William of Minerve returned to his people. Although credentes like himself would gladly swear the oath, the Perfect were immune from such base instincts as self-preservation. True, they had come to Minerve to avoid certain death, but only as a means of continuing their work as exemplars of otherworldly purity. Deliberate suicide, when other options were available, was a form of material vanity. But now they were faced with a choice between dying and renouncing the consolamentum, which was really no choice at all.
There were approximately 140 Perfect in Minerve, separated into two houses for men and women. None of the bearded, black-robed male Perfect agreed to take the oath. A priest was rebuffed by a Cathar who said, “Neither death nor life can tear us from the faith to which we are joined.” Three of the women, however, abjured the dualist faith and thereby chose to live. To their Perfect sisters, these three were to be mourned, for they had relinquished their chance to commune with the Good for all time.
The 140 Cathar Perfect of Minerve were led down the ruined staircase to the canyon floor and tied to stakes planted in great piles of wood and kindling. The fire was lit. Peter of Vaux de Cernay, a chronicler and crusader fierce in his hatred of the heresy, claimed that the Cathars jumped joyfully into the flames, so perverse and life denying was their faith. The other chronicles omitted this detail. William of Tudela added only that “afterwards their bodies were thrown out and mud shovelled over them so that no stench from these foul things should annoy our foreign forces.” The first mass execution by fire of the Albigensian Crusade had taken place.
It was July 22, 1210, once again the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene.
9.
The Conflict Widens
THE TRIUMPHS OF SIMON DE MONTFORT coincided with a diplomatic offensive by Raymond of Toulouse. Ever since August 1209, when he presented his twelve-year-old son to Simon and the great barons of France in Carcassonne, the fortunes of Raymond had waned. It took no great strategist to see that the crusade, once done with the Trencavel territory, might vent its violent piety on the rest of Languedoc. Despite Raymond’s elaborate penance in June and his passive presence in the camp of the crusaders at Béziers and Carcassonne in July and August of 1209, signs of ecclesiastical hostility toward him were not long in returning.
In September, he was excommunicated again. The charge—not having lived up to the promises he had made at his public humiliation at St. Gilles—was partially true but verged on the vindictive, given the short amount of time that had elapsed between promise and nonfulfillment. Arnold Amaury raised the stakes by excommunicating the civic government of Toulouse as well and placing the city under interdict—that is, in a state of spiritual limbo during which no Catholic services, not even baptism and burial of the dead, could be legitimately performed. The accusation dealt with sheltering heretics, which the Toulousains disingenuously denied.
In attacking such a powerful force as the consuls of a rich and independent city, the papal legate was showing that the Church in Languedoc had been emboldened by the military success of the crusade. The count and his consuls, alarmed at this turn of events, decided to take their case directly to the pope. Fearing that he might be overruled, Arnold implored the excommunicates to stay in Languedoc and negotiate with him. His entreaties were ignored, and the Toulousains left for Rome in late 1209.
Innocent III must have awaited the aggrieved Occitans serenely. No pope in memory had been as powerful as Innocent was in the eleventh year of his pontificate. He ruled turbulent Rome with undisputed authority. He had consolidated his holdings, brought distant kingdoms to their knees, become the lawgiver of Europe, and purged the ranks of the clergy of undesirable loafers. His brother Riccardo had long ago finished constructing the Torre dei Conti, the brick fortress towering over the city as proof of the family’s might. It had taken Innocent and his kinsmen only a few years to coerce the great clans of the city into obedience; the Frangipani, Colonna, and others of their ilk had been bought or outmaneuvered and were forced to sit out his pontificate in tight-lipped silence. The so-called Patrimony of Peter, the swath of central Italy coveted by German emperors, was now firmly back in the camp of the papacy, its fertile estates and trading cities handing over a rich tribute to Innocent every year. No one had paid much attention to the indigent popes of the twelfth century; now all of Europe sat up when Innocent rose to speak. Thundering anathemae had variously fallen on the monarchs of France, Germany, and Britain, and intractable disputes between laymen were regularly referred to the pope in his role as ultimate arbiter. A zealous bureaucracy dedicated to elaborating canon law had expanded, for Rome’s aim was nothing less than to codify, and thereby control, the affairs of a continent. Even the disgraceful Fourth Crusade had been turned to Innocent’s advantage. The sack of Constantinople led to the installation of a Latin patriarch in the episcopal palace of Byzantium. For the first time in centuries, all of Christendom genuflected toward Rome.
