Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/447

 LEGISLATION IN ITALY. 4 31 Italy affords us the earliest example of mediaeval legislation on the subject. In the first half of the twelfth century the Norman king of the two Sicilies, Roger, threatened punishment for com- pounding a love-potion, even though no injury resulted from it. The next recorded measure is found in the earliest known statutes of Venice, by the Doge Orlo Malipieri in 1181, which contain pro- visions for the punishment of poisoning and sorcery. Frederic II. was accused by his ecclesiastical adversaries of surrounding him- self with Saracenic astrologers and diviners, whom he employed as counsellors, and who practised for his benefit all the forbidden arts of augury by the flight of birds and the entrails of victims, but though Frederic shared the universal belief of his age in keep- ing in his service a corps of astrologers with Master Theodore at their head, and was addicted to the science of physiognomy, he was too nearly a sceptic to have faith in vulgar sorcery. His rep- utation merely shared the fate of that of his protege, Michael Scot, who translated for him philosophical treatises of Averrhoes and Avicenna. In his collection of laws known as the Sicilian Consti- tutions, he retained indeed the law of King Roger just alluded to, and added to it a provision that those who administer love-potions, or noxious, illicit, or exorcised food for such purposes, shall be put to death if the recipient loses his life or senses, while if no harm ensues they shall suffer confiscation and a year's imprisonment, but this was merely a concession to current necessities, and he was careful to accompany it with a declaration that the influencing of love or hatred by meat or drink was a fable, and he took no note in his code of any other form of magic. In the Latin kingdoms of the East the Assises de Jerusalem and the Assises d'Antioch are silent on the subject, unless it may be deemed to be comprised in a general clause in the former, declaring that all malefactors and all bad men and bad women shall be put to death. Yet, that sor- cery was punished throughout Italy, and was regarded as subject to the secular tribunals, is shown by an expression in the bull Ad extirpanda of Innocent IY. in 1252, ordering all potentates in public assembly to put heretics to the ban as though they were sorcerers.* Corte di Roma I. 15.— Chron. Senoniens. Lib. iv. c. 4 (DWchery II. 631).—
 * Constitt. Sicular. in. xlii. 1-3. — Cechetti, La Republics di Vcnizia e la