Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/306

CHAPTER V. THE SLAVIC CATHARI. When Innocent III. found himself confronted with the alarm- ing progress of the Catharan heresy, his vigilant actnaty did not confine itself to Italy and Languedoc. The home of the belief lay to the east of the Adriatic among the Slavic races Thence came the missionaries who never ceased to stimulate the zeal ot their converts, and every motive of piety and of pohcy led him to combat the error at its source. Thus the field of battle stretched from the Balkans to the Pyrenees along a front of oyer a thou- sand miles, and the result might have been doubtful but for the concentration of moral and material forces resulting from the cen- tralized theocracy founded by Hildebrand. The contest in the regions south of Hungary is instructive as an illustration of the unconquerable persistence of Rome m con- ducting for centuries an apparently resultless struggle, undeterred by defeat, takmg advantage of every opening for a renewal of he strife, and using for its ends the ambition of monarchs and the self-sacrificing devotion of zealots. A condensed review of the rapid vicissitudes of such a contest is therefore not out of p^ace, although the scene of action lay too far from the centres of Euro- pean life to have decisive influence upon the development of Euro- pean thought and behef , except as it served as a refuge for the perse- cuted and a centre of orthodoxy to which neophytes could be sent. The vast regions east of the Adriatic scarce paid more than a nominal spiritual allegiance to Rome. A savage ^nd turbulent . population, conquered by Hungary towards the end o the eleventh century, and always endeavoring to throw off the yoke, was Chiis- tian in little more than name. Such Christianity as it boasted, moreover, was not Latin. The national ritual was Slavic, in spite of its prohibition by Gregory VII., and the Roman observance was detested, from its foreign origin, as the badge of subjugation.