Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/567

 The Medieval Chtirch at its Height 483 believer in the Church nothing could exceed the guilt of one who committed treason against God by rejecting the religion which had been handed down in the Roman Church from the immediate followers of his Son. Moreover, doubt and unbelief were not merely sin ; they were revolt against the most power- ful social institution of the time, which, in spite of the sins of some of its officials, continued to be venerated by people at large throughout western Europe. The story of the Albigensians and Waldensians, and the efforts of the Church to suppress them by persuasion, by fire and sword, and by the stern court of the Inquisition, form a strange and terrible chapter in medieval history. In southern France there were many adherents of both the Albigensians and the Waldensians, especially in the county of Toulouse. At the beginning of the thirteenth century there was in this region an open contempt for the Church, and bold heretical teachings were heard even among the higher classes. Against the people of this flourishing land Innocent III Albigensian preached a crusade in 1208. An army marched from northern France into the doomed region and, after one of the most atrocious and bloody wars upon record, suppressed the heresy by wholesale slaughter. At the same time, the war checked the civilization and destroyed the prosperity of the most enlightened portion of France. The most permanent defense of the Church against heresy was The inqui- 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. The unfairness of the trials and the cruel treatment to which those suspected of heresy were sub- jected, through long imprisonment or torture, — inflicted with the hope of forcing them to confess their crime or to implicate others, — have rendered the name of the Inquisition infamous. sition