The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  Termes and a succession of hangings and burnings called forth a new wave of capitulation. Even Peter Roger of Cabaret dropped his defiance, by announcing to his prisoner, Bouchard de Marly, that he would hand over to him all his lands, castles, and titles in exchange for lenient treatment from the new viscount of Carcassonne. Bouchard went free, and the rebel base on the Montagne Noire shut down. By the new year, the great majority of the old Trencavel possessions had been taken.

  King Pedro of Aragon tried to prevent the war from engulfing the rest of Languedoc. In January of 1211, he made a generous overture to the Church: Pedro recognized Simon de Montfort as his vassal, thereby giving a sworn seal of approval to the new viscount among the nobility on both sides of the Pyrenees. The bond of vassalage, a complex link of subservience for the vassal and obligation for the liege lord, was above all else a contract that established legitimacy. In recognizing Simon, Pedro was consigning the infant son of the late Raymond Roger Trencavel to feudal irrelevance and, in the process, acknowledging the Church’s right to depose his vassals without his permission. It was an important concession for which Pedro sought something in return: the restitution of his brother-in-law, Raymond VI, to his rightful place as the most important lord of Languedoc. Pedro might well have added that Raymond de Saint Gilles, count of Toulouse, Quercy, and Agen, duke of Narbonne, marquis of Provence, viscount of the Gévaudan, was no mere serf to be trampled underfoot.

  Arnold Amaury promised to end the charade of Raymond’s ostracism the following month at a council in Montpellier. On February 4, 1211, Pedro and Raymond were told to wait in the cold outside a church while the Church’s proposal was dictated to a scribe by the legates. Given Arnold’s record as a merciless negotiator, the two men standing in the chill February wind must have braced themselves for a stern document.

  Arnold did not disappoint. Raymond had the offer read to him by a literate member of his entourage. The legate enjoined the count to forsake the use of mercenaries, to pay the clergy their due, to levy no illegal tolls, to stop employing Jews, and to deliver all heretics in his lands to the crusaders within one year. It was the second part of the document that innovated: All of the castles and fortresses of Languedoc had to be demolished; Raymond and his subjects were forbidden to eat meat more than twice a week; henceforth all were required to wear only coarse brown robes; the nobles were forced to move out to the country-side and live “like villeins,” and all of their property, goods, and earthly possessions were placed at the disposal of the crusaders. Furthermore, Raymond was required to go to Palestine and stay there until permitted to return by the Church.

  This was not an olive branch; it was a club. Raymond seethed in silence, then, according to a chonicler, gestured to Pedro: “ ‘Come here, my lord king,’ he said with a smile. ‘Listen to this document and the strange orders the legates say I must obey.’ The king had it read out again and when he had heard it, he said in a quiet voice, ‘Almighty God in heaven, this must be changed!’ ”

  The Church was asking nothing less than for the entire nobility of Languedoc to vanish and leave the way open for others to fill the vacuum. Raymond galloped off without even deigning to reply; he would never again even consider joining a crusade. For this and his previous acts of brazen impiety, he was solemnly excommunicated once again, and all of his territories were placed under interdict. Innocent chose to confirm the sentence.

  The holy war finally approached the lands of Toulouse in April of 1211, when Simon de Montfort brought his crusaders to the town of Lavaur. Among their number were Enguerrand of Coucy, a wealthy noble from Picardy, and Peter of Nemours, the bishop of Paris. Peter had come to Languedoc to join his brother William, the priest of the Paris cathedral chapter whose expertise as a siege engineer had helped reduce Termes to submission. Many historians believe that Dominic, a good friend to Simon de Montfort, was also in attendance at Lavaur. To complete the crusader panoply, several hundred men of the White Brotherhood took their places on the hillside opposite the town to chant out hymns under the direction of Bishop Fulk of Toulouse.

