The Cathars, the most Successful
Heresy of the Middle Ages
By Sean Martin
The Albigensian Crusade
The Languedoc at the Turn of the Thirteenth Century
The Languedoc in the year 1200 was a society in remarkable flower. It was one of the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated areas of Europe: trade flourished in the great towns of Toulouse and Carcassonne, with Toulouse itself being only outclassed by Rome and Venice in terms of size and cultural life.The arts were enjoying a renascence, with the ideals of courtly love being praised in the songs and poems of the Troubadours. Religious tolerance was conspicuous, and Jews in particular enjoyed freedoms that they were denied elsewhere. Woven into this rich fabric was Catharism, which, by the turn of the thirteenth century, was endemic throughout the Languedoc. Encouraged by the momentous visit of Nicetas, the Perfect had been hard at work for over a generation, spreading the dualist word throughout the south, creating an heretical kingdom that stretched from Provence to Aragon. That they had been so successful is a tribute both to the temerity and faith of the Perfect, but also to the unique way of life that the Languedoc was enjoying at this high-water mark in its history.
The name Languedoc is a contraction of langue d’oc, the ‘language of yes’, a reference to the fact that in the region’s native tongue, Occitan, yes is oc, not oui.The French language and those who spoke it were far to the north in the Île de France. Power in the Languedoc was shared between the counts of Toulouse, Foix and Comminges, and the viscounts of Béziers and Carcassonne. Although the Languedocian Cathars did not argue amongst themselves, the lords of Languedoc resembled the Italian Cathars: disputes were frequent, quarrels habitual, petty vendettas the norm.
The most powerful of them all was Raymond VI, count of Toulouse. His court was a kaleidoscopic mix of Catholic, Cathar and Jew, entertained by Troubadours and Jongleurs. His friends, as Stephen O’Shea notes, ‘were not distinguished for their piety.’55 Raymond had inherited his title in 1194 from his father, Raymond V. His parents seem to have been on opposite sides of the fence in matters of faith: Raymond’s mother, Constance, had been present at Lombers in 1165 when the Cathars had faced down their Catholic opponents, while his father had invited a group of churchmen to investigate the heresy situation in his lands in 1177.They came, they saw, and promptly concluded that eradicating Catharism from the Languedoc was an impossible task, and went home as soon as possible.The one man whom they did manage to convict was sent to Jerusalem as penance.When he got back to Toulouse, far from having his tail between his legs, he was given a hero’s welcome and was promptly given a well-paid job. This pretty much summed things up: as St Bernard had found to his cost, the Languedoc was indeed a ‘land of many heresies’ and respect for the Church was about as low as it could possibly be.
The Church during Raymond VI’s early years as count of Toulouse unfortunately deserved everything it got. The clergy were deeply unpopular: they were conspicuously indulgent, and there were churches where Mass had not been said in years. The locals used the phrase ‘I’d rather be a priest’ when asked to do something they would rather not. The bishop of Toulouse was a classic case in point: Raymond of Rabastens was a galloping financial liability. His main claim to fame seems to have been mortgaging church property in order to conduct a private war against his own vassals (done with the aid of mercenaries hired for the occasion). Raymond duly bankrupted the diocese, and was replaced with the more able Fulk of Marseilles, who had been a former Troubadour and was thought to be the only man who could handle the hornet’s nest of the Languedoc. Such was the dire state of diocesan finances that when Fulk took over he did not dare send his mules to the well for water lest they be repossessed.
The moribund state of the Church was not helped by constant interferences from the nobility. The activities of the Trencavels – rivals to Raymond VI’s family, the St Gilles – are a case in point. In 1178, they had the bishop of Albi arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown into jail, while the following year they forced an enormous sum of money out of the coffers of the monastery of St Pons-deThomières. In 1197, they contested the election of a new abbot in Alet, in the highlands of Languedoc. Their intermediary in the dispute, Bertrand de Saissac (several of whose family were Perfect), decided to show the Church who was boss: he dug up the body of the former abbot, propped him up in a chair and asked him who should be his successor. Bertrand got his way, a Trencavel puppet was installed and the late abbot was returned to his resting place.
In the midst of all this chaos, the Cathars were quietly, but firmly, spreading their faith. While the likes of Raymond VI and the Trencavels were either priest-baiting or conducting territorial wars against fellow nobles, the Good Christians were establishing themselves in home and hearth across the length and breadth of the Languedoc. Part of the reason for their success had to do with their respect for women, who enjoyed a higher status in the Languedoc than in most other parts of Europe. Primogeniture was non-existent, which resulted in estates being shared between sons and daughters. Although men were the largest landowners, women did at least stand a chance of being able to own property and thereby increase their status. Catharism helped women further: unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathars saw the sexes as equal, and there was nothing to stop any girl or woman becoming a Perfect. It is not surprising that women responded quickly to Catharism, given that the dualist faith actively encouraged women to participate, with the possibility of becoming Perfect and therefore semi-divine.The Catholic Church offered no such respect. In short, if you were a woman in the Languedoc of 1200, it made more sense to be a Cathar than a Catholic.
Cathar women therefore played a crucial role in the nurturing of the faith. While male Cathars travelled the countryside in pairs gaining new converts, the women established a network of Cathar houses; some of them, such as the houses at Laurac and Villemur, were exclusively for women. A number of the leading Cathar women of the early thirteenth century were also related to the nobility, either by blood or by marriage: Esclarmonde of Foix was the sister of Raymond Roger of Foix, one of the Languedoc’s leading nobles, while Blanche of Laurac, was married to Aimery, count of Laurac and Montréal.
Innocent III
The appointment of Fulk of Marseilles to the destitute bishopric of Toulouse was part of a wider plan of reform initiated by the new pope, Innocent III. Born Lotario dei Conti di Segni in 1160, Innocent studied theology in Paris and law in Bologna before taking the cloth. His rapid ascension through the Church paid its ultimate dividend when, on 22 February 1198, he was crowned pope. It was the end of a long and frequently disastrous century for the Church: 11 of the twelfth century’s 16 popes had seen out their pontificates in places other than Rome, which was barred to them by the likes of Arnold of Brescia, rioters and foreign kings. The papacy was on shaky ground, too, with the Holy Roman Emperors. Frederick Barbarossa in particular had been a thorn in Rome’s side for much of his reign, which had only come to an end when the emperor drowned crossing a river during the Third Crusade. Innocent was well aware of the troubles his predecessors had endured, and was determined to prevent history repeating itself.
The situation in the Languedoc was high on Innocent’s list from the beginning. There had been periodic attempts to tackle heresy before his accession. Aside from the delegation which responded to Raymond V’s invitation in 1177, the Third Lateran Council of 1179 had debated the issue of heresy, and decreed that force could be used to extirpate it. Two years later, Henri de Marcy besieged Lavaur, where two Cathars were known to be hiding. The town surrendered and handed over the Cathars, who were persuaded to return to the Church and became canons in Toulouse. Of greater significance was the papal bull Ad abolendam, issued by pope Lucius III in 1184. Although it focused on Italy as much as the Languedoc, it was the first direct attempt to deal directly with the problem of heresy. It denounced various sects – including the Cathars – and instructed clergy to make annual visits to parishes where heresy was suspected. However, Christendom had more pressing matters to deal with. The situation in the Latin east was deteriorating, and in 1187 it was overrun by Saladin’s forces. Jerusalem fell on 2 October of that year, and suddenly heresy seemed to be of little consequence.
