It is probable, too, that during the Dark Ages thousands of helpless souls were put to death as sorcerers by mobs without process of law, apart from those executed under the old laws against magic or divination, and the Teutonic codes of the same order. In a similar spirit, Christian mobs in all countries and ages had chronically wreaked a half-religious, half-economic hatred on the Jews, of whom enormous numbers died by massacre. Here the motive was not wholly religious, since their unfortunate specialization in usury--albeit forced upon them by Christian exclusiveness--had set up ill-will against the Jews in the period of the pagan empire, and even among the Moors, who had given them religious toleration. But Christian animus certainly counted for much, and carried the passion to lengths rarely reached in antiquity. Thus the common run of Christian life was grossly intolerant. It was left to the Church as such, however, to frame for the suppression of free thought in religion a machinery never paralleled in human history.
Though all the heresy hunts of the ancient Church had implied an inquisitorial ideal, nothing in the nature of a "Holy Office" had existed in the Church till the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It was felt that the faithful could as a rule be trusted to raise the cry of heresy wherever it could be scented. Such prompt action we have seen taken in the cases of Jovinian, Pelagius, Gottschalk, and Berengar. But in the twelfth century the spirit of militant orthodoxy, as seen in zealots like St. Bernard, had reached a strength which pointed to some systematic action on the part of the now much aggrandized papacy. St. Bernard's attitude to Abailard is that of the true Inquisitor: he suspects, to begin with, the accursed spirit of independent thought, and he is straightway determined to make an example of the upstart who dares to reason on all doctrines for himself. But even St. Bernard, eager as he was for the blood of Moslems, could hardly have anticipated the spirit in which the papacy acted from the Albigensian crusade onwards. Coincident with that crusade was the digging up of Amalrich's bones, the burning of his followers, and the veto on the study of Aristotle at Paris. Intolerance had entered on a new era.