This Pope was, in certain respects, a very slave to the letter of the law. The protests of St. Augustine and many other early Fathers did not affect him in the least. In the beginning, while he was legate, he merely insisted upon the enforcement of the penal code of Innocent III, which did not decree any punishment severer than banishment, but he soon began to regard heresy as a crime similar to treason, and therefore subject to the same penalty, death. Certain ecclesiastics of his court with extremely logical minds, and rulers like Pedro II of Aragon and Frederic II, had reached the same conclusion, even before he did. Finally, in the fourth year of his pontificate, and undoubtedly after mature deliberation, he decided to compel the princes and the podestà to enforce the law condemning heretics to the stake. He did his utmost to bring this about. He did not forget, however, that the Church could not concern herself in sentences of death. In fact, his law of 1231 decrees that: "Heretics condemned by the Church are to be handed over to the secular courts to receive due punishment (_animadversio debita_)."[1] The emperor Frederic II had the same notion of the distinction between the two powers. His law of 1224 points out carefully that heretics convicted by an ecclesiastical trial are to be burned in the name of the civil authority: _auctoritate nostra ignis judicio concremandus_.[2] The imperial law of 1232 likewise declares that heretics condemned by the Church are to be brought before a secular tribunal to receive the punishment they deserve.[3] This explains why Gregory IX did not believe that in handing over heretics to the secular arm he participated directly or indirectly in a death sentence.[4] The tribunals of the Inquisition which he established in no way modified this concept of ecclesiastical justice. The Papacy, the guardian of orthodoxy for the universal Church, simply found that the Dominicans and the Franciscans were more docile instruments than the episcopate for the suppresion of heresy. But whether the Inquisition was under the direction of the bishops or the monks, it could have been conducted on the same lines. [1] _Decretales_, cap. xv, _De Hæreticis_, lib. v, tit. vii. [2] _Mon. Germ., Leges_, sect. iv, vol. ii, p. 126. [3] Ibid., p. 196.