  The siege of Lavaur lasted longer than expected because Simon lacked sufficient forces to smother the town, his reinforcements having been annihilated by Count Raymond Roger of Foix. In a surprise attack, Raymond Roger and his wild-eyed mountain knights fell upon a large column of crusaders who had made the long march from Germany to join up with Simon. Less than a day away from Lavaur, they were ambushed at Montgey, a hill near St. Felix en Lauragais, the village where the Cathars had met in 1167. The Pyrenean knights plowed into the thousands of hapless foot soldiers and killed as many as possible before the crusaders at Lavaur could ride to the rescue. When Simon arrived, Raymond Roger and his men had already taken flight. The leader of the crusade found only crowds of peasants from nearby villages, knives and clubs in hand, finishing off what the count of Foix had started.

  The following month came Simon’s response. On May 3, 1211, the walls of Lavaur were breached by Father William and his sappers, and the crusaders successfully stormed the town. The eighty Occitan knights who had commanded the defense of Lavaur were all hanged, in an egregious flouting of the rules of warfare. Captured noblemen were usually imprisoned or ransomed off to their families; in killing all of the nobles, the crusaders were showing that the legitimate rulers of Languedoc were just as much the enemy as the heretics. The leader of the defeated defenders was Aimery of Montréal, the lord who had hosted Cathar-Catholic debates and, in 1210, sworn allegiance to Simon de Montfort. He paid a steep price for double-crossing the northerner; the weight of Aimery’s large and lifeless body was said to have snapped the crossbeam of the gallows.

  Aimery had broken his word to Simon in order to come to the aid of his sister, Geralda, the lady of Lavaur’s castle. Their mother was Catharism’s grande dame, Blanche of Laurac, whose three other children had become Perfect. Although neither Aimery nor Geralda had received the consolamentum, both were known to be credentes, and Geralda, a widow, gained a certain fame for her generosity to the indigent. She was, according to the sources of the time, the most beloved noblewoman of Languedoc. After hanging her brother, Simon de Montfort had Geralda thrown down a well, then stoned to death. Even by the standards of the day, the act was shocking.

  Yet the fate of Geralda, Aimery, and his knights was just a prelude on that May day of 1211. The lady’s reputation for hospitality, especially after the terrible summer of Béziers, had spread throughout the south—Simon de Montfort and Arnold Amaury found 400 Perfect in Lavaur. As Fulk’s White Brotherhood sang a Te Deum, the Cathars were marched to the riverside and burned, in the largest bonfire of humanity of the Middle Ages.

  10.

  A Time of Surprises

  IN THE CENTER OF THE IBERIAN PENINSULA, the blazing plain of La Mancha once stretched out as a no-man’s-land between Christian and Muslim. Beyond the abrupt mountains of the Sierra Morena, in the parched river valley of the Guadalquivir, rose the rich mosques and minarets of Al-Andalus, the most accomplished Islamic civilization ever to have gained a lasting bridgehead in western Europe. North of the Morena’s rocky divide stood the forlorn forward position of medieval Christendom, the brooding line of castle after castle that gave Castile its name.

  In the year 1212, a host of 70,000 crusaders, led by four Christian kings, trudged across the dusty expanse of La Mancha to fight against the Almohad armies under the command of their new caliph, Muhammad al-Nasír. The Muslim forces fanned out over the jagged mountains until they thought all the passes through the Sierra Morena had been blocked or primed for sudden ambush. A local shepherd knew otherwise and guided the Christian hordes safely through a defile hitherto unsuspected by either side. Thus it was in Andalusia, not Castile, that on July 16, 1212, the two great armies met on a plain to join battle. Nearby was the village of Las Navas de Tolosa. The elite defenders of the caliph chained themselves to the tent poles of their monarch’s red silk pavilion, so that flight would be impossible if the day went against them. The Chri
stians won a crushing, total victory. There would henceforth be no stopping the inexorable spread of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain.

  The tidings from Las Navas de Tolosa set bells pealing across a continent. For Innocent, here at last was a crusade that had scored an unambiguous, untainted triumph. No sack of Constantinople, no holocaust at Béziers—just a clear-cut massacre of the heathen Moor. Even more gratifying was the news that the hero of the hour was King Pedro II of Aragon, whose inspired leadership of the army’s left wing proved decisive in winning the day. Pedro had brought thousands of his vassals to the fight, including some from his turbulent possessions in Languedoc. Simon de Montfort, as viscount of Carcassonne, had sent fifty knights to join forces with their Aragonese suzerain. Arnold Amaury, recently named archbishop of Narbonne, had once again shouldered his armor and ridden out to combat. He had shown the king that he, too, was now a worthy vassal of Aragon.

