A stone marker indicates where the pyre stood. For more than three quarters of a millennium the field has been known in Occitan, the local language, as the prat dels crematz—the “field of the burned.”
“Let God Sort Them Out”
Travel around Languedoc and the Pyrenees today, and you might think the Cathars had actually won. As in any self-respecting region of Europe, there is a secessionist movement afoot, though its gains are cultural (and gastronomic) rather than political. The flag of Languedoc—the cross of Toulouse, in gold, against a red background—flies everywhere, and the better bookstores display a prominent selection of works relating somehow to the Cathars (and including The Da Vinci Code). The Cathar moment in local history has echoes of Camelot and Brigadoon, with a dash of Thermopylae and the Alamo. On the roadways, tasteful signs in brown announce that you are entering Pays Cathare—“Cathar Country”—and hikers can tramp along a rugged 150-mile Cathar Trail. Occitan, closely related to neighboring Catalan, was the language of the troubadors and of courtly love. The name Occitan, like the name Languedoc, derives from oc, the Occitan word for “yes.” The language is now enjoying a mild resurgence: street names in the region are sometimes given in French and Occitan, and activists are busily inventing homegrown Occitan terminology for the twenty-first century—Oeb site instead of Web site, for instance. Toulouse, the high-tech capital of France and the headquarters of Airbus, uses both Occitan and French recorded messages in its metro system. In gift shops, the Cathar religion is presented as a form of New Age spirituality against a sound track of mournful wind instruments.
The sheer brutality of the Cathar suppression can be hard to summon. The Albigensian Crusade was launched by Pope Innocent III in 1208. Innocent was perhaps the most strong-willed and powerful pope of the Middle Ages, claiming for the holder of his office a status “lower than God but higher than man.” He was not a sentimentalist or a happy warrior: his chief surviving work is a glum, or perhaps realistic, treatise titled On the Misery of the Human Condition. Innocent greatly strengthened the papal administration and asserted the supremacy of the pope above secular rulers, at one point excommunicating King John of England and placing the entire country under interdict. He also launched an ill-fated crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims.
The crusade against the Cathars went better. The proximate cause was the murder of a papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, perhaps on the orders of Count Raymond of Toulouse, long known as sympathetic to the heretics. Raymond was an indifferent warrior but a nimble diplomat who shuttled between excommunication and a state of grace throughout his life. To save his skin he would change sides and lead a campaign against the Cathars—and then change sides again.
Heretical movements within Christendom had been emerging with new virulence for half a century or more, and in southern France and northern Italy groups like the Cathars and Waldensians enjoyed growing popular support, along with the quiet or open protection of the local nobility. The Church attempted to cope with the situation by preaching intensively in the affected areas. It was a tough sell. In 1178, a papal legate in Toulouse reported that a large crowd had taunted him and made obscene gestures: “Digit demonstrarent,” he complained—“They gave the finger.” Several years later, Pope Lucius III issued the decree Ad abolendam (“For the purpose of abolishing . . .”), which provided a taxonomy of heretical sects and, to close the tautological circle, made it clear that refusing to submit to papal authority was itself a form of heresy.
The Albigensian Crusade set out to crush the Cathars, and up to a point it succeeded. The pope’s own legions were mainly angelic, but he harnessed the forces of local magnates (who saw which way the wind was blowing) and then of the kings of France (who saw an opportunity to extend their control over the south). The crusade was waged over twenty years, punctuated regularly by wholesale massacres. “Forward, then, most valiant soldiers of Christ!” a papal legate urged the warriors at the outset. “Go to meet the forerunners of Antichrist and strike down the ministers of the Old Serpent!”
Modernity, as the geographer David Harvey once noted, is not a time—it’s a place. I came across his remark in the twenty-first century, reading a book in the cocoon of an aircraft cruising above the Syrian Desert; pockets of the Middle Ages probably survived only a few miles below. For most people in the developed world, memories of outright religious warfare, once a gruesome fact of life, have long been buried. The past decade, with its ominous references to a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, has revived them. Jihadist violence affords a fresh taste of what religious warfare can be like. In terms of pungency and sensibility, the rhetoric of Islamist groups might have been drawn directly from a thousand years ago. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the leader of Al Qaeda, sounded not unlike that papal legate when he pronounced an anathema against his enemies in 2009:
O Allah, annihilate the Americans and Jews and the hypocrites and apostates who help them. O Allah, take revenge on our behalf from them. O Allah, make their end one of loss and destruction. O Allah, destroy their riches and harden their hearts . . . O Allah, annihilate the secularist politicians of hypocrisy who rush madly to earn the Crusaders’ pleasure . . .
