The popes had endeavoured to overcome episcopal indifference to the matter of heresy by a somewhat irregular “Legatine Inquisition.” It would appear, however, as if up to the beginning of the 13th century this whole business of the discovery and the correction of heresy had been cared for by the Church authorities in an unsystematic manner and with no consistency of policy. The more conscientious and more forcible rulers of the Church recognised that heresy must be exterminated at whatever cost, but the measures for its extermination proved to be difficult to bring into organisation. “The institution of the mendicant orders,” says Lea, “placed at the disposal of the Church groups of workers who possessed exceptional facilities for the task to be undertaken. The Dominicans and the Franciscans were peculiarly devoted to the Papacy, and the papal authority placed in their hands to carry on in its larger development the work of the Inquisition, proved to be a powerful instrument to extend the influence of Rome and to lessen the independence of the local churches.”[97] The consecutive history of the Inquisition as a definite organisation may be said to date from the Council of Toulouse in 1229. The Spanish Inquisition, which proved to be by far the most persistent, the most effective, and the most terrible of the Inquisition organisations of the world, dates from 1480. Curiously enough, the most complete and pitiless of the acts of persecution that were based upon the Lateran canons was the work of one of the fiercest opponents of the Church, the Emperor Frederick II. It became necessary, on more grounds than one, for the Emperor to meet the charges of heresy that had been freely brought against him, and for this purpose, he found it convenient to manifest special zeal in the persecution of heretics. The edicts putting this persecution into form were issued between the years 1220 and 1239. In 1232, Frederick placed at the command of the papal inquisitors the whole machinery of the State, for the purpose of tracing heresy and of capturing and condemning heretics. Frederick’s coronation edict against heretics, issued in 1220, was sent by Pope Honorius to the University of Bologna to be taught as a part of practical law. The whole series of Frederick’s edicts was subsequently promulgated by successive popes in repeated Bulls. The substance of these edicts was finally incorporated in the _Corpus Juris_ as part of the canon law itself, and their regulations may, technically speaking, be regarded as in force in the present day.[98]