These extensive powers could only be put in practice by an elaborate machinery for their enforcement. In the first place the Pope was surrounded by a numerous body of officials to whom is applied from the middle of the eleventh century the title Curia. Gerhoh of Reichersberg, an ardent papal supporter writing about a century later, objects to the substitution for the word "Ecclesia" of this term "Curia," which would not be found in any old letters of the Roman pontiffs. The rapacity of the officials became a byword throughout Christendom. John of Salisbury told Hadrian IV, with whom he was on terms of intimacy, that many people said that the Roman Church, which is the mother of all the churches, shows herself to the others not so much a mother as a stepmother. "The Scribes and Pharisees sit in it, laying intolerable burdens on the shoulders of men, which they do not touch with a finger.... They render justice not so much for truth's sake as for a price.... The Roman pontiff himself becomes burdensome to all, and almost intolerable." Honorius III in 1226 acknowledged to the English bishops that this greed was a long-standing scandal and disgrace, but he ascribed it to the poverty of Rome, and proposed that in order to remove the difficulty two stalls should be given to him for nomination in every cathedral and collegiate chapter. The magnates considered the remedy, if possible, worse than the disease. The popular songs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contain many references to the fact that nothing was to be had at Rome except for money, and that success in a cause went to the richest suitor. And yet Rome had many sources of wealth. She drew regular revenues from estates which had been given to the papal see; from monasteries which were subject to visitation of papal officers alone; from kingdoms, such as England, whose kings had made themselves feudal vassals of the Pope. Several nations, moreover, paid special taxes, such as Peter's Pence, a kind of hearth tax, which went from England. The Papacy also exacted a number of dues on various pretexts which increased with the growth of papal power. Such were the Annates or Firstfruits and analogous payments, which amounted to the value of the first year's income, and were claimed from newly appointed bishops and abbots as an acknowledgment of the papal right of confirmation. Nor did Metropolitans get their pall, which was necessary for the exercise of their special authority, without the payment of considerable sums. Over and above these regular and occasional sources, the Popes exacted on especial occasions, such as the Crusades, a tax amounting to a tenth on all ecclesiastical property, and even allowed kings to take it with their leave. But these formed a small portion of the money which found its way to Rome. When the papal legate found fault with Ivo of Chartres because simony was still prevalent in his diocese, the bishop retorted that those who practised it excused their action from the example of Rome, where not even a pen and paper were to be had free. Dante addresses the shade of Pope Nicholas III in the _Inferno_ (xix.):--