With the Languedoc’s mixture of heretics, religious toleration, corrupt clergy and godless nobles, Innocent realised that action needed to be taken at once to prevent the already bad situation there from getting worse. In one letter, he described the clergy of Narbonne as ‘blind men, dumb dogs who can no longer bark … men who will do anything for money … zealous in avarice, lovers of gifts, seekers of rewards.’There was no doubt in Innocent’s mind as to who was the biggest offender: ‘The chief cause of all these evils is the Archbishop of Narbonne, whose god is money, whose heart is in his treasury, who is concerned only with gold.’56 Innocent tried to woo Raymond VI by lifting the excommunication the count had received in 1195 from Innocent’s predecessor, Celestine III, for abusing the monastery of St Gilles. Raymond seemed little concerned, and so Innocent tried the more direct tack of writing him a number of letters, urging the count of Toulouse to do something about the Cathars. He did not mince his words. One letter rails at Raymond: ‘So think, stupid man, think!’57
Innocent was not relying solely on Raymond, however, which was just as well, as Raymond was either unable or unwilling to persecute the Cathars. In April 1198, only two months after being made pope, Innocent commissioned the Cistercians to preach in the Languedoc with the specific aim of winning the heretics back into the arms of the Church. On 25 March 1199, he issued the bull Vergentis in senium, which equated heresy with the Roman crime of treason against the emperor, echoing the imperial statute Lex quisquis of 397. The punishment for heresy was to be the confiscation of property and the disinheritance of descendants.The civil right of election and of holding civil office was also forfeited. If the heretics were clergy, they were stripped of benefices; if they were lawyers, they were forbidden to exercise office as judges. Although it was initially intended to cover Italy, specifically Viterbo, whose Cathar population was militant and aggressive in a manner similar to the Paulicians, Innocent planned to extend Vergentis to other lands as soon as circumstance would allow. The following year, circumstance did just that, and Innocent suggested in no uncertain terms to the king of Hungary that he use Vergentis against heretics in Bosnia, while in the Languedoc, papal legates arrived to begin the work of smoking out heretics and confiscating their property.
Innocent potentially had another card up his sleeve. A dispute had arisen with the Hohenstaufen leader, Markward of Anweiler, who was acting as guardian to the child emperor, Frederick II. As a last resort, Innocent wrote to the people of Sicily (the Hohenstaufen court being in Palermo), urging insurrection against Markward. He drew parallels between Markward and Saladin, and offered Crusade indulgences to anyone who would take the sword against the German. Although the plan came to nothing – Markward died in 1202 – it shows that, even at this early stage of his pontificate, Innocent was thinking along military lines when dealing with enemies. 1199 would indeed prove to be a turning point: a further Crusade against fellow Christians was theoretically possible. A precedent had been set.
An Enterprise of Peace and Faith
Innocent decided to replace his initial legates in the Languedoc – a certain John of St Paul and his companion – with three new recruits in 1203. All of the men were southerners: Arnold Amaury was no less than the Abbot of Cîteaux, while his two colleagues were both from the monastery of Fontfroide. Peter of Castelnau had been trained as a lawyer, and, like lawyers both before and after his time, had the habit of being violently disliked, so much so that he was subject to frequent death threats while on his tour of duty in the south. The third Cistercian, Brother Ralph, seems to have been the least troublesome of the three, and had at times to go into diplomatic overdrive to patch up the damage caused by Peter. They were universally loathed, and were to play a crucial role in the unfolding of events. Innocent referred to their undertaking as ‘negotium pacis et fidei’ – the enterprise of peace and faith.
The trio’s first prong of attack was to try to force the local nobility to swear oaths of allegiance to the Church, in which they would also agree to anti-Cathar legislation. Failure to do so would result in instant excommunication. Toulouse, Montpellier, Arles and Carcassonne all agreed – at least in principle – with the measures the legates were proposing. Raymond VI was not happy, however, as the anti-heretical statutes that the consuls of Toulouse had agreed to effectively diminished his rights as count. For the time being, he did what he had been doing all along when it came to persecuting the Cathars: nothing.
The trio’s second prong of attack was to invite the Cathars to debate with them, in public, on matters of doctrine. Arnold, Peter and Ralph hoped they might be capable of rousing the people as St Bernard had done at Albi, rather than facing the humiliation the saint had endured at Verfeil. The first debate was held at Carcassonne in 1204, with Raymond VI’s brother-in-law, King Peter II of Aragon, acting as the adjudicator as 13 Cathars faced 13 Catholics. The two sides defined their positions eloquently, but the debate ended inconclusively.The papal legates were unable to have the Cathars put in chains or on pyres, and left Carcassonne in a fume of frustration. It looked as though their efforts would echo St Bernard’s defeat at Verfeil after all.
After Carcassonne, things only became more difficult for the legates. No one liked them being there: the Cathars naturally regarded them as the servants of Satan, but the clergy also were uncomfortable with the presence of the three Cistercians, no doubt fearful their cosy lifestyles and riches would disappear overnight.The nobility saw them as foreign meddlers, attempting to bring the ways of Rome to a land that had absolutely no need for them. Peter of Castelnau, already angry at the response he had so far encountered, tendered his resignation in 1205, begging to be allowed to go back to Fontfroide. Innocent refused his request. Although the pope did not know it at the time, he had just signed Peter’s death warrant.
And so the trio plodded on, criss-crossing the Languedoc, haranguing nobles and disputing with the Cathars, but all to no avail – the heresy was too deeply entrenched. In Montpellier in the spring of 1206 the three Cistercians wearily concluded that they had failed. They were indeed in a land of many heresies, heresies that had defeated St Bernard and had defeated – and would probably outlive – the three legates. It was at this point that the luck of the campaign began to change. They were approached by two Spaniards, Diego de Azevedo, bishop of Osma, and his younger sub-prior, Dominic Guzman. Diego and Dominic told the Cistercians that they had seen the Perfect at first hand, and they had been struck by the Cathars’ lives of the utmost simplicity, humility and poverty. The Perfect owned nothing except the clothes they stood up in and their holy books, a sharp contrast to the Cistercians, who travelled in pomp and circumstance with a retinue of lackeys and bodyguards. The Spaniards suggested that Arnold, Peter and Ralph take on the Cathars at their own game, citing the example of the Sending of the Seventy (Luke 10.1–12).The Cistercians were impressed, and agreed to the plan.
The summer of 1206 was a busy one, seeing the men adopting the apostolic model and preaching in poverty across the Languedoc. There were debates in Servian, Béziers, Carcassonne again, Pamiers, Fanjeaux, Montréal and Verfeil. As with the first debate at Carcassonne, these were lively and protracted affairs, sometimes lasting a week or more.58 Without the usual Roman regalia to hamper them, they were getting results: 150 Cathar Believers were said to have been converted after the Montréal debate. But it was not enough.The enterprise of peace and faith had been in operation for three years, and the number of souls brought back to the Church was negligible for the amount of effort expended. By the spring of 1207, the preaching and debating seemed to have run its course, and Arnold Amaury left to chair a Cistercian conference. Peter of Castelnau was less easily dissuaded, and spent the rest of the year trying to get various Languedocian nobles to start rounding up the Cathars. Ralph followed in his wake, trying to keep Peter away from the crowds, almost all of whom detested him without reservation. In what debates remained, Fulk of Marseilles took his place. Dominic continued to preach, and even managed to found a convent for former Cathar women at Prouille.
Raymond VI again proved to be the stumbling block in the Church’s path. Peter visited the count of Toulouse at a time when he was conducting one of his wars, this latest one being against his vassals in Provence. Peter wanted Raymond to turn his attention away from conducting private wars using mercenaries – who were a common feature of armed conflict in the Languedoc – and begin actively to persecute heretics. Raymond protested that he couldn’t do without his mercenaries: they were a vital component of his power base. He refused to swear an oath of allegiance, and Peter excommunicated him on the spot. It was Raymond’s second excommunication, but it would not be his last. Peter’s final words on the subject echoed around the hall in which he and Raymond – and numerous other nobles – were gathered: ‘He who dispossesses you will be accounted virtuous; he who strikes you dead will earn a blessing.’59
Raymond moved into diplomatic gear. He agreed to begin persecuting the Cathars and, by the summer, his excommunication had been lifted. By the autumn, having done nothing, he was excommunicated again. By now, patience was fraying on all sides. Innocent wanted action against the Cathars, while Raymond wanted the Catholic Church to stop meddling in his affairs. A new meeting was arranged at Raymond’s castle at St Gilles in early 1208. Exchanges between Raymond and Peter were heated, with the count threatening physical violence against the papal legate. On Sunday, 13 January, negotiations broke down completely. Peter left for Rome at first light next morning. He was never to get there. While waiting for the ferry across the Rhône, a hooded rider galloped up to Peter and put a sword through him. The identity of the assassin remains unknown, but it mattered little: it was now war.
