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 The Crusades: Heresy and the Mendicant Orders 245 development of a promising civilization and destroyed the peaceful prosperity of the most enlightened portion of France (see below, 438). " 399. The Inquisition. The most permanent defense of the Church against heresy was the establishment, under the headship of the Pope, of a system of courts designed to ferret out secret cases of unbelief and bring the offenders to punishment. These courts, which devoted their whole attention to the discovery and conviction of heretics, were called the Holy Inquisition, which gradually took form after the Albigensian crusade. Those sus- pected of heresy were often subjected to long imprisonment or torture, inflicted with the hope of forcing them to confess their crime or to implicate others. Without by any means attempting to defend the methods em- ployed, it may be remarked that the inquisitors were often earnest and upright men, and the methods of procedure of the Inquisition were not more cruel than those used in the other courts of the period. If the suspected person confessed his guilt and abjured his heresy he was forgiven and received back into the Church ; but a penance was imposed upon him sometimes even imprisonment for life as a means of wiping away the unspeakable sin of which he had been guilty. If he persisted in his heresy he was " relaxed to the secular arm"; that is to say, the Church, whose law for- bade it to shed blood, handed over the convicted person to the civil power, which burned him alive without further trial. 400. Founding of the Mendicant Orders. We may now turn to that far more cheerful and effective method of meeting the opponents of the Church which may be said to have been dis- covered by St. Francis of Assisi. His teachings and the example of his beautiful life probably did far more to secure continued al- legiance to the Church than all the harsh devices of the Inquisi- tion. St. Francis and St. Dominic strove to meet the needs of their time by inventing a new kind of clergyman, the begging brother, or "mendicant friar" (from the Latin frater, "brother"). He was to do just what the bishops and parish priests often