Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/644

 628 CONCLUSION. moted prelates of everything. If the latter cannot pay their de- mands, forbearance for a time is sold at an immoderate price under terrible oaths, and if anything has been kept back for the expenses of the homeward journey it is extorted, so that whoever escapes from their clutches can truly say, Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator. If you go there to pay a thousand florins and a single one is light, you are not allowed to depart till you have replaced it with a heavier one, or made good in silver twice the deficiency. And if, within a year, the promised sum is not paid, the bishop be- comes a simple priest again, and the abbot a simple monk. Xever satiated, the proper place of these officials is with the infernal furies, with the harpies, and with the unsatisfied Tantalus. Pog- gio, who was papal secretary for forty years, describes the appli- cants for preferment as worthy of these oificials. They were idle, ignorant, sordid men, useless for all good purposes, who hung around the curia, clamoring for benefices or any other favor which they could get. Another papal official tells us that Boniface IX. filled the German sees with unfit and useless persons, for he who paid the most obtained the preferment. Many paid ten times more than it had cost their predecessors, for some archbishoprics fetched forty thousand florins, others sixty thousand, and others eighty thousand.* Schismate Lib. n. c. xiv. ; Ejusd. Nemor. Unionis Tract, vi. c. 36, 37, 39.— Poggii Bracciol. Dialogus contra Hypocrisim. — Gobelini Personam Cosmodrom. Mt. V. c. 85. The question as to the possibility of a pope committing simony was long under discussion. At the Council of Lyons, in 1245, Guiard, Bishop of Cambrai, was asked by a cardinal if he believed it possible, when he rendered a most em- phatic answer in the affirmative (Th. Cantimprat. Bonum Universale, Lib. n. c. 2). Thomas Aquinas not only asserts it, but adds that the higher the position of the offender the greater the sin (Summ. Sec. Sec. Q. 100, Art. 1, No. 7). Yet the venality of the Holy See was too notorious for concealment, and arguments were framed to prove that the pope had a right to sell preferments, for which see the Aureum Speculum Papa, P. n. c. 1, written in 1404, under Boniface IX., and the laborious effort of William of Ockham to controvert the assertion. The ingfeni- ous methods of the curia to extract the last penny from applicants are described iu P. i. c. v. of the Speculum. The author has no hesitation in pronouncing the curia to be in a state of damnation (Fascic. Rer. Expetend. et Fugiend. II. 63, 70, 81, 461). All who deplored the condition of the Church instinctively turned to the Holy See as the source of corruption and demoralization. Nothing can well
 * Von der Hardt, I. xvi. 841.— D'Argentrg I. n. 228.— Theod. a Niem de