The fourth crusade was preached by Innocent III. and Fulk of Neuilly. The soldiers were chiefly French and Venetians; and, instead of going to Palestine, they contented themselves with capturing, with circumstances of horrible pillaging, debauchery and bloodshed, the city of Constantinople from the Greeks (in 1204), and founding there a Latin empire, which lasted till 1261. The dislike of the Greek for the Roman Catholics was thus converted into vehement and perpetual hatred. – As it was concluded by many that none but "innocent" hands could effect the conquest of the Holy Land, it is said that, in A.D. 1212, thirty thousand French boys and girls under the peasant lad Stephen, and twenty thousand German boys and girls under the peasant lad Nicholas, set out for that purpose, but perished miserably by fatigue and starvation and shipwreck and in Mohammedan slavery. – In what is called by some the fifth, and by others the sixth, crusade (1215-1229), Damietta in Egypt was taken, and Frederick II. of Germany, by a treaty with the sultan of Egypt, was crowned King of Jerusalem, which was recaptured by the Turks in 1247, and has remained in their possession ever since. –The sixth and seventh crusades were both French; in the sixth, King Louis IX. lost his liberty in Egypt in 1249; and in the seventh he lost his life before Tunis, in Africa, in 1270. In 1291 Acre was taken by the Mameluke Turks, and a termination was put to Catholic dominion in Palestine.

In 1212 the Catholic kings of Castile, Aragon and Navarre slew one hundred and sixty thousand Moslems in one battle; and, before the close of this century, the Moorish dominion was restricted to the kingdom of Granada, which paid homage to Castile.

After dreadful wars of more than fifty years (1230-1283), Prussia was made almost a desert by the papal knights – "booted apostles," says Mosheim – and the miserable remnant of the people were forced to submit to Catholic baptism. The similar "conversion" of Lithuania in Russia was begun, but a permanent nominal success was not obtained until near the close of the fourteenth century.

The Catholic crusade against the Albigenses in Southern France (from 1209-1229), under Popes Innocent III., Honorius III. And Gregory IX., was one of the bloodiest tragedies in human history. The crusade was much shorter, easier and safer than that to Palestine, and the temporal rewards were more certain. The popes promised the crusaders, as in the Mohammedan expeditions, the forgiveness of all their sins, and also the partition among them of the estates of the heretics. An army, variously estimated at from two to five hundred thousand men, assembled from Italy, Germany and France. The leader was the able, rapacious, unfeeling and unprincipled Simon de Montfort, of England. The heretic was regarded as worse than the robber, the traitor or the murder – as a beast of prey, to be exterminated wherever found. "Never is the history of man," says Milman, "were the great eternal principles of justice, the faith of treaties, common humanity, so trampled under foot as in the Albigensian war. Never was war waged in which ambition, the consciousness of strength, rapacity, implacable hatred and pitiless cruelty played a greater part. And throughout the war it cannot be disguised that it was not merely the army of the (Catholic) ‘Church,’ but the (Catholic) ‘Church’ itself in arms. Papal legates and the greatest prelates headed the host and mingled in all the horrors of the battle and the siege. In no instance did they interfere to arrest the massacre, in some cases urged it on." "At the taking of Beziers (July 22, 1209), the commander, the Abbott Arnold, legate of the pope, being asked who the heretics were to be distinguished from the faithful, made the infamous reply, ‘Slay all; God will know his own.’ "

"The policy of persecution," says Mr. J. H. Allen, "was adopted by the Roman Catholic ‘Church’ deliberately and with open eyes in the Third Lateran Council of 1179, notwithstanding the opposition of a more wise and humane spirit. Nothing so completely disproves that infallibility to which she asserts so many fantastic, sentimental and rotten claims."

As many as four hundred "heretics" were sometimes burned in one great pile, to the great rejoicing of the Catholics. Twenty thousand men, women and children were slain indiscriminately at the capture of Beziers, and two hundred thousand during that year (1209). The number of Albigenses that perished in the twenty years’ war is estimated at from one to two millions. Whoever harbored a "heretic" was to lose his property and be reduced to slavery. Every house in which a "heretic" was found was to be destroyed. A wretched few sought concealment in caves and rocks and forests, or fled to other lands.

