The lands which Raymond had succeeded in retaining were, moreover, drained by the enormous sums exacted of him in the pacification. To enable him to meet these demands he was authorized to levy taxes on the subjects of the Church, in spite of their immunities, and this and the other expedients requisite for the discharge of his engagements could not fail to excite widespread discontent with the settlement and hostility to all that represented it. That it was hard to extort these payments from a population exhausted by twenty years of war is manifest when, in 1231, two years after the treaty, the Abbey of Citeaux had not as yet received any part of the two thousand marks which were its share of the plunder, and it was forced to agree to a settlement under which Raymond promised to pay in annual instalments of two hundred marks, giving as security his revenues from the manor of Marmande.[2] The Inquisition, it is true, was at first warmly greeted by the Church, but the Church had grown so discredited during the events of the past half-century that its influence was less than in any other spot in Christendom. Even in Aragon the Council of Tarragona, in 1238, felt itself compelled to decree excommunication against those who composed or applauded lampoons against the clergy. The abuse of the interdict had grown to such proportions that Innocent IV., in 1243, and again in 1245, was obliged to forbid its employment throughout southern France, in all places suspected of heresy, because it afforded to heretics so manifold an occasion of asserting that it was used for private interests, and not for the salvation of souls. During the troubles which followed after the crusade of Louis VIII. the bishops had taken advantage of the confusion to seize many lands to which they had no claim, and this involved them in endless quarrels with the royal fisc in the territories which fell to the king, while in those which remained to Raymond, the pious St. Louis was forced to interfere to obtain for him a restoration of what they obstinately refused to surrender. The Church itself was so deeply tainted with heresy that the faithful were scandalized at seeing the practical immunity enjoyed by heretical clerks, owing to the difficulty of assembling a sufficient number of bishops to officiate at their degradation, and Gregory IX. felt it necessary, in 1233, to decree that in such cases a single bishop, with some of his abbots, should have power to deprive them of holy orders and deliver them to the secular arm to be burned--a provision which he subsequently embodied in the canon law. Innocent IV., moreover, in 1245, felt called upon to order his legate in Languedoc to see that no one suspected of heresy was elected or consecrated as bishop. On the other hand, priests who were zealous in aiding the Inquisition sometimes found that the enmities thus excited rendered it impossible for them to reside in their parishes, as occurred