The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  111. Fragment of a Cathar text.

  15. Languedoc and the Albigensian Crusade.

  The response was modest. A small military campaign in 1181 under Henry of Marcy, now Cardinal Bishop of Albano (and future preacher of the Third Crusade), briefly besieged Lavaur, a major Cathar centre between Albi and Toulouse, securing the conversion of two prominent Cathars who were then installed in canonries in Toulouse – an ironic demonstration of the fluidity of allegiances that made eradicating heretics so problematic. In 1184, Lucius III’s bull Ad Abolendam decreed condemned heretics should be delivered to the secular powers for unspecified punishment. However, only with the failure of Innocent III’s legatine missions (1198, 1200–1, 1203–4) did a new policy of direct action emerge that bypassed the inertia of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (1194–1222), increasingly seen by the pope as an obstacle if not an outright enemy, and a supporter of heretics. In 1204, when appointing a new legate in Languedoc, Innocent offered Holy Land crusade indulgences to those who joined the struggle against the heretics, at the same time trying to persuade Philip II of France to support the ‘material sword’ against them.12 Efforts to engage Philip failed, despite a further offer of Holy Land indulgences in 1207. The direction of Innocent’s policy was clear: ‘wounds that do not respond to the healing of poultices must be lanced with a blade’. In January 1208 the assassination of the papal legate Peter of Castelnau near St Gilles on the Rhône by an employee of Raymond VI provided Innocent with the opportunity to launch a full crusade in the cause of ‘faith and peace’, urging ‘knights of Christ’ against ‘the perverters of our souls’, worse than Saracens: ‘we must not be afraid of those who kill the body but of him who can send the body and soul to hell’.13 Command, preaching and recruitment for the crusade army were entrusted to the papal legate Arnaud Aimery, abbot of Cîteaux. Recruits were clear that they were crucesignati ‘against the heretic Albigensians’ (hereticos Albigenses), and, like those in the Jerusalem wars, their mission was penitential, their status akin to pilgrims.14

  In practice, the Albigensian crusades differed from other theatres of crusading. With recruits from across much of France, the proximity of the battlefields – not more than a very few weeks’ march – encouraged short-term commitment. In 1210 the legates insisted that at least forty days of service were required before crusaders could receive the full indulgence, a term that soon became standard. Rhetoric was tailored to elevate the war against heretics and their supposed protectors to equivalence with the Holy Land crusade. From the start the Albigensian crusades involved regime change across western and southern Languedoc. This held serious implications alike for the invading crusaders and the local counts and lords threatened with dispossession, but also for other interests: the kings of Aragon, France and England (in his role as duke of Aquitaine), each of whom had claims to overlordship in the region; the compromised southern French ecclesiastical establishment; urban communities in cities such as Toulouse, eager to assert autonomy; and the papacy, whose policy never lost sight of wider international implications. The objective of extirpating heresy provided a raw, at times vicious religiosity, inciting, if chroniclers can be believed, often fanatically barbarous ferocity in treating opponents and captives. Until subsumed into French royal policy in the 1220s, the Albigensian crusades lacked consistent or adequate external funding beyond the resources of participants and the lands they invaded. Socially, the crusades exposed a cultural gulf: the crusaders’ genuine or confected horror at the existential threat of heresy collided with the daily experience of Languedoc where fellow Catholics and heretics had lived together without violent confessional conflict.

  For the first campaign in 1209, Abbot Aimery recruited widely in northern France, despite Philip II remaining aloof. The leading nobles included Duke Odo III of Burgundy (1193–1218) and the counts of Nevers, St Pol and Boulogne. They were self-funded; their followers were paid. Duke Odo recruited Count Simon V of Montfort (d. 1218), the future leader of the crusade, with ‘substantial gifts’.15 This did not suggest a lack of emotional or ideological commitment: Simon proved a stern, tenacious uncompromising zealot against heretics. Given the temporary seasonal nature of most crusaders’ commitment, material incentives of conquest alone cannot explain recruitment. Rather, motives conformed to similar church-approved expeditions: peer-group enthusiasm; reputation; spiritual reward; payment; and putting military habits to recognised good use.

