As he was the earliest, so he was the chief and foremost of the persecutors. On the day of his election he announced that he meant to unsheath “the sword of Peter” and pursue all heretics unsparingly. One of his first acts was to circulate letters apostolic among the bishops, calling upon them to help and encourage the two travelling “inquisitors” whom he was about to despatch from Rome, who were to investigate and call all heretics to account in France, Spain and Portugal. If any, after admonition, hesitated to repent them of their evil opinions, they were to be excommunicated; the property of offending men of rank was to be confiscated, sentence of banishment passed upon them, and if they still remained in the country, graver penalties were to be imposed. No one might hope to escape discovery; his emissaries were to penetrate all districts, even the most remote, to hunt out and repress the slightest heresies. How the Inquisition, once started, grew into an engine of the most cruel intolerance, wreaking vengeance upon thousands of victims, inflicting almost inconceivable tortures and death by the most barbarous methods, was seen in its most extreme development in Spain. We have to deal here with the doings of the Inquisition in Italy, and more particularly in Rome, where Innocent III, consumed with perfervid zeal, made all Romish bishops inquisitors by virtue of their office, to execute justice upon all heretics they might find in their dioceses. The summary action taken against heretics is seen in a decree which was promulgated by the pope which ordered: “Every heretic, especially a Patarino, found in the patrimony of St. Peter to be seized instantly and summarily delivered to the secular court to be punished according to law. All his property to be forfeited, and one-third given to the person who caught him, another to the court that punished him, and a third to be employed in public works; his house to be demolished and never built again but made a dunghill; his friends to be fined, one-fourth of their property to be given to the state for the first offence, and to be banished for the second; such persons to have no power of appeal in any cause nor any right to take proceedings, but to be prosecuted by whomsoever chooses.”