Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/177

 THE HERESY OPENLY DEFENDED. 161 spising for several years the excommunication which they had pronounced against him. Even the inquisitors themselves, espe- cially in Franciscan districts, were not always earnest in the work, possibly because there was little prospect of profitable confiscations to be procured from those who regarded the possession of property as a sin, and in 1346 Clement found himself obliged to reprove them sharply for their tepidity. In such districts the Fraticelli showed themselves with little concealment. "When, in 1348, Cola di Eienzo fled from Rome after his first tribuneship, he betook himself to the Fraticelli of Monte Maiella ; he was charmed with their holi- ness and poverty, entered the Order as a Tertiary, and deplored that men so exemplary should be persecuted by the pope and the Inquisition. Tuscany was full of them. It was in vain that about this period Florence adopted severe laws for their repression, plac- ing them under the ban, empowering any one to capture them and deliver them to the Inquisition, and imposing a fine of five hundred lire on any official declining, when summoned by the in- quisitors, to assist in their arrest. The very necessity of enacting such laws shows how difficult it was to stimulate the people to join the persecution. Even this appears to have been ineffectual. There is extant a letter from Giovanni delle Celle of Vallombrosa to Tommaso di Neri, a Fraticello of Florence, in which the former attacks the fatuity of the latter in making an idol of poverty ; the letter was answered and led to a controversy which seems to have been conducted openly.* Yet, trivial as was apparently the point at issue, it was impos- sible that men could remain contentedly under the ban of the Church without being forced to adopt principles destructive of the whole ecclesiastical organization. They could only justify them- selves by holding that the}^ were the true Church, that the papacy was heretical and had forfeited its claim of obedience, and could no longer guide the faithful to salvation. It is an interest- ing proof of the state of public opinion in Italy, that in spite of the thoroughly organized machinery of persecution, men who held these doctrines were able to disseminate them almost publicly and 1346, No. 70— Comba, La Riforma, I. 326-7, 387.— Lami, Antichita Toscane, pp. 528, 595. III.— 11
 * Werunsky Excerptt. ex Registt. Clem. PP. VI. pp. 23-4. — Raynald. ann.