areas, it was their business to investigate heresy. Busy bishops often had little time for such investigations, however, and sometimes they lacked the inclination to get involved in them. In the early thirteenth century the great Pope Innocent III, although greatly concerned with suppressing heresy and banishing dangerous heretics such as the Cathars, was very lenient toward those of merely doubtful orthodoxy. He never mentioned the death penalty, and his policies were a great improvement over the