Not surprisingly, apostates and secularists have often risen to the bait. Some have couched their responses in religious terms. President George W. Bush, in a public statement soon after the 9/11 attacks, used the word “crusade” to characterize the task ahead, though he later regretted the terminology. One journalist in Iraq described how, in 2004, members of the 1st Infantry Division painted the words “Jesus Killed Mohammed,” in Arabic, on the front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Another journalist that same year recounted a prayer session held by the American troops of Bravo Company on the eve of the battle of Fallujah:
Then a chaplain, Navy Lieutenant Wayne Hall, of Oklahoma City, blessed Bravo: “Today is Palm Sunday,” he began. “The day of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where he broke the bounds of Hell. Tonight commences your triumphal entry into Fallujah, a place in the bounds of Hell. This is a spiritual battle, and you Marines are the tools of mercy.” As Hall invoked the Holy Spirit, the Marines all dropped to one knee and bowed their heads, removing their bush or field caps as they did so.
A few months earlier, an army lieutenant general, William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a distinguished thirty-year veteran, attracted unwelcome attention when, in the course of a speech, he made reference to a Muslim warlord he had faced in Somalia. Boykin said: “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” In 2007, General Ricardo Sanchez, who was for a time the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, ended a speech to a gathering of military reporters with these words, drawn from Psalm 144: “Praise be to the Lord my rock, who trains my fingers for battle and my hands for war.”
Around U.S. military installations—on bumper stickers, on T-shirts—you’ll frequently come across this injunction: “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.” It’s an expression of humor and braggadocio, not a capsule version of army doctrine or the rules of engagement. As it happens, the words on those T-shirts and bumper stickers, or something like them, were first attributed to a papal legate named Arnaud Amaury near the outset of the Albigensian Crusade. The context was the siege of Béziers, in 1209, when a force of crusaders under the command of Simon de Montfort broke through into the city and massacred all the inhabitants, Cathar and Catholic alike: God would know his own, Amaury is said to have explained. The crusaders consisted largely of opportunists from the north of France, drawn by a promise of lands confiscated from heretics. Simon de Montfort would by the time of his death be the largest landholder in Languedoc. In his case, opportunism was yoked to religious zealotry and merciless technique. To persuade the inhabitants of the fortress of Cabaret to submit to his will, he took a hundred men from the nearby town of Bram, gouged out their eyes, and cut off their noses and lips. He left a single man with a single eye, who led the mutilated party to the fortr
ess, arms to shoulders, single file. The village of Bram would not enter history again until World War II, when it became the site of an internment camp for Jews.
The Albigensian Crusade lasted until 1229. The crusaders took Béziers, Carcassonne, dozens of other cities and towns, and ultimately Toulouse before suffering reverses and rebellions. The long version of the story is a tortuous saga of betrayal, greed, religious fervor, and wanton bloodletting. The fortunes of crusader and Cathar shifted continually. When the French king finally intervened, Cathar military resistance came to an end.
But the Cathar heresy had not been fully rooted out. It flourished underground. Clerical investigators continued to roam southern France, where they worked at the sufferance of local bishops, and popes encouraged secular rulers to become heretic hunters in their own right. Both efforts proved politically complicated. Neither brought conclusive results.
Finally, in 1231, Pope Gregory IX issued two documents that effectively created what we know as the Inquisition, though it was for a long time far more decentralized than the word “the” suggests. Henceforth, Rome would pick specially trained clerics to serve as inquisitors—primarily members of the Dominican Order, but also Franciscans and others. The inquisitors ventured into suspect regions, papal writ in hand, examining presumed heretics by the hundreds or thousands. Unlike local bishops, whose diligence was often compromised by close ties with the community, the inquisitors were beholden to no one save the pope. They subjected countless numbers to harsh punishments and condemned many to death by burning at the stake.
The inquisitorial process had a long history. It grew out of developments in ancient Roman law, when procedures governing how aggrieved private parties might adjudicate an alleged wrong were replaced by a more formal public process firmly in the hands of the state. The new process was called an inquisitio, and the magistrate who conducted it, the inquisitor, served in essence as detective, prosecutor, and judge rolled into one. When Theodosius officially made the Roman Empire a Christian state, in the fourth century, any deviance from orthodox Christian teaching became a crime—indeed, became tantamount to treason, which carried the death penalty. After the fall of Rome, which led to a chaotic hodgepodge of legal regimes in Europe, the inquisitio process survived in the internal tribunals of the Church. It would prove to be a powerful tool. In its earliest form, the accused was not told the identities of those who had testified against him and had no right to defense counsel. The proceedings were conducted out of public view, though careful records were kept. The inquisitio did not need to wait for someone to file a complaint (though denunciations were frequent); it could bring charges on its own, on the basis of general suspicion. This capability was central and gave inquisitors considerable power that was, in essence, preemptive—power to intervene before a transgression had been definitively discerned, based on a supposition that something harmful might ensue.
