The Troubadour's Song

by David Boyle

  What had gone wrong? It is true that some of the disasters that struck Europe were the direct result of Richard's arrest. The wars in France had deepened in their bitterness, especially after his death. In 1202 John took twenty-two of his captives from his successful defence Mirebeau castle in Anjou back to Corfe Castlein Dorset and deliberately starved them to death. He also probably murdered his own rival — his admittedly infuriating nephew Arthur of Brittany — by throwing him into the Seine at Rouen during a drunken rage. Others were the result of the emperor's death, as the rival claimants to the throne — Otto, Philip and the child Frederick and their supporters — battled it out in Germany, causing inflation and a succession of despoiled harvests, followed by cata­strophic famines. The bodies of those who had starved to death lay in piles in the fields and villages. But some of the disasters were entirely natural or supernatural. The year after Duke Leopold's death, there were disastrous floods in Vienna. And by the River Mosel, a gigantic ghost of a long-forgotten king appeared and warned that the empire faced disasters and misery ahead. The worst hit region of Germany was Thuringia, where the court of the margrave Henry I had been the centre of courtly literature. The attack on courtly culture and music was not yet direct, but that would come too.

  But something else was in the air besides war. A new kind of intolerance was beginning to corrode the gentle spirit of the age that had moulded Richard and Blondel. It had been a period when the closest adviser to Alexander III, Pope for twenty-two years, had been a rabbi, and when the doctor of Henry I, King of Castile, had been Jewish. The papal household had been managed by Jews throughout the twelfth century. Since the days of Peter Abelard, Europe's intellectuals had enjoyed their set-piece public debates with Jews, Muslims and heretics alike. But it was not to last.

  As so often in history, a renewed spirit of persecution came as people began to project their own loss of innocence on to their children, to imagine that these were uniquely threatened by dark, often sexual, possibly demonic forces within their own society. The first signs of the new brutality emerged during Richard's lifetime as an obsession across Europe with the dangers to children from their own underworld. The first hint of what was to come had been the discovery in a shallow grave in 1144 of the child William of Norwich, almost certainly the victim of a cataleptic fit and buried prematurely by his relatives. When there were reports of a local Jewish man seen with a sack in the neighbourhood of the discovery, the story began to circulate that William was the victim of kidnap and ritual murder by Jews. The story was so clearly outrageous that local magistrates made strenuous efforts to protect the Jewish community, but it was too late. Little William eventually got his own plaque in the cathedral, followed by venera­tion as a Christian martyr, and he was soon the heart of a new persecuting cult.

  Similar stories began to filter through the consciousness of Western Europe. In an age when impoverished peasants were still known to send their unwanted children into the forests to die, it became convenient to blame the local Jews. There were more rumours of ritual murders of children in Gloucester in 1168, where a child called Harold had been murdered and thrown into the Severn, followed by Blois in 1171, Bury St Edmunds in 1181 and Bristol in 1183. At the same time, it was increasingly believed that Jews were sexually voracious — the heart of an international conspiracy to sacrifice children — and that even leprosy was a sexual disease that engorged the sexual organs of sufferers and sent them out wildly in pursuit of the innocent.

  But there were other factors at work as well. Increasingly, as the Church and state began to centralize, their officers saw themselves as the bastions against the forces of subversion — heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable. They were all in their interconnected ways symptoms of the Devil working to subvert the Christian order or, as one cleric put it, 'Islam within'. This was a phrase that was coming increasingly to be applied to homosexuals, a particular obsession of the preacher Peter the Chanter from Notre-Dame in Paris. It was he who revived the myth that homosexuals had died on the first Christmas night, because the pure revelation of God on earth had destroyed those who commit crimes against nature.* It was no coincidence that people began seeing demons more regularly. Western Europe shivered at the sinfulness of their neighbours.

