by Michael Haag
There were few circumstances in which the women of the region could achieve some sort of independence; one was if the family was no longer headed by a man, usually because the man had died or had left the household; another was in a handful of occupations permitted to women, like running a shop selling wine or cheese for example, or acting as hostess at a roadside inn. It sounds like the restricted lives of Jewish women of traditional families in first-century Palestine; not at all like the freedom enjoyed by fully Hellenised women as Mary Magdalene probably was.
As for those women who were perfecti, unlike men they rarely travelled and almost never left their homes; their status was not permanent, instead normally it was laid aside and resumed as childbearing required. Girls might become perfecti a few years before puberty, were married as soon as they reached it, then became perfecti again once they were matrons or widows and their years of fertility were over. ‘In other words’, writes the historian R.I. Moore in The War On Heresy, ‘whatever religious beliefs lay behind or underpinned it, this was an institution whose function was to protect the chastity of nubile females.’
The Skull of Mary Magdalene
Unlike Vézelay where the most they could ever muster were a few fragments of Mary Magdalene’s ribs, the Mary Magdalene in the crypt at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume is a beaming skull set within a robe and headdress of gold, her breast and shoulders too of gold, and her long hair of gold.
The skull said to be that of Mary Magdalene in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence. The idea behind relics was to get as close as possible to Jesus himself; given her supporting presence during his ministry and her witness at the crucifixion and the resurrection, to get this close to Mary Magdalene is as close to Jesus as you can possibly get.
Skull of Mary Magdalene. Photograph by Michael Haag.
Though nothing is known of who came upon the skull of Mary Magdalene, the fact that the Vatican and King Charles of Anjou immediately placed the relics under the supervision of the Dominicans suggests that they were part of the discovery from the start. The Dominicans may even have initiated the find, for Mary Magdalene was just the sort of woman they needed to destroy the Cathars.
The founder of the Dominican Order was Dominic de Guzmán, a Spanish priest who early in his career in about 1205 visited the South of France where he participated in a mission to convert the Cathars, several times engaging them in public debates, but with little effect. In his view the Cathars were alienated from the Church by its show of wealth and its lack of humility and spirituality. Deciding there was a need to combine the spiritual qualities of monastic life, including a deep training in religious studies, with an active life of preaching, he obtained permission from the papacy in 1216 to found the Order of Preachers, known popularly as the Dominican Order. ‘Zeal must be met by zeal, humility by humility, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching falsehood by preaching truth’, Dominic told his friars, but even so they won few converts.
A digital facial reconstruction based on the skull and jaw of Mary Magdalene at the Basilica Saint-Maximin by Brazilian experts in 2015. The skull belonged to a woman who died at the age of fifty-one but the face has been reconstructed to show how she looked at twenty-one – in other words, by their reckoning, at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Apart from being used to recreate the faces of Tutankhamun and Ivan the Terrible digital forensic facial reconstruction has also been used by police forces and the FBI seeking help from the public to identify murder victims. But the accuracy is not good enough to be accepted as evidence in courts of law. Which begs the question of whose skull this is. The reconstruction might be accurate but who is she? It would not have been out of character for the Dominicans to have dug up a dead Cathar for their purposes.
Reconstruction of the face of Mary Magdalene from her skull. Cicero Moraes, Wikimedia Commons.
Meanwhile already in 1184 the episcopal inquisition against the Cathars had begun. Ordered by the papacy but conducted by local bishops, it was intermittent and haphazard. But these persuasions were so far only sideshows compared to the brutal warfare that was undertaken in the name of the Church against the Cathars.
