The maverick faith could not fail to appeal to beleaguered medieval womanhood. Not since the time of the gnostics had women had such a say in the affairs of the hereafter. Simple credentes could bask in the reflected glory of their stronger sisters and, more important, take solace in the knowledge that they were not some sort of afterthought of the divine mind. In any event, the Evil One had created the world, so the shibboleths of its organization—including its sexual pecking order—were there to be endured, not endorsed. Like the Kabbalists who were their neighbors in Languedoc, the Cathar women found comfort in the notion of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.
Not that the Cathars were entirely free of the prejudices of the time. Some believers questioned by the Inquisition in the fourteenth century spoke of male Perfect teaching that one’s last incarnation had to be as a man, if one were ever to leave this Earth for good. Clearly, this was a misogynist twist on earlier Cathar precepts. A few former female credentes, again under Inquisition questioning, told of being called sinks of corrupting temptation and blamed for encouraging procreation, an act which produced yet another prisoner of matter. Here, at least in its first proposition, was the familiar complaint of the medieval male ascetic, no matter what his faith. In this, some of the Cathar Perfect must have agreed with St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
Yet given the importance of women in spreading the faith, it is unlikely that such female-baiting formed a majority opinion in Catharism. The role of women was further enhanced by Languedoc’s system of partible inheritance, whereby families split legacies evenly. Unlike the north’s system, where everything went to the eldest son and the remainder of his siblings had to fend for themselves, the south’s splintering of estates gave many women a slim margin of independence that they would not have enjoyed elsewhere. Noblewomen, especially, founded, managed, and led Cathar homes. Raymond Roger, the count of Foix, a mountain capital at the foot of the Pyrenees, would applaud in 1204 as his sister, Esclarmonde, received the consolamentum from Guilhabert of Castres in a ceremony held in Fanjeaux, a town near Carcassonne. With her, in a ceremony attended by most of Languedoc’s nobility, were three ladies of equally exalted birth who would pledge their lives to spiritual perfection. When Raymond Roger’s wife, Philippa, decided that she too wanted to be a Perfect, the count offered no objections.
In the numerous small fortified settlements dotting the landscape between Toulouse, Albi, and Carcassonne, Catharism touched a third to a half of the population. A network of religious women, whether Cathar grandmothers or daughters-in-law, was supporting the work of the itinerant men. In the prescribed absence of church buildings or even chapels, credentes gathered in homes run by female Perfect to listen to the visiting male Cathars from the cities. The most influential Perfect hostesses—Blanche of Laurac, Esclarmonde of Foix—had previously resided in the local castle. There, in the evening, the troubadours and jongleurs would come to entertain the same people who had been uplifted by the Cathars in the afternoon. The Perfect and the troubadours coexisted in the hearths of the Languedoc nobility. From the dualists’ love your neighbor to the jongleurs’ love your neighbor’s wife all in the course of a day, the Occitan culture of piety and fine feeling was slipping the traces of traditional Christianity. Amor was indeed the opposite of Roma. The consensual scholarly guess puts the number of Perfect at 1,000–1,500 in the Languedoc of the year 1200. Among the most effective of these were what one Occitan troubadour called, admiringly, bela eretga—the fair heretics.
None of Languedoc’s spiritual eccentricity would have been possible without the tacit assent—or fecklessness—of its overlords. By the year 1200, the cause of religious sedition was well served by the region’s fractured feudalism. The consolidation of power between king and clergy that would soon hoist the Ile de France and its dependencies into the first rank of medieval nations was singularly lacking in the south. Instead, Languedoc’s nobles and churchmen fought like fishwives, often over the revenues that the merchants of the towns were appropriating for themselves. In such an anticlerical environment, an alternate faith like Catharism could prosper.
