Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/208

 192 POLITICAL HERESY.— THE CHURCH. organization of the Hildebrandine theocracy the heretical charac- ter of simple disobedience, which had been implied rather than expressed, came to be distinctly formulated. Thomas Aquinas did not shrink from proving that resistance to the authority of the Roman Church was heretical. By embodying in the canon law the bull Unam Sanctum the Church accepted the definition of Boniface VIII. that whoever resists the power lodged by God in the Church resists God, unless, like a Manichaean, he believes in two principles, which shows him to be a heretic. If the supreme spiritual power errs, it is to be judged of God alone ; there is no earthly appeal. " We say, declare, define, and pronounce that it is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subjected to the Roman pontiff." Inquisitors, therefore, were fully justified in laying it down as an accepted principle of law that disobedience to any command of the Holy See was heresy ; so was any attempt to deprive the Roman Church of any privilege which it saw fit to claim. As a corollary to this was the declaration that inquisi- tors had power to levy Avar against heretics and to give it the character of a crusade by granting all the indulgences offered for the succor of the Holy Land. Armed with such powers, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Inquisition as a political instrument.* Incidental allusion has been made above to the application of these methods in the cases of Ezzelin da Romano and Uberto Pal- lavicino, and we have seen their efficacy even in the tumultuous lawlessness of the period as one of the factors in the ruin of those powerful chiefs. AVhen the crusade against Ezzelin was preached in the north of Europe he was represented to the people simply as a powerful heretic who was persecuting the faith. Even more conspicuous was the application of this principle in the great Tract, de Haeret. c. ii., xxxvii. It was probably as a derivative from the sanctity of the power of the Holy See that the Inquisition was given jurisdiction over the forgers and falsifiers of papal bulls — gentry whose industry we have seen to be one of the inevi- table consequences of the autocracy of Rome. Letters under which Fra Gri- maldo da Prato. Inquisitor of Tuscany in 1297, was directed to act in certain cases of the kind are printed by Arnati in the Archivio Storico Italiano, No. 38, p.G.
 * Th. Aquinat. Sec. Sec. Q. 11, No. 2-3.— C. 1. Extrav. Commun. i. 8.— Zancbini