The popes founded the Mendicant Franciscan and Dominican Orders and the Inquisition to aid them in counteracting the growing "heretical" sects, either by conversion or extermination. One of the characteristic features of Roman Catholicism is its incorporation of hundreds of religious institutions, male and female, by which to accomplish its purposes. The Military Orders were established in the twelfth century to fight against the Saracens; and the Mendicant (or Begging) Orders, in the thirteenth century, to war against the "heretics"; just as the Jesuit Order was created in the sixteenth century to counteract the Protestant Reformation. Sacerdotal "Christianity" had, in the thirteenth century, ascended a throne so high above the people, teaching them only by the ritual, and neutralizing even the small benefit derivable from that teaching by priestly wealth, pride and corruption; and those communions which it denominated "heretical sects" had drawn so near the people by their moral and lowly condition, and by their private and public preaching of the simple gospel of Christ; that the papists realized and sought to obviate this great disadvantage of theirs in winning and retaining the masses. The Franciscan Order, named from Francis of Assisi (a town in Italy), was founded in 1210; and the Dominican Order, named from Dominic, a Spanish priest, was founded in 1216. The avowed principles of both Orders were poverty, chastity and obedience, the latter to be rendered to the pope through the Superior of the Order. Those who entered the Orders thereby renounced all freedom of thought and conscience, and became absolutely devoted to the papal service, each Order, like a vast army, acting as the instrument of a single will. Their fundamental principle, not to work, but to live by begging, was in point-blank contradiction to the express Divine commandment both of the Old and the New Testament that man should labor. "The begging-friar soon became a by-word for all his ignoble arts, his shameless asking, his importunity which would take no refusal, his creeping into houses, his wheedling of silly women, his having rich men’s persons in admiration because of advantage, his watchings by wealthy death-beds to secure legacies for his house, his promising spiritual benefits, not his to grant, in exchange for temporal gifts. Bonaventura, himself the head of the Franciscan Order, and writing not fifty years after Francis’s death, does not scruple to say that already in his time the sight of a begging-friar in the distance was more dreaded than that of a robber." These Orders were most successful Catholic missionaries. They spread with wonderful rapidity, and soon became wealthy, proud and corrupt. It was pretended that each of their founders, Francis and Dominic, performed far more miracles than Christ, and that Francis equalled or surpassed Christ in the glories of his birth, transfiguration, gospel and death, insomuch that, in the minds of multitudes, the idolatrous worship of Francis took the place of the professed worship of Christ. The Dominicans were so eager and successful in hunting and persecuting "heretics" that they were called by the people Domini Canes, dogs of the Lord. Teaching that there is virtue in frequent repetitions of forms of prayer, they invented the rosary, as series of prayers and a string of beads by which they are counted.

