Begun in 1209, the Albigensian crusades outlasted the life of Innocent III, who grew sick of the slaughter while the priesthood were calling for its extension. They praised in particular the Anglo-French Simon de Montfort, who slew many of his victims by torture, and tore out the eyes of many more. For nearly twenty years the wars lasted, plunder being a sufficient motive after heresy had been drowned in blood or driven broadcast throughout Europe. It has been reckoned that a full million of all ages and both sexes were slain. Yet as late as 1231 Pope Gregory IX was burning troops of the heretics at Rome, and causing many more to be burned in France and Germany. The precocious civilization of Languedoc and Provence was destroyed, and the region became a stronghold of Catholic fanaticism; but the political diversity of Europe baffled the papal hope of destroying heresy. Thenceforth the anti-clerical animus never died out: in the course of the thirteenth century it reached even England, then the most docile section of the Catholic fold. Generations before Wiclif, there were heretics in the province of Canterbury who denied the authority of the pope and even of the Fathers, professing to stand solely on the Bible and the principle of "necessary reason." Wiclif stood on a less heterodox plane, impugning chiefly the extreme form of transubstantiation and the practices of the begging friars; and he was proportionately influential. In the fourteenth century, when international crusades of repression had become politically impossible, the critical spirit is seen freshly at work on anti-papal lines in England, Flanders, France, Germany, and Bohemia, as well as in Italy; and again, the more energetic began in their earnest ignorance to frame new schemes of life in the light of their sacred books. The lapse of time and the continuance of orthodox culture had made an end of the old Paulician heresy as such; and of the new movements many, like that set up by Saint Francis in the period of the Albigensian crusades, were meant to be strictly obedient to the Church. Such were the "Brethren of the Common Lot," a body set up in Holland by educated Churchmen after the so-called Beghards (otherwise Beguins or Beguttæ) had there for a time flourished and degenerated. But the Beghards and the "Brethren of the Free Spirit," who spread widely over northern Europe, had not only aimed at a communal life, but developed the old tendency to pantheism, now gaining ground philosophically on the lines of Averroism. Even among the Franciscans the "Spirituals," who resented the falling away of the order from its ideals of poverty, became heretical. Some adopted the new "Eternal Gospel," by Abbot Joachim of Flora in Calabria, in which it was declared that there now began a new dispensation of the Holy Spirit, superseding that of Jesus. Others, called the Fraticelli, or Little Brothers, had a "Gospel of the Holy Spirit," composed by John of Parma. In both cases