Progress From the First to the Fourteenth Century - James Aitken Wylie

Chapter 9
Crusades Against the
Albigenses
THE torch of persecution was fairly kindled in
the beginning of the thirteenth century. Those
baleful fires, which had smoldered since the fall of
the Empire, were now re-lighted, but it must be
noted that this was the act not of the State but of
the Church. Rome had founded her dominion upon
the dogma of persecution. She sustained herself
"Lord of the conscience." Out of this prolific but
pestiferous root came a whole century of
fulminating edicts, to be followed by centuries of
blazing piles. It could not be but that this maxim,
placed at the foundation of her system, should
inspire and mold the whole policy of the Church of
Rome. Divine mistress of the conscience and of the
faith, she claimed the exclusive right to prescribe to
every human being what he was to believe, and to
pursue with temporal and spiritual terrors every
form of worship different from her own, till she
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