Though all the heresy hunts of the ancient Church had implied an inquisitorial ideal, nothing in the nature of a "Holy Office" had existed in the Church till the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It was felt that the faithful could as a rule be trusted to raise the cry of heresy wherever it could be scented. Such prompt action we have seen taken in the cases of Jovinian, Pelagius, Gottschalk, and Berengar. But in the twelfth century the spirit of militant orthodoxy, as seen in zealots like St. Bernard, had reached a strength which pointed to some systematic action on the part of the now much aggrandized papacy. St. Bernard's attitude to Abailard is that of the true Inquisitor: he suspects, to begin with, the accursed spirit of independent thought, and he is straightway determined to make an example of the upstart who dares to reason on all doctrines for himself. But even St. Bernard, eager as he was for the blood of Moslems, could hardly have anticipated the spirit in which the papacy acted from the Albigensian crusade onwards. Coincident with that crusade was the digging up of Amalrich's bones, the burning of his followers, and the veto on the study of Aristotle at Paris. Intolerance had entered on a new era. The first steps towards a systematic and centralized Inquisition were taken about 1178, when, under Pope Alexander III, the Church began moving against the "Manichean" heretics of Languedoc. A papal legate at that time forced from the Count of Toulouse and his nobles a promise on oath to resist heresy; and in a council of the following year orthodox princes in general were invited to use force for the purpose. The pope proceeded not only to excommunicate the heretics and their backers but to declare, in the fashion already consecrated by the Crusades, that no one need keep faith with them; further offering indulgences for two years to all who should make war on them, and calling on their lords to reduce them to slavery. As a result, a crusade was made in 1181, so little marked by bloodshed as to be insignificant in comparison with those of the next generation, but sufficient to force an abjuration of heresy from the lords concerned. Thereafter, in 1184, a Council held at Verona prescribed with a new precision and emphasis a systematic search for heresy by all bishops, and called upon the nobles to lend their support in the way of the necessary violence. Innocent III had thus had the way marked out for him, alike in suppression and in prevention; and the Inquisition as such dates from the close of his crusade against the Albigenses, when Pope Gregory IX took from the bishops the business of heresy-hunting and made it a special task of the Dominican order (1233). After "Manichæism" had been stamped out there was a lull in persecution as in heresy; but the institution remained, to prevent new growths.