  In victory Pedro became a secular saint, an untouchable paladin of the Church. His faithful annual payment to Rome, his respect for ecclesiastical rights, his warrior valor placed in the service of a holy cause—no cleric could now even try to tarnish the glittering reputation of the thirty-eight-year-old monarch of Aragon. Troubadours sang of his gallantry, monks of his piety, and ladies bestowed their favors on this most Christian of heroes. It came as a surprise, then, when the golden boy of orthodoxy demanded that another crusade, the one in Languedoc, be suspended immediately.

  The king made the pope a proposition. He, Pedro, would act as a ward over all the lands of Toulouse for a few years. His brother-in-law, Count Raymond VI, would relinquish his territories in favor of his adolescent son, who would be educated in the court of Aragon in the ways of devout governance. When he attained manhood, Raymond VII could come into his inheritance, which would by then be cleansed of Catharism by the Aragonese king. The son should not pay for his father’s shortcomings.

  Moreover, Pedro demanded that his vassals north of the Pyrenees—the counts of Foix and the neighboring mountain domains of Béarn, Comminges, and Couserans—be left in peace by the Church and its sanguinary servants. In Pedro’s view, Simon de Montfort had overstepped himself; having begun his career as an enemy of the Cathars and a spiritual athlete, he had become an outlaw. Simon had, in 1211 and 1212, attacked lands over which Pedro was suzerain, territories that had never been infected by heresy. Worse yet, according to the Aragonese’s reading of the recent past, Simon had taken advantage of Pedro’s absence in Andalusia on God’s business to launch his assault.

  The crusader against the Moors was picking a fight with the crusader against the Cathars. At the Lateran Palace the 28 steps of the Scala Santa awaited Innocent’s troubled footfalls, for the pope now needed divine guidance.

  Pedro’s support was manna to the Toulousains. Simon had outsmarted and outfought them for more than two years. Even with the awkward nature of his army, which bloated, then shrank as forty-day crusader tours of duty were undertaken and completed, Simon had smashed and burned his way across all of Languedoc. As far north as Cahors, as far west as Agen, as far south as the Pyrenees, the tireless successor to the Trencavels had stretched his grasp over most of the lands of the Saint Gilles and the lower-lying fiefs of King Pedro’s mountain vassals.

  Simon may have been a gifted strategist, but his opponents helped him by their bumbling. What had been a peacetime boon—truculent independence—turned into a wartime albatross. Occitan lords, faidits, and citizen armies seldom acted in concert, even when the weight of their numbers would normally have beaten the often depleted ranks of the crusaders. In the autumn of 1211 at Castelnaudary, a town midway between Toulouse and Carcassonne, a small garrison under Simon held out for days in the face of a massed army of Languedoc knights and foot soldiers. When Bouchard de Marly and Alice of Montmorency, Simon’s wife, rumbled into the plain from Carcassonne at the head of a column of reinforcements and wagon loads of supplies, the knights of Raymond Roger of Foix immediately charged down to attack. Thousands upon thousands of their fellows watched the ensuing combat from a hilltop, waiting for the order to join the battle. It never came. Count Raymond of Toulouse, as wretched a general as can be imagined, dithered ineffectually in the Occitan camp. Seizing the moment, Simon made a daring dash out to rescue his would-be saviors, thereby changing certain defeat into victorious stalemate.

  Not all of the south courted debacle so assiduously. The family of Foix, the crusade’s most feared foe, consistently acted with the belligerence it had shown at Castelnaudary and Montgey. When Simon, in his sole mistake of these years, attempted in June 1211 to besiege Toulouse with a force too small to encircle the city, Raymond Roger ignored Count Raymond’s pleas for caution and repeatedly rushed out of the ramparts to kill as many of the besiegers as possible. Simon, seeing his losses mount, lifted the siege within a fortnight. Roger Bernard of Foix, Raymond Roger’s son, then ventured into Simon’s territory on missions of mayhem. Near Béziers, well within the countryside pacified by the terror of 1209, Roger Bernard met up with a group of crusaders bound for Carcassonne, who naturally thought that any cavalcade of knights so deep in God’s country had to be supporters of orthodoxy. The subsequent attack came as an utter surprise, and the unfortunate northerners were dragged back to the castle at Foix, where they were tortured and torn to pieces.

