The other employed subtle means to fill the vacuum thus created with spurious erudition, sophistries, casuistical abominations and false doctrines profitable to the Papal absolutism.

Opposed in temper and in method, the one fierce and rigid, the other saccharine and pliant, these two bad angels of Rome contributed in almost equal measure to the triumph of Catholicism.
In the earlier ages of the Church, the definition of heresy had been committed to episcopal authority.

But the cognizance of heretics and the determination of their punishment remained in the hands of secular magistrates.

At the end of the twelfth century the wide diffusion of the Albigensian heterodoxy through Languedoc and Northern Italy alarmed the chiefs of Christendom, and furnished the Papacy with a good pretext for extending its prerogatives.

Innocent III.