Yet there remained, as Innocent put it, “foxes in the vineyards of the Lord,” and the vineyard most at risk belonged to the men who had traveled to see him. The meetings between Innocent and the men of Toulouse seem to have been cordial, perhaps even warm. The chronicler who was the most antipathetic to the Occitan cause, Peter of Vaux de Cernay, claimed that the pope harangued Count Raymond repeatedly during his month-long sojourn in Rome. Another contemporary source, William of Tudela, gave an entirely different cast to the proceedings and itemized as proof of good feelings the gifts offered to Raymond by the pope: a gold ring, a “princely cloak,” and a fine palfrey. It is reasonable to speculate, given Innocent’s subsequent instructions to his legates, that the pope may have felt an affinity for Raymond, notwithstanding the invective that had peppered the pontiff’s letters to the count prior to the crusade. Raymond was an elder statesman, a representative of an ancient family with blood ties to England, France, Aragon, and other, smaller principalities. As a nobleman, Innocent may have had second thoughts about dispossessing such an important figure. Squashing the Trencavels was one thing; getting rid of the great Saint Gilles, another. As a lawyer, the pope would have been fully aware that the march of canon law sometimes stepped on the toes of feudal practice. The presence of the consuls alongside Raymond showed that henceforth Church courts would have to take into account emerging civic customs. But as the supreme pontiff, Innocent knew that neither class sentiment nor legal scruple should prevail over questions of faith. In his view, Raymond was a protector of heretics and always had been.
In the wake of the Occitan embassy’s extended visit, Innocent lifted the interdict hanging over Toulouse. In January of 1210, he wrote to his legates with instructions. The count was not to be restored to the state of grace he had enjoyed following his scourging at St. Gilles, but neither was he to be cast out of the Christian community. A special ecclesiastical tribunal was to be convened in Languedoc in the spring to give Raymond his day in court. If, on that occasion, he could clear himself of the charges of murdering Peter of Castelnau and of reneging on the promises undertaken during his penance at St. Gilles, then he was to be left alone. The excommunication would be lifted and the count given all the help possible in chasing the heretics from his lands. If, on the other hand, Raymond refused to exculpate himself, or failed to do so, his case was to be referred directly to the pope. On matters of such gravity, only Innocent could arbitrate.
While Raymond pleaded in Rome, Toulouse was in an uproar, its reputation as a city of tolerance and intelligent self-interest shattered, thanks to the eloquence and agitation of the man with a miter. Fulk, the merchant-turned-troubadour-turned-monk-turned-bishop, no longer needed to have his mules clop softly past his creditors. The debts of his diocese were paid in full, and the first successes of the crusade had spurred him to action.
For Fulk, the time had come to put an end to what he viewed as the scandalous acceptance of Jews and heretics in his city. Even as their brothers in sin burned at Béziers, the bishop knew that the black-robed weavers strolled openly through the stre
ets of Toulouse, spreading their malignant dualism. A chronicle spoke of knights dismounting in front of Cathar holy men to perform the melioramentum, the ritual exchange of greeting and blessing between believer and Perfect, without the slightest attempt at discretion. Worse yet, in Fulk’s eyes, the Catholics of Toulouse took such displays for granted, as if their fellow citizens’ damnable practices were as normal as making the sign of the cross.
Fulk embarked on a campaign of preaching to instill the fear of hellfire in the faithful. The former troubadour crafted his homiletics carefully—and almost lost his audience as a result. The bishop fulminated on the evil of usury and charging interest on loans, which was forbidden to Christians in early medieval society. Yet brandishing the bogey of interest, often a prelude to persecuting Jews in medieval revivalist tours, failed to impress the sophisticated Toulousains. Commercial loans in the city had become commonplace, and the sale of shares—as was done to raise capital to rebuild flood-damaged Garonne textile mills—had been reinvented in the Toulouse of these years. The Jews, excluded from most professions except moneylending, were seen as respectable civic partners, as were their Christian rivals in banking, some of them Cathar credentes.