The Albigensian Crusade
When Innocent heard the news, he was said to have buried his face in his hands, before going off to St Peter’s to pray.60 Raymond was not forthcoming with an apology, and, although it could not be proved that he had ordered Peter’s murder, his lack of apology was seen as an admission of guilt. It was a diplomatic blunder of monumental proportions. That Peter had so many enemies in the Languedoc that the list of potential suspects could have included most of the nobility and the clergy was irrelevant.61 Innocent was convinced of Raymond’s complicity in the killing, and, on 10 March, called for a Crusade. The use of force had been in the air ever since the trouble with Markward of Anweiler, and Innocent had been considering a campaign in the south since at least the previous November. The Crusade was to be preached by Arnold Amaury and Fulk of Marseilles, who spent the better part of 1208 rallying support from kings and nobles across Europe. Most were too busy fighting each other to go off and do the pope’s bidding, but Arnold’s and Fulk’s persistence paid off and, by the middle of the following year, a ragtag army of nobles, knights and mercenaries were on their way. Innocent had given them the full Crusade indulgence: forgiveness of all sins, cancellation of debts and the promise of booty in the shape of land confiscated from the Cathars and their sympathisers. The Albigensian Crusade – like all Crusades before it – adopted the feudal custom that all who went on it only had to serve for 40 days before being released from their military obligations. The Languedoc also had the advantage of being easier to get to than the Middle East. Crusaders flooded down the Rhône valley in their droves.
Innocent had not given up entirely on diplomacy, but the deaths of Ralph of Fontfroide and Diego of Osma within 18 months of Peter’s assassination had left the Church without two of its most valuable diplomatic assets in the south. Raymond had not given up on his own brand of diplomacy either. After failing to persuade Raymond Roger Trencavel, the 24-year-old viscount of Carcassonne, Béziers and Albi to join him in submitting to the Church – possibly as an attempt to keep the Crusaders off his lands – the count of Toulouse agreed to undergo a humiliating penitential scourging at the church of St Gilles. He was stripped naked and thrashed by a papal legate in front of two dozen bishops and a huge crowd of Toulousains, before being led into the church to swear allegiance to both the Church and the Crusade. He agreed to serve for the required 40-day period, but the demands forced on him did not stop there: he also had to renounce any claims he might have over religious institutions on his lands, and to apologise to all the clergy he had insulted, harassed and extorted money from. Seven of his castles had to be forfeited, as was the use of mercenaries, and all the Jews he employed had to be dismissed. When it came to the Cathars, he was to do as he was told: it was up to the Church, not the count of Toulouse, to decide who was a heretic and who wasn’t. If Raymond stepped out of line, he was to be judged by papal legates. It was harsh treatment, and everyone knew it. The count of Toulouse had been made an example of. It was 18 June 1209, and apocalypse was only weeks away.
Raymond Roger Trencavel knew time was running out, but was confident that, as a Catholic, he would be able to parley with the Church. After all, most of Innocent’s efforts had been directed against Raymond, the Cathars and their supporters who lived on his lands, and he must have thought that he was in a strong position. He was wrong. The Trencavels had a long record of antagonising the Church. In one of their boldest coups, Raymond Roger had kicked out the bishop of Carcassonne and installed a puppet. The new bishop’s mother, sister and three of his brothers were all Perfect. Realising that Raymond VI had played a very canny hand by undergoing his scourging and submission, Raymond Roger also offered to submit to the Church, join the Crusade and take action against the Cathars. Arnold Amaury refused to allow this.The crusading army moved towards Béziers, while Raymond Roger retreated to Carcassonne.
Béziers – which had refused to hand over its Cathars to the Cistercians in 1205 – was annihilated on 22 July, as described in the Prologue above. Such was the scale of atrocity that even Crusade apologists such as Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay felt the need to distance themselves from it by blaming the bloodbath on the ribauds, the mercenaries. That such – even by mediaeval standards – appalling cruelty had been authorised by the papal legate, Arnold Amaury, was no doubt felt by some in the Church to have been justified. Arnold certainly thought so, and wrote to Innocent that ‘the workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.’62 This view is echoed by the English writer, Gervase of Tilbury,63 who described the situation in terms of a conversation between a priest and a ghost. The ghost told the priest that God had approved of the death of the Cathars, and that the citizens of Béziers had sinned because they had tolerated the presence of the Cathars in their town.64
The news of the atrocity at Béziers spread like wildfire. The Crusaders marched on Narbonne, which, fearing a similar fate, surrendered at the first sight of the Crusade. Carcassonne was next, and Raymond Roger Trencavel knew it. He implemented a scorched-earth policy around the city to make the land as inhospitable as possible for the Crusaders, who arrived on 1 August.The following day, the suburb of Bourg, which lay outside the city walls, fell. Further progress was halted by the arrival of King Peter II of Aragon, who asked to speak to Raymond Roger, who was his vassal. Peter informed Raymond Roger that he had brought the Crusade on himself by allowing Cathars – ‘a few fools and their folly’ as he described them unmolested in his city. Peter urged negotiations, as the size of the crusading army vastly outnumbered Raymond Roger’s men.
Talks began, and Arnold Amaury guaranteed Raymond Roger safe passage from the city once the surrender had been effected.The fate of the city’s inhabitants would be left to the discretion of the Crusaders. Peter left in disgust at such terms and went back to Aragon.The siege dragged on. In losing Bourg and its wells, Carcassonne had lost its supplies of fresh water, and the city was soon suffering under a miasma of typhoid and dysentery. Raymond Roger was coaxed out of the city by a relative to negotiate. The precise details of the deal are not known, but Raymond Roger managed to save the lives of all the people of Carcassonne – including all the Cathars – on the condition that they leave the city. On 15 August, they did just that. They were not allowed to take with them anything more than the clothes they were wearing; many emerged from the gates barefoot.Arnold reneged on the promise he had made to Peter of Aragon, and had Raymond Roger clapped in chains in the dungeon of his own castle. He died there on 10 November, allegedly of dysentery. At the end of August, Raymond Roger’s lands, and the leadership of the Crusade, passed to an obscure noble whose name was to become synonymous with ruthlessness and terror on a scale never before seen: Simon de Montfort.
Simon de Montfort
De Montfort was, until Carcassonne, only a minor feature of the Albigensian Crusade. He had distinguished himself during the attack on Carcassonne other suburb, Castellar, and also during the Fourth Crusade, when he had refused to take part in the sack of the port of Zara on the Adriatic. This was not due to cowardice on Simon’s part – he was a fearless warrior, almost suicidally so at times – but due to principle: the Crusade was meant to be attacking Muslims, not fellow Christians. He left the Crusade disillusioned. Simon’s family were middling wealthy, with lands in the north, near Paris, and also possessed the earldom of Leicester, with which Simon’s fourth son, another Simon, would become closely associated.
Arnold Amaury began to look for a successor to Raymond Roger after the fall of Carcassonne. He approached the nobles one by one, but all declined on political grounds, fearing a potentially jealous reaction from Philip Augustus, the French king. Simon, with his modest holdings in the north, was deemed a safer choice, especially as his military credentials and piety were beyond reproach.The Trencavel lands had a new viscount, and the Albigensian Crusade a new leader.
Simon’s immediate problems were twofold: with the winter drawing on, most of the northern nobles returned home, and a number of the castles that had submitted to the Crusaders in the wake of Béziers had been retaken by southern forces. Indeed, resistance to the northerners was to be a near permanent feature of the Albigensian Crusade, and at Lombers there was even an attempt on Simon’s life. No doubt such actions reinforced Simon’s belief that he was fighting a just war; the towns and cities of the Languedoc were viewed – unlike Zara – not as Christian, but heretical, and the only way to bring them to submission was through merciless brutality. [it is a disease to worry about what someone else believes DC]
The campaigning season of 1210 got off to just such a start. In early April, Simon had taken the small town of Bram after a siege lasting only three days. He ordered 100 of Bram’s defenders on a forced march. Before setting off, the men were blinded, and had their noses and upper lips cut off.The man at the head of the procession was left with one eye intact, to guide his mutilated comrades to Cabaret, the nearest town 20 or so miles distant, which was known to be sheltering Cathars. It was the most hideous of warnings; Cabaret would fall to Simon within the year.
In June, the Crusaders besieged Minerve, a town perched on rocky cliffs 30 miles to the east of Cabaret. A huge trebuchet nicknamed The Bad Neighbour began bombarding the stone staircase that led to the town’s wells, which lay at the foot of the cliffs. Once the wells were inaccessible, all the Crusaders had to do was wait; it would be Carcassonne all over again. Despite an unsuccessful attempt by the town’s defenders to set The Bad Neighbour alight, the trebuchet continued to bombard the town into July. With their water supply cut off, Minerva’s lord, William, had no other option than to surrender. He offered Simon all of his lands and castles on the condition that everyone within the walls of Minerve be spared. Simon agreed, and was just about to let the exhausted defenders of Minerve leave when the papal legate, Arnold Amaury, arrived.
