As nations sought to define themselves through legal and literary means, the spectre of torture encouraged by secular and ecclesiastical institutions loomed large and was cast as a weapon of tyranny. As Caroline Smith points out, the thirteenth century was ‘a vital one in the formation of France and its literary culture’. This formation is evident in the implicit resistance in literary sources to the legal application of torture, the perception of which is rooted in the proliferation of inquisitorial tribunals, particularly in Languedoc, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. James Given explains that the work of inquisitors in Languedoc is ‘persuasive testimony to the power medieval rulers could generate through the careful and determined applications of [torture] techniques’, but the same techniques employed by inquisitors for ‘seeking out, isolating, breaking down, and condemning heretics or imagined heretics were not effective in generating active support for their work’. In an attempt to quell heretical uprisings and stamp out individual sects, Pope Gregory IX codified the existing legislation concerning heresy in 1231, creating the Inquisition as an institution. It was not a single autonomous body but individual tribunals that were never unified; ‘indeed, virtually no provision was made to assure mutual cooperation between them’.