The Treasure of Montsegur

by Sophy Burnham

  The Treasure of Montségur

  A Novel

  Sophy Burnham

  For my sister, Anne

  Contents

  Preface

  One

  They say I am mad.

  Two

  She was sewing in the window-seat overlooking the racefields at…

  Three

  The sight of the Inquisitors riding past has upset me.

  Four

  The memories come in flashes, like sunlight shining in a…

  Five

  Anger! Anger! It beats like waves of fire in my…

  Six

  Was it God’s will or hers that made things happen?

  Seven

  This morning I awaken to the bells all ringing gaily…

  Eight

  During Ascension Week she heard about the joust. It was…

  Nine

  This morning, as I’m gathering my things together getting ready…

  Ten

  I don’t slow down until I’m out in the dirt…

  Eleven

  Well, that was a good cry.

  Twelve

  Jerome may have been, as his friend Bernard said, the…

  Thirteen

  He hollows out a loaf of bread and pours the…

  Fourteen

  I took two days to walk to Montségur, and by…

  Fifteen

  Who can tell the tortuous ways of God? Or even…

  Sixteen

  I wake up with a start. Where am I? My…

  Seventeen

  I wake up next morning to a cold, white rain…

  Eighteen

  Another day: it’s time to hide my book.

  Nineteen

  Sunday. We prepare for church, Jerome and I. He has…

  Twenty

  Night. Jerome is sharpening his scythe, honing it on a…

  Twenty-One

  It began on May 13.

  Twenty-Two

  After that I would talk no more. Jerome undressed me…

  Twenty-Three

  We made one pitiful last stand to take back the…

  Twenty-Four

  They lowered us down the cliff face on ropes. We…

  Twenty-Five

  “And the gold and silver, the bullion and books, the…

  Twenty-Six

  I wept when she died. Alazaïs and I had spent…

  Twenty-Seven

  We live now in chastity, as if perfected friends, while…

  Twenty-Eight

  Spring comes early this year. By the end of February…

  Twenty-Nine

  They rode up the hill at a gallop. They thundered…

  Thirty

  I sit on the cold stone with my knees curled…

  Thirty-One

  I think of Baiona and William happy together in the…

  Thirty-Two

  For the second time: they take me to the torture…

  Thirty-Three

  They found him sitting in the dark, hands dangling between…

  Epilogue

  Ninety years later, a violent storm uprooted the huge beech…

  Bibliography

  Reader’s Guide to the Treasure of Montségur

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Sophy Burnham

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The mount of Montségur

  Preface

  The historical events described in this novel are little known to Americans. But recent atrocities and religious wars from Ireland or the Balkans to Somalia and Kashmir (not to mention in the U.S. itself) led me to this period, when Pope Innocent III called for a Christian Crusade against another Christian group.

  The largest army ever seen in Europe, perhaps as many as three hundred thousand men, gathered in the Languedoc region, which is now the south of France, to fight the heretics. The targets of their assault were known as Cathars, the Pure Ones, or Albigensians. Among themselves, they were called Good Men or Good Women or Good Christians, the Friends of God all joined in the Church of Love. By the enemy they were called haeretici perfecti—perfected heretics.

  They worshiped Christ, were pacifists, vegetarians, with strict rules of poverty, work, chastity, charity. They believed that humans were fallen angels, spiritual beings captured by demons in a physical form, and they eschewed all physical matter—pleasures in things of the world, including sex—as wrongful or illusory. They had, of course, various orders of believers. Not everyone was called to take the robe and live as a Good Man, a perfectus, or Good Woman, a perfecta, or to follow the most serious vows.

  We know little of the Cathar faith, and most of it only from the point of view of its enemies. A hundred years after the events depicted here, Jacques Fournier, the fanatical Inquisitor who served as Bishop of Pamiers and later became Pope Benedict XII of Avignon (1334–1342), provided our principal information by tenaciously investigating the inhabitants of the village of Montaillou. His work, Registries of the Inquisition, furnish us with the detailed inner working of the Inquisition, and some view of the Cathar Friends of God.

  But for the most part we can only surmise at that religion. The Cathars were Christian, but their true sins may have lain in translating the Bible into the vernacular, in refusing to tithe to the Catholic Church, and in dismissing the authority of the Pope as well as the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist in place of their own spiritual baptisms. Certainly the seeds of their rebellion fed the later Protestant Reformation and fueled the subsequent religious wars that pitted Catholic against Huguenot with such slaughter that many Protestants fled France for Germany, Holland, or the New World.

  There is a tendency to romanticize the Cathar Church of Love. Heresy is a relative concept, but even within the parameters of Christianity you can see why the Cathars (as well as the Waldensians over to the east, who were known as “the Poor Men of Lyons”) presented a threat to established Catholicism. They believed in the divinity of Christ, but not that he had died and been resurrected—a foundation of Christianity!