Arnold, superior in authority to Simon, told William that everyone could go free on the condition that they swore allegiance to the Church. All the townspeople did so, but the Cathars were another matter. Swearing oaths was anathema to the Cathars, swearing one of allegiance to Rome unthinkable. Three Believers went back to Catholicism, but the rest remained unrepentant. On 22 July 1210, exactly a year to the day since the atrocities at Béziers, all 140 Cathar Perfect in Minerve were burnt in the valley below the town. It was the first mass burning of the Crusade. It would not be the last. [these people were batshit crazy DC]
After Minerve, the remaining Trencavel castra – fortified towns – of Montréal, Termes and Puylaurens all fell to Simon’s forces. It was while besieging Lavaur in the spring of 1211, that Simon’s tactics reached new extremes of cruelty. No doubt enraged by the fact that reinforcements from Germany had been wiped out by Raymond Roger of Foix at Montgey near St Félix the day before they were expected to arrive at Lavaur, Simon’s forces breached the walls of the town on 3 May.
With flagrant disregard for the conventions of mediaeval warfare, all 80 knights defending Lavaur were hanged, as was its lord, Aimery of Montréal, who was suspected of being a Cathar Believer. His sister, Geralda, was famed for her generosity towards Cathars who had been displaced from towns that the Crusaders had taken. She was thrown down a well and stoned to death.All the town’s Perfect – around 400 – were burnt at the stake. It was the largest mass execution of the Crusade.
Later in the same month, between 50 and 100 Perfect were burnt outside the town of Les Cassès. If one were looking for proof that the world was, according to Cathar belief, evil, one would need to look no further than the events of May 1211.
Toulouse was next in Simon’s sights, and the siege started the month after the bonfires at Lavaur. Within its walls, Raymond VI had not been having an easy time. He had been excommunicated yet again in September 1209 for failing to show enough commitment to the Crusade. The count then journeyed to Rome to bargain with Innocent, who allowed him to remain within the Christian fold, but only just. He then began a frantic diplomatic campaign, making good on all the promises that he had committed to during his scourging the previous June.Toulouse, meanwhile, was being terrorised by its bishop, Fulk of Marseilles, who had organised a vigilante group called the White Brotherhood, whose main occupation was nightly attacks on the homes of Cathars and Jews. In response, the Toulousains formed the Black Brotherhood, who clashed with the Whites on the city’s streets on an almost daily basis.To cap it all, Raymond had been excommunicated for a fifth time at the Council of Montpellier in February 1211 after refusing to obey its directives, which would have restored him to the Church at the cost of abandoning all his possessions and giving up his titles. It was, therefore, a moment of respite when Simon called off the siege of Toulouse after only two weeks.
Peter II of Aragon was particularly sensitive to the threat posed to Toulouse and Raymond’s lands. He attempted to negotiate with Innocent. He knew he was in a strong position: as one of the commanders of the crusading army which had achieved a decisive victory over Moorish forces on 16 July 1212 at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in Andalusia, he was one of the heroes of Christendom. He argued that the Crusade had betrayed its original purpose – that of exterminating the Cathars – as it was now becoming evident that Simon de Montfort had killed as many Catholics as Cathars, if not more, and was also in the process of building up a nice little empire for himself. Peter proposed that he should oversee all of Raymond’s possessions, which would then pass to the count’s son, the future Raymond VII, when he came of age, leaving Peter to mop up the vestiges of Catharism that remained.
Innocent weighed up Peter’s proposition, and was prepared to find in the Aragonese king’s favour. On 17 January 1213, Innocent stunned Church forces in the Languedoc by announcing the end of the Albigensian Crusade, and instructed Simon de Montfort to return lands to the counts of Foix, Comminges and Béarn. Arnold Amaury protested loudly, arguing that the Crusade was still valid, as the Cathars remained very much at large. To make the situation even more tense, the remaining southern nobles – the counts of Toulouse, Foix and Comminges among them – agreed to Peter’s plan to let him rule over all of the Languedoc, at least as long as the Albigensian Crusade was in operation against them. On 21 May, Innocent was finally swayed by Arnold Amaury, and reinstated the Crusade.
Simon de Montfort swung back into action, but, on 12 September, found himself confronted by a huge army of southerners led by Peter outside the town of Muret. Although greatly outnumbered, the Crusaders routed the southern and Aragonese forces. Not only that, Peter himself was killed. It was a disaster for the south, with at least 7,000 men being killed. It was de Montfort’s greatest victory. He was now effectively the lord of all Languedoc.
The Fourth Lateran Council
November 1215 saw the biggest gathering of churchmen for centuries when the Fourth Lateran Council convened. Of its predecessors – the councils of 1123, 1139 and 1179 – only the latter had had any business with heresy, when it had been deemed acceptable to use force against heretics. By the time of the Fourth, that force had been a reality for six bloody and long years. Remarkably, the Fourth Lateran Council saw all of the major figures of the Albigensian Crusade in Rome, with the exception of Simon de Montfort and the Perfect. Even that veteran of excommunication, Raymond VI, was in town, as was the fearsome Raymond Roger of Foix.The southerners clearly had business with Innocent, and meant to be heard.
After a month of dealing with other issues – the preparations for the Fifth Crusade, the forcing of all Jews and Muslims to wear a yellow mark on their clothes to distinguish them from Christians – Innocent finally had time to address the situation in the Languedoc, which was, as ever, grave.Things got off to a bad start with Fulk of Marseilles, bishop of Toulouse, lambasting Raymond Roger of Foix for tolerating Cathars on his lands, and for his role in the massacre of Crusaders at Montgey. Raymond Roger retaliated, hurling abuse at Fulk and saying that he was only sorry he hadn’t killed more Crusaders. It was all too much for Innocent, who had to go out into the gardens of the Lateran Palace to get away from the poisonous atmosphere inside and try to regain a clear head. When he came back in, he had decided to allow Simon de Montfort to retain all his lands in the Languedoc. Raymond VI’s son, Raymond the Younger, would become heir to various smaller possessions, but Simon would now be officially the count of Toulouse. It seemed to be the final nail in the Languedoc’s coffin.
The Siege of Toulouse
When Toulouse heard the news, there was uproar; the Toulousains were determined to keep de Montfort out of the city. He was, after all, universally hated. Resistance was compounded by the unexpected military victory of the Younger Raymond, who took the Crusader-held town of Beaucaire. Then Innocent died unexpectedly on 16 July 1216. It seemed as though things might be turning in the favour of the south.
Simon de Montfort’s reaction was to hit Toulouse, and hit it hard. He was aided by that most charming of men, Fulk of Toulouse, who persuaded the city’s dignitaries to discuss terms outside the city walls. Either Fulk was remarkably convincing, or the city fathers remarkably forgetful of what had happened to Raymond Roger Trencavel at Carcassonne, but they took the bait.They left the safety of the city, and were promptly put in chains as soon as they reached Simon’s camp.With no one left to coordinate its defences, Toulouse fell almost immediately to the Crusaders, who then spent a month sacking the city. To cap it all, Simon imposed exorbitant taxes on the beleaguered Toulousains.
At the moment of what was potentially his finest hour, Simon made a fatal mistake. Despite the fact that Arnold Amaury had recently excommunicated him for his bullying tactics in Narbonne, Simon blithely disregarded the excommunication and left Toulouse to harass the nobles of Provence, leaving a garrison to hold the city. The Toulousains immediately began to build up weapons secretly and devised plans to revolt against this most hated of men. On 13 September 1217, Raymond VI re-entered the city under the cover of dawn mist; the populace was ecstatic. Despite the fact that Raymond was an almost notoriously bad military commander – at the battle of Muret he had famously done nothing – the Toulousains felt that salvation was at hand. Raymond immediately ordered the rebuilding of the city’s defences. Simon’s garrison was terminated with extreme prejudice.
When he heard the news, Simon rushed back to Toulouse, intent on atrocity. Much to his surprise, he was thwarted time and time again. Despite the arrival of reinforcements from the north, Simon’s forces could not breach the city walls. The stalemate lasted nine months, until June 1218, when the Crusaders decided, somewhat belatedly, to employ siege engines against the walls of Toulouse. On 25 June, during a defence of his siege engineers, Simon de Montfort’s head was destroyed by a stone launched from a catapult on the walls of Toulouse. According to tradition, the catapult was operated by women and girls. The most hated man in the Languedoc was dead; no revenge was ever sweeter.
