Raimon VI. was not, like his friend the Count of Foix, a fighting baron in the ordinary sense. His personal courage on the battle-field was unimpeachable, but he did not love the fight for the fight’s sake. When the spreading of the heresy in his territories, fostered by his leniency, first began to alarm the watchfulness of Rome, he did everything in his power to avoid the thunders of the Church. Many were the penances and humiliations and promises of amendment to which he submitted without much personal reluctance, it would seem. But all attempts at a final reconciliation were frustrated by his one unalterable resolve, not to give over his subjects to the tender mercies of the Inquisition. Their safety and freedom were to him dearer than his lands and castles, more sacred even than the vows extracted from him under compulsion. Much fault may be found with Raimon’s general conduct in these transactions; even in his noble principle of toleration he may have been influenced by the ties of relationship and other personal motives. But the fact remains, that at a time when heretics were treated worse than robbers and murderers, a great prince struggled and fought, at the risk of his life and property, for the religious freedom of his subjects, whose belief he did _not_ share. Raimon’s great antagonist—intellectually, and perhaps morally, infinitely his superior—was Pope Innocent III. He is one of those characters in history which leave their impress on periods of which they at the same time represent the highest development in one direction or another. Without him the Church of Rome might have succumbed to the aggressions of temporal and spiritual enemies, but neither would he have been possible except as the representative of a great spiritual power, full of latent vitality, and with a strong hold on the minds of the people. The one great idea of his life was the consolidation and enlargement of the Church, with regard to its dogma, its discipline, and its political power. To this aim he devoted the energy of his mind and the great stores of his acquired knowledge; to it he sacrificed his personal interests, perhaps his conscience. For, even accepting his own standard of duty, it is difficult to justify at least the one act of his reign which concerns us most immediately. This is, the diverting of the enthusiasm which found its tangible result in the Crusades, from the Turk, the common enemy of Christianity, to a comparatively harmless sect in his more immediate neighbourhood. I am alluding to the celebrated crusade preached by him against the Provençal heretics, fatal alike to the political freedom and to the independent literature of Southern France.