Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/303

 THE TWO SICILIES. 287 ishments as he might deem fit, which were to be mercilessly in- flicted by all judges and other officials, and he was moreover to constrain, under pain of confiscation, the Jews to surrender to him for cancellation all letters and privileges granted to them by former monarchs. Yet there was still a simulacrum of the In- quisition maintained, for in the following year, 1428, we find Mar- tin y. confirming the appointment of Fra Mccolo di Camisio as Inquisitor of Benevento, Bari, and the Capitanata.* Whatever vitality the Inquisition retained was still more re- duced when, in 1442, the House of Aragon obtained the throne of Naples. Giannone tells us that the Aragonese princes rarelv ad- mitted inquisitors, and, when they did so, required minute reports as to their every official act, never permitting any conviction with- out the participation of the secular magistrates, followed by roval confirmation, as we have seen to have been the case in Sicily. When, in 1449, Nicholas Y, appointed Fra Matteo da Eeggio as inquisitor to exterminate the apostate Jews who were said to be numerous throughout the kingdom, the terms employed would seem to indicate that for some time the Inquisition had been prac- tically extinct, although but two years before he had given a com- mission to Fra Giovanni da Napoli, and although subsequent in- quisitors were occasionally appointed.f In Sicily, however, in 1451, the Inquisition obtained fresh vi- tality by means of an ingenious device. Fra Enrico Lugardi, In- quisitor of Palermo, produced a most impudent forgery in the shape of a long and elaborate privilege purporting to have been issued by the Emperor Frederic II. in 1224, ordering aU his Sicihan subjects to give aid and comfort to the " inquisitors of heretical pravity," and stating that, as it was unfitting that aU confisca- tions should inure to the royal fisc without rewarding the inquisi- tors for their toils and perils, the confiscations henceforth should be divided equally between the fisc, the Inquisition, and the Holy See ; moreover, all Jews and infidels were required once a year When, in 1447, Nicholas V. issued a cruel edict subjecting the Jews to severe disabilities and humiliations, Capistrano was likewise appointed conservator to enforce its provisions (Wadding, ann. 1447, No. 10). t Giannone, 1st. Civ. di Napoli, Lib. xxxii. c. 5.— Wadding, ann 1449 No !<> —Ripoll m. 240, 441, 501. , . i-
 * Wadding. T. III. Regesta, p. 392.— Ripoll II. 689.