Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/164

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160
MARTYRDOM

believers increased, that the whole land moaned and groaned like a trackless desert. In 1236 Prince Zbislas and many other chiefs of the diocese of Bosnia were distinguished for heretical pravity. In 1238 a new crusade was preached against the Bosnian heretics in Hungary. In 1243 Innocent IV. commissioned a legate to Croatia and Dalmatia to extirpate the stain of heretical pravity wherewith the entire region was infected. In 1247 Innocent IV. declared that as well the church as the entire diocesan district of Bosnia had totally lapsed into the iniquity of heresy; although the Archbishop of Cologne, not without great effusion of blood, much slaughter of men, and great expenditure of the church property of Cologne, which had obtained the temporai dominion of that region, had violently subdued a portion of that country; while nevertheless the church could not be sustained in the purity of the faith because castles and fortresses had not been sufficiently strengthened to resist assault and siege. We are compelled to preserve the friendship of the empire and the church under the conditions recently established.” The unsettled condition of Prussia restrained the sanguinary purposes of Ladislaus for the present.