Traveling light, with a secretary or two and perhaps a small armed escort, the thirteenth-century inquisitor would arrive at his destination. He would preach a sermon, urging heretics to abjure their beliefs, and would declare a period of grace during which they could repent with relative ease. At the same time, he would begin hearing accusations against specific individuals. When the period of grace expired, he would set about conducting trials. The process was labor-intensive and time-consuming, but it enabled the examination of large numbers of people. In the fifteen months after the fall of Montségur, inquisitors in the Lauragais region of southern France questioned 5,471 men and women. The period of grace was of course a trap, perhaps an inadvertent one. Its lenient terms, coupled with its “sell-by” date, encouraged people to come forward quickly and own up to something—anything—if only to put the matter behind them. It also encouraged them to turn in their neighbors—an inducement that, in every age and place, feeds on tainted motives. In a sense, the period of grace ended up creating heresy.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The phrase “take for granted” is a sly one—it conceals the barriers to understanding that the phrase itself erects. In our own age, we take many things for granted, and have no clear idea—never pause to think—about the moment when any of them made the transition from “can’t even imagine” to part of the woodwork. We take for granted that micro-organisms cause disease, that our planet is billions of years old, and that we can send pictures through the air. The medieval world, where the Inquisition was conceived, is remote. To begin with, it was physically fragmented. At the time when the Cathars were active, someone in southern France might have referred to a stranger as “French,” meaning from the north. More than that: every valley was its own little country. In Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s book Montaillou, about the Inquisition in Languedoc, there is a passage, drawn from a clerical interrogation, in which a man named Arnaud Sicre recalls meeting a woman who said she was from a town called Saverdun—but he knows from her accent that she must be from somewhere around Montaillou. Fine: most of us can identify people from Chicago or Boston, Minneapolis or New York, by their accents. But the man’s remark struck home as I drove around Languedoc one spring and realized that Montaillou and Saverdun are only about twenty-five miles apart.
In medieval Europe, the main usable roads were the Roman roads built a thousand years earlier. It’s symptomatic of the poor state of communications that medieval words for some distances were often based not on actual length but on the time it took to cover them. A “league” is the amount of distance that could be covered in an hour. The word “journey” comes from the French journée—the amount of distance that could be covered in a day. Politically, the continent was fractured among kings and counts and dukes, bishops and abbots, cities and towns, all with overlapping rights and obligations. No organizational chart is possible. The legal system differed from place to place and was a strange mixture everywhere—bits of Roman law tossed in with ancient customs, feudal mandates, Church prerogatives, and perhaps the newfangled procedures of a distant king. For a historian today, disentangling the power relationships in just one locale—Toulouse, say, or Foix, or Carcassonne—may be the work of a lifetime. Literacy was available to very few; as a proportion of the population, those who could read and write were perhaps equivalent in number to those who can create computer code today. As for religion, everyone was nominally Catholic, but “orthodoxy” was not well defined, parish priests had minimal schooling, and the folkways of yesteryear were very much alive. Peasants everywhere consulted soothsayers. In secret places, young women took part in fertility rites of forgotten origin. Magic and superstition were deeply rooted. A man named Arnaud Gélis, a church sexton in Languedoc, told an interrogator about his beliefs regarding the dead: “When you are walking, do not throw your arms and legs about carelessly, but keep your elbows well in, or you might knock a ghost over. Do not forget that we walk unwittingly among a multitude of ghosts.” Ideas like that had filled the heads of ordinary people for centuries, and for centuries, with sporadic exceptions, no one in authority had done very much about it.
And yet change is slowly coming. Roads radiate afresh from towns and cities into a distant beyond; isolated areas once reachable only by track or footpath may now be touched by a via nova, a “new road.” Along pilgrimage routes, monastic houses repair the ancient bridges and build new ones. In 1300, a Jubilee year for the Church, some two million pilgrims will converge on Rome. Trade expands rapidly throughout the continent. Meanwhile, universities in places like Paris and Bologna start bringing order to philosophy, theology, and the law. Although there will never be anything like uniformity, a new way of doing official business begins to gather momentum at royal courts and in the Church. All this has a bearing on how dissent is perceived and handled.
Why the apparent surge in heretical activity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? One can point to many factors: the corruption of the Church, economic stresses of various kinds, the role of charismatic preachers, a pervasive sense of injustice. Individuals, as one historian notes,
are also showing “feelings of alienation” and “expanded curiosity about the human condition.” The truth is that popular belief had always diverged widely and without discipline from the pure strains of belief and practice as defined by Church councils. What had undeniably changed was the Church itself.
By the standards of the time, it is a modernizing institution, increasingly centralized under a Roman pope whose claims to both spiritual and temporal authority over all of Christendom are to be taken seriously—and to be seriously defended. The papal chanceries become busier and busier; under Innocent III, secretaries begin making copies of every letter for the official files. Clerics sent out from Rome on specific missions now carry the stamp of papal authority with them, superseding the writ of local bishops. At the same time, the conceptual structure of “orthodoxy,” together with laws to codify it, has been laid out with unprecedented clarity—the work of scholastics and canon lawyers in the great university centers.
God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World Page 4