By the beginning of the thirteenth century there may have been between 1,000 and 1,500 perfecti in the region centred on the area between Toulouse and Carcassonne but stretching north to the Lot valley and the Cahorsin and south to the Pyrenean foothills.13 The number of credentes is impossible to gauge accurately, partly because of the nature of the surviving records but partly because their faith only revealed itself unequivocally through receipt of the consolamentum, by its nature often a hurried private ritual conducted at the bedsides of the sick and dying. More generally, credentes merged into a wider spectrum of response to Cathar belief, from the commitment of the perfectus, lay belief, general sympathy and familial or social contact through hedging religious bets and indifference to distaste, suspicion, opposition and persecution. The fact that each Cathar diocese of Languedoc geographically covered a number of Catholic ones, while reflecting cheaper running costs, may indicate a relatively limited scale of adherence. Languedoc did not become a Cathar province. Donations and recruits to Catholic religious orders continued, the heretics operating as just one of a number of manifestations of piety and religious enthusiasm. The suggestion that Catharism somehow especially embodied a distinctive Languedoc culture is fanciful. For instance, none of the great magnates and few if any of the local troubadours, however critical of the church authorities, were heretics. At least two prominent troubadours, Bertrand of Born and Fulk of Marseilles, became monks, Fulk ending as the anti-Cathar bishop of Toulouse. However, the Cathar church retained hierarchy, structure, organization and funding even beyond the period of the crusades. The raw numerical strength may have been less significant than the quality and social status of many believers and the implications of the mere existence of these organized radical anti-clerical beliefs. The nature of Cathar threat perceived by the Catholic authorities was famously indicated by a knight, Pons Adhemar of Roudeille, in 1206 or 1207. In reply to Bishop Fulk of Toulouse asking why he did not expel heretics from his lands despite admitting the superiority of Catholic theology, he confessed ‘we cannot; we were brought up with them, there are many of our relatives amongst them, and we can see that their way of life is a virtuous one.’14
The prevalence of heresy in Languedoc should not, therefore, be exaggerated. Neither should the geographical, political or cultural identity of the region be assumed. Although it is now fashionable to talk wistfully of the lost glories of Occitania, the land where people spoke the langue d’oc included such diverse regions as the Limousin in the north, the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south and the Alps in the east, the wastes of the Camargue in the Rhône Delta, the volcanic outcrops of Le Puy, the Massif Central, the Provençal hills and the commercial Mediterranean towns of Narbonne and Montpellier. Even within the part of region more commonly now understood as Languedoc, roughly from the lower Garonne and Dordogne valleys eastwards and southwards to the Pyrenees, Mediterranean and Rhone valley, largely associated, often very tenuously, with the county of Toulouse, geography contradicted politics. Toulouse, although less than 100 miles from the Mediterranean, sat on the Garonne, whose waters flowed into the Atlantic, for much of its course though lands ruled by the Angevin kings of England, who, until the early thirteenth century, as dukes of Aquitaine controlled most of the region from the Loire to the Pyrenees as well as Normandy and Anjou. The twelfth-century counts of Toulouse had to resist Angevin attempts at domination and continued to hold the Agenais as an Angevin fief. Much of the region to the south and east of Toulouse, which drained into the Mediterranean, looked more to Catalonia and Aragon than northern France or even northern Languedoc; the king of Aragon was overlord of the viscounts of Béziers and Carcassonne, as well as parts of the Gévaudan and the Pyrenean counties such as Foix and Comminges. East of the Rhône in Provence, suzerainty lay with the distant German emperor.
The term ‘Albigensian’ (literally ‘of’ or ‘from Albi’, a cathedral city on the river Tarn forty miles or so north-east of Toulouse) to describe the Cathars of Languedoc is something of a misnomer. Despite the earliest Cathar diocese being based there, the heaviest concentration of Cathars existed further south. The name ‘Albigensian’ gained wide currency only after the crusades had begun with the northern invaders, possibly because their first target in 1209 was Raymond Roger Trencavel, lord, among other places, of Albi. Innocent III used the term only once. Its use by the French conquerors illustrated their ignorance of the land they annexed.15 Until the Albigensian crusades, little integration of southern and western Languedoc into the kingdom of France was apparent. Just as the victories of Philip II of France against King John in the early years of the thirteenth century reoriented the political direction of north-west France, so the victories of Simon of Montfort and later Louis VIII under the banner of the cross determined that the French crown would have direct access to the Mediterranean and the surrounding region would look to Paris and the Seine not Barcelona or the Ebro. Within this region, the Cathars prospered in only a relatively small area, their presence increasingly peripheral to the wider political conflict that their armed suppression provoked. The Albigensian crusades settled the fate of nations more readily than it did the destiny of souls or faith.