  Lepers became official targets early, as stories spread about their mythical sexual appetite. But by the early fourteenth century, royal agents were torturing and burning lepers to extract confessions of a plot to poison wells all over France — an attempt, as it turned out, to seize the revenues of the leper houses for the royal treasury. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council — a conference of the whole Catholic Church in Rome — removed all the legal rights of lepers, making them legally dead. But even then the Pope had called for tolerance towards Jews 'on the grounds of humanity alone'.

  Even that was not to last. In 1199, the year Richard died, Pope Innocent III was demanding that 'no Christian ought to presume . . . wickedly to injure their persons, or with violence to take away their property, or to change the good customs which they have had until now in whatever region they inhabit'. But a new intoler­ance was institutionalized by his Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Despite the bitter divisions between bishops supporting different claimants to the imperial throne, they still managed to agree a whole raft of measures that sowed the seeds of intolerance across Christendom. Jews had to wear a horned cap and a distinctive yellow circle on their clothing. Lepers had to carry bells. Prostitutes had to dress with a red cord. Philip Augustus had already outlawed debate on religious matters between Christians and Jews, which had been the very stuff of twelfth-century culture, and this was extended across Europe in 1233.

  Europe did not succumb immediately to anti-Semitism. In Eng­land, the regency for John's child heir Henry III, led by William the Marshal, refused to follow the instructions from Rome about the Jews.* All over Europe, large sections of the population refused to join in the persecution and in England and France even lobbiedthe court on their behalf. The famously independent-minded Emperor Frederick II, Henry VI's son, later set up a commission to inquire into the ritual slaughter of children by Jews and found there was absolutely no evidence for it.

  But the repression only intensified. In England the Warden Justices of the Jews, set up by Richard and Hubert Walter in 1194, soon disposed of their one Jewish member. John's administration raided the Jewish treasure-houses while insisting that Jews were under royal protection. 'If I give my peace even to a dog, it must be kept inviolate,' he said, rather unconvincingly, in 1203. Hubert Walter saw himself as responsible for protecting them, but when he died in 1205 the floodgates opened and the houses of the richest Jews were confiscated and given to royal favourites. Finally, three generations later, in 1291, Edward I expelled the entire Jewish population of England as the simplest way to avoid his debts.

  This rising anti-Semitism was driven partly by their enforced role of moneylenders in the days when the word 'usury' was used to define any lending of money for interest. Rage at bankers and anti-Semitism have always been closely and unnecessarily linked, and the impact of Richard's ransom — when many Jewish bankers were forced to call in their debts, to the misery of those affected — certainly fanned the flames in England and Normandy. Even Leopold of Austria's Jewish mint-master Schlom, charged with the task of turning Richard's ransom into a silver currency, was murdered by fifteen crusaders who happened to be passing through the city. The link between the Jewish community and banking had made many Jewish families extremely wealthy, but it was a dangerous kind of wealth because the whole idea of money and banking remained deeply controversial, and charging interest was still condemned by the Church. It was considered unnatural for money to breed money, when the crops or goods it was based on did not behave in the same way. The close connection between Jews and moneylending was making them increasingly vulnerable, even though many Jewish families did other things and they were far from being the only moneylenders in the market.

  *

  We s
hould not exaggerate the tolerance of the twelfth century. The European pogroms against the Jews began, after all, with the First Crusade in 1095, and even the open-minded debates could be a nerve-racking experience for the Jewish theologians on the other side. But there were other dangerous shifts as well. The disaster that was overtaking Europe's Jewish communities was mirrored by the suppression of heresy, and of the Cathars in particular. Catharism is said to have begun in the tenth century with a peasant priest called Bogomil who preached that the world was overwhelmingly evil, and the solution was penitence, sim­plicity and prayer. His followers were expelled from Byzantium in 1110 and wandered Dalmatia and Serbia before reaching Italy and France, their new ideas brought West by returning crusaders. But its origins are mysterious and it may simply have emerged in various different forms spontaneously in Western Europe.