  Although the crusaders identified their enemies as ‘Albigensians’, after Albi, a major centre for heretical support, the initial target in 1209 was Toulouse and its excommunicate count. This quickly changed when Raymond VI prudently submitted, taking the cross in June 1209 as the crusading army neared. This deflected the invasion to Béziers and Carcassonne, lands held by Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel (also lord of Albi) who, though personally orthodox, refused to comply with the crusaders’ demands to persecute heretical subjects. The tone for the crusade was set on 22 July with the sack of Béziers and the massacre of its inhabitants, regardless, the legates with the army reported, ‘of rank, sex or age’.16 Even if the notorious story of Aimery Arnaud dismissing qualms over killing fellow Catholics (‘Kill them. The Lord knows who are his own’, II Timothy 2:19)17 is apocryphal, making an example of Béziers showed the religiously inspired invasion as determinedly political in execution. Previous failures of direct evangelism had persuaded crusade planners that eradication of heresy depended on the removal of complaisant or complicit local rulers and their substitution by energetic promoters of Catholic orthodoxy. The first step came after the surrender of Carcassonne on 14 August 1209 with the election of Simon V of Montfort as commander of the crusade and ruler of the Trencavel lands. Over the following twenty years, to the accompaniment of calculated self-justifying sanctimonious atrocities, the Albigensian crusades redrew the political map of Languedoc, redesigning its social and tenurial contours through dispossession and the redistribution of loyalties, lordships and estates. The consequent disruption, devastation and lawlessness scarred the region for decades. Yet, with cruel irony, while heresy was driven underground, it was far from obliterated.

  The Albigensian crusades fell into four rough periods: the conquest of the Trencavel lands, 1209–11; the Montfortian annexation of the county of Toulouse and the Pyrenean counties to the south, 1211–16; a messy revival of concerted local resistance, 1216–25; and the final decisive campaigns of Capetian armies, 1226–9. Until 1226 regular crusading reinforcements, while militarily significant, merely added temporary makeweights to existing and shifting political balances of power; even the interventions of Philip II’s son Louis (1215, 1219) made little lasting impact. Until his defeat and death at the battle of Muret against the Montfortians (2 September 1213), Peter II of Aragon, a crusader against the Moors at Las Navas de Tolosa only the year before, presented the most serious challenge to the reordering of Languedoc. Historic Aragonese claims of overlordship were incompatible with the creation of a separate Montfortian principality, pushing Peter towards support for the dispossessed Raymond VI. However, even Muret’s apparent resolution of the fate of Languedoc proved temporary.

  112. Stone relief showing the siege of Carcassonne, 1209.

  Apart from the resistance of local baronage, concerned less with religious orthodoxy than their freedoms, traditions and property, and sharp rivalries between Montfort and the new church hierarchy, geography posed the chief obstacle to conquest. The hill country of the Pyrenees foothills and between the valleys of the Aude, Tarn and Lot, speckled with castles and fortified villages, often remote and protected by forbidding terrain, made political control from distant centres on the Garonne or Mediterranean coastal plain difficult. The landscape forced an unceasing round of arduous policing sorties long after nominal control had initially been seized from local lords. Tenacity proved Montfort’s most necessary quality.18 Closely linked to reformist academics and orthodox evangelical groups, such as the early Dominicans, Montfort on the Fourth Crusade had baulked at
fighting fellow Catholics at Zara in 1202, reportedly announcing before he left the expedition that ‘I have not come here to destroy Christians’.19 His orthodox horror at heresy appears sincere; it also proved convenient in his attempt to carve out a Montfort principality.

  The military campaigns revolved around sieges and piecemeal investment of castles, villages and towns. Precariously funded by church taxes, booty, and income and tributes from conquered territory, the core of Montfort’s armies was modest, although repeatedly swelled by brief attendance by recruits from the north. The conquest of Trencavel lands was complete by May 1211. Attention then turned to the lands of the re-excommunicated Raymond VI and his Pyrenean allies, the counts of Comminges and Foix. After victory at Castelnaudary in September 1211, one of the few pitched battles of the wars (Muret 1213, Baziège 1218 the others), in 1212 Montfort conquered large swathes of territory from Agen on the Garonne towards the Pyrenees, although Toulouse itself eluded him. Signalling his dominance in the creation of a new polity, in December 1212 he issued the so-called Statute of Pamiers, establishing judicial, tenurial and ecclesiastical rights in his new lordship, privileging northern French incomers, who would enjoy the ‘usages and customs observed in France around Paris’.20 However, in January 1213, Innocent III, now focused on a new crusade to the Holy Land, cancelled further crusade indulgences for Languedoc in response to slick diplomacy by Peter of Aragon, whose attempt to broker Raymond VI’s rehabilitation was rejected by the militantly hostile papal legates. Montfort was instructed to return his conquests of 1212. However, pressure from his legates forced a papal volte face. The bull Quia Maior (April 1213) launching the Fifth Crusade allowed inhabitants of Languedoc to take the cross against the Albigensians once more, and Montfort’s position was restored in May, provoking Peter II’s invasion and Montfort’s crushing victory over Aragonese and Toulousan forces at Muret.