The normally astute Fulk, who had also been a businessman, may have underestimated the appeal of the heresy to the traders of Toulouse. Catharism, not Catholicism, spoke to the protocapitalists of the city, because its all-or-nothing approach to the material world allowed credentes to do whatever they wanted with their money. The bishop in his silks denounced cash; the Perfect in his simple robe conceded its necessity. The Church’s position—calling money sinful while practicing rapacious tax collection—was hard to defend, even for someone with Fulk’s gifts of oratory. In their countersermons, the Cathars would have driven home their advantage. Fulk’s talk of virtue and vice about things mired in matter was, to the Perfect, yet another example of the pettifoggery that the Church passed off as moral teaching. If dubious distinctions had to be drawn, trading in money could, in fact, be considered a worthier occupation than bartering crops or livestock. Money and interest were abstractions, thus less tainted with the tangible evil of the material.
Bishop Fulk of Toulouse depicted guiding Dante and Beatrice in the Paradiso
(The British Library)
The bishop then opted for the argument of force. Fulk’s medieval city was not a monolith of anticlerical consuls and striving artisans. Deep rivalries existed among districts, guilds, even families; inevitably, some people had been left behind, bankrupted, badly used by banker and merchant. In the neighborhood near Fulk’s cathedral of St. Stephen, the strength of episcopal patronage could be marshaled and put to good use working God’s mischief.
From his pulpit, Fulk sharpened his attacks on the profiteers, the godless, the landless, and the usurers, this time calling for reprisals. Among the ranks of the disgruntled, he formed a religious militia, called the White Brotherhood. They wore a large white cross emblazoned on dark robes and marched in torchlight procession through the streets of their enemies. Heavily armed, they launched nighttime attacks on the houses of prominent Jews and Cathars. Arson became respectable, almost sacramental.
Out of self-defense, the embattled opponents of the bishop responded by founding the Black Brotherhood. Its task was to confront the chanting vigilantes and make sure they did no harm. Like an Italian Renaissance city two centuries before its time, Toulouse in 1210 was wracked by gang warfare, in which scuffles and ambushes left dozens killed or wounded. The Blacks and the Whites terrorized a populace accustomed to civic peace. Bishop Fulk, revolted by the workaday amity between different creeds, had accomplished his goal.
Although Fulk succeeded in making an unholy mess of their city, the returning Raymond and his consuls knew that the supreme menace to Toulouse came from without. Not that the devout hooligans of the White Brotherhood failed to qualify as a serious vexation, or the bishop as a monumental pest. Relations between bishop and count, in fact, could hardly have been more acrimonious. Fulk treated Raymond somewhat like a stinking fish, at one time demanding that the count take a walk outside the city walls so that priests could be ordained in an odor of sanctity unpolluted by the fulsome proximity of an excommunicate. The threat of a renewed interdict was waved repeatedly in the face of Raymond’s allies.
Yet as bothersome as Fulk and his Whites were, their campaign of troublemaking was a pallid reflection of the darker force abroad in Languedoc. If Toulouse was to retain its independence, it had to come to terms with Simon de Montfort’s army as quickly as possible, before the marauding French finished picking over the carcass of the Trencavel domains. To spare Toulouse and its dependencies from being next in line, Raymond had to muster arguments and allies in his campaign for rehabilitation. The softening of Innocent, which had been the purpose of his trip to Rome, was having its desired effect: The legates were organizing, albeit in a dilatory fashion, a council to hear the count defend himself against the charges that had led to his excommunication. During the spring and early summer of 1210, the same season that Simon was mutilating at Bram and building Malvoisine at Minerve, Raymond raced throughout Languedoc and Provence, settling disputes with local monasteries, pulling down offensive castles, making payments of reparation. His intent was to live up to all the promises made at his public humiliation.
