Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/427

Rh most effective weapons. The growing danger, moreover, was lead- ing the bishops to abandon somewhat their traditional jealousy. In this same year, 1418, the council of the great province of Salzburg not only urged the bishops to extirpate heresy and to enforce the canons against the secular powers neglecting their duty in this respect, but commanded all princes and potentates to seize and imprison all who were designated as suspect of heresy by the prelates and the inquisitors. Thus at last the episcopate recognized the Inquisition and came to its support.

Yet the attention of the persecutors was not so exclusively directed to the Hussites as to allow the Brethren of the Free Spirit to escape, and in their zeal they continued to molest the orthodox Beguines in spite of the action of Martin V. at Constance. In 1431 Eugenius IV. found himself obliged to intervene for their protection. In a bull, addressed to the German prelates, he recites the favorable action of his predecessors and the troubles to which, in spite of this, they were exposed by the inquisitors. Those who wander around without fixed habitations he orders to be compelled to dwell in the houses of the confraternity, and those who reside quietly and piously are to be efficiently protected. This bull affords perhaps the only instance in which the episcopal power is rendered superior to the Inquisition, for the bishops are authorized to enforce its provisions by the censures of the Church, without appeal, even if those who interfere with the Beguines enjoy special immunities, thus subjecting the inquisitors to excommunication by the prelates. This stretch of papal power exasperated Doctor Felix Hemmerlin, Cantor of Zurich, who detested the Beguines. He wrote several bitter tracts against them, and explained the favor shown them by Eugenius by irreverently stating that the pope had himself been once a Beghard at Padua. In one of his numerous assaults upon them, written probably about 1436, he alludes to several recent cases within a limited region, which would indicate that in spite of the papal protection of the Beguines, the Brethren of the Free Spirit were actively persecuted, and that, if the statistics of the whole empire could be procured, the number of victims would be found not small. Thus in Zurich a certain