De Montfort’s Impact on Catharism
With de Montfort dead, a chapter had closed in the Albigensian Crusade, yet it remains debatable what he had actually achieved. As Malcolm Barber notes:‘The relationship between Montfort’s unceasing military activity and the actual extirpation of the Cathars is much more complex than the pope’s rhetoric [of his call for a Crusade in 1208] suggests.’66 Out of the 37 places de Montfort is known to have besieged, contemporary chroniclers record only three where Perfect were actually known to be (Minerve, Lavaur and Les Cassès). Although Cathars are not actually recorded as being anywhere else during the de Montfort years, ‘it is probable that the Crusaders took it for granted that the defenders of places which resisted them must by definition at least be sympathetic to the heretics and their teaching.’67
Furthermore, there were no fewer than 86 places on the eve of the Crusade where Cathars were known to have been living, of which de Montfort held 23 at one time or another between 1209 and 1218. This leaves 63 places that de Montfort did not attempt to take. It is possible that de Montfort was unaware of the presence of Cathars in some of these places, or besieging them may have been beyond his resources. Despite a crusading tax levied by Innocent, the Albigensian Crusade was not properly financed, and de Montfort had to rely on the support of private bankers and on obtaining booty to keep the Crusade afloat. The accusations that de Montfort, despite his piety, had a keen eye for booty and a desire for personal power are reinforced by the fact that he also managed to gain control of another 63 places that had no reputation for heresy whatsoever.
Most of Simon’s campaigns concentrated on Trencavel lands or around Toulouse, and the odds of any given town being attacked were between three or four to one against. The Perfect therefore had plenty of places to hide, and hide they seem to have done, as there were no mass burnings of Cathars after Lavaur and Les Cassès. De Montfort was partially successful at breaking up the infrastructure on which the Cathars depended: there were no Cathar bishops of Albi, Carcassonne and Agen during his tenure, and only one deacon (in Carcassonne).68 Cathar bishops seemed to have held office in Toulouse throughout Simon’s years,69 but they only survived by hiding at the Cathar stronghold of Montségur in the Pyrenees.
One partially successful policy had been the encouragement of crusading settlers in the south. The property of Cathars and their supporters, once abandoned, proved to be virtually impossible to get back, as they had been bequeathed to Crusaders such as Alan of Roucy, who took over Termes, Montréal and Bram, and Bouchard of Marly, who got Saissac and Cabaret.70 Once installed, they were encouraged to marry local women, and thereby eliminate heresy through marriage. (Landed southern widows and heiresses required a licence to marry; Crusaders did not.) However, few of the settlers founded long-term dynasties in the south: they were either killed during subsequent southern uprisings, or went back north while they still had the opportunity to do so.
During the de Montfort years, diplomacy and preaching were still being used as weapons against the Cathars: Innocent never tired of trying to check the violence, and was constantly in talks with various ambassadors, legates and lobbyists. That he had to censure Simon in January 1213 shows how much he had come to distrust the military solution, and de Montfort’s execution of it. It was not his military genius that was in question, but the sheer number of extracurricular sieges that he was undertaking, all in the name of increasing his own power base (indeed, after the Fourth Lateran Council, Simon held more land than the king of France, Philip Augustus).
However, the nine years of violence, brutality and terror did have a profound impact on Catharism. Before 1209, the Cathars had been able to pursue their faith quite openly.After that date, they became cautious and secretive, knowing they were hunted and might meet the same fate as the Perfect of Minerve, Lavaur and Les Cassès. De Montfort’s other main achievement was to leave a legacy of hatred. The anonymous second author of the Song of the Cathar Wars spoke for many in the Languedoc when he wrote:
The epitaph says, for those who can read it, that he is a saint and martyr who shall breathe again and shall in wondrous joy inherit and flourish, shall wear a crown and be seated in the kingdom. And I have heard it said that this must be so – if by killing men and shedding blood, by damning souls and causing deaths, by trusting evil counsels, by setting fires, destroying men … seizing lands and encouraging pride, by kindling evil and quenching good, by killing women and slaughtering children, a man can in this world win Jesus Christ, certainly Count Simon wears a crown and shines in heaven above.71
The Changing of the Guard Simon de Montfort’s death heralded not only the end of one of the darkest eras in the west since the Viking raids, but also a period of change that saw the old figures die off: Dominic Guzman died in 1221 (in 1234 he would be canonized as St Dominic); Raymond VI died in 1222; King Philip Augustus of France died in 1223, the same year as Raymond Roger of Foix, who remained unrepentant and went to his grave wishing he’d killed more Crusaders; Arnold Amaury died in 1225. In their place rose sons and heirs such as Raymond the Younger, who would become Raymond VII upon his father’s death, and Roger Bernard, son of Raymond Roger of Foix. Both men were able warriors, and played key roles in repelling the siege of Toulouse in 1218 and in subsequent southern resistance.
Simon de Montfort’s son, Amaury, however, was not a chip off the old block when it came to military matters. After his father’s death, he faced six years of constant conflict with Raymond the Younger and Roger Bernard.The de Montfort lands began to shrink on an annual basis.Amaury tried in 1221 to found a military religious order dedicated to fighting heresy modelled on the Templars,72 but without success. His incompetence was to undo virtually everything his father had built up.
Innocent had long wanted the French crown to intervene in the south, but it was not until 1215 that Philip Augustus’s son, Louis, finally launched an expedition of his own. Nothing much came of it. In 1219, he tried again, this time getting as far as committing wholesale slaughter at the small market town of Marmande, where all 7,000 inhabitants were killed, before attempting to take Toulouse. He wasn’t able to, and went back to Paris.
The Albigensian Crusade further suffered under Innocent’s successor, Honorius III (1216–27), who had another Crusade to deal with, the official Fifth, which began in the first year of his pontificate. While he saw the need to continue the fight against heresy, he did not put all his faith in crusading. He gave his blessing to Dominic Guzman’s Order of Preachers (better known as the Dominicans) and the Franciscans; both orders were to expand exponentially in the following years, with both Dominic and Francis being canonised between 1228 and 1234.
The Perfect began to re-emerge during this period. Those who had survived Simon de Montfort had done so by hiding in caves, or in the Pyrenean fortresses of Montségur and Quéribus. In 1223, the Cathar bishop of Carcassonne, Peter Isarn, had copies made of the records of the meeting at St Félix so that he could determine and reestablish his diocesan boundaries after the havoc wrought by the Albigensian Crusade. In 1226, there was another major Cathar gathering at Pieusse. It was not as epochal as St Félix, but the fact that it happened at all showed that the Cathar church was far from beaten, and was confident enough to resume as normal a life as was possible: the council even established a new bishopric at Razès. But peace was not to last.
It was Amaury de Montfort who inadvertently brought more grief on the Good Christians. After several years of losing ground to both Raymond VII and Roger Bernard of Foix, Amaury and Raymond agreed a truce in the summer of 1223. In January 1224, Raymond took control of Toulouse, and the following month Amaury admitted that he was beaten. He ceded all his claims to the possessions in the Languedoc to King Louis XIII. The southern nobles now had one overpowering enemy: the French crown.
The Peace of Paris
King Louis was not the only person who wanted to settle matters in the south once and for all.The new papal legate to France and the Languedoc, Romano di San Angelo, was a ruthless and duplicitous man; perfect Vatican material and perfect for harassing the beleaguered nobility of the south, Raymond VII in particular. Raymond was operating under the supervision of the aged Arnold Amaury, who, since excommunicating Simon de Montfort, had – in the greatest irony of the whole saga – become sympathetic to the southern cause. Raymond and Arnold proposed a series of reparation payments to the de Montforts, in addition to Raymond swearing allegiance to the French crown and promising to drive the Cathars out of his lands. Romano, however, wanted the reinstatement of the Crusade, and made sure that Raymond’s and Arnold’s peace plan never got off the drawing board by excommunicating Raymond in early 1226.
Louis, for his part, was also keen on crusade rather than diplomacy, after getting the taste for mass murder at Marmande. He was also aware that he could use the Church to bankroll the whole enterprise; it was the start of an era in which French kings would simply appropriate Church wealth for their own ends, and it ultimately led to the waning of Church influence in France. He and Romano haggled and argued over funding, until Romano managed to extract money from wealthy sees such as Chartres, Rheims, Rouen and Amiens.
