led. Since, however, the
people took sides with the unjust judges, their will was executed
everywhere." "The pitiless and incompetent judges later saw that they
could not maintain their conduct without the help of great men, whom
they won by saying that they would burn rich people, whose goods the
great men should have." "That pleased the great men, who helped them,
and called them to their cities and towns." "The people, when they saw
this, asked the reason, to which the persecutors answered, 'We would
burn a hundred innocent if there was one guilty amongst them.'"[566]

+249.+ It was also true of the persecutions of the philosophers in
Mohammedan Spain that they were popular. "The best educated princes
allowed themselves to be driven to persecute, in spite of their personal
preferences, as a means of winning popularity."[567]

+250. Theory of persecution.+ The public opinion of the ruling classes
of Europe demanded that heresy should be exterminated at whatever cost,
and yet with the suppression of open resistance the desired end seemed
as far off as ever.... Trained experts were needed, whose sole business
it should be to unearth the offenders and extort a confession of their
guilt.... Thus to the public of the thirteenth century the organization
of the Inquisition and its commitment to the children of Saint Dominic
and Saint Francis appeared a perfectly natural or rather inevitable
development arising from the admitted necessities of the time and the
instrumentalities at hand.[568]

+251. Duties laid on the civil authority.+ The secular authority
accepted the functions allotted to it out of the spirit of the age. To
fall into disfavor at Rome was, for a prince, to risk the loyalty of his
subjects, with whom it was a point of high importance to belong to a
"Christian" state, that is, one on good terms with the church. "We are
not to imagine, however, from these reduplicated commands that the
secular power, as a rule, showed itself in the slightest degree
disinclined to perform the duty. The teachings of the church had made
too profound an impression for any doubt in the premises to exist. As
has been seen above, the laws of all the states of Europe prescribed
concremation as the appropriate penalty for heresy, and even the free
commonwealths of Italy recognized the Inquisition as the judge whose
sentences were to be blindly executed."[569]

+252.+ "The practice of burning the heretic alive was thus not the
creatu