down, and utilized the Inquisition for this purpose. Under Clement V the lot of the Spirituals considerably improved, and inveighing against the abuses of their false brethren they very nearly succeeded in securing a permanent separation into an order of their own. Instead of this Clement, while declaring in favour of the ascetic party and favouring them generally during his pontificate, endeavoured to induce the rival factions to drop their quarrels and live together in amity. His efforts at settlement were defeated by the action of Spirituals in Italy, who at the very time when a Council at Vienne, sitting in 1311-12, was declaring in favour of the Spirituals and prohibiting their enemies from referring to them as heretics, proclaimed themselves a separate community and brought down the Pope’s wrath upon them as rebels and schismatics and indeed founders of a pestilential sect. The controversy came to a head under Clement’s successor, the resolute and aggressive John XXII, to whom the pauper ideal was particularly obnoxious. He was extremely avaricious and full of worldly ambitions which involved him in frequent wars in Italy. This pontiff—possessing in his nature not one single feature in common with St. Francis—determined on restoring order within the Franciscan fold and bringing the Spirituals to obedience.[51] The first attack on the ascetic party was made in Languedoc. One of the minor distinctive features of the Spirituals was their wearing smaller gowns and hoods than the Conventuals. The Spirituals in the province of Aquitaine, in Béziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne, were forbidden to wear this distinctive garb. Twenty-five, to whom the wearing of their habit was symbolical of the whole principle for which they stood, refused to submit and were delivered to the Inquisition at Marseilles. Already the Pope had declared that all the wandering Spirituals in Languedoc who styled themselves _Fratres de paupere vita_ or _Fraticelli_ were heretics, and had stated very significantly in the bull _Quorundam_ that however praiseworthy poverty might be, more praiseworthy was obedience. Four of the twenty-five remained obdurate to the last, were handed over to the secular arm, and burnt. This proved to be but the beginning of a persecution carried out most rigorously by means of the Holy Office, particularly in the south of France, but also in Spain and Italy.