Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/352

 336 GERMANY. " If against such men the earth should rise up, and the stars of heaven reveal their iniquity, so that not only men, but the ele- ments, should unite in their destruction, wiping them from the face of the earth without sparing sex or age, and rendering them an eternal opprobrium for the nations, it would not be a sufficient and worthy punishment of their crimes." If they cannot be con- verted, the strongest remedies must be used. Fire and steel must be applied to wounds incurable by milder applications. Conrad was instructed forthwith to preach a crusade against them, and the bishop of the province, the emperor, and his son. King Henry, were ordered to exert all their powers for the extirpation of the wretches.^ The means which Master Conrad took to obtain these avow- als from his victims were simple in the extreme. The processes of the Inquisition had not yet been formulated, and the unhmited powers with which he was clothed enabled his impatient tem- per to reach the desired goal by the shortest possible course. As officially reported, after the bursting of the bubble, to Gregory by his own penitentiary, the Dominican Bernard, and the Arch- bishop of Mainz, the accused was allowed simply the option of confessing what was demanded of him, and receiving penance, or of being burned for denial — which, in fact, was the essence of the inquisitorial process, reduced to its simplest terms. Conrad had no prisons at his disposal for the incarceration of penitents, and the infliction of wearing crosses seems to have been unknown to him, so he devised the penance of shaving the head as a mark of humiliation for his converts, who were moreover, of course, obliged to give the names of aU whom they had seen in the hideous noc- turnal assemblies. At the outset he had fallen into the hands of a designing woman, a vagrant about twenty years old who had quarrelled with her relations, and who, coming by chance to Bingen, and observing what was going on, saw her opportunity of revenge. She pretended to be of the sect, that her husband had been burned, that she wished to perish hkewise, but added that if the Master would believe her she would reveal the names of the guilty. Con- Gest. Treviror. Archiepp. c. 171.
 * Raynald. ann. 1233, No. 41-6.— Epistt. Ssecul. XIII. T. I. No. 533, 537.—