Only one serious calamity overtook them during the period we are surveying. Toward the close of the seventeenth century there was a violent quarrel between the King of the Two Sicilies and the Pope; always one of the most painful dilemmas for the Society. The King claimed a high spiritual authority, and the bishops, supported by the Papacy, placed an interdict on large areas of Sicily. The civil power retorted with a decree of banishment against the clergy who obeyed the Pope, and part of the Jesuits incurred the sentence. Later, when Victor Amadeo received the island and promised conciliatory conduct, the Jesuits reopened their churches; but they were directed from Rome to close them, and were again exiled. Spain then resumed control of Sicily, and reinstated them. In the year 1705, Gonzalez died, and the learned Tamburini succeeded him. At that time the scandal of the Jesuit concessions in India and China was added, in the literature of their opponents, to the scandals of the American missions, and the Papacy was being forced to act. In 1710 and 1715, Clement XI. sternly condemned their practices, and the Roman Jesuits could do no more than represent, inaccurately, that their missionaries had submitted. The next Pope, Innocent XIII., found that this was untrue, and again severely condemned them; but he was followed by several complaisant Pontiffs, and the Society continued its irregular ways in all parts of the globe. Edifying utterances on the part of the Roman authorities were not wanting. Tamburini died in 1730, and at the Congregation which followed one of the decrees severely enacted that the fathers of the Society must, in every part of the world, avoid "even the appearance of commerce," and refrain from violence in attacking their opponents. No one knew better than these rulers of the Society the industrial and commercial system which was then followed everywhere by the fathers, and the devices by which they silenced their critics; yet no effort whatever was made to enforce the decree.