If Louis at first thought to gain strength by thus utilizing the jealousy and dislike felt by the secular clergy towards the Mendicants, he soon realized that a surer source of support was to be found in espousing the side of the Franciscans in the quarrel forced upon them by John. The two months' delay granted by John expired March 7 without Louis making an appearance, and on March 25 the pope promulgated against him a sentence of excommunication, with a threat that he should be deprived of all rights if he did not submit within three months. To this Louis speedily rejoined in a document known as the Protest of Sachsenhausen, which shows that since December he had put himself in communication with the disaffected Franciscans, had entered into alliance with them, and had recognized how great was the advantage of posing as the defender of the faith and assailing the pope with the charge of heresy. After paying due attention to John's assaults on the rights of the empire, the Protest takes up the question of his recent bulls respecting poverty and argues them in much detail. John had declared before Franciscans of high standing that for forty years he had regarded the Rule of Francis as fantastic and impossible. As the Rule was revealed by Christ, this alone proves him to be a heretic. Moreover, as the Church is infallible in its definitions of faith, and as it has repeatedly, through Honorius III., Innocent IV., Alexander IV., Innocent V., Nicholas III., and Nicholas IV., pronounced in favor of the poverty of Christ and the apostles, John's condemnation of this tenet abundantly shows him to be a heretic. His two constitutions, _Ad conditorem_ and _Cum inter nonnullos_, therefore, have cut him off from the Church as a manifest heretic teaching a condemned heresy, and have disabled him from the papacy; all of which Louis swore to prove before a general council to be assembled in some place of safety.[148]
John proceeded with his prosecution of Louis by a further declaration, issued July 11, in which, without deigning to notice the Protest of Sachsenhausen, he pronounced Louis to have forfeited by his contumacy all claim to the empire; further obstinacy would deprive him of his ancestral dukedom of Bavaria and other possessions, and he was summoned to appear October 1, to receive final sentence. Yet John could not leave unanswered the assault upon his doctrinal position, and on November 10 he issued the bull _Quia quorumdam_, in which he argued that he had exercised no undue power in contradicting the decisions of his predecessors: he declared it a condemned heresy to assert that Christ and the apostles had only simple usufruct, without legal possession, in the things which Scripture declared them to have possessed, for if this were true it would follow that Christ was unjust, which is blasphemy. All who utter, write, or teach such doctrines fall into condemned heresy, and are to be avoided as heretics.[149]