The most encouraging feature of the situation, one, indeed, full of promise, was the steady progress of the Dominican Order. It had outgrown the modest Church of St. Romano, bestowed upon it by Bishop Foulques; and in 1230 the piety of a prominent burgher of Toulouse, Pons de Capdenier, provided for it more commodious quarters in an extensive garden, situated partly in the city and partly in the suburbs. The inmates of the convent, some forty in number, were always ready to furnish champions of the Cross, whose ardent zeal shrank from neither toil nor peril; and when, in 1232, the fanatic Bishop Foulques died and was succeeded by the yet more fiery fanatic, the Dominican Provincial Raymond du Fauga, the Order was fully prepared to enter upon the exterminating war with heresy which was to last for a hundred years.[6] The eager zeal of the friars did not wait to be armed with the organized authorization of inquisitorial powers. Their leading duty was to combat heresy, and their assaults on it were unintermitting. In 1231 a friar, in a sermon, declared that Toulouse was full of heretics, who held their assemblies there and disseminated their errors without hindrance. Already the magistrates seem to have looked askance on these pious efforts, for this assertion was made the occasion of a decided attempt at repression. The consuls of the city met and summoned before them, in the capitole, or town-hall, the prior, Pierre d’Alais. There they roundly scolded and threatened him, declaring that it was false to assert the existence of heresy in the town, and forbidding such utterances for the future. Trivial as was the occurrence, it has interest as the commencement of the ill-will between the authorities of Toulouse and the Inquisition, and as illustrating the sense of municipal pride and independence still cherished in the cities of the South. It required but a few years’ struggle to trammel the civic liberties which had held their own against feudalism, but which could not stand against the subtler despotism of the Church.[7]