  Apparently they believed in reincarnation—and felt a desperate need to do something drastic to avoid that dreaded fate. So fierce was their determination that sometimes (though who knows how often) a perfectus might starve himself to death, undergoing the endura rather than continue to live among the evils of the world.

  They had a strong belief in dualism, although precisely how their outlook differed from that of the Roman Catholic church of the thirteenth century is hard to ascertain. Some scholars link the Cathars to a reflowering of Manichaean thought, the ancient form of Christianity to which Saint Augustine had belonged as a young man, before converting. Although stamped out as a heresy, Manichaeanism may have continued underground. Whatever the answers, I imagine that the theology of the Catholic Church and the folk-beliefs of the common people probably differed widely.

  To raise his army in 1209, the Pope promised any soldier who fought for forty days a freeze on his debts, the remission of all sins, and the possibility of plunder. Moreover, no one had to travel as far as the Holy Land, as in earlier Crusades, but only down to the rich, lush lands of the Languedoc, owned by the Count of Toulouse. This made it a popular war, and it lasted twenty years, first under the leadership of the French Count Simon de Montfort and then of his son, Amaury. In 1229, Raymond VII, the Count of Toulouse, surrendered an independent Occitanie and became vassal to the king of France.

  Soon after, Pope Gregory IX asked the Dominicans to form the Inquisition to stamp out the dissidents while bringing order to the atrocities perpetrated by wild mobs. The harder they worked, however, the harder the Resistance grew—as
often happens when an invading conqueror imposes a repressive rule.

  Events came to a head on May 13, 1243, when the French laid siege to the fortress of Montségur. It was one of the longest sieges in history, lasting some ten months. Two hundred Good Christians, the cream of the Cathar Church, were trapped on the mountaintop, together with a protecting garrison.

  In January of 1244 the Cathars, seeing the end was near, smuggled their treasure of gold and money (pecuniam infinitam) off the mountaintop and hid it “underground.”

  They held out for another six weeks, but on March 1, 1244, the fortress fell. On the night of the surrender, three perfecti and one other, who may have been a guide, were lowered down the cliff on ropes and vanished into the woods. Their task: to keep their church alive.

  The Cathar treasure has never been found. I’m told that Hitler sent an expedition to the south of France to search for it. Strange tales make more of the mystery, connecting the treasure and the Cathar heresy to the Knights Templar and various occult brotherhoods.

  For the record, the last perfectus, the semiliterate Guillaume Bélibaste, was burned in 1321 in Villerouge-Termenès, in the Corbières (Aude) district. With that, after nearly three hundred years of effort, the Catholic Church succeeded in stamping out the heresy and establishing the political boundaries of France. The Inquisition then turned its attention to new enemies, finding them in dissidents and Jews.

  Even today, if you visit the Languedoc in the south of France, you will find an easygoing people, more “Mediterranean”—more Italian perhaps—than in the rest of France, for they take their heritage direct from early Rome. As late as the Middle Ages their cities were governed, as they had been under the Roman Empire, by elected consuls. The three major religions lived side by side in peace, and women, Arabs, and Jews all had civil rights as well as opportunities for education. The Cathar faith provided, at least by implication, an equality between men and women, while Catholicism remained staunchly antifeminist. We find no women, however, among the Cathar bishops and deacons, since men were more suited for the hardships of that wandering lifestyle, but women perfectae could transmit the power of the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands. They were much concerned with girls’ education and often acted as nurses and doctors, especially to their own sex. More of them devoted themselves to the contemplative life than did their male counterparts.

  Describing this period offers a challenge. The times were harsh, the speech and attitudes so foreign to our modern comprehension, so violent, cruel, and bloody, that if one of us were somehow sent back in a time machine she would lose her mind. Lives were short and brutal.

  People did not wash often; they knew nothing of cleanliness. Their rooms were incredibly hot, with roaring fires kept blazing even in summer, and their many layers of clothing were rarely removed. They stank. They were filled with fear: they distrusted night, the dark, witches, wolves, werewolves, demons, and anything unknown (and this at a time when everything was unknown). They were afraid of one another, and especially mistrustful of anything or anyone who lay beyond their own village. I said that women, Arabs, and Jews were permitted civil rights in the early period. In some jurisdictions they were allowed to hold public office. As time passed, however, these rights were gradually removed. By the full Middle Ages, women were so little valued that their births and deaths went largely unrecorded.

  I am told that 73 percent of women died in childbirth, although the figure seems high. Despite the high mortality rate, many people in the Middle Ages lived as long as people today. Both the Lady Esclarmonde and Guilhabert de Castres lived well into their eighties, and died peacefully in their beds. And Esclarmonde was the mother of six children, and grandmother to more.

  When the Inquisition began its questioning, some people, including the Lady Esclarmonde, were too important to arrest. Others, such as her son Bernard-Otho de Niort, were arrested, held for ransom, then released. Still others—deemed less important—were tortured and burned at the stake or thrown down wells or stoned or buried alive, as befitted those, it was felt, who denied the one True Church.

