This step was taken by Pope Gregory IX, who may therefore legitimately be said to have founded the Inquisition. Both the episcopal courts and the experiment of the occasional legate had been insufficient. Gregory made use of a powerful weapon which came readily to hand in the two great Mendicant Orders. Recognizing their potential utility, Gregory, herein followed by Innocent IV, showered upon them all manner of special privileges and exemptions and bound them by this means peculiarly to the service of the papacy. They were pre-eminently fitted, as it happened, for the special service of prosecuting heresy. They were still young in the first white heat of a new enthusiasm, while their zeal and their purity made them both influential and popular. They were also often endowed—especially the Dominicans—with high intellectual gifts and early acquired a great reputation as subtle and learned theologians. Thus while their poverty, their single-mindedness and their good works were an answer to anti-sacerdotal attacks, their theological attainments enabled them to combat the dialectical arguments of the heterodox. The uniformity and permanence of inquisitorial practice came largely from the selection of the two orders of the Friars to undertake the jurisdiction over heresy. In so far, therefore, as the choice of a particular date or incident for the commencement of an institution can be otherwise than arbitrary, it is legitimate to fix upon the delegation by Gregory IX of jurisdictional powers almost exclusively to the members of the Franciscan and Dominican orders as marking the beginning of the Inquisition as an organized tribunal. Actually the first delegation made by Pope Gregory in regard to heresy was made neither to a Franciscan nor a Dominican, but to a man notorious for his extraordinary relations with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, namely Conrad of Marburg. Whatever his status to begin with, he certainly became a delegate possessed of very wide powers eventually. He was in fact an inquisitor in precisely the same sense as Pierre de Castelnau and Arnaud of Citeaux had been inquisitors; and the question of his precise authority has exactly the same bearing on the question of the beginnings of the tribunal of the Inquisition as the question of _their_ authority—no more.[301]