  It was a Christian-based religion of peace, non-violence and equality between men and women that also embraced reincar­nation. Like the southern Occitan culture that moulded Richard's upbringing and gave birth to courtly love, Cathars particularly venerated St Mary Magdalene as one who turned away from the world and they set great store by purity. Those who reached the highest priestly levels were known as 'perfects' — women as well as men — and they abstained completely, not just from violence but also from sex. Even so, the rising forces of intolerance taught that — like Jews and the lepers — heretics possessed prodigious and unnatural sexual appetites.

  Catharism grew rapidly in some of the most socially advanced regions of Europe — the bustling financial centres of Champagne, the trading cities of northern Italy, but also across the Languedoc region of France, with their independent-minded towns, their sexual equality and their tolerant culture of music and jiri amor. In turn, Eleanor's and Richard's generations had ignored the Cathars, and had been taught to do so by enlightened churchmen like Peter Lombard, a future Bishop of Paris. We need heresy, he said, 'both because of their teaching, but because they stimulate us as Catholics in our search for the truth and for a proper understanding ofeverything in the world'. Even so, heretics could expect the same punishments as traitors, and the lands and property of anyone who failed to hunt them down would also be forfeit. It was to be a tempting prospect for landless younger sons of the aristocracy.

  The Cathars had established themselves so firmly in the south of France that, in 1165, they were able to hold open public debates with the bishops of Toulouse and Albi. And when a papal mission arrived in Toulouse ten years later, the locals felt safe enough to jeer. By then they were organizing their own network of bishops across the region to deal with their burgeoning congregations. Many of the leading aristocratic women in the south led Cathar religious houses. The court of Raymond VI of Toulouse, briefly Richard's brother-in-law, was a tolerant mix of Cathars, Jews and orthodox Catholics. One contemporary in the city noted that nobody could be arrested 'for reason of adultery, fornication or coitus in any store or house he or she rents, owned or maintained as a residence'. Jews there were allowed to own property and hold public office. In nearby Beziers, the chief magistrate was Jewish. In Narbonne and Nimes, many of the vineyard owners and most important merchants were Jewish as well. One of Raymond's previous wives, also a relative of Eleanor's, was said to have secretly conducted a Cathar service in the same chapel where the Pope was celebrating mass. At one unforgettable Sunday mass in Albi cathedral, the bishop and chapter found themselves alone and without any congregation at all. For some powerful churchmen, the situation was intolerable.

  This was also a period when the centralized Church was turning its back on women again and found the influence of the powerful women behind Cathar society particularly threatening, so the early years of the thirteenth century saw a concerted attempt to win back ground from the Cathars. The new initiative began with a series of public debates led by St Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order of friars. The debates drew audiences of thou­sands but had little impact, and Raymond of Toulouse consistently refused the instructions from Rome to oppress his own people. It was the beginning of a period of unprecedented brutality.

  St Dominic's debates, and the subsequent murder of a papal legate, set the scene for one of the most destructive events of the Middle Ages. A group of ambitious and land-hungry young aristocrats from northern France marched south to suppress the Cathars in a long and brutal struggle known as the Albigensian Crusade. It marked the end of the era of tolerance ushered in a century before by Peter Abelard and the troubadours, culminating in the destruction of Beziers in 1209 by Simon de Montfort, from a noble family just outside Paris — heir through his mother of the earldom of Leicester — and the head of the Cistercian monastic order, Arnold Amaury. As the 'crusaders' stormed into the city, ironically on the feast of St Mary Magdalene — the patron saint of southern culture and tolerance — Amaury was asked how they could tell the heretics from the faithful Catholics. 'Kill them all,' he is supposed to have said. 'God will know his own.' As many as 20,000 men women and children, Catholic and Cathar alike, were slaughtered together, almost 2,000 of them sheltering in churches.

  Even in tolerant Toulouse, the White Brotherhood, formed by the local bishop, dressed in dark robes with a large white cross, and marched with torches through the streets at night, attacking the homes of Jews and Cathars. It was the White Brotherhood that sang the Te Deum around the foot of the largest human bonfire of the age, when Amaury and Simon de Montfort burned 400 Cathars from Lavour on May Day 1211. The leader of the defenders in the city, Aimery of Montreal, had hosted the debates a few years before and was in the town to protect his sister, who was one of the leading Cathar women and one of the most loved and hospitable in Languedoc. Simon had him hanged and had her thrown down a well and stoned to death.

