, Jesus, and Mohammed], represents materialistic infidelity, due
to a study of the Arabs, and skulking under the name of Averroes."[592]
Of these two schools of heretics the former was the more popular and
tenacious. It is not to be understood that the masses ever recognized
their own handiwork in the Inquisition, or the popes of the fifteenth
century. On the contrary, the sequence goes on to the fourth stage in
which the masses, seeing the operation of ambition, venality, and
despotism in the officers of the institution created to meet a popular
demand, denounce it and turn against it to destroy it.

+262. Torture in civil and ecclesiastical trials.+ (See sec. 237
ff.) In the course of its work the Inquisition had introduced
torture into the administration of Christian justice and into the
mores. The jurists were all corrupted by it. They supposed that,
without torture, no crimes could be detected or punished, and
this opinion ruled the administration of justice on the continent
until the eighteenth century.[593] Lea finds the earliest
instances of legal torture in the Veronese Code of 1228, and in
the Sicilian Constitutions of 1231;--work of the rationalist
emperor, Frederick II, but it was "sparingly and hesitatingly
employed." Innocent IV adopted it in 1252, but only secular
authorities were to use it. This was to save the sanctity of
ecclesiastics. In 1256 Alexander IV, "with characteristic
indirection," authorized inquisitors and their associates to
absolve each other, and grant dispensations for irregularities.
This gave them absolute liberty, and they could inflict or
supervise torture.[594] There were other "poses," such as the
prohibition to shed blood, i.e. to break the skin, and the rule
to ask the civil power, when surrendering the victim to it, not
to proceed to extremes, although it was bound to burn the victim.
As the system continued in practice its methods were refined and
its experts were trained. Any one who was charged must be
convicted if possible. The torture produced permanent crippling
or maiming. It would not do to release any one so marked with the
investigation and then acquitted. Hence more and more frightful
measures became necessary. Nevertheless cases occurred in which
the accused held out beyond the power of the persecutors.[595] At
Bamberg, in 1614, a woman seventy-four years old endured torture
up t