Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/83

JOHN XXII. 67 Sprung from the most humble origin, his abilities and force of character had carried him from one preferment to another, until he reached the chair of St. Peter. He was short in stature but robust in health, choleric and easily moved to wrath, while his enmity once excited was durable, and his rejoicing when his foes came to an evil end savored little of the Christian pastor. Per- sistent and inflexible, a purpose once undertaken was pursued to the end regardless of opposition from friend or enemy. He was especially proud of his theologic attainments, ardent in disputa- tion, and impatient of opposition. After the fashion of the time he was pious, for he celebrated mass almost every day, and almost every night he arose to recite the Office or to study. Among his good works is enumerated a poetical description of the Passion of Christ, concluding with a prayer, and he gratified his vanity as an author by proclaiming many indulgences as a reward to all who would read it through. His chief characteristics, however, were ambition and avarice. To gratify the former he waged endless wars with the Yisconti of Milan, in which, as we are assured by a contemporary, the blood shed would have incarnadined the waters of Lake Constance, and the bodies of the slain would have bridged it from shore to shore. As for the latter, his quenchless greed displayed an exhaustless fertility of resource in converting the treasures of salvation into current coin. He it was who first reduced to a system the " Taxes of the Penitentiary," which offered absolution at fixed prices for every possible form of human wickedness, from five grossi for homicide or incest, to thirty-three grossi for ordination below the canonical age. Before he had been two years in the papacy he arrogated to himself the presentation to all the collegiate benefices in Christendom, under the convenient pretext of repressing simony, and then from their sale we are told that he accumulated an immense treasure. Another still more remunerative device was the practice of not filling a vacant episco- pate from the ranks, but establishing a system of promotion from a poorer see to a richer one, and thence to archbishoprics, so that each vacancy gave him the opportunity of making numerous changes and levying tribute on each. Besides these regular sources of unhallow-ed gains he was fertile in special expedients, as when, in 1326, needing money for his Lombard wars, he applied to Charles le Bel for authority to levy a subsidy on the churches of France,