  Raymond's dithering leadership and hopeless military skills meant that Occitan culture provided little organized resistance. But his son Raymond VII —Joanna's son and Richard's nephew — was a different animal, returning from the Lateran Council in the winter of 1216 and rallying the Provencal nobles to defend Toulouse against Simon de Montfort. It was then that Simon was finally killed by a stone from a siege engine fired by a band offighting women. But for all his inheritance of leadership and military flair, Raymond then came up against Richard's niece Blanche of Castile — another granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine — now the widow of Philip's Dauphin and the devoted regent of France in the name of her son, Louis IX, the future crusader St Louis. She watched in Paris as Raymond VII was scourged as part of the agreement to end the Albigensian Crusade. She presided over the agreement whereby Raymond's only daughter was forced to marry one of her brothers-in-law. When Raymond died in 1249, his place as count was therefore taken by one of the uncles of the king of France, and when his daughter died childless forty-two years later, Toulouse and most of Languedoc were ruled directly by the French kingdom.

  But in another sense, the crusade was still not over. Village by village, town by town, a new inquisition — organized primarily by Dominicans — rooted out all that remained of Cathar culture over the next century, tearing apart the social fabric, using torture to extract each succeeding series of confessions and denunciations, flushing the last terrified Cathars out of hiding and burning them on the pyres. Repression was now the spirit of the age. In 1233 even the orthodox leaders of the southern Jewish community denounced the followers of the great Jewish philosopher Maimon-ides to the inquisition as part of their own crusade against heresy.

  Mathematicians like Maimonides were increasingly attracting suspicion because their ideas had come from the Arab masters. Arabic numerals were 'infidel knowledge'. Zero was even banned by the Church in 1229, though its vital importance to traders who needed to use it to balance their books while their cargoes were still at sea ensured its survival. It became a kind of underground symbol of the freedom to trade.*

  Again, it is hard to push this idea of a new intolerance too far. The culmination of the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century had been the
viciously bloody capture ofjerusalem by the Christians and mass slaughter inside what had been a city shared peacefully by three religions. It may have been the uncivilized influence of the crusades — the Church had traditionally tried to reduce violence, even in the twelfth century making great efforts to organize local truces for four days every week — but churchmen now appeared to have been inoculated against the revulsion towards war. The Muslim world, with the humane example of Saladin, clung to a tradition that remained in some ways more tolerant, sometimes amazing those of their Christian opponents on the receiving end of their generosity and superior learning, but there were fewer and fewer exemplars of peaceful thinking. One of the very few was Francis of Assisi, a wealthy eighteen-year-old apprentice merchant and would-be troubadour in the year of Richard's death. His determined poverty and message of peace were accepted by Innocent III, when so many similar movements were condemned, partly because the meeting between the two of them — culminating in the Pope sending Francis off to have a bath — gave the Pontiff obsessive dreams.

  Why this extraordinary collapse of the ideals of the Twelfth-century Renaissance? Was it the sheer success of the Cathars? Was it the greed of the nobility, and especially their younger sons — in 1204, after all, most of the Fourth Crusade was diverted to attack the Christian city of Constantinople? Was it — as some historians say — that persecution was a useful means by which the new administrators for the increasingly centralized machineries of state could advance themselves? Was it simply the triumph of the scholars around Lotario de Segni, the future Innocent III, with their vision of a corrupted Christendom rescued by a powerful Church? Or was it perhaps that the corrosive spirit of the crusades would inevitably turn inwards? It was probably all those factors, but still that is not quite enough of an explanation for why the century that gave us some of our great civilizing institutions —including universities, love songs, trial by jury and the feminizing cult of the Virgin Mary — should have petered out in such a bloodbath.