Once a victim was accused, escape from some kind of punishment was virtually impossible: the system would not allow it. But comparatively few were executed: less than ten per cent of those liable. LifeImprisonment was usual for those ‘converted’ by fear of death: this could be shortened by denunciations. Acts of sympathy or favor for heretics were punished by imprisonment or pilgrimage; there were also fines or floggings, and penance in some form was required of all those who came into contact with the infected, even though unknowingly and innocently. The smallest punishment was to wear yellow cloth crosses - an unpopular penalty since it prevented a man from getting employment; on the other hand, to cease to wear it was treated as a relapse into heresy. A spell in prison was virtually inevitable. Of course there was a shortage of prison-space, since solitary confinement was the rule. Once the Inquisition moved into an area, the bishop's prison was soon full; then the king's; then old buildings had to be converted, or new ones built. Food was the prisoner's own responsibility, though the bishop was supposed to provide bread and water in the case of poverty. The secular authorities did not like these crowded prisons, being terrified of gaol fever and plague, and thus burned many more people than the Church authorized. The system was saved from utter horror only by the usual medieval frailties: corruption, inertia, and sheer administrative incompetence. Where the system was employed against an entire community, as in Languedoc, it evoked resistance. There were riots, murders, the destruction of records. Many countries would not admit the Inquisition at all. In Spain, however, it became a state instrument, almost a national institution, like bullfighting, a mystery to foreigners but popular among the natives. It is surprising how often admirable, if eccentric, individuals were burned, not only without public protest but with general approval. Thus the fourteenth-century breakaway movement of Franciscans, the fraticelli, who opposed clerical property and reasserted the apostolic practices of their founder, were hunted and burned all over Europe but especially in their native Umbria and the Mark of Ancona; the crowds who watched them destroyed were apathetic or inclined to believe antinomianism was rightly punished. In the Middle Ages, the ruthless and confident exercise of authority could nearly always swing a majority behind it. And the victims of the flames usually died screaming in pain and terror, thus appearing to confirm the justice of the proceedings. The total Christian society of the Middle Ages was based on an intense belief in the supernatural. It tended to live on its nerves. Lacking any kind of system for determining the truth scientifically and objectively, society was often bewildered. Today's heterodoxy might become tomorrow's orthodoxy; and vice versa. The enthusiasm of faith so easily toppled over into hysteria, and so became violently destructive. Inside every saint there appeared a heretic struggling to get out; and the converse. One man’s Christ was another man's Antichrist. The official Church was conventional, orderly, hierarchical, committed to defend Society as it existed, with all its disparities and grievances. But there was also, as it were, an anti-Church, rebellious, egalitarian, revolutionary, which rejected society and its values and threatened to smash it to bits. It had its own tradition of revolutionary prophecy, inherited from the Jews, and continued into Christianity through the Book of Revelation, which acquired its place in the canon because it was believed to have been written by St John. Millenarianism had been, in the earliest days, almost the official political theory of the Church. But the eschatological moment had receded, and when Christianity became the state religion of the empire, millenarianism was frowned upon. Augustine, the ideologist of the official church, presented Revelation in his City of God as a mere spiritual allegory; the millenium had already begun with Christ and had been realized in the shape of the Church itself. But this did not end the argument, as he had hoped. Christians continued to believe in the millenium, the coming of Antichrist, cosmic battles, giant dragons, total upheavals of society ~ and endless series of signs which would presage these events. For better or for worse, the notion of the apocalypse was part of the canon, linked to bedrock articles of Christian belief it was too late to suppress. Moreover, the eschatological corpus was gradually added to by various sibylline texts: they had no canonical status but they were popular, and much used by preachers, writers and theologians. All stressed the coming battle between Christ and Antichrist. The idea could be reinterpreted to 84