Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/206

 190 POLITICAL HERESY. — THE CHURCH. papacy, men slaughtered each other in holy wars all over Europe. The disastrous expedition to Aragon which cost Philippe le Hardi his life in 1281 was a crusade preached by order of Martin IY. to aid Charles of Anjou, and to punish Pedro III. for his conquest of Sicily after the Sicilian Vespers.* With the systematization of the laws against heresy and the organization of the Inquisition, proceedings of this nature assume a more regular shape, especially in Italy. It was in their charac- ter as Italian princes that the popes found the supreme utility of the Holy Office. Frederic II. had been forced to pay for his coro- nation not only by the edict of persecution, but by the confirma- tion of the grant of the Countess Matilda. Papal ambition thus stimulated aspired to the domination of the whole of Italy, and for this the way seemed open with the death of Frederic in 1250, followed by that of Conrad in 1254. When the hated Suabians passed away, the unification of Italy under the triple crown seemed at hand, and Innocent IY., before his death in December, 1254, had the supreme satisfaction of lording it in Naples, the most powerful pope that the Holy See had known. Yet the nobles and cities were as unwilling to subject themselves to the Innocents and Alexanders as to the Frederics, and the turbulent factions of Guelf and Ghibelline maintained the civil strife in every corner of central and upper Italy. To the papal policy it was an invalu- able assistance to have the power of placing in every town of im- portance an inquisitor whose devotion to Rome was unquestioned, whose person was inviolable, and who was authorized to compel the submissive assistance of the secular arm under terror of a prosecution for heresy in the case of slack obedience. Such an agent could cope with podesta and bishop, and even an unruly populace rarely ventured a resort to temporary violence. The statutes of the republics, as we have seen, were modified and moulded to adapt them to the fullest development of the new power, under the excuse of facilitating the extermination of her- esy, and the Holy Office became the ultimate expression of the serviceable devotion of the Mendicant Orders to the Holy See. From this point of view we are able to appreciate the full signifi- . * Epistt. Selectt. Saec. XIII. T. I. No. 720, 801.— Berger, Registres dTnnoceut IV. No. 4181, 4265, 4269.— Ripoll I. 219, 225.— Vaissette, IV. 46.