The health of the Cathar church in Languedoc rested on weak or competing political authority; a feeble and impoverished church hierarchy; and a failure of cooperation between church and secular lords. To this could be added a lack of centres of Catholic learning. It was no coincidence that the university of Toulouse was only founded as part of the settlement that ended the crusades in 1229 in preparation for the judicial eradication of heresy. In northern France and western Germany, secular authorities were persuaded by active and well-funded bishops that heresy posed a threat to social as well as religious order. By contrast, in Languedoc local lords were alienated from the church, especially with the influx of reform-minded Gregorian churchmen, over control of church tithes and first fruits, the bulk of which tended to remain in the hands of laymen, with a smaller proportion left for parish clergy and nothing for the bishops. Bishop Fulk of Toulouse complained that on entering office in 1205 he found his revenues amounted to ninety-six sous; he could not afford to protect his train of mules in public and was confronted by creditors in his own chapter house.16 Lay appropriation of ecclesiastical funds not only weakened the church, it denied any material incentive for the local lords to succour it.
Attempts by the church or magnates to impose social or religious discipline sat ill with an aristocratic culture that militated against hierarchical control in favour of clannish independence. The structure of rural aristocratic society was characterized by what contemporaries described as paratge.17 Literally, this meant the free right to one’s inheritance. Perhaps almost 50 per cent of lands in the Toulousain were held as allods, owing no dues to a lord. Freedom was a feature of rural as well as urban society, where towns, even parts of towns, insisted on separate autonomy and rights. Vassalage was weak, especially compared with parts of northern France or England; military obligations rare. Equality, not subservience, typified how relations between lords and tenants were conceived. Knighthood denoted status and a mutually respectful position at a lord’s court rather than a niche in a pyramidal social hierarchy. If paratge implied independence from external pressure on the disposal of lands it also protected the rights of all possible heirs within the family, which led to a sharing of fiefs. Primogeniture had not come to dominate Languedoc inheritance customs as it had further north. One consequence of partible inheritance was the proliferation of co-lords; at the extremes dozens at one time.18 Another was the preservation of the inheritance rights of women, which were being sharply eroded further north. While the economics of partible inheritance and paratge encouraged infra-family cohesion, they discouraged wider social cohesion.
However, contemporaries in Languedoc seemed to invest the paratge system with almost transcendent cultural significance as a symbol of nobility, of the free customs of a whole society and of a system of aristocratic life, from courtly enter
tainments to independence, knightly generosity, personal honour and public morality. His enemies depicted Simon of Montfort as deliberately trying to destroy this world of paratge.19 Yet, while some have seen in paratge the principle of personal freedom, it might just as well be held responsible for noble selfishness, which produced a failure of public law and order. Violence between the clan groups of Languedoc may have been petty but it could be vicious; the sight of so many small castles perched on their neighbouring crags still provides evidence of this insecurity. Landholders felt little obligation or loyalty to their nominal overlords. As a direct consequence, to maintain and impose authority, great magnates had to resort to hiring mercenaries, an unpleasant feature of Languedoc life that drew condemnation from the Third Lateran Council in 1179.20 The absence of peace in Languedoc formed one of the twin themes of crusade propaganda, which frequently described the conflict as the negotium fidei et pacis, the business of the faith and of peace. The inability of the count to impose order exposed the feebleness of the episcopacy and encouraged the flourishing of heresy.
