Such a radical change had increased intelligence and the untrammelled exercise of reason wrought in the minds of the inhabitants of the most civilized country of Christian Europe. The malignant genius of Innocent III. was, however, equal to the emergency. In spite of the fact that ecclesiastical corruption was principally responsible for the widespread revolt against Papal authority, the Count of Toulouse and his feudatories were, in exquisite irony, appointed the ministers of apostolic vengeance. The mandate was issued by the Vatican that the Provençal nobility should become the persecutors of their vassals and lay waste their own possessions with fire and sword. No family ties, no considerations of friendship or intimacy, no hereditary connections, were exempted from the operation of this atrocious decree. When it had failed, as it was certain to do, as a last decisive expedient, a bull was promulgated announcing a crusade against the infidels of France. Their lands and their lives were declared forfeited for the crime of heresy; all good Catholics were called to arms; and the property of the rebellious sectaries was promised as a reward to the faithful champions of the Holy See. Every resource of Papal ingenuity and power was invoked. From twelve hundred monasteries, bands of fanatics issued to preach the crusade in all the states of Christendom. Plenary indulgence was granted to the warrior who donned his armor in the cause of the Church. Excommunication and the withdrawal of ecclesiastical protection were denounced against any guilty of hesitation or lukewarmness. In addition to the general absolution authorized by the Pope, the Crusaders were during the continuance of this Holy War released from the payment of all pecuniary obligations contracted prior to their enlistment, a concession which was practically equivalent to the repudiation of their debts. The answer to the summons of the Vatican was ready and unanimous. Every absorbing passion and every ignoble impulse--love of fame, religious zeal, national prejudice, desire of novelty, insatiable cupidity, private malice--attracted the roving, the licentious, and the unprincipled to the standard of the Cross. At that time Europe swarmed with military adventurers, some of whom had served in Palestine, in the trains of eminent personages; others, the refuse of disbanded armies, were outlaws and criminals who subsisted by plunder and extortion. To men like these, the announcement of such an enterprise appeared a singular stroke of good fortune. Provence and Languedoc embraced the richest territory, of its dimensions, west of Constantinople. Its luxury and its opulence, its elegant civilization, the magnificence of its cities, the vast treasures of its warehouses, the beauty of its women, were well known to its envious and ambitious neighbors. It was also known that no adequate means of defence existed, and that the hands, which had in the midst of barbarism evoked these marvels, lacked