The church always had great power in Genoa. As early as 1253, the friars of San Domenico executed a Master Luco as a heresiarch and confiscated his goods. The church grew so arrogant that three years later, Fra Anselmo, chief inquisitor, demanded that certain rules of his should be incorporated among the statutes of the Republic. The consuls refused to gratify him and the inquisitor excommunicated the city and its district. The government sent ambassadors to the Pope without success; it was forced to humble itself and register on its statute books laws dictated by a priest. In 1459, a decree of the Republic granted every facility and privilege to the father inquisitors. The bull of Paul III. inflamed our inquisitors with extraordinary zeal. The partisans of the new creed were increasing rapidly, and the fathers resolved to convert or exterminate them. Among the heretics, to say nothing of laics, was Cardinal Federico Fregoso whose books on the psalms had been entered in the index. The prior of San Matteo was accused of heresy in Bonfadio’s time and cited to appear before the inquisition in Rome, in spite of the friendship and protection of Doria and the government. It has never been clearly proved that Bonfadio shared the views of the reformers, but everything conspires to the support of that theory. However that may be, his opinions were certainly such as to afford his enemies a pretext for the accusation. He hated the priests and spoke and wrote bitterly against them. His letters, which give him the first place in that branch of Italian literature, show that he was opposed to all religious orders and particularly the regular clergy called _Theatine_, who reciprocated the sentiment and spoke of his death as a judgment of God. His annals and the freedom of his speech made him many other enemies in Genoa, but though they were powerful he despised them. Carnesecchi warned him that one of them had established himself near his person and exhorted him to be cautious. Bonfadio replied:--“The man of whom you write to me from the Roman court always disliked me.... His eyebrows are shorn, and he never laughs; wherefore I doubt that He who can do all things is able to make the man good. He has done an evil work, but it was his own proper work, and if he has poisoned the fruits of my labours that was inevitable, because he bears a serpent in his bosom.” The serpent uncoiled himself and Bonfadio was undone. It was not difficult for his enemies to fasten upon him the charge of heresy, adducing as proofs his intimacy with wicked or heretical men whom Rome had already doomed. Among the first-class was Nicolò Franco, of Benevento, who perished on the scaffold in Rome, prophesying the same fate for Pietro Aretina whom that age, after loading him with honours and riches, blasphemously called divine. Among the second class, that is those whom the church accused of heresy, were the Martinengo, who all belonged to the party of reform.