But it was not only the extremists that were made victims. On November 12, 1323, John XXII, to whom the Spirituals’ conception of the place of poverty in the Christian Church was definitely anathema, so irreconcilable was it with his papal policy, issued the bull, _Cum inter nonnullos_, in which it was authoritatively denied that Christ and His Apostles possessed no property. To assert that they held none was error and heresy.[52] This question of dogma became involved with secular politics, when Lewis of Bavaria, being claimant to the imperial crown and at enmity with Pope John, found it convenient to adopt the cause of the Franciscans and to denounce the Pope himself as a heretic for not believing in the absolute poverty of Christ, as he did in a formal indictment of John known as the Protest of Sachsenhausen. A controversy between Empire and Papacy was thus started which is of great interest because it evoked the ‘Defensor Pacis’ of Marsiglio of Padua and the numerous polemical works of William of Ockham on the imperial side. This controversy is of much greater interest and significance than the story of the persecutions of the _Fratres de paupere vita_, or _Fraticelli_, which continued as the result of John XXII’s action, more especially in Italy, into the later decades of the fourteenth century. The significance of the persecutions lies in the virtual creation of a heresy by a papal bull. That it should be possible for any individual wearer of the papal tiara to declare heretical what his predecessors had held to be praiseworthy and to stigmatize as heretics his opponents in secular politics revealed a great danger. To hold fast to an immutable faith is easy, but what if the immutable faith does as a matter of fact change! The bull _Cum inter nonnullos_ made it possible that a man might be condemned as a heretic because he held a certain view as to Christ’s poverty, although perfectly able and willing to subscribe to every article in the Christian creed as defined in the great councils of the early Church. Catharism may have been a real peril to the Church; but to maintain that men who had no other wish but to preserve the strict Rule of St. Francis in the order constituted such a peril is impossible. And men might well be bewildered by the fact that whereas the revolutionary teachings of Joachitism were not at first proscribed, the wearing of a particular type of hood became heretical not many years later.