In the summer of 1226, the Crusaders besieged Avignon. It was an uncomfortable stand-off lasting three months, during which Louis and his army succumbed to serious bouts of dysentery in the August heat. By the time the city finally surrendered, 3,000 Crusaders had died of the disease. But word spread: the great city of Avignon had capitulated. Even had they been able, the Crusaders would not have to do much fighting; the size of their army was such that southern nobles were offering their submission on first sight of it, or even hearing that it was nearby. In the light of potential instant annihilation, former Cathar sympathisers such as Bernard Otto of Niort, the nephew of Aimery of Montréal and Geralda of Lavaur, suddenly became staunch supporters of the Crusade. The only real military challenges the Crusade faced were guerrilla attacks from the forces of Raymond VII and Roger Bernard of Foix, which proved a nuisance more than a real danger. Dysentery, however, would do more damage than the forces of Toulouse and Foix: Louis himself was now seriously ill, and died on 8 November in Montpensier.
Louis’s son, the future Louis IX, was only 12 at the time of his father’s death, and his mother, Blanche of Castile, became Regent. She was determined that her husband’s death would not be in vain, and pressed on with the campaign to subdue the southern nobles and eradicate Catharism.With Cardinal Romano as her principal adviser – they were even reputed to be lovers – she ordered her armies to remain in the south and to finish what her late husband had started.
The late 1220s saw not so much a Crusade as a series of intermittent battles between Crusaders and southern nobility. It could have carried on indefinitely, were it not for the fact that, in 1228, the Crusaders began to employ an extreme form of scorched-earth policy.This was much more thorough than the one Raymond Roger Trencavel had ordered at Carcassonne in 1209; it was nothing less than the complete destruction of the countryside around Toulouse. Crops were burnt, orchards felled, sources of water contaminated. The skies were black for a whole year with smoke. By the beginning of 1229, with his lands an endless blasted heath that would take years to recover, Raymond had no choice: he had to sue for peace.
On 12 April 1229, history repeated itself. Raymond VII, like his father before him, was publicly flogged. It was to be known as the Peace of Paris, and the combined strength of Church and king had the count of Toulouse in a vice. Raymond’s lands were seized by the French crown, leaving him with little more than the city of Toulouse and a few life, after which they would be incorporated into the growing kingdom of France. He was also forced to marry off his only child, a nine-year old daughter, to one of the young Louis’s siblings. In addition, Raymond was instructed to found – and fund – a new university in Toulouse, at which Church-approved doctors of theology would instruct new clerics in the ways of righteousness. It was the end of the Albigensian Crusade. Life would slowly return to normal in the Languedoc after 20 years of war, but St Bernard’s original exhortation to catch the ‘little foxes’ before they ‘ruined the vineyard’ was now profoundly ironic: the vineyard of the Languedoc was indeed ruined, but it had not been the work of the little foxes. Although they did not know it at the time, the war-weary people of the Languedoc – both Cathar and Catholic – had little time to adjust to peace before they had to face a new terror: the Inquisition.
4
The Inquisition
While French troops reduced the Languedoc to the sort of barren wasteland we might more readily associate with Arthurian myth or the nightmares of Bosch and Bruegel, a nightmare of another sort was being planned in the Lateran Palace. Pope Honorius had died in 1227, and was succeeded by Gregory IX, who was as much an activist pope as his great forebears Gregory VII and Innocent III had been. Gregory – born Ugolino dei Conti di Segni – was one of Innocent’s nephews, and was as legally minded as his uncle had been. Gregory realised that if the Cathars were to be effectively destroyed, then the Church needed the tools to pursue individuals as much as, and perhaps even more than, the ability to intervene militarily, as it was apparent that the dualists were still active in the Languedoc and in other parts of Europe; the discovery of Cathars in Rome in 1231 can only have hardened Gregory’s resolve.
The Inquisition was based on procedures drawn up under Innocent to tackle wayward priests which gave Inquisitors – usually Dominican friars – the powers of arrest and trial.What started as a method for keeping the clergy in line was to become ‘one of the most effective means of thought control that Europe has ever known.’73
The First Inquisitors
The Rhineland, the haunt of the earliest known Cathars in 1143, was to receive the attentions of the first Inquisitor, Conrad of Marburg. Conrad was an extreme ascetic who brought a campaign of terror to the Rhineland with his two henchmen, Conrad Tors, a Dominican, and a one-eyed, one-handed layman called John. Almost everywhere they went, they found heretics of all denominations. Due to a combination of his own blinkered zealotry, and ignorance of what actually constituted Cathar belief, Conrad thought he had unearthed a heresy that he dubbed ‘Luciferianism’. No doubt he remembered – or had it pointed out to him – that ‘Cathar’ meant someone who indulged in satanic rites which included obscene kisses on the rear ends of cats. On top of this fiction, Conrad constructed an elaborate demonology that possibly also contained elements of undigested Cathar doctrine, such as the belief that the devil had created the world. The heretics were thought to worship the devil and engage in sexual orgies. Such beliefs were not new: exactly the same accusations (minus the cats) had been levelled at the Orléans heretics in 1022. Conrad relayed his findings to Gregory, who promptly issued the bull Vox in Rama in June 1233 denouncing the Luciferians.
Conrad’s procedure, if it can be called that, was swift and brutal. If the unfortunates whom the trio apprehended were adjudged guilty, they were burnt the same day without any further enquiries taking place. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people – most of them simple, unlettered believers – met their deaths. In amongst them were a small percentage of Cathars. The level of hatred Conrad generated was astonishing. He achieved a notoriety of de Montfort Esque proportions within months. He went a step too far, however, when he accused Count Henry II of Seyn of heresy. Count Henry demanded the right to a fair trial, and Conrad’s case against the count collapsed when it became apparent that the witnesses Conrad had called were amongst Henry’s enemies, and the Archbishops of Trier and Mainz wrote to Gregory to complain about Conrad’s behaviour. Conrad reacted by promptly calling for a Crusade against Henry and his supporters. On 30 July 1233, while Conrad was organising his Crusade, a local Franciscan decided to take matters into his own hands. He caught up with the Inquisitor as he was on his way back to Marburg from Mainz, and stabbed him to death.
Northern France and Flanders were subject to the attentions of Robert the Bulgarian, whose name suggests he was a Cathar who had renounced his former faith. Like Conrad, he was a fanatic of the most zealous kind, whose methods were ‘ferocious and arbitrary’.74 Chronicles report that Robert could detect heretics by foibles of speech and gesture; another spoke of a document, which, when placed on a suspect’s head, made them say whatever Robert wanted.75 Robert’s crowning achievement was his participation in the burning of 180 heretics at Mont Aimé in Champagne in the spring of 1239. The area had been known for Catharism since the twelfth century, and the mass incineration was no doubt intended to spread further terror, and also to show bishops from around a dozen local sees what had happened to the heretics who had been uncovered in their areas. Robert was still conducting his idiosyncratic campaign against the devil and all his works as late as 1244, but was eventually disgraced and imprisoned for his excesses.
The Inquisition in the Languedoc
Gregory seems to have taken the complaints of the Archbishops of Trier and Mainz about Conrad seriously. While he castigated them for failing to keep the Inquisitor in check, he realised that if the Inquisition was to do its job properly, it needed to be much more methodical and thorough-going in its approach.With that in mind, Inquisitors were appointed in Toulouse, Albi and Carcassonne in the spring of 1233. It was with their arrival in the south that the Inquisition proper came into existence, and was to remain a grim fixture of life in the Languedoc for the next hundred years.
When the Inquisition came to a town or a village, the first thing its agents would do was to talk to the clergy, in order to brief them on their procedure. The Inquisitors were then allowed to give a sermon in the church, in which they demanded a profession of faith from all males over the age of 14 and all females over 12. Those who did not or could not profess were automatically suspect and would be the first to be questioned.The congregation was obliged to swear an oath against heresy and ordered to go to confession three times a year.The Inquisitors then asked them to think about their past actions and make confidential statements the following week, either confessing to their own sins, or denouncing their neighbour. Cathars who voluntarily confessed were resettled in areas where no heresy was known, and had to wear two yellow crosses sewn onto their clothes, which identified them as former heretics.
Known or suspected heretics who hadn’t confessed voluntarily within this first week were issued a summons to appear before the Inquisitors immediately. Heresy, in the eyes of the Inquisition, included being a Perfect, sheltering them,‘adoring’ them (i.e., performing the melioramentum), witnessing a ‘heretication’ (i.e., a consolamentum), and failing to report others. The Inquisitors needed at least two witnesses to convict someone; witnesses’ names were always withheld, making it all the easier to accuse an enemy – who may have been a perfectly upstanding citizen – of heresy. In a gruesome and deliberately shocking ploy, the Inquisitors did not just restrict the search for heretics among the living. If people named dead relatives as heretics, their bodies were dug up and burnt. If the denounced deceased had any living relatives, their homes and possessions were taken, and they were forced to wear the yellow crosses to acknowledge their relatives’ heresy.