The Inquisition, the special and unprecedented enormity of Roman Catholicism, surpassing, in cold systematic treachery and cruelty, the wildest imaginations of romance, "the most formidable of all the formidable engines devised by popery to subdue the souls and bodies, the reason and the consciences of men, to its sovereign will," was founded during the Albigensian war to extirpate those obstinate "heretics," and was afterwards employed against other "heretics" and against the Jews and Moors. The Greek Emperor Theodosius I., in 382, had instituted the first Inquisition against "heresy," especially Manichaeism, and had enforced the first death penalty for religious opinion. The Inquisition was revived in more awful form by the Twelfth General Council (Fourth Lateran) in 1215, and its code established by the Council of Toulouse in 1229. It was made a permanent tribunal in 1233, and put in charge of the Dominican Order in 1234. Special Courts (independent of the local authorities) for hunting out and exterminating "heretics" had been established under Dominic and his followers during the crusade against the Albigenses. "The base of the code of the Inquisition," says Milman, "was a system of delation at which the worst of the Pagan emperors might have shuddered as iniquitous; in which the sole act deserving of mercy might seem to be the Judas-like betrayal of the dearest and most familiar friend, of the kinsman, the parent, the child. The Court sat in profound secrecy; no advocate might appear before the tribunal; no witness was confronted with the accused; who were the informers, what the charges, except the vague charge of heresy, no one knew. If the suspected heretic refused to testify concerning himself and others similarly suspected, he was cast into a dungeon – a dungeon the darkest in those dreary ages – the most dismal, the most foul, the most noisome. No falsehood was too false, no craft too crafty, no trick too base, for this calm, systematic moral torture which was to wring further confession against himself, denunciation against others If the rack, the pulleys, the thumbscrew and the boots were not yet invented or applied (as they were afterwards), it was not in mercy. It was the deliberate object to break the spirit. The prisoner was told that there were witnesses, undeniable witnesses, against him; if convicted by such witnesses, his death was inevitable. In the meantime, his food was to be slowly, gradually diminished, till body and soul were prostrate. He was then to be left in darkness, solitude, silence. Then were to come one or two of the faithful, dexterous men, who were to speak in gentle words of interest and sympathy – ‘Fear not to confess that you have had dealings with those men, the teachers of heresy, because they seemed to you men of holiness and virtue; wiser than you have been deceived.’ The dexterous men were to speak of the Bible, of the Gospels, of the epistles of Saint Paul, to talk the very language, the scriptural language, of the heretics. ‘These foxes,’ it was said, ‘can only be unearthed by fox-like cunning.’ But if all this art failed, or did not perfectly succeed, then came terror and the goading to despair. ‘Die you must – bethink you of your soul.’ Upon which if the desperate man said, ‘If I must die, I will die in the true faith of the gospel,’ he had made his confession; justice claimed its victim. The Inquisition had three penalties; for those who recanted, penance in the severest form which the Court might enact; for those not absolutely convicted, perpetual imprisonment; for the obstinate or the relapsed, death – death at the stake, by the secular arm. The Inquisition, with specious hypocrisy, while it prepared and dressed up the victim for the burning, looked on with calm and approving satisfaction, as it had left the sin of lighting the fire to pollute other hands."

In case of sickness, however severe, no "heretic" was allowed the services of a physician. "Friends and relatives were admitted to testify, but only against the prisoner, never in his favor." The property of the condemned heretic – often even before condemnation, pretendedly to pay the expenses of the mock trial – was confiscated, the most of it being given to the accusers and judges. The Inquisition (which was never established in England) was established in France, Spain, Italy and Germany during the thirteenth century, steadily increased in power and vigor through the fourteenth century, became the most terrible at the close of the fifteenth and during the sixteenth centuries, steadily declined during the seventeenth century, abandoned torture and was almost abolished during the eighteenth century, and has been partially revived, with the old murderous will, but with little power for harm, on account of the separation of "Church" and State, in the nineteenth century. Its last capital punishments were those of a Jew who was burnt, and a Quaker schoolmaster hanged, in Spain, in 1826. Roman Catholic writers of the present century acknowledge the horrible deeds of the Inquisition, and seek to justify them; and large numbers of Catholics, especially the Jesuits, yearn for the re-establishment of the Satanic institution, with all its original powers. The Prince of Darkness and his worshipers still passionately love the old deeds of darkness of the darkest ages of the world. But God is mightier than Satan, and has never left Himself without witnesses on earth.

The Lateran Council of 1215, under Pope Innocent III., adopted seventy canons, exalting the papal supremacy to the highest point, and containing a summary of papal doctrine and polity, justifying, among other things, transubstantiation, indulgences, works of supererogation, and the extirpation of "heretics." The doctrine of "works of supererogation" was founded upon the alleged distinction between the precepts of the law and the exhortations of the gospel, the former being considered obligatory, and the latter non-obligatory; so that, when a person performed the latter, he laid up a stock of merits; and all the merits of the saints, with the merits of Christ, formed a vast treasury, from which indulgences might, on certain conditions, be granted to persons of deficient merit or of positive sinfulness. This doctrine was defended by the famous Schoolmen, Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Bonaventura; and it was implicitly decreed in the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. – The Council of Toulouse, in 1229, under Pope Gregory IX., prohibited "laymen" from possessing or reading the Bible in the mother tongue; and the same pope in 1231 prohibited "laymen" from disputing on the faith under penalty of excommunication.

