No previous sovereign had ventured thus to trammel the Inquisition. These regulations, in fact, rendered it virtually powerless, for it had no organization of its own; even its prisons were the king’s and might be withdrawn at any time, and it depended wholly upon the secular arm for physical force. In some places, as at Albi, it might rely upon episcopal assistance, but elsewhere it could do nothing of itself. Philippe had, moreover, been careful not to excite the ill-will of his bishops, for his Ordonnances and instructions alluded simply to the friars, thus excluding the Inquisition from royal aid without specifically naming it. His quarrel with Boniface VIII. was now beginning. Between January, 1296, and February, 1297, appeared the celebrated bulls _Clericis laicos_, _Ineffabilis amoris_, _Excitat nos_, and _Exiit a te_, whose arrogant encroachments on the secular power aroused him to resistance, and this doubtless gave a sharper zest to his desire to diminish in his dominions the authority of so purely papal an institution as the Inquisition. So shrewd a prince could readily see its effectiveness as an instrument of papal aggression, for the Church could make what definition it pleased of heresy; and Boniface did not hesitate to give him fair warning, when, in October, 1297, he ordered the Inquisitor of Carcassonne to proceed against certain officials of Béziers who had rendered themselves in the papal eyes suspect of heresy because they remained under excommunication, incurred for imposing taxes on the clergy, boasting that food had not lost its savor to them nor sleep its sweetness, and who, moreover, dared with polluted lips to revile the Holy See itself. Under such an extension of jurisdiction Philippe himself might not be safe, and it is no wonder that tentative efforts made in 1296 and 1297 to find some method of reconciling the recent royal Ordonnances with the time-honored absolutism of the Inquisition proved failures.[72]