During the War of the Spanish Succession, Sardinia was captured by the Allies in 1708 and, in 1718, it passed into possession of the House of Savoy. As soon as the Spanish domination ceased the Inquisition disappeared and the bishops revendicated their jurisdiction over heresy, each one organizing an Inquisition of his own, not so much, we are told, with the object of eradicating heresy as to enable them to exempt retainers from public burdens, by appointing them to useless offices.[224] Jealousy of the Inquisition had been the traditional policy of the Dukes of Savoy[225] and, as the support of the secular arm was essential to the activity of the institution, we may presume that even these episcopal substitutes faded away in silence. In 1775 a survey of the ecclesiastical and religious condition of the island makes no allusion to prosecutions for heresy although it records a tradition that, towards the end of the seventeenth century, certain Quietists and followers of Molinos had found refuge in the mountain caves.[226] CHAPTER IV. MILAN. By the treaty of Cambrai, in 1529, Francis I abandoned the Milanese to Charles V and it thenceforth formed part of the Italian possessions of Spain. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries it had been the hot-bed of heresy and it was, in the thirteenth, one of the earliest scenes of inquisitorial activity. It was there that Pietro di Verona sealed his devotion with his blood and became the patron saint of the Holy Office. With the gradual extermination of heresy, the Inquisition there as elsewhere grew inert and, even after the new and threatening development of the Reformation, when Paul III, in 1536, was alarmed by reports of the proselyting zeal and success of Fra Battista da Crema, he had no tribunal on which he could rely to suppress the heretic. In default of this he commissioned Giovanni, Bishop of Modena, who was then in Milan, together with the Dominican Provincial, to preach against the heretics and to punish according to law those whom they might find guilty, at the same time significantly forbidding the inquisitor and the episcopal Ordinary to interfere.[227]