The custom of voluntary flagellation, as a means of self-purification or of the propitiation of the Deity, was practiced by the ancient Pagan Egyptians and Greeks and Romans; and, before being abandoned by the latter in the fifth century, was adopted by some Catholic "Bishops" in their courts. But, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, especially in the years 1260, 1349 and 1414, it raged in many countries of continental Europe as a religious mania. "All ranks, both sexes, all ages, were possessed with the madness – nobles, wealthy merchants, modest and delicate women, even children of five years old. They stripped themselves naked to the waist, covered their faces that they might not be known, and went two and two, both day and night, in solemn, slow procession, from city to city, with a cross and a banner before them, scourging themselves till the blood tracked their steps, and shrieking out their doleful psalms. Thirty-three days and a half, the number of years of the Lord’s sad sojourn in this world of man, was the usual period for the penance of each. Sovereign princes, as Raymond of Toulouse, kings, as Henry II. of England, had yielded their backs to the scourge. Flagellation was the religious luxury of ‘Saint’ Louis IX. of France, who had his priest scourge him every Friday with an iron chain, and in Lent on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and who wore in his girdle an ivory case of such scourges, such boxes being his favorite presents to his courtiers. A year of penance was taxed at three thousand lashes. Dominic, the founder of the Mendicant Order, accompanied each Psalm with one hundred lashes; so that the whole Psalter, with fifteen thousand stripes, equalled five years’ penance. Dominicus Loricatus (wearing a shirt of mail next his skin) could discharge, in six days, the penance of an entire century, by a whipping of three hundred thousand stripes." Francis of Assisi, from self-flagellation, had made his skin one sore from head to foot, when he died. Scourging was considered a substitute for all the "sacraments of the church," and even for the merits of Christ. It became so excessive and scandalous that even popes and Catholic governments suppressed the public exhibitions; but the merit of voluntary self-chastisement is still a doctrine of Roman Catholicism.

In 1215 King John of England was forced by his barons, at Runnymede, to sign the Magna Charta, the legal basis of English liberties, securing life, liberty and property from arbitrary spoliation – representation with taxation, the Habeas Corpus, and Trial by Jury. In 1265 "the knights, citizens and burgesses" were summoned to form the House of Commons, and thus, with the House of Lords, complete the organization of the British Parliament. – In 1268 Louis IX. issued an edict, called the Pragmatic Sanction, which, though affirming the plenary power of the pope in all other countries, made an exception in the case of France, "limiting, in that country, the interference of the court of Rome in the elections of the clergy, and directly denying its right of ecclesiastical taxation." This has been considered the great charter of the independence of the "Gallican Church." It was emphasized and enlarged by the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII. in 1438, but virtually annulled by the Concordat of Francis I. with Pope Leo X. in 1516, which, though professing to grant to each party mutual privileges, gave the real advantage to Rome; these advantages it has been the constant aim of Rome ever since to improve.

