which they belonged, to whom was confided power of punishment up to removal.[1]
The natural result of this conflicting legislation was that the inquisitors held themselves accountable to their superiors only for their actions as friars and not as inquisitors ; in the latter capacity they acknowledged responsibility only to the pope, and they asserted that the power of removal could only be exercised' in cases of inability to act through sickness, age, or ignorance. Their vicars and commissioners they held to be completely beyond any jurisdiction but their own, and any attempt on the part of a provincial to remove such a subordinate was to be met with a prosecution for suspicion of heresy, as an impeding of the Inquisition, to be followed by excommunication, when, if this was endured for a year, it was to be ended by condemnation for heresy. Men armed with these tremendous powers, and animated with this resolute spirit, were not lightly to be meddled with. The warmth with which Eymerich argues the subject suggests the character of the struggle continually going on between the provincials and their appointees, and the conclusions to which he arrives indicate the temper in which the latter vindicated their independence. The grave abuses and disorders to which this led obliged John XXIII. to intervene and declare that the inquisitors should in all things be subject and obedient to their superiors. The Great Schism, however, had weakened the papal authority, and this injunction met with scant respect, so that one of the first utterances of Martin V., in 1418, when the Church was reunited at Constance, was to repeat the order, and to prescribe implicit obedience to it. Yet, as in the matter of removals, the insatiable greed of the curia was a fatal obstacle to the enforcement of subordination, for those who were commissioned directly by the pope could not be expected to endure subjection to the officials of their Orders.[2]
From Eymerich's remarks we see that an inquisitor was bound
- ↑ Wadding, ann. 1323, No. 17 ; ann. 1327, No. 5 ; ann. 1339, No. 1 ; ann. 1347, No. 10, 11; ann. 1375, No. 30; ann. 1432, No. 10, 11; ann. 1474, No. 17-19.— Archivio di Firenze, Prov. del Convento di S. Croce 26 Ott. 1439.— Ripoll II. 324, 421, 570-1. —Sixti PP. IV. Bull. Sacri, 16 Jul. 1479, § 11.
- ↑ Eymeric. pp. 540-9, 553. — Archivio di Firenze, Prov. del. Conv. di. S. Croce, 16 Apr. 1418.