  Still, such reverses were the exception. In 1211 and 1212, Simon was free to cut a swath all around Toulouse. He gave the defiant, if disorganized, city a wide berth, but nonetheless penned off its access to the hinterland. He picked off one castle after the next, and his conquest soon came accompanied by further outrage. In the town of Pamiers, the new master of Languedoc drew up decrees in December of 1212 that effectively abolished southern law in favor of northern feudal practice. In many ways this was the unkindest cut of all, for time-honored systems of inheritance, justice, and civil procedure formed the touchstone of medieval identity. Simon’s statutes, among other things, forbade southern noblewomen from marrying suitors from Languedoc; henceforth, brides with fetching dowries would be compelled to wed only northerners. The desire to destroy, then colonize, became manifest.

  The shifting nature of the conflict made the crusade stray from its original purpose. As Simon used his talents to carve out a kingdom for himself, fewer bonfires were lit. He had no time to winkle out the heretic hidden in the sheepfold when there were nobles in a nearby castle refusing to pay him homage. In any event, the devastating flames of Lavaur, Minerve, and other towns had shown that there was no safety in numbers. The surviving Perfect heard the word from Montségur: It was wiser to wait out the storm in the house of one’s family, or in a cave in the Corbières, than to gather in a castle or city that the invincible Simon de Montfort would eventually get around to storming. For those imperiled few still living in the midst of orthodox spies, a trek over the Pyrenees to the discretion of Aragon and Catalonia was always an option. For all his talk, Pedro the Catholic ignored the Cathars in his domains. No more than the counts of Toulouse and Foix, the king of Aragon was loath to persecute his own people.

  As the year 1213 dawned, Innocent grappled with the contradictions of the holy war he had launched four years earlier. Simon’s forays into the lands held by Pedro’s vassals smacked more of temporal ambition than of spiritual devotion. A genie had been unbottled at Carcassonne when Simon was allowed to usurp Trencavel. Innocent sympathized with King Pedro, his vassal and his champion, qualifying his ambassador to Rome as an “extremely cultivated” man. Moreover, now that the Moors were on the run and the Cathars weakened, Innocent wanted to turn the attention of Christendom eastward, to the reconquest of Jerusalem. In a letter to Arnold Amaury, the pope claimed that a new crusade to Palestine must take precedence over any further action in Languedoc. Accordingly, Innocent prepared a surprise of his own: In stern letters sent out in January of 1213, the pope announced that the Albigensian Crusade was over, effective immediately.

  Before this stupefying news arrived from Rome, the
situation in Languedoc had worsened. In a tense meeting at Lavaur, Pedro and Arnold Amaury brought their irreconcilable views out into the open. One wanted the preservation of the southern nobility; the other, its destruction. Since Pedro’s failed intercession at Carcassonne to save the young Trencavel, Arnold had never once backed down in the face of pressure from the Aragonese king. If anything, Arnold had always upped the ante, changing unacceptable offers into insulting ones. The novelty this time came from Pedro, who no longer meekly walked away from Arnold’s provocations. The victory at Las Navas de Tolosa had made of him an equal, if not a superior, to the legates in the construction of Christendom’s future. He could now show his hand, and, like Arnold, Pedro did not disappoint.

  In February 1213, he convoked the quarrelsome lords of the south and had them swear to let him govern their possessions during these times of emergency. Languedoc was now his protectorate. With his brother, Sancho, who was the count of Provence, Pedro created in one fell swoop a vast new entity, the makings of a protostate that, had it survived, would have dramatically changed the course of European history. From Saragossa in Aragon and Barcelona in Catalonia, their holdings now stretched in a great unbroken arc around the Mediterranean almost as far east as Nice, encompassing Toulouse, Montpellier, and Marseilles. Pedro aimed for nothing less than the unification of the Occitan- and Catalan-speaking peoples under one monarch.