The patronage of Catharism by local noble families proved crucial to the heretics’ success and represented one of the Languedoc heresy’s most distinctive features. Elsewhere, from Bulgaria to Italy and France, Germany and Flanders, popular heresy appeared particularly attractive to urban artisans and the rural poor. Yet despite Cathar communities in Toulouse and the much smaller towns such as Béziers and Carcassonne, urbanization in the areas of Languedoc most affected was limited. There was little or no heresy in Narbonne, the second great city of the region. Rural Catharism revolved around the small castles, fortified villages and households of the local nobility, whose adherence to the radical faith was eased by the sophisticated literary cosmology imported by Nicetas from Constantinople, which was not predicated on hierarchical social or economic tensions or guilt. Lords had much to gain from opposing Catholic assertion of financial ecclesiastical rights and from the Cathars’ absolute, rather than the Catholics’ conditional, separation of church and state. In return, support from social leaders afforded Catharism material protection and financial support; physical centres for study and proselytizing; and networks for the transmission of the faith both laterally, through extended aristocratic family contacts, and vertically, to the servants, tenants and peasants of the lords. One of the common accusations levelled against Cathar perfecti was that they preyed on the vulnerable – the sick, dying or anxious – with promises of unconditional salvation through the consolamentum in return for gifts and legacies of money and property. True or not, the financial viability of the Cathar church, which distinguished it from other heretical sects, including the smaller Waldensian community in the region, probably depended less on deathbed larceny than well-heeled patrons.
The patronage of the nobility politicized the Languedoc Cathars, encouraging a political response: war. Although there is no evidence that the greatest magnates, such as the counts of Toulouse or the Trencavel counts of Albi, Béziers and Carcassonne, were heretics themselves, Cathar perfecti were to be found in some of the grander local aristocratic families. As early as 1178, Raymond V of Toulouse was lamenting ‘the plague of infidelity’ that had claimed ‘the most noble of my lords’ and many of their followers.21 When inheriting his title as a child, Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel (1194–1209) had been placed under the protection of a patron of heretics, Bernard of Saissac. Count Raymond Roger of Foix (1188–1223) earned an evil reputation among Catholic observers for his depredations against local monasteries and churches, on one occasion slaughtering monks who had been disrespectful of his perfecta aunt, Fais of Dufort.22 The count’s wife and sister were also perfectae, although his anti-clerical behaviour probably had more to do with money and jurisdiction than faith. The mother and two of the sisters of the wealthy and powerful Aimery, the lord of Lavaur and Montréal west of Carcassonne, were Cathars who established a flourishing house for perfectae at Lavaur. The family castles became centres of extensive networks of Cathar perfecti, credentes and sympathizers, provoking the ferocity following Simon of Montfort’s capture of Lavaur, the ‘synagogue of Satan’, in May 1211. Aimery was hanged; eighty of his knights were put to the sword and between 300 and 400 Cathars burnt. Aimery’s sister, the perfecta Girauda, lady of Lavaur, was flung screaming into a well and rocks thrown on top of her.23 However, the atrocities at Lavaur contained a political purpose and message. Aimery’s power had already been severely undermined by the crusader invasion; his knights were regarded by Montfort as traitors, regardless of their devotional practices; the butchery served to discourage further resistance to the northern conquerors. The intimate association of secular lords with heretical networks put each in additional jeopardy from an adversary as intent on subjugating lordships as in eradicating error. Heresy in Languedoc had been recognized as a problem for over sixty years before the start of the Albigensian crusades. The iconoclastic anti-sacramentalist Peter of Bruys enjoyed some notoriety before his execution at St Gilles in 1131. In 1145, Bernard of Clairvaux conducted a concerted and apparently successful preaching campaign in pursuit of Henry the Monk, an itinerant anti-clerical Donatist who had established a base in Toulouse after a long career evangelizing in western France. By 1178, the rise of Catharism sufficiently alarmed Raymond V of Toulouse for him to appeal Louis VII of France and Henry of Marcy, abbot of CÎteaux for help. Although this may have had as much to do with Raymond’s problems with the Trencavels, in whose lands the heretics prospered most, as with his dislike of heresy, it shows there was no inevitable anti-crusading alliance of Languedoc nobility with heresy. After all, Raymond’s father had gone on the Second Crusade and his grandfather Raymond IV had been one of the heroes of the First.24 In response to Raymond V’s appeal, a combined force of soldiers and preachers arrived to conduct inquiries at Toulouse, exposing and punishing a few local heretics. Abbot Henry excommunicated two prominent Cathars, including Bernard Raymond, Cathar bishop of Toulouse. In 1179, Canon XXVII of the Third Lateran anathematized heretics and, significantly, those protecting or conversing with them and called for military action, which would earn participants two years’ remission of sins and church protection equivalent to that for Jerusalem crusaders.25 In pursuance of this canon, in 1181, Henry of Marcy, now a cardinal, led an army into Languedoc and besieged Lavaur. Local discretion prevailed. Lavaur submitted. The two Cathar leaders Henry had encountered in 1178 publicly converted and were rewarded with canonries in Toulouse.26 The expedition went home. In contrast with 1209, there was no thought given to replacing the local ecclesiastical or secular authorities in the pursuit of heresy, merely providing assistance and a slightly menacing incentive to act.