By 1200 Catharism had become so widespread that the papacy was alarmed. Pope Innocent III said that the Cathars were ‘worse than the Saracens’. In 1209 a crusade was launched against them – the Albigensian Crusade, as so many Cathars lived around Albi – initiated by the Church and enthusiastically backed by the king of France and the nobility of the north. At that time Languedoc was not part of the French kingdom; and so the king of France and the northern nobles saw rich territorial gains to be had from a crusade against the aristocracy, the common people and the growing middle class of the south. Not all of these were Cathars but among many in the south sympathy for the Cathars ran deep. As one knight of Languedoc replied when asked by a papal legate why they did not display more zeal in pursuit of the heretics, ‘We cannot. We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them and we see them living lives of perfection’.
The crusade began by moving against Béziers in July 1209. The population was given the chance to hand over the Cathars among them but they refused, and the Catholics of Béziers also refused the offer to freely depart. Instead the people trusted in their walls and were determined to wear down the crusader army in the course of a long siege. But as some of the townspeople were making a sally at the encircling enemy the gates were breached. When the papal legate was asked by the crusaders how to tell the Catholics from the heretics, he replied, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own’. Within hours the entire population, about 20,000 men, women and children, Cathars and Catholics, was slaughtered and the city was razed. The day was 22 July, the feast day of Mary Magdalene.
In that same first year of the crusade the core of Cathar resistance withdrew to the castle of Montségur atop a great domed hill in the eastern Pyrenees, where they withstood assaults and sieges until capitulating in 1244. Some two hundred still refused to surrender their beliefs; they were bound together within a stockade below the castle and in what Lawrence Durrell has called ‘the Thermopylae of the gnostic soul’ were set ablaze on a huge pyre.
A Cathar bound to a stake and being burnt alive in what looks like an eye-witness sketch. It was found on the back of a document addressed by Alphonse, count of Toulouse, to Pope Innocent IV recommending that the pope issue what became known as the Papal Bull Ad Extirpanda of 1252 in which Innocent authorised the Dominicans’ use of torture against the Cathars.
Sketch of a Cathar being burnt at the stake. Wikimedia Commons.
Between the destruction of Béziers in 1209 and the fall of Montségur in 1244 the crusade swept back and forth across southern France like a recurrent plague, killing Cathars in their thousands, destroying homes and towns. Barely more than a week after the destruction of Béziers the crusaders marched on the great walled town of Carcassonne which surrendered in the middle of August. In this case the inhabitants were permitted to go free, Catholic, Cathar and Jew, but only one by one through a postern gate, where they were stripped naked and cast out broken and barefoot into the parched landscape, their property, their livelihoods, their personal possessions left behind in the empty city. More towns fell throughout that autumn and the following year; in July 1210 the town of Minerve resisted but surrendered when its water supply was damaged; 140 Cathars were burnt at the stake. Likewise when Montréal surrendered in 1211 several hundred Cathars were burnt alive. And so it continued for years. In 1219 when the town of Marmande surrendered the crusaders nevertheless demanded a blood-price from the entire population for the Cathars they had harboured. A contemporary account written by the unknown author of the second part of the Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise describes what happened next.
Clamour and shouting arose, crusaders ran into the town with sharpened steel; terror and massacre began. Lords, ladies and their little children, women and men stripped naked, all these were slashed and cut to pieces with keen edged s
words. Flesh, blood and brains, torsos, limbs and faces hacked in two; lungs, livers and guts torn out and tossed aside lay on the open ground as if they had rained down from the sky. Marshland and firm ground, all was red with blood. Not a man or a woman was left alive, neither old nor young, no living creature, unless any had managed to hide. Marmande was razed and set alight.
The inquisitions were a supplement to this violence; they reached deep into people’s lives, tormenting their minds and bodies and terrifying their hearts and souls, destroying all deviations from the authority of the apostolic hierarchy. In 1234, under Pope Gregory IX, the papacy took over the inquisition from the bishops and put the Dominicans in charge. Dominic himself had died in 1222 but not the zeal he had instilled in the Dominicans. Torture was usual though as yet unofficial, but in 1252 its use was explicitly sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV, and inquisitors and their assistants were permitted to absolve one another for the tortures they committed. There was no possible way of proving one’s innocence, but there was every motivation for deciding upon guilt, for the victims’ properties were confiscated and after deducting expenses – including the cost of interrogation, torture, trial, imprisonment and execution – half went to the inquisitors, half to the papacy. So lucrative was the inquisition that the Dominicans took to digging up the dead, trying and condemning them in absentia so to speak, and then dispossessing their families of their inheritances.
