been celebrated, but the Inquisi- tion can boast of no participation in it.^ In the Two Sicilies the Inquisition dragged on a moribund exist- ence. Letters of King Eobert in 1334 and 1335 and of Joanna I. in 1342 and 1343 show that inquisitors continued to be appointed and to receive the royal exequatur, but they were limited to mak- ing fifty arrests each, and record of these was required to be entered in the royal courts ; they had no jails, and the royal officials re- ceived their prisoners and tortured them when called upon. The Jews appear to be the main object of inquisitorial activity, and this can only have been halting, for in 1344 Clement YL orders his legate at Naples, Aymerico, Cardinal of S. Martmo, to punish condignlv all apostate Jews, as though there were no Inquisition at work'^there. Yet in 1362 there were three inquisitors m Na-^ pies Francesco da Messina, Angelo Cicerello da MonopoU, and Ludovico da iS^apoh, who took part in the trial of the rebellious Luigi di Durazzo. Still, when efforts were to be made agamst the Fraticelh, Urban Y., in 1368, deemed it necessary to send a special inquisitor, Fra Simone del Pozzo, to Naples. Although his juris- diction extended over the island of Sicily, Gregory XL, m 1372, when informed that the reUcs of the FjaticelU were venerated there as those of saints, ordered the prelates to put a stop to it, as though he had no inquisitor to call upon. Yet Fra Simone was there in that year, and had a theological disputation with Fra Niccolo di Girgenti, a learned Franciscan who had been provincial of his Order. The question turned upon some scholastic subtle- ties respecting the three persons of the Trinity, and as each dis-
 * Paramo de Orig. Office S. Inq. p. 113.