In July 1210, three months past the pope’s deadline, the special conclave convened in St. Gilles, the same Rhône town where a year earlier Raymond had allowed himself to be scourged by Milo. The people of Béziers were now all dead, as was Raymond’s nephew, the Trencavel viscount of Carcassonne. So too was Milo, who died unexpectedly in the spring of 1210. Toulouse, Raymond’s capital, was on the brink of civil war, and Simon had just burned the Cathars at Minerve. Only the greatest nobles of the south, Raymond Roger of Foix and Pedro of Aragon, stood by the count in his effort to keep the plague of crusade away from his lands.
Raymond came to plead his defense in the murder of Peter of Castelnau. The churchmen of the south, even if they despised Raymond, would have to listen to what he had to say. Innocent’s instructions had been explicit.
Yet the pope underestimated the animus harbored against Raymond by the Catholic hierarchy of Languedoc. Arnold Amaury still headed the anti-Toulouse drive, but he was now ably seconded by a certain Thedisius, Milo’s replacement. Peter of Vaux de Cernay, the most pro-Catholic of the three chroniclers to report on the council, candidly admitted to the schemings that had preceded the meeting: “[Thedisius] desired most passionately to find some lawful means by which the Count could be prevented from demonstrating his innocence. For he saw very well that if the Count were given authority to exonerate himself—an end which he might achieve by means of fraud or false allegations—the whole work of the Church in this country would be ruined.”
At the conclave Arnold Amaury asked to speak before Raymond. His line of argument was simple: When the churchmen had met in Avignon the previous September, Count Raymond had not carried out the terms of his penance and, as a result, had been excommunicated. Not all of those terms were carried out even now, particularly those that concerned illegally levying tolls on Church lands. Therefore Raymond had been, and still was, a perjurer. If he could not be trusted on such minor matters, he should not be listened to on far graver affairs. The Cathar heresy, which he had also sworn to eliminate, flourished in his lands. There could be no pleading if the accused was already without a trace of credibility. He had lied once; he should not be allowed to lie again.
The assembled bishops and abbots, coached beforehand in the springing of this perjury trap, agreed that the word of a forsworn nobleman was worthless. Raymond of Toulouse would not be allowed to speak. Even the chroniclers who detested him noted that tears welled up in the count’s eyes as the decision was handed down. The count had been gagged on a technicality that even the punctilious pope had not foreseen.
Innocent’s instructions had given the council the power to absolve Raymond but not to condemn him. If he cou
ld not speak, absolution was impossible. The tonsured heads at St. Gilles voted to extend indefinitely the excommunication decreed in September 1209. In so doing, they were not taking any initiative that could be construed as disobeying the pope; they were merely upholding the status quo. The perjury argument was an ingenious tactic, a great moment, one could say, in the annals of lawyering. Innocent went along with the decision, although he may not have been convinced of its justice. In a letter to King Philip Augustus of France shortly thereafter, he allowed, “We know that the Count has not justified his actions yet; but whether this omission is his fault or not we cannot tell.”
Raymond would spend the next six months trying to get the prelates to change their minds. An absurdist round of conferences and conclaves enlivened the major cities of Languedoc, as Raymond went knocking on doors that would not open because he was an excommunicate. His promises of greater concessions to the Church were automatically invalid unless accompanied by a sworn oath; yet he could not swear to anything until his excommunication had been lifted. And the count could not request a hearing, since, as a perjurer, he could not speak.
Time pressed in the latter half of 1210, for Simon de Montfort’s unbroken string of victories brought him closer and closer to Saint Gilles territory. Victory at Minerve was followed by the taking of Termes, a hilltop castle in the Corbières that was thought unassailable by anything less than mountain goats. As Simon and his cadre of grizzled knights and crusaders from Germany and Flanders clung to the steep slope, a Paris priest and siege engineer named William directed the fire of the catapults and Simon’s ever-faithful Alice of Montmorency hustled reinforcements through the dangerous defiles to her husband’s exposed position. After four months, Termes surrendered and its lord was sent to a Carcassonne dungeon.
The Perfect Heresy Page 11