The most effective inquisitor, however, was Jacques Fournier, from 1317 the bishop of Pamier, who examined the people of Montaillou and elsewhere in the region, relying on close questioning rather than torture and in only five cases condemning persons judged heretics to the flames, among them the perfectus Guillaume Bélibaste who was burnt alive in 1321. By 1326 Fournier believed he had completely rooted out the Cathar heresy. In 1334 he was elected Pope Benedict XII.
Between them the crusade and the inquisition had inflicted savage and grotesque deaths on countless people and did terrible damage to the society and culture of southern France. Heresy was the excuse but independence of thought was the crime. The terror unleashed by the Church was against a whole people; the Cathars had been part of a varied and tolerant civilisation which included all manner of Christians as well as Jews; Languedoc had been the home of the troubadours, of their poetry and songs of chivalry, romance and courtly love. All this was destroyed.
Montségur where the Cathars held out against the papal crusade for thirty-five years. When they finally surrendered in 1244 two hundred or so were brought down from the fortress atop the mountain to where the village is now and were burnt alive.
Postcard of Montségur. Michael Haag collection.
Enforcers though they were for the Church, the Dominicans’ self-image was one of submission, obedience, poverty and humility and rather than identifying with the power and wealth of the Church, at whose head stood St Peter, they were drawn to Mary Magdalene. They were drawn to the very woman to whom the Cathars were also drawn, but whereas the Cathars saw Mary Magdalene as the visionary companion of Jesus in opposition to the institutionalised Church, its whole apparatus a delusion and evil, the Dominicans saw Mary Magdalene as the Church’s kinder and feminised face while yet being the apostle to the apostles and therefore the upholder of apostolic authority. And they also saw her as a lure; a way of drawing Cathars back into the Catholic fold and holding them there.
Mary Magdalene, in the words of the late thirteenth-century Dominican Giovanni da San Gimignano who identified her with Luke’s sinner woman at the house of Simon the Pharisee, ‘exhibited obedience to Christ because she kissed his feet. Thus her kisses were kisses of devotion and holiness. Likewise the kiss to the foot is a sign of veneration. Thus a person kisses the foot of the pope. And so did the Magdalene, out of reverence and humility, not kissing his mouth like a wife or his hand like a daughter but his feet like a servant’.
And so today the skull of Mary Magdalene shines out from her gilded reliquary in the crypt of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. Yet a mystery remains. Why Mary Magdalene?
For the Cathars, as it had been for the gnostics in Egypt, Mary Magdalene was the embodiment of their spiritual vision and their rejection of the structure of the Church. And for the Church, and especially for the Dominicans, Mary Magdalene was their way of grappling with and neutralising dissent.
But the fact that Mary Magdalene is there at all – that she is there regardless of being overlooked by Paul, that she found her way from Palestine to Egypt and to France – suggests that she had taken on a life of her own, that her story lives and she cannot be ignored. By her presence at the cross and the empty tomb she is forever bound up with the oldest and most fundamental mystery of mankind, the mystery of death and new life and the erotic link between the two.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Escape from the Cave: Renaissance Magdalene
IN 1337, SIXTEEN YEARS after Guillaume Bélibaste, the last Cathar perfectus, was condemned as a heretic by the inquisitor Jacques Fournier and burnt at the stake, and three years after Fournier was elected pope as Benedict XII, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch climbed the steep and rocky path up to Sainte Baume, the remote cave 3,300 feet up the face of a limestone massif overlooking Provence. Baume means cave in Provençal; in the High French used by ecclesiastics it means balm. This was the holy cave, the holy balm, where a repentant Mary Magdalene was said to have lived out the last thirty years of her life in contemplation of the divine.
