What part Dominic personally had in these bloody proceedings is litigated history.  His admirers strive to rescue his memory from the charge that he was “a cruel and bloody man.”  It is argued that while the pope and temporal princes carried on the sanguinary war against the heretics, Dominic confined himself to pleading with them in a spirit of true Christian love.  He was a minister of mercy, not an avenging angel, sword in hand.  It has to be conceded that the constant tradition of the Dominican order that Dominic was the first Inquisitor, whether he bore the title or not, rests upon good authority.  But what was the nature of the office as held by the saint?  As far as Dominic was concerned, it is argued by his friends that the office “was limited to the reconciliation of heretics and had nothing to do with their punishment.”  It is also claimed that while Dominic did impose penances, in some cases public flagellation, no evidence can be produced showing that he ever delivered one heretic to the flames.  Those who were burned were condemned by secular courts, and on the ground that they were not only heretics but enemies of the public peace and perpetrators of enormous crimes.

But while it may not be proved that Dominic himself passed the sentence of death or applied the torch to the faggots with his own hand, he is by no means absolved from all complicity in those frightful slaughters, or from all responsibility for the subsequent establishment of the Holy Inquisition.  The principles governing the Inquisition were practically those upon which Dominic proceeded; the germs of the later atrocities are to be found in his aims and methods.  By what a narrow margin does Dominic escape the charge of cruelty when it is boasted “that he resolutely insisted on no sentence being carried out until all means had been tried by which the conversion of a prisoner could be effected.”  Another statement also contains an inkling of a significant fact, namely, that secular judges and princes were constantly under the influence of the monks and other ecclesiastical persons, who incited them to wage war, and to massacre, in the Albigensian war as in other crusades against heresy.  No word from Dominic can be produced indicating that he remonstrated with the pope, or that he tried to stop the crusade.  In a few instances he seems to have interceded with the crazed soldiery for the lives of women and children.  But he did not oppose the bloody crusade itself.  He was constantly either with the army or following in its wake.  He often sat on the bench at the trial of dissenters.  He remained the life-long friend of Simon de Montfort, the cruel agent of the papacy, and he blessed the marriage of his sons and baptized his daughter.  Special courts for trying heretics were established, previous to the more complete organization of the Inquisition, and in these he held a commission.