Boniface VIII., who occupied the papal chair from 1294 to 1303, was the most ambitious, arrogant, avaricious, crafty, unscrupulous, revengeful and cruel of all the popes of Rome; and he was believed by his contemporaries to be exceedingly immoral. The unexampled loftiness of his pretensions shook the papal throne to its base, and led to his own most ignominious fall and end. Soon after his death his ineffaceable epitaph was announced to an unprotesting world: "He came in like a fox, he ruled like a lion, and he died like a dog." He craftily procured the abdication of his predecessor, Celestine V., whom he imprisoned, and, it is thought, poisoned. His inauguration was the most magnificent that Rome had ever seen. The kings of Naples and Hungary held the bridle of his noble, richly caparisoned white horse on either side. He had a crown on his head, and was followed by the nobility of Rome, and could hardly make his way through the masses of the kneeling people. In the midst of the inauguration of a furious storm burst over the city, and extinguished every lamp and torch in the building. A riot broke out among the populace, in which forty lives were lost. The next day, while the pope dined in public, the two kings waited behind his chair. In 1296 he published his bull Clericis Laicos, declaring himself the one exclusive trustee of all the property held throughout "Christendom" by the clergy, the monasteries and the universities, and that no authority should, on any plea, levy any tax on that property without his distinct permission. This bull was received with indignant resistance in England and France. To aggrandize his power and enrich his treasury Boniface, by way of a Catholic revival and combination of the old Pagan Roman Secular or Centennial Games and the Mosaic Jubilee, decreed that the last year of the thirteenth century, the year 1300, should be a year of Jubilee, in which all who should make a pilgrimage, not to Jerusalem, but to Rome, and visit for fifteen days "the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul, the tombs of the chief Apostles," and repent and confess, should receive full absolution of all their sins. It was much easier to go to Rome than to Jerusalem. All Europe, we are told, was thrown into a frenzy of religious zeal. The roads everywhere were crowded with pilgrims of all ages, of both sexes. Thirty thousand entered and left Rome in a single day; two hundred thousand strangers were in the city at one time; and it is thought that millions visited it during the year. The offerings were incalculable. An eyewitness reports that two priests stood with rakes in their hands, sweeping the uncounted gold and silver from the altars. The entire treasure was at the free and irresponsible disposal of the pope, who professed to give in return pardon of all sin and everlasting life. During the Jubilee Boniface assumed alternately the splendid habiliments of pope and emperor, with the crown on his head, the sceptre in his hand, and the imperial sandals on his feet; and he had two swords, symbolical of temporal and spiritual power, borne before him, thus openly assuming the unlimited sovereignty of the world. By his bull Unam Sanctam, issued in 1302, he declared that strict submission to the Pope of Rome was absolutely essential to salvation for every individual of the human race. From this high and golden zenith of pretension he soon had a miserable and fatal fall. He had a long and hot quarrel with King Philip the Fair, of France, who was his equal in avarice, ambition and unscrupulousness, and he was just on the point of excommunicating Philip when the envoy of the latter, William of Nogaret, a stern and bold lawyer, whose grandfather had perished, on the side of the "heretics," in the Albigensian war, attacked with three hundred horsemen and seized the pope in his castle at Anagni, and insulted and imprisoned him. Thirty-four days afterwards the proud-hearted old man of eighty-two died a raving maniac, either beating out his own brains against the wall or smothering himself with his own pillows. The history of the world affords no more striking instance of the truth of the scriptural declaration that "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall" (Prov. xvi. 18).

Among the unscriptural and fanatical sects that appeared in Germany during the thirteenth century were those who called themselves "Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit." In their libertine doctrines and deeds they claimed to be above all law human and Divine. "Consistent pantheists, they denied the distinction between good and evil. All was good, they said, for God was good, and God was all and in all; as truly and as much in the sinner sinning as in the saint walking in uprightness; as much honored in and by the one as the other, for He had equally willed the sin and the uprightness." They looked with contempt upon the ordinances of the gospel and upon all external acts of religious worship; and maintained that all persons would finally be absorbed in the Deity, and thus become a part of the Godhead. This doctrine was made by many an apology for all kinds of wickedness. (The true people of God are not anti-Pauline, but Pauline Antinomians; that is, they carry their opposition to the law just as far as, and no further than, Paul did. While they earnestly maintain with him that they are justified freely, without the deeds of the law, by the grace and faith of Christ – that Christ is all their wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption – they, with equal earnestness, maintain with Paul – as Paul did not only in his doctrine, but also in his life – that the grace and faith of Christ do not make void, but rather establish, God’s holy, spiritual and good law of love in the heart of every believer forever, as that law was eternally in the heart of their elder brother, Christ, and is graciously written by God also in their hearts, in accordance with the blessed promise of the new and everlasting covenant. The Spirit of Christ, that dwells in His people, is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Holiness, and frees them from the love and bondage of sin, upholds them to walk lovingly in the way of His commandments, teaches them to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world, and to be careful to maintain good works, unto, which they were created new creatures in Christ Jesus, and in which God hath before ordained that they should walk.) The Catholic Inquisitors put large numbers of these people to death, not, of course, because of their wickedness, but because of their opposition to Rome.

The scriptural, simple, peaceful, industrious and upright Waldenses in Northern Italy were providentially protected by the favor of the Dukes of Savoy, during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until 1487.

NOTE. – Several eminent historians maintain that, in the very rough and wild times of the Dark Ages, the general influence of the Roman Catholic organization, notwithstanding the gross errors and vices and crimes of numerous individuals in that communion, was a great check on the evil passions of men, and a great political, social and moral benefit. – See George P. Fisher’s Reformation, p. 9; E. A. Freeman’s General Sketch of History, p. 169; and W. E. H. Lecky’s Rationalism, vol. ii., p. 37.

Even a nominal reverence for the true God, and a very imperfect acquaintance with the Scriptures of eternal truth, may be attended by important temporal advantages.