Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/61

 DEVELOPMENT OF INQUISITION. 45 years the life of the inquisitors was a busy one. The stunned populations no longer offered resistance, and grew used to the de- spair of the penitents sentenced to perpetual prison, the dragging of decomposed corpses through the streets, and the horror of the Tophets where the victims passed through temporal to eternal flame. Still there is a slight indication that the service was not wholly without danger from the goadings of vengeance or the courage of despair, when the Council of Beziers, in 1246, ordering travelling inquests, makes exception in the cases when it may not be safe for the inquisitors to personally visit the places where the inquisition should be held; and Innocent lY., in 1247, authorizes the inquisitors to cite the accused to come to them, in view of the perils arising from the ambushes of heretics.* The fearless and indefatigable men who now performed the functions of inquisitor in Languedoc can rarely have taken advan- tage of this concession to weakness. Bernard de Caux, who so well earned the title of the hammer of heretics, was at this time the leading spirit of the Inquisition of Toulouse, after a term of service in Montpellier and Agen, and he had for colleague a kin- dred spirit in Jean de Saint-Pierre. Together they made a thor- ough inquest over the whole province, passing the population through a sieve with a completeness which must have left few guilty consciences unexamined. There is extant a fragmentary record of this inquest, covering the years 1245 and 1246, during which no less than six hundred places were investigated, embrac- ing about one half of Languedoc. The magnitude of the work thus undertaken, and the incredible energy with which it was pushed, is seen in the enormous number of interrogatories recorded in petty towns. Thus at Avignonet there are two hundred and thirty; at Fanjoux, one hundred; at Mas - Saintes - Puelles, four hundred and twenty. M. Molinier, to whom we are indebted for an account of this interesting document, has not made an accurate count of the whole number of cases, but estimates that the total cannot faU far short of eight thousand to ten thousand. When we consider what all this involved in the duty of examination and comparison we may weU feel Avonder at the superhuman energy of these founders of the Inquisition ; but we may also assume, as
 * Concil. Biterrens. ann. 1246, Consil. ad Inquis. c. 1.— Ripoll, 1. 179.