Against the people of this flourishing land Innocent III preached a crusade in 1208. An army under Simon de Montfort[152] marched from northern France into the doomed region and, after one of the most atrocious and bloody wars upon record, suppressed the heresy by wholesale slaughter. At the same time the war checked the civilization and destroyed the prosperity of the most enlightened portion of France. [Sidenote: The Inquisition.] The third and most permanent defense against heresy was the establishment, under the headship of the pope, of a system of tribunals designed to ferret out secret cases of unbelief and bring the offenders to punishment. These courts of experts, who devoted their whole attention to the discovery and conviction of heresy, constituted the Holy Inquisition, which gradually took form after the Albigensian crusade. We cannot stop to describe these courts, which became especially notorious in Spain some two centuries after their establishment. The unfairness of the trials and the cruel treatment to which those suspected of heresy were subjected, through long imprisonment or torture--inflicted with the hope of forcing them to confess their crime or implicate others--have rendered the name of the Inquisition infamous. Without by any means attempting to defend the methods employed, it may be remarked that the inquisitors were often earnest and upright men whose feelings were not unlike those of a New England judge presiding at a witch trial in the seventeenth century. The methods of procedure of the Inquisition were not more cruel than those used in the secular courts of the period. The assertion of the suspected person that he was not a heretic did not receive any attention, for it was assumed that he would naturally deny his guilt, as would any other criminal. A person's belief had, therefore, to be judged by outward acts. Consequently one might fall into the hands of the Inquisition by mere inadvertent conversation with a heretic, by some unintentional neglect to show due respect toward the Church rites, or by the malicious testimony of one's neighbors. This is really the most dreadful aspect of the Inquisition and its procedure. It put a premium on talebearing and resorted to most cruel means to convict those who earnestly denied that their beliefs were different from those of the Church. [Sidenote: Fate of the convicted heretic.] If the suspected person confessed his guilt and abjured his heresy, he was forgiven and received back into the Church; but a penance of life imprisonment was imposed upon him as a fitting means of wiping away the unspeakable sin of which he had been guilty. If he remained impenitent, he was "relaxed to the secular arm"[153]; that is to say, the Church, whose law forbade it to shed blood, handed over the convicted person to the civil power, which burned him alive without further trial. [Sidenote: Founding of the mendicant orders.]