  The principal characters in this book are fictional. Some, however, lived, and performed the acts recounted here. These include Jean Tisseyre, who walked through town shouting out his innocence, and the randy cleric Gervais Tilbury. In addition, the two bishops of the Church of Love, Guilhabert de Castres and Bertrand Marty, as well as the Lady Esclarmonde, Raymond de Perella, and all those named at Montségur, are based on historical figures. We know the names of those who were burned at Montségur, their station, and even something of their lives.

  What happened to the four who escaped is unknown.

  Concerning the Bible, I am sorry to say that the prohibition on ordinary people reading the Scriptures themselves lasted for centuries, although today, of course, Roman Catholics are permitted to read in his or her own language the Word of God.

  ONE

  They say I am mad.

  Listen, I have seen enough to drive anyone mad, and when the townsfolk see me now, straggling down the street in my ragged gown, sometimes leaning on the rough stone walls of a house or stopping at the fountain to look in the water, when they find me leaning on both hands on a fence to catch my breath before picking up my pack again and hobbling on, then I feel them ease away. The children come out of the byways, calling, “Witch, witch!” They throw stones at me. They are like rats or buzzing flies swarming at some undisclosed signal to my plight; they throw mud and stones at the poor madwoman, with her wild gray hair, which is me. They hoot and point and run in circles round me, touching my torn gray dress and making me forget who I am and what I came out for.

  I cover my face with both hands and weep, because I am afraid; because I am a clod of dirt and should have been burnt with the others.

  I told them so. “Burn me,” I cried. I ran to the two Dominicans, the Preaching Friars in their black robes and stark white hoods, who like our perfecti live in poverty. There were two of them begging outside the cathedral doors. I threw myself on my knees, there on the flagstones, and made obeisance as I used to do to the perfectus bishop Bertrand Marty, bowing in adoratio at his feet. “Burn me,” I begged the friars, “I am not worthy,” and held out both my hands to show the rope-burns on my wrists. But they pulled away, repulsed. I could see the younger one curl his lip at my smell. “I am not worthy to live,” I cried. “In the name of Christ! I have lied. I have sworn oaths. I have drunk, fucked, killed. I am unclean.”

  They gathered their garments and scurried away from the cathedral, away from me.

  Then I sank in the dust, leaning against the heavy wooden doors. Not a large cathedral, this one beside the monastery. Not a large monastery either—only ten or fifteen brothers living there. I scratched my fingers in the dust as our Lord did once when passing judgment on the adulteress, and I thought of all that had happened to bring me to this pass, and all my lovers gone, my friends, a way of life wiped out, and I, the wanderer, lost and trying to do right and trying to serve Christ.

  Esclarmonde used to say that misery and self-pity are the lies of the demon. “Take control,” she would command in that firm, impatient way she had. I laugh out loud, remembering. “Esclarmonde,” I whisper. I can see her crossing the square in her long black habit with a white cord at the waist, and the way she used to cock her head and purse her lips at scrawny me, one reproving eye trying to push some sense into my head. Her socia, Ealaine, would be at her side. Es-clar-monde, the light of the world.

  “Jeanne, you don’t let horses run away with you,” she used to caution me. “You rein them in. The same with the wild horses of your mind. Take control of your thoughts. Curb the dismal thoughts, and force forward those of blessings and thanks. They are horses at your own command.”

  After a time I picked myself up from the cathedral stones and took my cane and let my feet lead me slowly over the cobblestones, out of the town, past the vineyards and into the woods. My feet knowing where to go.

  They
took me right through the forest into the pastures where cattle grazed, tended by two little boys. There were some geese too, I remember, and one little goosegirl about six years old with hair as black as night. It fell into her eyes like a straggly pony’s mane.

  I stopped to stare at her for a long time, leaning on my stick.

  But she was not mine, that girl, for mine would have been much older, I think, maybe grown by now, though I cannot say for sure, for time has flooded through my brain, days into nights and seasons into seasons, and I don’t know how long I’ve been like this or even what year it is anymore, and maybe my daughter’s older than I am now; it’s not impossible.

  I went on a few steps, carried by the inner spirit that was guiding my feet, and then I sat on a stone by the side of the road and cried. I cried first for my dead daughter, and then for Esclarmonde, whom I miss so much, and Baiona and William, then for all the children of Montségur, and finally for all the children everywhere, including myself, that other child, who was also born in war. She wore a white dress with little pearls sewn down the front. I used to turn it in my hands. I watched it shrink smaller and smaller every year, until it seemed impossible that I’d ever been so tiny, no bigger than a kerchief, it seemed. One day I put it on my own child, and tried to ignore the brown bloodstain that ran all down the front. I should not have done it. Baiona claimed it didn’t bring a curse, but I buried my baby soon after. She died of pox, not war. She lay in my arms, that cold little form. That’s not a thing a mother can forget. I suppose if she hadn’t died, she would have been burnt up too.