The third wide sphere of action within the Church in which the Pope established his supremacy was that of justice. The _Dictatus Papae_ asserts not only that the Pope should be judged by no one, but that the "greater causes" of every Church should be referred to him, that none should dare to condemn any one who appealed to Rome, and that no one except the Pope himself can interfere with a papal sentence. Litigants of all kinds were only too ready to appeal against the local tribunal, and the Pope gave them every encouragement. St. Bernard indignantly pointed out to Innocent II that every evil-doer and cantankerous person, whether lay or cleric or even from the monasteries, when he is worsted runs to Home and boasts on his return of the protection which he has obtained. It is true, Gregory VIII (1187) tried to check the practice of appeals; but his short reign gave no time for any real result. Bishops and archdeacons tried sometimes to stop appeals by excommunication, which prevented the victim from appearing in an ecclesiastical court; but the third Lateran Council (1179) forbade this method of defence. Alexander III definitely laid it down that appeals could be made to the Pope in the smallest no less than in the greatest matters, and at every possible stage, before and after trial, at the pronouncement of the sentence and after it has been awarded; and this, he points out, is not the case in civil law, where an appeal is only admitted after judgment. Indeed, the most serious matter with regard to papal appeals was the reservation by the Pope to his own decision of cases which were regarded as too serious for the local courts. The bishops had themselves largely to thank for the development of this direct papal jurisdiction; for they began the custom of referring to Rome the cases of great criminals and of serious crimes. But these "greater causes," claimed for the Pope as early as the time of Gregory VII, included not only grave moral crimes such as murder, sacrilege, and gross immorality, but also cases of dispensation beforehand, of absolution after excommunication for certain offences. Under the same head would come the right of canonisation exercised by archbishops until Alexander III claimed it exclusively for the Pope, and the right of translating a bishop from one see to another, which involved a dissolution of the metaphorical marriage between the bishop and his see and therefore needed a special dispensation. [Sidenote: The papal Curia.]