Affirming that they had the direct consent of His Holiness the Pope, they menaced with excommunication whosoever attempted to impede them in their free peregrination. Five years after the foundation of Manila, the city and environs were infested with niggardly mendicant friars, whose slothful habits placed their supercilious countrymen in ridicule before the natives. They were tolerated but a short time in the Islands; not altogether because of the ruin they would have brought to European moral influence on the untutored tribes, but because the Bishop was highly jealous of all competition against the Augustine Order which he assisted. Consequent on the representations of Alonso Sanchez, His Majesty ordained that all priests who went to the Philippines were, in the first place, to resolve never to quit the Islands without the Bishop's sanction, which was to be conceded with great circumspection and only in extreme cases, whilst the Governor was instructed not to afford them means of exit on his sole authority. Neither did the Bishop regard with satisfaction the presence of the Commissary of the Inquisition, whose secret investigations, shrouded with mystery, curtailed the liberty of the loftiest functionary, sacred or civil. At the instigation of Alonso Sanchez, the junta recommended the King to recall the Commissary and extinguish the office, but he refused to do so. In short, the chief aims of the Bishop were to enhance the power of the friars, raise the dignity of the Colonial mitre, and secure a religious monopoly for the Augustine Order.