[Footnote 78:  See Cantu, Gli Eretici d’Italia, vol. i.  Discorso 5, and the notes appended to it, for Frederick’s edicts and letters to Gregory IX. upon this matter of heresy.  The Emperor treats of Heretica Pravitas as a crime against society, and such, indeed, it then appeared according to the mediaeval ideal of Christendom united under Church and Empire.  Yet Frederick himself, it will be remembered, died under the ban of the Church, and was placed by Dante among the heresiarchs in the tenth circle of Hell.  We now regard him justly as one of the precursors of the Renaissance.  But at the beginning of his reign, in his peculiar attitude of Holy Roman Emperor, he had to proceed with rigor against free-thinkers in religion.  They were foes to the mediseval order, of which he was the secular head.]

[Footnote 79:  Sarpi, ‘Discorso dell’Origine,’ etc. Opere, vol. iv. p. 6.]

This Apostolical Inquisition was at once introduced into Lombardy, Romagna and the Marches of Treviso.  The extreme rigor of its proceedings, the extortions of monks, and the violent resistance offered by the communes, led to some relaxation of its original constitution.  More authority had to be conceded to the bishops; and the right of the Inquisitors to levy taxes on the people was modified.  Yet it retained its true form of a Papal organ, superseding the episcopal prerogatives, and overriding the secular magistrates, who were bound to execute its biddings.  As such it was admitted into Tuscany, and established in Aragon.  Venice received it in 1289, with certain reservations that placed its proceedings under the control of Doge and Council.  In Languedoc, the country of its birth, it remained rooted at Toulouse and Carcassonne; but the Inquisition did not extend its authority over central and northern France.[80] In Paris its functions were performed by the Sorbonne.  Nor did it obtain a footing in England, although the statute ‘De Haeretico Comburendo,’ passed in 1401 at the instance of the higher clergy, sanctioned the principles on which it existed.

The wide and ready acceptance of so terrible an engine of oppression enables us to estimate the profound horror which heresy inspired in the Middle Ages.[81] On the whole, the Inquisition performed the work for which it had been instituted.  Those spreading sects, known as Waldenses, Albigenses, Cathari and Paterines, whom it was commissioned to extirpate, died away into obscurity during the fourteenth century; and through the period of the Renaissance the Inquisition had little scope for the display of energy in Italy.  Though dormant, it was by no means extinct, however; and the spirit which created it, needed only external cause and circumstance to bring it once more into powerful operation.  Meanwhile the Popes throughout the Renaissance used the imputation of heresy, which never lost its blighting stigma, in the prosecution of their secular ambition.  As Sarpi has pointed out, there were few of the Italian princes with whom they came into political collision, who were not made the subject of such accusation.