The thirteenth century was the culminating period of this fatal notion and the sanction of it conferred by civil legislation as well as ecclesiastical teaching.

St.Louis joined, so far, with sincere conviction, in the general and ruling idea of his age; and the jumbled code which bears the name of _Etablissements de Saint Louis,_ and in which there are collected many ordinances anterior or posterior to his reign, formally condemns heretics to death, and bids the civil judges to see to the execution, in this respect, of the bishops' sentences.

In 1255 St.Louis himself demanded of Pope Alexander IV.

leave for the Dominicans and Franciscans to exercise, throughout the whole kingdom, the inquisition already established, on account of the Albigensians, in the old domains of the Counts of Toulouse.

The bishops, it is true, were to be consulted before condemnation could be pronounced by the inquisitors against a heretic; but that was a mark of respect for the episcopate and for the rights of the Gallican Church rather than a guarantee for liberty of conscience; and such was St.Louis's feeling upon this subject, that liberty, or rather the most limited justice, was less to be expected from the kingship than from the episcopate.