Their very existence was a protest against Papal infallibility and an assertion of the right of individual judgment. Their liberal opinions, their charity, the persuasive eloquence with which they promulgated their doctrines, obtained for them the respect of the nobility and the ardent devotion of the multitude. The name of the obnoxious sect was to every consistent member of the Catholic communion a term of peculiar infamy and reproach. Throughout the region tainted with this heresy, which derived its name from the diocese of Albi, where its professors were most numerous, the authority of the Vatican was undermined or entirely destroyed. The habits of the clergy had prejudiced all classes against them. The churches were empty. Payment of tithes had ceased. Vassals subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction refused obedience and withheld their tribute. In certain districts it was unsafe for a priest to appear upon the highway. The public exhortations of friars, whose extraordinary influence was now for the first time disclosed, were interrupted by shouts of derision and flying missiles. At Toulouse, the centre of the Albigensian doctrines, a renegade prelate, usurping the functions of the Pope, convoked at intervals councils of heretic bishops. The recalcitrant sectaries possessed houses of worship, ecclesiastical residences, cemeteries. The piety or fears of the devout bestowed upon their clergy valuable estates and great sums in legacies. That portion of the community which did not accept the new belief--which probably equalled the rest in numbers, and certainly surpassed it in wealth and social importance, infected with the theories of Arabic philosophy--was thoroughly infidel. Against such rebels the thunders of the Vatican availed nothing. Apostolic admonitions were treated with ridicule. Interdicts had lost their power. Even the Papal legate was treated with scant courtesy. The missionary efforts of Dominic, whose fiery zeal now began to raise him to eminence, met with signal and ignominious failure. The Church--menaced at the same time by this serious defection, by rebellion in her own temporal dependencies, and by the aspiring genius of the youthful emperor, Frederick II.--was in great distress. At no time in her history had she been confronted with such powerful enemies or been exposed to more deadly perils. And yet this beautiful land, now under the ban of the Papal See, had scarcely a century before been regarded as one of the bulwarks of the Christian faith. It was at Clermont that the first Crusade was proclaimed by the Languedocian Bishop of Puy, as the representative of the Pope. A hundred thousand persons from Southern France followed Peter the Hermit to Palestine. The famous Order of Hospitallers was a Provençal institution. A large proportion of its Grand Masters were natives of Languedoc. The treasure contributed by its people to the prosecution of these chimerical expeditions of Rome was far from inconsiderable.