While the activity of 1178–81 led nowhere, church policy towards heresy was clarified in Lucius II’s decree Ad abolendam (1184), which provided for convicted heretics to be handed over to the secular authorities for punishment, unspecified.27 Yet in Languedoc, Catharism became, by the early years of the thirteenth century, so rooted ‘that it could not easily be dug out’,28 a process assisted by limp ecclesiastical control and absentee bishops. Until the accession of Innocent III in 1198, the main Catholic vigour in the area seemed to have been reserved for the patronage of Cistercian monasteries. The new pope adopted a typically active if cerebral approach. As early as April 1198,29 Innocent despatched his confessor to investigate and followed this with a series of legatine missions, in 1198, 1200–1201 and 1203–4. The pope’s alarm seems to have grown as he became aware of the ineffectiveness of his legates’ preaching and disputations, the full extent of the crisis in Languedoc and the strength of Catharism not just in southern France and Italy but throughout the Balkans as well. He began a radical overhaul of the Languedoc episcopacy and urged his legates to a more aggressive stance. In 1204, when adding Abbot Arnaud Aimery of Cîteaux to his fellow Cistercians Master Ralph of Frontfroide and Peter of Castelnau, Innocent offered Holy Land indulgences to those who ‘laboured faithfully against the heretics’.30 In tune with his crus
ading policies elsewhere, Innocent was moving towards a military solution. This was encouraged by the stalling of his latest legatine mission, apparently through the indifference or obstruction, as the legates saw it, of the secular rulers such as Raymond VI of Toulouse (1194–1222). A fresh approach in 1206–7 adopted by new recruits to the preaching campaign, the Spanish Bishop Diego of Osma and his canon Dominic Guzman, achieved little.31 They travelled as if in mirror image of perfecti, in simple clothes, walking barefoot along the footpaths and byways to a series of disputations with Cathar leaders. Although this later bore fruit in the creation of Dominic’s Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, immediately it produced no tangible reversal of the heretic tide. Still less did it deal with the problem of the Cathars’ powerful protectors.
Local solutions, as envisaged in 1179 or even by Innocent III himself as late as 1204, had not worked. Unlike Peter II of Aragon, who took measures against heretics in his realm, the count of Toulouse appeared unwilling or unable to act in the church’s interests. This problem was compounded by the poor relations that developed between Raymond and the legates, one of whom, the brusque Peter of Castelnau, made himself extremely unpopular with local opinion.32 To force the issue, the legates excommunicated Count Raymond in 1207 and 1208, draconian action that merely served to expose their impotence. If Raymond refused or was unable to take measures against the heretics, some external force would be required to compel or replace him. In 1205 and 1207 the pope attempted to interest Philip II of France in intervening. On the second occasion, in a letter of 17 November 1207, Holy Land indulgences were offered. Implicit was the pope’s recognition that the enemies of such a campaign stood to be disinherited and their lands confiscated. Not even this incentive could attract Philip, who argued that he was busy enough defending himself from his enemies John of England and Otto IV of Germany, awkwardly one of Innocent’s protégés. The pope’s own strategy was still hedged with qualifications: ‘we want you to bear in mind’, he told the French king, ‘the needs of the Holy Land, so that no aid is prevented from reaching her’. However, Innocent’s attitude towards the Cathars and their supporters was ominously clear: ‘wounds that do not respond to the healing of poultices must be lanced with a blade’.33 Almost immediately, the pope was presented with a perfect casus belli. On the morning of 14 January, the legate Peter of Castelnau was assassinated on the west bank of the Rhône north of Arles, ten miles from the abbey of St Gilles, by a servant of the man with whom the legate had held a fierce row the previous day, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse.34
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