Philip the Fair, who was noble-hearted occasionally, addressed a letter May 13, 1291, to the seneschal of Carcassonne in which he denounced the Inquisitors for their cruel torturing of innocent men, whereby the living and the dead were fraudulently convicted; and among other abuses he mentions particularly "tortures newly invented." Another letter of his (1301) addressed to Foulques de Saint-Georges, contained a similar denunciation. In a bull intended for Cardinals Taillefer de la Chappelle and Bérenger de Frédol, March 13, 1306, Clement V mentions the complaints of the citizens of Carcassonne, Albi, and Cordes, regarding the cruelty practiced in the prisons of the Inquisition. Several of these unfortunates "were so weakened by the rigors of their imprisonment, the lack of food, and the severity of their tortures (_sevitia tormentorum_), that they died." The facts in Savonarola's case are very hard to determine. The official account of his interrogatory declares that he was subjected to three and a half _tratti di fune_. This was a form of torture known as the _strappado_. The Signoria, in answer to the reproaches of Alexander VI at their tardiness, declared that they had to deal with a man of great endurance; that they had assiduously tortured him for many days with slender results.[1] Burchard, the papal prothonotary, states that he was put to the torture seven times. It made very little difference whether these tortures were inflicted _per modum continuationis_ or _per modum iterationis_, as the casuist of the Inquisition put it. At any rate, it was a crying abuse.[2] [1] Villari, _La storia di Girolamo Savonarola_, Firenze, 1887, vol. ii, p. 197. [2] H. Lucas, _Fra Girolamo Savonarola, a Biographical Study_. London, Sands, 1905. We may learn something of the brutality of the Inquisitors from the remorse felt by one of them. He had inflicted the torture of the burning coals upon a sorceress. The unfortunate woman died soon afterwards in prison as a result of her torments. The Inquisitor, knowing he had caused her death, wrote John XXII for dispensation from the irregularity he had thereby incurred. But the greatest excesses of the Inquisition were due to the political schemes of sovereigns. Such instances were by no means rare. Hardly had the Inquisition been established, when Frederic II tried to use it for political purposes. He was anxious to put the prosecution for heresy in the hands of his royal officers, rather than in the hands of the bishops and the monks. When, therefore, in 1233, he boasted in a letter to Gregory IX that he had put to death a great number of heretics in his kingdom, the Pope answered that he was not at all deceived by this pretended zeal. He knew full well that the Emperor wished simply to get rid of his personal enemies, and that he had put to death many who were not heretics at all.