Once the Inquisition had names, it was merciless in its pursuit of suspected heretics. The Inquisitors had the power to search a house, and burn down any building where heretics were known to have hidden.Anyone caught in possession of an Old or New Testament was seen as suspicious, and the sick and dying were watched closely lest ‘wicked and abominable things’76 occur (i.e., they receive the consolamentum). Once a suspect was caught, they were bombarded with questions: Have they seen a heretic or been acquainted with one? How many times have they seen them? Where did they see them? Who was with the heretics? Has the suspect admitted heretics into their home? If so, who brought them? How many times did the heretics visit? Where did they go after they left? Did the suspect adore them? Did the suspect see others adore the heretics? Did the suspect witness an heretication? If so, what was the name of the people at the ceremony? If the person was hereticated on their deathbed, where were they buried? If they recovered, where are they now?77
The ruthless fanaticism with which the Inquisitors carried out their duties is illustrated by the fate of an old woman in Toulouse. A Cathar Believer, she wanted to receive the consolamentum while she was still able. On her deathbed, her family sent out for a Perfect to come and administer the sacrament. A Perfect was located, ministered to the woman and left before the Inquisitors got wind of his presence in the woman’s house. However, they did get to hear of the deathbed consolamentum, and went to question the woman. Under the impression she was talking to the Cathar bishop, Guilhabert de Castres, she described her faith in detail. This was enough. Despite the fact that she only had a matter of hours left to live, she was taken out, still in her bed, and burnt.
Despite the power they wielded, the Inquisition met fierce – and frequently violent – resistance. In Albi, the Inquisitor Arnold Catalan’s assistants were too frightened to enter the cemetery to dig up the body of a woman who had been posthumously accused of heresy. Incensed, Arnold went to the cemetery himself with several of the bishop’s staff in tow. He broke the topsoil, intending to leave the actual digging to the bishop’s underlings, but before any further work could be done, a mob set upon Arnold and nearly beat him to death.They were only prevented from throwing the body of the unconscious Inquisitor into the River Tarn by the intervention of an armed delegation from the bishop. While Arnold was recovering in the safety of the cathedral, the mob outside shouted for his head to be cut off, put in a sack and then thrown into the river. Without even waiting to recover from his ordeal, Arnold excommunicated the entire town. There were similar incidents elsewhere. At Cordes two agents of the Inquisitor were thrown to their deaths down a well; in Moissac, while the Inquisitors Peter Seila and William Arnold were burning heretics, Cistercian monks were hiding them; in Narbonne, when Dominicans attempted to arrest a suspect an argument broke out that led to the sacking of the Dominican convent there.
Raymond VII was initially supportive – he was not in a position to be otherwise – but in 1235 a chance arose to fight back. Relations between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, were becoming increasingly strained. Indeed, they had never been good: one of Gregory’s first actions as pontiff had been to excommunicate Frederick for dallying over his crusading commitments. When Frederick did finally set off for the Sixth Crusade in 1227, Gregory excommunicated him again for going on Crusade while excommunicated. Raymond offered to intervene in the Languedoc on Gregory’s behalf if the Inquisitors could be made to show more restraint. Gregory agreed, and tried to curb the Inquisition’s most fanatical agents in the Languedoc.
Seeing that they had regained some ground, the Toulousains began to resist even more. Cathars and their sympathisers were hidden or whisked out of town. Matters escalated until, in October, the Inquisitors were thrown out of Toulouse by a jeering mob, who pelted them with stones and excrement. Realising he needed Raymond as an ally, the pope could do little more than write the count an angry letter, and installed a Franciscan friar, Stephen of St Thibéry, as the new Inquisitor, hoping that the Franciscans’ reputation for being more humane than their Dominican brothers might go some way to alleviate tensions. Unfortunately, the move backfired as Stephen proved to be as fanatical as any Dominican.
The Inquisition did score some successes, however.Two Perfect who had converted to Catholicism, Raymond Gros and William of Soler, provided dozens of names, and also told the Inquisitors that the Perfect had adopted a number of strategies to help them escape detection. Some male and female Perfect travelled in pairs, pretending to be married couples; some deliberately ate meat in public; others swapped their black robes for blue or dark green ones. Such ploys were seen as evidence of the cunning and deceit of heretics, despite the fact that it was the Catholic Church that made such cunning and deceit necessary.
The Trencavel and St Gilles Revolts
As the Inquisition continued to go about its detested business, discontent grew. Raymond Trencavel, son of Raymond Roger, attempted to capitalise on the ill-will shown towards the agents of the Church. From exile in Aragon, he assembled an army which in 1240 besieged his ancestral seat of Carcassonne. After a tense and bloody stand-off that lasted for over a month, the two sides agreed a truce. Raymond would never regain his birthright, but was at least still alive.
Raymond VII had played no part in the Trencavel revolt, but, with the death of Gregory VII the following year, he saw a chance to intervene militarily.The papacy was in no position to stop him, as Gregory’s successor, Celestine IV, was pope for only 17 days, and, due to Frederick II’s attacks on Rome, it wasn’t until June 1243 that his successor, Innocent IV, was elected. By the spring of 1242, Raymond had persuaded King Henry III of England and Hugh de Lusignan, the most powerful baron in Aquitaine, to join forces with him.
As if to announce the start of the revolt, the Inquisitors Stephen of St Thibéry and William Arnold were murdered on 28 May at Avignonet by a small group of Cathar supporters from Montségur. News of the incident spread quickly, and was greeted with enthusiasm; one country priest even rang the bell of his church to celebrate the deaths of the Inquisitors. Within days, Raymond’s forces struck, taking French possessions and Dominican properties with decisive ease. By late summer, it looked as if the coup would be successful, but then things began to go wrong: Henry landed with a force that was too small to do anything other than get itself wiped out, which it successfully managed to do in an engagement with French forces near Bordeaux. Among Henry’s knights was Simon de Montfort the younger, whose changing of sides was on a par with that of Arnold Amaury, and would no doubt have made his father turn in his grave. Hugh of Lusignan, suddenly fearing he might be on the losing side, joined the French. But the death knell was sounded by none other than Roger Bernard of Foix. Despite his family’s long history of pro-southern, pro-Cathar, anti-French activism, Roger Bernard too felt that the revolt was doomed, and negotiated a separate peace with the French. Raymond VII realised that all was lost, and he too came to terms in January 1243. It was the end of the St Gilles family’s power in the Languedoc, and everyone knew it.
The Fall of Montségur
With Raymond now a spent force, the Church had only one place left to tackle that openly defied them: the Pyrenean fortress of Montségur, the so-called ‘Synagogue of Satan’ that had been a Cathar stronghold ever since the days of Innocent’s ‘peace and faith’ campaign. At a council at Béziers in the spring of 1243, it was decided that action against Montségur had to be taken. By the end of May, an army led by Hugh of Arcis, the royal seneschal in Carcassonne, was in place at the foot of Montségur, but given the fortress’s reputation for impregnability, they knew they would be in for a long wait.
Montségur had been refortified in 1204 by Raymond of Pereille. He was a Believer, and both his mother and mother-in-law were Perfect. The castle had been a refuge for Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade, and when the Inquisition began its work, Guilhabert de Castres, the Cathar bishop of Toulouse, approached Raymond with the request that the castle become the centre of the faith. By the time Guilhabert died (of natural causes) around 1240, it was home to around 200 Perfect, overseen by Guilhabert’s successor, Bertrand Marty. They were protected by a garrison of 98 knights, under Peter Roger of Mirepoix, whom Raymond of Pereille had appointed co-lord of Montségur at some point prior to 1240. Raymond had guessed – rightly – that the community would need armed protection as the noose of the Inquisition tightened around the Languedoc. Peter Roger, who was from a family of Cathar Believers, had more in common with the bellicose Paulicians than the pacifist Perfect: he was not averse to armed robbery in order to keep the community fed, and had been the instigator of the assassinations at Avignonet. During its heyday, Montségur had been busy as a centre of both intense devotion and industry. Pilgrims travelled great distances to hear the Perfect preach, to be consoled, or simply to spend time in retreat. When not busy with tending to the needs of the Believers, the Perfect helped support the community by working as weavers (a craft long associated with heresy), blacksmiths, chandlers, doctors and herbalists. By the time the siege began, the total number of people living there – including the knights’ families – was somewhere in the region of 400.
