hout exception, forfeited their property the
very day they wavered in the faith. Actual confiscation of goods did
not take place in the case of those penitents who had deserved no
severer punishment than temporary imrisonment. Bernard Gui answered
those who objected to this ruling, by showing that, as a matter of
fact, there was no real pecuniary loss involved. For, he argued:
"Secondary penances are inflicted only upon those heretics who
denounce their accomplices. But, by this denunciation, they ensure
this discovery and arrest of the guilty ones, who, without their aid,
would have escaped punishment; the goods of these heretics are at
once confiscated, which is certainly a positive gain."[1] Actual
confiscation took place in the case of all obdurate and relapsed
heretics abandoned to the secular arm, with all penitents condemned
to perpetual imprisonment, and with all suspects who had managed to
escape the Inquisition, either by flight or by death. The heretic who
died peacefully in bed before the Inquisition could lay hands upon
him was considered contumacious, and treated as such; his remains
were exhumed, and his property confiscated. This last fact accounts
for the incredible frequency of prosecutions against the dead. Of the
six hundred and thirty-six cases tried by Bernard Gui, eighty-eight
were posthumous. As a general rule, the confiscation of the heretic's
property, which so frequently resulted from the trials of the
Inquisition, had a great deal to do with the interest they aroused.
We do not say that the Holy Office systematically increased the
number of its condemnations merely to increase its pecuniary profits.
But abuses of this kind were inevitable. We know they existed,
because the Popes denounced them strongly, although they were too
rare to deserve more than a passing mention. But would the
ecclesiastical and lay princes who, in varying proportions, shared
with the Holy Office in these confiscations, and who in some
countries appropriated them all, have accorded to the Inquisition
that continual good-will and help which was the condition of its
prosperity, without what Lea calls "the stimulant of pillage?" We may
very well doubt it.... That is why, in point of fact, their zeal for
the faith languished whenever pecuniary gain was not forthcoming. "In
our days," writes the Inquisitor Eymeric rather gloomily, "there are
no more rich heretics, so that princes, not seeing much money in
prospect, will not