  113. Languedoc castles: Tour Cabaret and Tour Regine, near Lastours.

  In 1214–15, Montfort tightened his hold over the county of Toulouse, extending his control northwards towards the Dordogne and the frontier with Angevin-held Guyenne. His title to the county of Toulouse was recognised by the Church and Philip II’s only son, Louis, who toured Languedoc in the spring of 1215, fulfilling a crusade vow taken in 1213. The Fourth Lateran Council (November 1215), while restoring the count of Foix to his lands, confirmed Montfort in possession of the county of Toulouse and the Trencavel possessions, titles with which Montfort was invested by Philip II in April 1216. By the end of that year even the city of Toulouse was in Montfort’s hands. However, the completeness of his victory provoked reaction, facilitated by the French court’s distraction over Prince Louis’ invasion of England in 1216–17. Raymond VI began to regain support and territory. In September 1217, Toulouse opened its gates to him leading to another siege at which, on 25 June 1218, Montfort was killed, struck on the head by a stone hurled by a mangonel in the city, operated, some claimed, by women. With the tables now turned, a new crusade was announced by Honorius III in August 1218, led in 1219 by Prince Louis. Some initial success was followed by failure to take Toulouse. Louis withdrew in August 1219, leaving Montfort’s less talented son, Amaury, to preside over a gradual deterioration of the Montfortian position. By 1223, a truce between Amaury and Raymond VII (1222–49) found much of Languedoc, including the Trencavel lands, regained by the families of its pre-1209 rulers. By 1225, Amaury had effectively given up, ceding his rights in the south to the new French king, Louis VIII (1223–6), the crusade apparently a military, political and, given the survival of heresy, religious failure.

  This verdict was rejected by Louis VIII. The crusade posed unfinished business for a twice-sworn Languedoc crusader eager to promote his new kingship in sacral terms and anxious to further dominate the south following his conquest of Poitou from the Angevins in 1224. With the pope still implacably hostile to reconciliation, Raymond VII was excommunicated in late 1225 and a clerical crusade tithe ordered. Louis took the cross for the third time in January 1226, leading a large army south in June. A three-month siege of Avignon led to its negotiated surrender in September and the submission of Provence and most of Languedoc. Although Louis died on his return journey north (in November 1226), remaining Toulousan resistance was broken by vicious ravaging campaigns in 1227 and 1228 led by Humbert of Beaujeu, the Capetian agent in Languedoc. The Albigensian crusades ended when Raymond VII submitted to Capetian terms at the treaty of Paris in 1229. Besides accepting reduced lands and the prospect of their absorption after his death into Capetian lordship, Raymond agreed to assist in the suppression of heresy, a tacit admission that the crusade had failed in its primary aim. Over the following decades heresy was rooted out, occasionally by military force, as with the siege and capture of the Cathar stronghold of Montségur in 1244, but more conclusively by the alliance of the new political and ecclesiastical establishments championing direct evangelism, especially by friars, and new processes of clerical inquisition, legal intimidation and punishment. While pivotal in the political reordering of southern France, the crusades had proved ineffective in creating an obedient Catholic community cleansed of error. Yet the former proved vital in the subsequent achievement of the latter, once more confirming the ineradicable fusion of the secular and spiritual, the cultural rationale of crusading in the first place.

