That the Church should have made its principal aim correctness of belief (or rather obedience to its authority), and purity of life a secondary consideration, involved the policy of religious persecution systematically followed by the Inquisition. Except as a source of revenue, crime was of little consequence. Virtuous heretics were exterminated, and the guilty orthodox absolved from the worst crimes, in the name of Christ. A Flemish chronicler relates in 1379 “that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thieving, robbery, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, drunkenness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent within the space of ten months there occurred no less than 1,400 murders committed in bagnios, brothels, gambling houses, taverns, and other similar places.”[5] In the Italian Church there was no devotion, in the laity neither faith nor morals. Factions filled the streets with blood, the roads were closed by robbers, the seas swarmed with pirates. “Parents slew with rejoicing their children who chanced to be of the opposite faction.”[6] Æneas Sylvius wrote in 1453: “Whether I look upon the deeds of princes or of prelates I find that all have sunk, all are worthless.... Execration and falsehood and slaughter and theft and adultery are spread among you, and you add blood to blood..... There is no shame in crime, for you sin so openly and shamelessly that you seem to take delight in it.”[7] The flagrant immorality of many of the Bishops, and the frequency with which they took part in war, were even in rude times deemed unbecoming to their profession; but the difficulty of getting them punished by any ecclesiastical court was so great that in most cases the offenders could continue to tread the primrose path of dalliance without fear of retribution. About the worst of these clerical rakes was the Archbishop of Besançon, who in 1198 was accused of perjury, simony, and incest. He was formally indicted by his Chapter, but the Pope, on the authority of the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery, charitably dismissed the charge with a caution. The hardened old sinner continued his gay career for sixteen years, but was at length driven from his see by the townspeople. It took ten years to get rid of another prelate, a Bishop of Toul, and a few years later he was killed by his uncle in revenge for a murder. This gentleman’s favourite mistress was a daughter of his own, the mother being a nun.