The broad outcome of its work was that whereas the twelfth century had been one of intellectual dawn, and the thirteenth, despite its murderous beginning, one of diffusion of light, the fourteenth was on the whole one of stationary knowledge, save in Italy itself, where the growing energies of the Renaissance for the time eluded repression. Indeed the Church cared little about mere unbelief, as distinct from anti-clerical heresy, where its political rule was not thereby affected; and in Italy, when anti-clericalism was once put down, its wealth made it secure. Even in Italy the literary life of the fourteenth century was rather artistic than intellectual, science and serious thought making little progress; while in northern Europe they were visibly arrested. It was in the outlying States, where heresy might mean a cessation of papal revenue, that the Dominicans were specially hounded on to their work. In England, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, the great spirit of Roger Bacon was cabined and confined by inquisitorial enmities; and in France in the fourteenth there was a signal suspension of intellectual life, in the face of the activities of original thinkers such as William of Occam. The throttling of the civilization of the south had reacted on the north. Doubtless the desperate wars to which crusading experience had given a new incitement counted for much, and the constant political intrigues of the papacy for more, in arresting mental growth. "When a city for any political proceeding had given offence to its political head, emperor or king, or had irritated a Roman bishop by opposition, the usual punishment, by command or interdict, was to inhibit its professors from teaching, and to disperse its scholars." All the political causes wrought together for the hindrance of human advancement. The immense destruction of population by the Black Death, finally, was a great incitement to superstition.