At the top of the shaky ladder of precedence was Raymond VI, count of Toulouse. His mother, Constance, who had attended the public hearing of the Cathars at Lombers in 1165, was the sister of the king of France. Raymond’s father, Raymond V, appears to have been the last in his line to evince open support of the Church. In 1177, the elder man invited a bevy of prelates to sniff out Catharism in his capital of Toulouse, only to have the churchmen quickly discouraged by the immensity of the task. The one man convicted, a rich merchant, was forced to go on a pilgrimage to Palestine; on his return three years later, he was acclaimed a hero and given a position of high civic responsibility. In the household of the count, the younger Raymond no doubt failed to notice this outrage to the faith. Just turned twenty, he had already embarked on a precocious career of stealing his father’s mistresses. His mother, citing marital mistreatment, had by that time fled Languedoc for the court of her brother in Paris, and her marriage to Raymond’s father was annulled.
Seal of Raymond VI of Toulouse
(Archives Nationals, Paris)
By the year 1200, Raymond VI was in his early forties, having inherited his title six years earlier. He had just buried his fourth and penultimate wife, Joan of England, the sister of Richard Lionheart and John Lackland. To the horror of the orthodox, Raymond’s court was a cosmopolitan mix of Cathar, Catholic, and Jew, and his friends were not distinguished for their piety. One, a troubadour named Peire Vidal, once disguised himself as a wolf to woo the loveliest woman in Languedoc, Etiennette de Pennautier, whose licentious nickname was Loba, or she-wolf. Although unsuccessful in winning the favors of Loba (unlike Raymond Roger, the count of Foix), Vidal won fame for his exploits and composed songs for the edification of his noble patron. It is not recorded whether Count Raymond courted Loba.
Presumably, Raymond had other compensations; certainly, he had other worries. In theory, his family held sway from the hills of Provence to the lowlands of the River Garonne; in practice, the situation was a dog’s breakfast of conflicting allegiances, power-sharing arrangements, and hotly contested sources of money. After the ninth-century breakup of Charlemagne’s empire, which had stretched from Saxony to Catalonia, the lands of Languedoc were parceled out among a myriad of warring factions. The noble families of the region, approximately 150 in all at the turn of the millennium, fought obscure territorial skirmishes for generations, ensuring that the countryside bristled with castles and defensive fortifications. Through shrewd marriages and successful sieges, Raymond’s family, the Saint Gilles, had by the turn of the twelfth century established its preeminence, if not its dominion, in Languedoc.
Yet they were never to develop into a putative royal family of the south. Any chance the Saint Gilles clan had of increasing its power at home was squandered by its fondness for foreign adventure. Raymond’s great-grandfather, Count Raymond IV, answered the call for the First Crusade and in 1099 led the Christian armies into Jerusalem. He then decided to stay in the East, carving out a kingdom for himself in what is now Lebanon,*and consigning a bastard son to look after the family possessions at home. Years of fitful struggle ensued in Languedoc, during which the Saint Gilles lands became fair game for neighboring clans, including those from Aquitaine, to the west, and Aragon, to the south. By the time a legitimate Saint Gilles had grown to manhood and moved from Palestine—Alfons-Jordan, so named for his baptism in the River Jordan—the family had let slip the opportunity to increase its power and lay the groundwork for a future kingdom. Elsewhere in the early twelfth century, such prominent families as the Capets of France had begun the long process of reining in their fractious barons, and the Plantagenets of England and Hohenstaufens of Germany hovered in the wings of power. Closer to Languedoc, the ruling families of Barcelona and Aragon had merged to form a coherent, powerful kingdom just south of the Pyrenees.
The years of absentee landlordship by the Saint Gil
les would cost them dearly. As the twelfth century progressed, the south saw repeated disputes over jurisdiction as the rising clans of the north pressed claims to areas under the weak control of the Saint Gilles. Strategic marriages forestalled any great armed conflict—although Raymond’s father had to undertake a series of minor defensive fights—so that by 1200 the Saint Gilles held territory in Provence as vassals of the Holy Roman emperor, land in the Toulousain from the king of France, and property in Gascony from the king of England. The king of Aragon had won control over much of the Mediterranean coast of Languedoc, including the important town of Montpellier. Given the rivalry between these overlords, the threat of war hung heavily over Languedoc. The balancing act required of Raymond VI was extremely delicate, especially as he, unlike northern barons and monarchs, did not own huge estates outright on which to rely for revenue or armed knights.