Hugh of Arcis did not have enough men to encircle the two-mile base of the mountain, and in such craggy terrain siege engines were useless. Hugh had no choice but to try to take the fortress by direct assault. His forces made numerous attempts to scale the peak, but each time were driven back by arrows and other missiles lobbed over Montségur’s ramparts by Peter Roger and his men. The months dragged on wearily and, by Christmas, Hugh’s army was becoming disillusioned. He needed a breakthrough if there was any chance of raising morale. He ordered an attack on the bastion that sat atop the Roc de la Tour, a needle of rock at the eastern end of the summit. The men climbed the Roc by night, and caught the garrison at the top by surprise. The defenders were all killed. When daylight came, the royal troops looked down in horror at the sheer face they had scaled, swearing they could never have made the ascent by day. Nevertheless, it gave the royal forces a strong foothold just a few hundred yards from the main castle itself, and work began immediately on winching up catapults and mangonels. Bombardment began immediately.
Inside the walls of Montségur, the atmosphere of devotion intensified.While Peter Roger’s men returned fire on the French troops, who were edging ever nearer from their foothold at the Roc, Bertrand Marty and Raymond Agulher, the Cathar bishop of the Razès, attended the spiritual needs of both the garrison and the non-combatants.A messenger arrived to say that Raymond VII might intervene to lift the siege. Rumour had it that Frederick II was also planning a rescue mission to liberate Montségur. The weeks dragged on, but no one came. Finally, on 2 March 1244, Peter Roger walked out to announce the surrender of the fortress to Hugh of Arcis. The victors were lenient with their terms: everyone could go free, provided they allowed themselves to be questioned by the Inquisition, and swear an oath of loyalty to the Church. Past crimes, including the assassinations at Avignonet, were forgiven. For the Perfect, the choice was as stark as it had been for their forebears at Minerve and Lavaur: renounce Catharism, or burn.They had two weeks to think about it.
For the Perfect, it was no choice at all. Not one of their 200-strong number was willing to recant. They spent the two weeks of the truce distributing their goods to their families and followers. Peter Roger was given 50 doublets that the Perfect had made to sell or give away as he saw fit. The atmosphere inside the castle during this period must have been indescribable, a sorrow touched with the joy in knowing that, for the Perfect, their journey through the vale of tears that is the material world would soon be over. On the final Sunday of the truce, 21 Believers – some of whom had originally gone to Montségur merely as mercenaries to help Peter Roger defend the castle, and all of whom had the option of going free – asked to be given the consolamentum.They knew that in doing so, they were giving themselves up to the pyres already being built at the foot of the mountain. If there is anything in the entire history of Catharism that illustrates the appeal and power of the faith, it is this extraordinary moment.All of them were consoled.
At first light on Wednesday, 16 March 1244, Montségur was evacuated. Peter Roger and his knights and their families went free, watching as the Perfect were lashed together on the pyres. They were from all walks of life: Corba of Pereille and her daughter Esclarmonde were nobles (as well as being Raymond of Pereille’s wife and daughter), while William Garnier was, if not a peasant, certainly a man of humbler means than the Pereilles. The 21 last-minute converts were also among their number, as were Bertrand Marty and Raymond Agulher. Hugh of Arcis and Peter Amiel, the Archbishop of Narbonne, looked on as the pyres were lit.The site of the burnings is still known to this day as the Field of the Cremated.
The Inquisition after Montségur
With the last major redoubt of Catharism gone, Perfect and Believers found themselves in a world with little shelter and fewer protectors. No one was safe, as Peter Garcias found out to his cost in Toulouse during Lent 1247. His relative, William, a Franciscan, had invited him to their convent in order to discuss issues of faith and doctrine. Naturally, Peter had no qualms about telling William about his Cathar faith; after all, William was family. Peter railed against the Church of Rome, declaring that it was a ‘harlot who gives poison’, while the law of Moses was ‘nothing but shadow and vanity’.78 Peter was too trusting: in a scene reminiscent of the exposing of Basil the Physician, a curtain was pulled back to reveal that Peter’s testimony had been carefully transcribed by a team of secretaries. Peter was handed over to the Inquisition. 114s
William Garcias was not the only person to betray his family to the Inquisitors. A former Cathar Perfect, Sicard of Lunel, denounced scores of his former associates and supporters ‘whether they had offered him a bed for the night or given him a jar of honey.’79 The list of people he denounced included his parents. Sicard’s treachery was amply rewarded by the Church, and he survived well into old age.
These two examples were but among many. The Languedoc in the years immediately after the fall of Montségur was subject to inquisitorial scrutiny of proto-Stalinist proportions. Heading this clampdown on the thirteenth-century equivalent of thoughtcrime were Bernard of Caux and John of St Pierre. Over 5,000 depositions survive, but this is only a fraction of what was actually taken down at the time. As Malcolm Lambert notes, Bernard, John and their brethren were attempting to build ‘a total, all-embracing picture’ 80 of Cathar belief, practices and support in the areas in which they operated.
For the Cathars, being caught presented a major dilemma: the Perfect were forbidden to lie or to swear oaths. Whatever they did, they would be compromising their beliefs. Some chose to tell the truth, and thereby implicate other Perfect, Believers and supporters, while others either lied or gave away as little information as possible. Others opted for collaboration, and became double agents, continuing to live as Cathar Believers and receiving the fugitive Perfect into their homes, and then reporting them. Collaboration, however, was risky, as there were frequent reprisals against turncoats. One such was Arnold Pradier, who had been a Perfect during the de Montfort years, but later converted to Catholicism along with his wife (who had also been a Perfect) and began naming names. The Inquisition installed them in a safe house, the Château Narbonnais in Toulouse, where they lived well at the Church’s expense.
Although resistance continued – at Castelbon, the Inquisitor was poisoned and the castle attacked – there was ultimately little people could do.The Inquisition became a fact of life, ‘an entrenched institution rather than a single, unrepeated ordeal.’81 If people were suspected of giving false or incomplete testimony, they were hauled back in front of the Inquisitors to be re-interrogated, regardless of whether they were high-born or peasant. Faced with such intensive action, most nobility realised there was no point any more in trying to oppose the Church; even Raymond VII began to persecute suspected heretics, burning 80 at Agen in June 1249.
The Fall of Quéribus
While the Inquisition was doing its inexorable work, there was still one Cathar castle attempting to hold out against all the odds.The eleventh-century castle of Quéribus sat on a rocky outcrop high in the Corbières. Like Montségur, its remoteness and the difficulty of the terrain protected it from the attentions of northern forces.The castle had been sheltering fugitive Cathars for years, ever since Oliver Termes regained lordship over his ancestral lands at Termes after the death of Alan of Roucy, the northern Crusader who had been given the fief by Simon de Montfort, in the early 1220s. Oliver had played a part in the Trencavel and St Gilles revolts of the early 1240s, which had led to the loss of his castle at Aguilar, to the north-east of Quéribus, and to his excommunication. The Church trusted him about as much as it had Raymond VI of Toulouse. Like Raymond VI, he was undeterred by excommunication, and together with his co-lord, Chabert of Barbéra, he continued to shelter Cathars at Quéribus until Oliver was forced to submit to King Louis IX in 1247. Oliver redeemed himself sufficiently during the Seventh Crusade (1249–54) that some of his possessions, including Aguilar, were returned to him. However, upon his return from the Crusade in 1255, he was forced into one final act of betrayal: he had to ambush and hand over Chabert of Barbéra to the Inquisition.
Unlike the fall of Montségur, the fall of Quéribus is still shrouded in mystery. It is not known how many Cathars were in residence at the time, and neither is it certain whether the castle fell by force or surrender. But fall it did, in August 1255. Oliver managed to save the life of Chabert through negotiation, and all the Cathars in the castle managed to escape. During the winter of 1255–56 Peter of Auteuil, Louis’s seneschal in Carcassonne, took over the castle, and also the neighbouring castle of Puylaurens, which was also known to be sympathetic to the Cathars. There were now no walls the Good Christians could hide in safety behind. The Cathar church was driven underground.
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The Autier Revival
source and footnotes
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/cathars-successful-heresy.pdf
1 comment:
May the perps rot in hell. But they never do. They come back over and over to plague humanity.
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