Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/636

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G20 CONCLUSION. Greeks, showing that the inquisitors of the West were accustomed to lay hold of any unlucky Greek who might be found in the Mediterranean ports of France. Their fate was doubtless the same in Aragon, for Eymerich does not hesitate to qualify them as heretics. The persecuting spirit grew, for about 1350 the Coun- cil of Kicosia, although it allowed the four Greek bishops of Cy- prus to remain, still ordered all to be denounced as heretics who did not hold Rome to be the head of all churches and the pope to be the earthly vicar of Christ, and in 1351 a proclamation was issued ordering all Greeks to confess once a year to a Latin priest and to take the sacrament according to the Latin rite. If this was enforced, it must have provided the Inquisition with abun- dant victims, for in 1407 Gregory XII. defined that any Greek who reverted to schism after participating in orthodox sacraments was a relapsed, arid he ordered the inquisitor Elias Petit to punish him as such, calling in if necessary the aid of the secular arm.* The Venetians, when masters of Crete, endeavored to starve out the Greek Church by forbidding any bishop of that rite to enter the island, and any inhabitant to go to Constantinople for ordination. Yet, in 1373, Gregory XL learned with grief that a bishop had succeeded in landing, and that ordination was con- stantly sought by Cretans in Constantinople. He appealed to the Doge, Andrea Contareni, to have the wholesome laws enforced, but to little purpose, for in 1375 he announced that nearly all the inhabitants were schismatics, and that nearly all the cures were in the hands of Greek priests, to whom he offered the alternative of immediate conversion or ejectlon.f

  • Theiner Monument. Siavor. Meridional. I. 120. — Berger, Registres dTnnoc.

IV. No. 2058, 4053, 4750, 4769.— Barb, de 1 Mironi, Hist. Eccles. di Vicenza II. 102.— Thomas, Registres de Boniface VIII. No. 613-4.— Raynald. ann. 1318, No. 57.— Ripoll II. 172, 482.— B. Guidon. Practica P. n. No. 9; P. v. No. 11.— Ey- meric. p. 303.— Harduin. VII. 1700, 1709, 1720. The relations between the races in the Levant were not such as to win over the Greeks. A writer of the middle of the thirteenth century, who was zealous for the reunion of the churches, repeatedly alludes to the repulsion caused by the tyranny and injustice of the Latins towards the Greeks. Even the lowest of the former treated the Greeks with contempt, pulling them by the beard and stigmatizing them as dogs. — Opusc. Tripartiti P. n. c. xi., xvii. (Fasci.*. Rer. Ex- petend. et Fugiend. II. 215, 216, 221). t Raynald. ann. 1373, No. 18; ann. 1375, No. 25.