Petrarch’s Pilgrimage of Love
No sooner had the papacy and King Charles of Anjou put the Dominican Order in charge of Mary Magdalene’s relics at St Maximin than the friars also commandeered the cave attributed to Mary Magdalene in the face of the mountain ridge nearby. The Dominicans, who did so much to destroy the Cathars who had venerated Mary Magdalene as the bride of Christ, usurped her for themselves, promoting and elaborating her tradition in Provence. The Dominicans after all were the Order of Preachers and Mary Magdalene was the Apostle to the Apostles who had preached the resurrection to the doubting apostles and also had preached the Christian faith to the pagans of Provence.
The Dominicans lost no time ensuring that St Maximin and Sainte Baume were celebrated throughout Europe and became famous centres of pilgrimage. Mary Magdalene’s tomb at St Maximin became the third holiest site in Christendom – after the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem and the burial place of Peter at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome – and the cave of Mary Magdalene at Sainte Baume was recognised as one of the oldest Christian shrines in the world. A friary and a church stood on the cliff face ledge outside the cave to service the pilgrimage traffic and several altars stood within. And the pilgrims did come. Among them was Petrarch, who is often described as the first humanist, an originator of the Renaissance, and the founder of the tradition of Renaissance love poetry; he was also a religious man and he came as a devout pilgrim to Sainte Baume.
The interior of the cave at Sainte Baume where according to the Provençal legend Mary Magdalene lived for the last thirty years of her life. Pilgrims have been climbing to the cave since the Middle Ages. Shrines and altars have been set up within and there is space enough to hold services for 750 people.
The cave at Sainte-Baume. Library of Congress.
Petrarch’s family were from Florence but political disturbances forced them into exile in 1302, the same year in which Dante was driven from the city, so that Petrarch was born in Arezzo in Tuscany in 1304. When he was eight his family moved to Avignon in Provence, which was then the seat of the papacy; there Petrarch studied Latin literature and took holy orders, in 1330 becoming private chaplain to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, whose friendship and patronage allowed Petrarch to travel widely and pursue his interests as a classical scholar. Passionate about recovering the knowledge of the classical world, Petrarch sought out ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts during his travels and discovered a previously unknown collection of Cicero’s letters.
Petrarch’s ecclesiatical care
er, however, did not prevent him fathering a son in 1337, just before his ascent to Sainte Baume, nor a daughter a few years later, both children born out of wedlock to an unknown woman. But his greatest love lay elsewhere; eleven years before his climb to the cave he met a young woman at Avignon, thought to have been Laura de Noves, who awoke in him a lifelong passion. But Laura was married to Count Hugues de Sade, an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade, and would not respond to his attentions; instead she forever lived for Petrarch as the idealised woman of his poetry.
The year before his pilgrimage to the cave of Mary Magdalene, Petrarch had climbed the 6,300-foot Mont Ventoux, the highest mountain in Provence, where he stood dazed at the spectacle of clouds passing beneath his feet, the Rhone flowing almost under his eyes, the far-off snow-capped Alps rising seemingly at the stretch of his arm, and the blue expanse of the Mediterranean filling the horizon beyond Aigues-Mortes and Marseilles several days’ journey away.
But then changing his gaze from space to time, and looking within his own life, he reflected on the ten years since he had first seen Laura. The words of St Augustine came to mind, ‘I desire to recall my foul past and the carnal corruption of my soul, not because I love them, but that I may the more love you, O my God’. Petrarch lived in a state of perpetual flux between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit. ‘These two adversaries’, he said, ‘have joined in close combat for supremacy, and for a long time a war has been waged in the field of my mind, its outcome still unknown’. That evening, after descending from the mountain, he wrote to a friend,