Apparently a man of commanding personality but holding a curious medley of religious opinions, Dolcino was soon recognized as the spiritual head of a community numbering several thousand persons, who called themselves the Apostles. The success of his mission being dangerous to the Church, the Pope Clement V proclaimed a crusade against him. He and his followers camped on a bleak mountain summit in the province of Vercelli, supporting themselves by raids for food into the neighbouring valleys. Three crusades failed, but a fourth was successful; and after terrible sufferings, cannibalism being resorted to by the besieged, the mountain was captured with merciless slaughter on both sides, the fanatics were broken up, and their leaders handed over to the secular arm and punished with the utmost barbarity. The beautiful Margarita, Dolcino’s “sister in Christ,” refusing pardon and offers of marriage, was slowly roasted alive before his eyes, and Dolcino himself was taken on a cart through the district on a hot summer day, and gradually torn to pieces with red-hot pincers. Such was the man’s resolution that he bore this frightful treatment without even a change of countenance. Strange as were some of the tenets of these enthusiasts, they were harmless enough in a moral sense, their chief crimes being their protests against the evil lives of the clergy, their success in making converts, and their contention that Christ had forsaken the Church of Rome because of its wickedness. Believing purity of life to be the first essential to salvation, they scorned the formalities of priestly religion, and dedicated themselves to poverty, chastity, and humility. In the fourteenth century the great question which divided the Church was that of the poverty of its founder, and to this all other questions had to give way. The Franciscans ventured to say that Jesus was very poor in worldly goods. The Dominicans, on the other hand, were confident that he possessed some property, though they could not say exactly how much. On this momentous question the good old Church was rent almost in twain. Regardless of Scripture, the Dominicans even hung on the walls of their monasteries pictures representing Jesus on the Cross, with one hand nailed and the other putting money in his pouch. The latter Order was favoured by the Pope, who persecuted the Franciscans with great persistency, and men were burnt for holding heretical opinions on a subject of which no one possessed the smallest fragment of knowledge.