The accession of Innocent the Third to the pontificate brought about a rapid change in the attitude of the Church towards the Jews. Innocent was the first to advance, on behalf of the Papacy, the claim that the Lord gave Peter not only the whole Church, but the whole world to rule,[185] and he endeavoured with a merciless enthusiasm, from which all unbelievers and heretics in Christian countries had to suffer, to make good his claim, and to establish in Europe one united Catholic Church. He took his stand on the doctrine, which his predecessors had held[186] in a modified form, and without ever acting on it, that the Jews were condemned to perpetual slavery on account of the wickedness of their ancestors in crucifying Christ; and he thought that they ought to be made to feel, and their neighbours likewise, that it was only out of Christian pity that their presence was endured in Christian countries. The position of the Jews at the time of Innocent’s accession to the pontificate was very far from being such as his theory required. They had magnificent synagogues, they employed Christian servants, they married, or were said to marry, Christian wives; they refused, in what some Christians regarded as a spirit of outrageous insolence, to eat the same meat and to drink the same wine as the Gentiles, and they made no secret of their disbelief in the sacred history of Christianity. Moreover, they were suspected of exercising a considerable influence on the growth of the heresies which it was the chief work of Innocent’s life to combat. The Vaudois, the Cathari, and the Albigenses, all kept up Jewish observances, and were said to have learnt from the Jews their heretical dogmas; the Albigenses, indeed, were accused of maintaining that the law of the Jews was better than the law of the Christians. And, nevertheless, Christian kings supported the Jews in every way. They countenanced their usury, they refused (so, at least, Innocent said) to allow evidence against them on any charge to be given by Christian witnesses, and they even employed them in high offices of State. In view of these facts, Innocent thought that a great effort of repression should be made, and he wrote to the King of France, the Duke of Burgundy, and other monarchs, asking for their assistance in the work of reducing the Jews to that condition of slavery which was their due. He decreed in his general Church Council that Jews should be excluded in future from public offices, and that they should wear a badge to distinguish them from Christians; and he renewed the old regulation of the Church, which required them to dismiss Christian servants from their houses. In order to ensure that the last provision should be observed, he decided that any Christians having any intercourse with Jews that transgressed it should be subject to excommunication. For the enforcement of his other anti-Jewish measures he relied on the help of the temporal power in all Christian countries.[187]