Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/154

 138 THE FRATICELLI. to be a heretic. His two constitutions, Ad conditorem and Cum inter nonnullos, therefore, have cut him off from the Church as a manifest heretic teaching a condemned heresy, and have disabled him from the papacy ; all of which Louis swore to prove before a general council to be assembled in some place of safety.* John proceeded with his prosecution of Louis by a further dec- laration, issued July 11, in which, without deigning to notice the Protest of Sachsenhausen, he pronounced Louis to have forfeited by his contumacy all claim to the empire ; further obstinacy would deprive him of his ancestral dukedom of Bavaria and other pos- sessions, and he was summoned to appear October 1, to receive final sentence. Yet John could not leave unanswered the assault upon his doctrinal position, and on November 10 he issued the bull Quia quoru?nda?n, in which he argued that he had exercised no undue power in contradicting the decisions of his predecessors : he declared it a condemned heresy to assert that Christ and the apos- tles had only simple usufruct, without legal possession, in the things which Scripture declared them to have possessed, for if this were true it would follow that Christ was unjust, which is blas- phemy. All who utter, write, or teach such doctrines fall into condemned heresy, and are to be avoided as heretics. f Thus the poverty of Christ was fairly launched upon the world as a European question. It is a significant illustration of the intel- lectual condition of the fourteenth century that in the subsequent The date of the Protest of Sachsenhausen is not positively known, but it was probably issued in April or May, 1324 (Miiller, op. cit. I. 357-8). Its authorship is ascribed by Preger to Franz von Lautern. and Ehrle has shown that much of its argumentation is copied literally from the writings of Olivi (Archiv fur Litt.- u. Kirchengeschichte, 1887, 540). When there were negotiations for a settlement in 1336, Louis signed a declaration prepared by Benedict XII., in which he was made to say that the portions concerning the poverty of Christ were inserted without his knowledge by his notary, Ulric der Wilde for the purpose of injur- ing him (Raynald ann. 1336, No. 31-5); but he accompanied this self-abasing statement with secret instructions of a very different character (Preger, Kirchen- politische Kampf, p. 12). t Martene Thesaur. II. 660-71.— Nich. Minorita (Bal. et Mansi III. 233-6). Even in far-off Ireland the bull of July 11, depriving Louis of the empire, was read in all the churches in English and Irish. — Theiner, Monument. Hibern. et Scotor. No. 456, p. 230.
 * Martene Thesaur. II. 652-9.— Xich. Minorita (Bal. et Mansi III. 224-33).