would have made a monarchy if he had succeeded, which would have
anticipated that of Charles V or Philip II by three hundred years.[577]
It was the mores of the age which decided between him and the pope. His
court was a center of Arabic culture and of religious indifference.
There were eunuchs, a harem, astrologers from Bagdad, and Jews richly
pensioned by the emperor to translate Arabic works. "All these things
were transmuted, in popular belief, into relations with Ashtaroth and
Beelzebub."[578] The saying that there had been three great
impostors--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed--was attributed to him, and it
appears that his contemporaries generally believed that he first used
the statement. The only thing which he left behind was the code of laws
which he had made, by way of concession and attempt to buy peace from
the popes, by which all civil authorities were made constables and
hangmen of the church, to which all dissenters were sacrificed.

+256. Formative legislation.+ In 1252 Innocent IV issued a bull "which
should establish machinery for systematic persecution as an integral
part of the social edifice in every city and every state." He authorized
the torture of witnesses. "These provisions are not the wild imaginings
of a nightmare, but sober, matter-of-fact legislation, shrewdly and
carefully devised to accomplish a settled policy, and it affords us a
valuable insight into the public opinion of the day to find that there
was no effective resistance to its acceptance." There is evidence,
twenty years later, that the Inquisition "had not been universally
accepted with alacrity, but the few instances which we find recorded of
refusal show how generally it was submitted to." The institution was in
full vigor in Italy, but not beyond the Alps, "yet this was scarce
necessary so long as public law and the conservative spirit of the
ruling class everywhere rendered it the highest duty of the citizen of
every degree to aid in every way the business of the inquisitor, and
pious monarchs hastened to enforce the obligations of their subjects."
"It was not the fault of the church if a bold monarch like Philip the
Fair occasionally ventured to incur divine vengeance by protecting his
subjects."[579]

+257. Dungeons.+ It is evident that the lust of blood was educated into
the mores by public executions with torture, by obscene adjuncts, by
inhuman sports, and by public shows. Cruelty and inhumanity in civil
cases were as gr