  The Extension of Crusading

  The Albigensian crusades let the genie out of the bottle. Accusations of heresy and schism against a protean array of opponents flowed freely. The association of crusading and the defence of rights suited political contests, such as the civil wars in England in 1215–17 and 1263–5: at the battle of Evesham in 1265 both royalists and rebels wore crusade crosses (respectively red and white). On one occasion, in Germany in 1240, a pseudo- or anti-crusade, complete with preaching, giving the cross and granting of indulgences, was directed against a papal legate promoting a crusade against King Frederick II.21 Crusades were directed against the Colonna family in Italy (1297–8), enemies of Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), and to crush the disruptive northern Italian charismatic cult of Fra Dolcino (1306–7). As a tool of social and political discipline, crusading became a weapon of choice for rulers who energetically (and not always successfully) petitioned popes for access to crusade indulgences and money.

  114. From the Customs of Toulouse, 1296: torture.

  115. Heretics thrown to the fire.

  Papal enthusiasm could be impressive. Gregory IX (1227–41), a canon lawyer and veteran crusade preacher, demonstrated particular versatility in authorising, with careful legal justification, full-blown crusades or the reward of plenary indulgences. Targets included the supposedly heretical Stedinger peasants in the Lower Weser valley (1232–5) and German heretics more generally (1228–32, 1233–4); Bosnians suspected of heresy and inadequate orthodoxy (1233–8); Italian heretics and their alleged protectors (1231, 1235); Greek Orthodox rulers (1231, 1235–8); the Bulgarian King John Asen (1238), who threatened the Latin empire of Constantinople established in 1204; and Russian Orthodox enemies of the Teutonic Knights (1240). Gregory’s eagerness provided precedents for his successor, the even more distinguished canon lawyer Innocent IV (1243–54), whose crusade attention fell on Bosnians, Italian heretics, Greeks and Sardinians. For both Gregory and Innocent, the main enemies were the Hohenstaufen: Frederick II, his descendants and their supporters.

  The Hohenstaufen

  The wars against the Hohenstaufen provided the most dramatic example of the crusade used to redress a political problem, in this case the prevention of territorial encirclement of papal lands in Italy by Emperor Frederick II (1197–1250). Indelible distrust between successive popes and what Urban IV (1261–4) called a ‘viper race’ prevented a settlement, the feud becoming increasingly venomous under a succession of popes: Gregory IX, Innocent IV, Alexander IV (1254–61), Urban IV and Clement IV (1265–8). Frederick had first been excommunicated in 1227; a campaign against him led by the former king-regent of Jerusalem John
of Brienne in 1228–30 had attracted clerical taxes. However, only after Frederick had again been excommunicated in March 1239 did Gregory IX declare a crusade against him in the winter of 1239–40, hoping to reassure local allies and extend support in northern Italy and Germany where, renewed in 1240 and 1243, the crusade was preached. The full vial of papal vitriol was liberally poured on the Hohenstaufen as schismatics, heretics, harbingers of the Anti-Christ, fomenters of disorder and covert Muslims. After Innocent IV had deposed Frederick at the First Council of Lyons (1245), anti-kings were set up in Germany (Henry Raspe of Thuringia, 1246–7; William of Holland, 1247–56), perhaps encouraged by funds generated by the crusade. Thereafter, the crusade provided a focus and respectable cover for local rivalries in Italy and Germany as well as papal hostility that persisted after Frederick’s death. Crusades continued in Germany against his son Conrad IV (1250–4) and his illegitimate son, Manfred (regent, then, after 1258 king of Sicily; d. 1266), in Italy where, after 1254, the military action took place. In 1255, Henry III of England accepted from Alexander IV the crown of Sicily on behalf of his second son, Edmund, the pope wishing to harness the resources of a secular kingdom to the cause. English involvement failed to materialise, as Henry’s optimistic financial guarantees almost cost him his throne when leading English magnates rebelled at what they saw as the cost and caprice of the ‘Sicilian Business’. In place of the English, Urban IV and Clement IV enlisted Louis IX of France’s youngest brother, Charles of Anjou (d. 1285), to tackle Manfred. Following a swift, daring campaign in the winter of 1265–6, Charles defeated and killed Manfred at the battle of Benevento (February 1266). In 1268, Charles repulsed an attempted Hohenstaufen restoration, defeating Conrad IV’s son Conradin at Tagliacozzo (in August) and executing him in Naples (October), the last Hohenstaufen in the male line.