Raymond fared little better as liege lord of the greater noble families of the region. In the rugged foothills of the Pyrenees, mulish independence was the rule, not the exception. The count of Foix, the man whose sister and wife became Perfect and who won the heart of the she-wolf Loba, exemplified the type of miscreant whose excesses Raymond was expected to curb. Whenever Raymond Roger of Foix murdered a priest or besieged a castle, as he sometimes did, Raymond of Toulouse was powerless to punish him, even had he been so inclined. The other mountain lords were similarly independent.
The prickliest thorn in Raymond’s side came from the Trencavel family. They sat squarely in the middle of Languedoc, firmly ensconced behind the battlements of Carcassonne. Their vast holdings around the city, stretching as far as Béziers, sundered the Saint Gilles lands in two. To ensure their independence from Toulouse, the Trencavels had made themselves vassals—and thus protégés—of Aragon in 1150. Raymond, showing his usual preference for the bedroom over the battlefield, tried to neutralize the threat from Carcassonne by taking a Trencavel trophy wife, Beatrice of Béziers. Instead of founding a new dynasty, the couple eventually had their marriage annulled, and Beatrice became a chaste Cathar holy woman. It is unknown whether she went willingly or was shoved aside by Raymond, whose infatuation with the daughter of the king of Cyprus led to his third marriage. The result was that the patchwork of Trencavel and Saint Gilles loyalties remained as motley as ever.
The Church made the situation in Languedoc even more complex. Bernard of Clairvaux’s Cistercian monastic movement—the reforming wing of the Benedictine family—had spread from its founding house in Cîteaux, Burgundy, to the south, attracting the talents of such men as Fulk of Marseilles, who would become the bishop of Toulouse. Its zealot monk-farmers, still in that period of grace when successful monasticism did not mean excessive waistlines, amassed thousands of acres of property through a combination of hard work and bequests of land from people hedging their bets on the hereafter. Visitors to present-day France, marveling at the picturesque ubiquity of villages no matter how steep the slope, wet the marsh, or barren the moor, are often admiring of the handiwork of the monks. They tamed the last wildernesses, enticed peasant pioneers into newly founded settlements, and became a tonsured gentry managing enormous estates. Given the absence of legitimate offspring among monks, these estates would not be subdivided in later generations.
Such wealth did not go unnoticed. First in line for a share of the riches were the Cistercians’ fellow churchmen, the secular clergy—that is, priests living in lay society as opposed to the regular clergy, monks following some prescribed communal rule. Among Languedoc’s secular clergy, there were breathtaking differences in levels of piety, liturgical literacy, and financial solvency. Bishops feuded with abbots over money, sometimes leaving parish churches vacant for years, their taxes and tolls the subject of acrimonious dispute. The office of bishop was a position very much of this world—as the Cathars never failed to deplore.
The strife between the monastic regular clergy and the secular clergy paled in comparison to the woes inflicted on them by the Languedoc laity. Attacking the property and persons of priests was something of a national pastime. The “Peace of God” movements, essentially oaths by which rambunctious nobles swore not to despoil defenseless clerics, had been started as early as the tenth century. In Languedoc, with its chronic lack of central authority, there was no force powerful enough to ensure that these oaths would be upheld. The glue of medieval society was coming unstuck. Hard-strapped counts, viscounts, and members of the petty nobility seldom came to the aid of embattled bishops—who, in any event, were rarely paragons of virtue. Tithes were routinely diverted to the coffers of secular grandees or simply not paid at all. In 1178, the Trencavels had thrown the bishop of Albi in prison; the following year, they added insult to injury by extorting a whopping 30,000 sols from the monastery of St.-Pons-de-Thomières.*Count Raymond of Toulouse made it something of a hobby to harass the abbots of the monastery near his ancestral seat of St. Gilles, a town in the Rhône delta.
