With all these influences, moral and material, to give to the local clergy a direct interest in the maintenance of the ordeal, it is no wonder that they battled resolutely for its preservation. In this, however, as in so many other details of ecclesiastical policy, centralization triumphed. When the papal authority reached its culminating point, a vigorous and sustained effort to abolish the whole system was made by the popes who occupied the pontifical throne from 1159 to 1227. Nothing can be more peremptory than the prohibition uttered by Alexander III.,[1334] who sought moreover to enlist on his side the local churches by stigmatizing as an intolerable abuse the liability which in Sweden forced the highest prelates to submit to the red-hot iron ordeal.[1335] About the same time we find the celebrated Peter Cantor earnestly urging that it was a sinful tempting of God and a most uncertain means of administering justice, which he enforces by numerous instances of innocent persons who, within his own knowledge, had been condemned by its means and put to death; and he declares that any priest exorcising the iron or water, or administering the oaths preliminary to the judicial duel, is guilty of mortal sin.[1336] Somewhat earlier than this, Ekkehard Bishop of Munster took the same ground when he refused to his steward Richmar permission to undergo the red-hot iron ordeal in order to convert the Jew, Hermann of Cologne; it would be, he said, a tempting of God.[1337] A different reason was given when Albero, a priest of Mercke near Cologne, offered to pass through fire to prove the orthodoxy of his teaching that the sacraments were vitiated in the hands of sinful priests, and his request was refused on the ground that skilful sorcery might thus lead to the success of a flagrant heresy.[1338] In 1181, Lucius III. pronounced null and void the acquittal of a priest charged with homicide, who had undergone the water ordeal, and ordered him to prove his innocence with compurgators, giving as a reason that all such “peregrina judicia” were prohibited.[1339] Even more severe was the blow administered by Innocent III. early in the thirteenth century. At Albenga, near Genoa, a man suspected of theft offered to prove his innocence by the red-hot iron, and agreed to be hanged if he should fail. The ordeal took place in the presence of the bishop and judge; the man’s hand was burnt and after some consultation the bishop ordered him to be hanged. When Innocent heard of this he promptly had the bishop deprived of his see and a successor elected; his decision in this case was carried into the canon law as a precedent to be followed.[1340] In 1210, moreover, when Bishop Henry of Strassburg was vigorously persecuting heresy and convicting heretics by the ordeal, one of them named Reinhold hurried to Rome and returned with a letter from Innocent forbidding it for the future; ordeals might be adjudged, he said, by the secular tribunals,