claimed that prisons should be built at the expense of the recipients of the confiscations, and suggested that the fines should be used for their maintenance and for that of the inquisitors. The piety of St. Louis, however, would not see the good work halt for lack of the necessary means; with a more worldly prince we might assume that he recognized the money spent on inquisitors as profitably invested. In 1248 we find him defraying their expenses in all the domains of the crown, and we have shown above how he assumed the cost of prisons and prisoners; in addition to which, in 1246, he ordered his Seneschal of Carcassonne to pay out of the confiscations ten sols per diem to the inquisitors for their expenses. It may fairly be presumed that Count Raymond contributed with a grudging hand to the support of an institution which he had opposed so long as he dared ; but when he was succeeded, in 1249, by Jeanne and Alphonse of Poitiers, the latter politic and avaricious prince saw his account in stimulating the zeal of those to whom he owed his harvest of confiscations. Not only did he defray the cost of the fixed tribunals, but his seneschals had orders to pay the expenses of the inquisitors and their familiars in their movements throughout his territories. He paid close attention to detail. In 1268 we find Guillem de Montreuil, Inquisitor of Toulouse, reporting to him the engagement of a notary at six deniers per diem and of a servitor at four, and Alphonse graciously ordering the payment of their wages. Charles of Anjou, who was equally greedy, found time amid his Italian distractions to see that his Seneschal of Provence and Forcalquier kept the Inquisition supplied on the same basis as did the king in the royal dominions.[1]
Large as were the returns to the fisc from the industry of the Inquisition, the inquisitors were sometimes disposed to presume upon their usefulness, and to spend money with a freedom which
- ↑ Concil. Tolosan. ann. 1229 c. 9. — Concil. Albiens. ann. 1254 c. 24. — Harduin. VII. 415. — Archives de L'Évêché de Béziers (Doat, XXXI. 35). — Concil. Biterrens. ann. 1246 c. 22. — D. Bouquet, T. XXI. pp. 262, 264, 266, 278, etc.— Vaissette, Éd. Privat, VIII. 1206, 1573.— Archives de l’Inq. de Carcassonne (Doat, XXXI. 250).— Archivio di Napoli, Regist. 20, Lett. B, fol. 91.
The care with which Alphonse looked after the proceeds of the confiscations is seen in his demand for an account from his seneschal, Jacques du Bois, March 25, 1268 (Vaissette, Éd. Privat, VIII. 1274).