Often the conflicts verged on the macabre. In 1197, the Trencavels contested the election of a new abbot in the highland monastery of Alet. Their emissary, Bertrand of Saissac, a nobleman with several Cathar Perfect in his family, came up with a novel solution to the dispute. He dug up the body of the former abbot, propped it upright in a chair, then called upon the horrified monks to listen carefully to the corpse’s wishes. Not surprisingly, given such ghoulish encouragement, a friend of the Trencavels easily carried a new election. To make the proceedings legal, the consent of the Catholic hierarchy was needed, so Bertrand turned to the archbishop of Narbonne, the preeminent churchman of Languedoc. He was also its preeminent grifter. Innocent III would write of the Narbonne clergy in exasperation: “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… . 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.” The Trencavel request for confirmation of the new abbot’s election came augmented by a handsome payoff, and approval was promptly given. A Catholic chronicler noted somberly that many people in Languedoc, when refusing to do a particularly unpleasant task, reflexively used the expression “I’d rather be a priest.”
Although such anticlericalism existed elsewhere, Languedoc’s quarrels were endemic, not episodic, and came to be played out in a society that did not have just nobility and clergy competing for prizes at the expense of the peasantry. For, like Lombardy in northern Italy and Flanders by the English Channel, Languedoc of the year 1200 had become a landscape of towns, full of obstreperous burghers elbowing their way into what was once thought a divinely ordained procession of priest, knight, and serf. Stadtluft macht frei (City air makes men free) would run the later German byword about medieval towns, and Languedoc’s precocious experience proved the axiom fully. The main centers—Montpellier, Béziers, Narbonne, Albi, Carcassonne, Toulouse—teemed with energy, most of them recovering the vigor they had known a millennium earlier under the Romans.
Toulouse, the most important of the lot, was self-governing, having purchased its freedoms from Raymond’s father and elected consuls, called capitouls, to legislate in a new town hall built in 1189. In any city where a consular system took root, civic truculence became automatic. In 1167, the year of the Cathar meeting at St. Félix, the merchants of Béziers had even gone so far as to murder their Trencavel viscount. The capitouls of Toulouse, perhaps reflecting the diplomacy and disposition of their count, preferred to legislate reasonably about their pursuit of wealth and pleasure. An observer noted that in the city, a married person could not, by a law of the capitouls, be arrested “for reason of adultery, fornication or coitus in any store or house he or she rented, owned or maintained as a residence.” Clearly, Languedoc’s mix of troubadour and trader culture was cocking a snook at the Church.
The towns also began tolerating ideas and people usually kept outside the confines of the feudal Christian commonwealth. Groups at the margin of society�
��and not just heretics—began testing the waters of the mainstream. Languedoc’s numerous Jews, who had lived in the region since the time of the Romans, were among the prime beneficiaries of the culture of clemency that arose out of the crossfire of southern noble, cleric, and townsman. An Easter tradition called “strike the Jew,” whereby members of the Toulouse Jewish community would be batted around a public square by Christians, was ended in the middle of the twelfth century, after hefty payments had been made to count and capitouls. The clergy protested, but the ban held. The Church, which had evolved a policy of clearly delineated ostracism of the Jews, howled even louder when non-Christians were allowed to own property and, in some instances, hold office. In Béziers in 1203, the chief magistrate in the Trencavel lord’s absence—or bayle—was a Jew named Simon. In Narbonne, which supported a Talmudic school and several synagogues, some Jewish merchants possessed vineyards in the surrounding countryside and employed Christian peasants to work the land, an open flouting of the Church’s prohibition on Jews having any kind of authority over Christians. Whereas these changes were usually effected through the greasing of palms or the paying of steep taxes, they nonetheless signaled the dawning of a freer, or at least more freewheeling, society.
The Perfect Heresy Page 5