ABSTRACT
The same year as John of Vicenza was presiding over the burning ofheretics in Verona, Conrad of Marburg, a secular priest, was putting dissenters to death in Rhineland and Robert ‘le Bougre’, a former Cathar turned Dominican friar, was being encouraged to continue burning folk on the borders between France and Germany. Technically these were different operations, since the last two were inquisitors, specifically designated by Pope Gregory IX to investigate heresy, but in practice the episodes were similar and reflect a growing impatience among churchmen with the spiritual marketplace which had emerged in the early thirteenth century. Only later, after this approach had encountered repeated failure, did a more considered strategy emerge, relying on systematic gathering of information and the imposition of a range of punishments. The ‘ad hoc’ inquisitions became a recognised institution and their accumulated records slowly buried the remaining Cathars.
