Meanwhile, as European society developed, money-lending went on increasing. And what would now be regarded as the inevitable accompaniment of material activity was then denounced as a symptom of moral degeneracy. At the same time the power of the Church grew, and her eagerness to suppress what she considered a sin grew with her ability. Under Gregory VII., the hurler of thunderbolts, the Papacy entered upon that career of political conquest which achieved its highest triumphs under Innocent III. ♦1083♦ Gregory had been on the throne for ten years when one of those missiles fell upon usurers, a term which, it must be remembered, in that age applied to all money-lenders alike. The warfare inaugurated by Hildebrand was carried on with unabated vigour by his successors. A decree issued by the Lateran General Council of 1139 deprived usurers of the consolations of the Church, denied them Christian burial, and doomed them to infamy in this life and to everlasting torment in the next. The religious enthusiasm aroused by the Crusades, and the economic ruin which they threatened, accentuated the common prejudice against the outlaws of the Church. Many of the holy warriors were obliged to resort to the usurer’s hoard for the expenses of these campaigns, and the Church felt that it was her duty to see that her champions were not left destitute and homeless. Pope after Pope, throughout the twelfth century, from Eugenius III. onwards, absolved Crusaders from their financial embarrassments, and Innocent III. went so far as to ordain that the Jews should be compelled to refund to their debtors any interest that might have already been paid to them. The prejudice was further strengthened and disseminated by the religious Orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic, which soon attained a degree of official and unofficial influence calculated to enforce their precepts. Members of both orders compiled moral codes, which were accepted throughout Western Christendom as manuals of Christian ethics and guides of Christian conduct. One of the principal sins condemned in those books was usury, and the doctrine, thundered from the pulpit, preached in the market-place, and whispered in the confessional, carried with it all the weight which attaches to the words of persons invested with the power of loosing and binding in this world and in the world to come.