A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume IILea, Henry Charles
History
A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume II
Lea, Henry Charles
Inquisition -- History
The secretly guilty were quite sufficiently influential, and the
innocent sufficiently apprehensive, to keep up the agitation which had
been commenced, and at last it began to bear fruit. A new inquisitor of
Carcassonne, Nicholas d’Abbeville, was quite as cruel and arbitrary as
his predecessors, and when the people prepared an appeal to the king he
promptly threw into jail the notary who drew up the paper. In their
desperation they disregarded this warning; a deputation was sent to the
court, and this time they were listened to. May 13, 1291, Philippe
addressed a letter to his Seneschal of Carcassonne reciting the injuries
inflicted by the Inquisition on the innocent through the newly-invented
system of torture, by means of which the living and the dead were
fraudulently convicted and the whole land scandalized and rendered
desolate. The royal officials were therefore ordered no longer to obey
the commands of the inquisitors in making arrests, unless the accused be
a confessed heretic or persons worthy of faith vouch for his being
publicly defamed for heresy. A month later he reiterated these orders
even more precisely, and announced his intention of sending deputies to
Languedoc armed with full authority to make permanent provision in the
matter. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of these
manifestoes as marking a new era in the relations between the temporal
and spiritual authorities. For far less than this all the chivalry and
scum of Europe had been promised salvation if they would drive Raymond
of Toulouse from his inheritance.[67]
It was probably to break in some degree the force of this unheard-of
interference with inquisitorial supremacy that in September, 1292,
Guillem de Saint-Seine, Inquisitor of Carcassonne, ordered all the
parish priests in his district for three weeks on Sundays and
feast-days to denounce as excommunicate all who should impede the
business of the Inquisition and all notaries who should wickedly draw up
revocations of confessions for heretics. This could not effect much, nor
was anything accomplished by a Parlement held April 14, 1293, at
Montpellier, by the royal chamberlain, Alphonse de Ronceyrac, of all the
royal officials and inquisitors of Toulouse and Carcassonne to reform
the abuses of all jurisdictions.[68]
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