The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Yet, overall, the fat indolent brother of folklore lay in the future, for the dynamic men of the first blossoming of the mendicants were by no means cut from the same cloth as Friar Tuck. To the contrary, the best of these men were engaged in what their literature calls metanoia, a heartfelt conversion in the struggle to get closer to God. Had they lived on another shore of the Mediterranean, they would have called their journey “the greater jihad.”

  As they crossed the Ponte St. Angelo, to celebrate the Jubilee with their papal protector, they had reason to look back on the past century with a great deal of satisfaction.

  They had reshaped the Church and Europe. The friars were at their apogee. Others on the bridge were, unwittingly, nearing their vanishing point. They were men in white cloaks embroidered with a red cross. Influential and incalculably rich, these were the Knights Templar. The Temple was one of the two great orders of warrior monks—the other was the Hospital—to have waged war against the Muslims and protected pilgrims to Outremer, the crusader states of the Levant. In 1300, however, Outremer was no more. The last toehold had been relinquished just nine years earlier, when St. Jean d’Acre had been lost to the armies of the Mameluke sultan.* The Templars and Hospitallers had put up a heroic fight, but they were eventually thrown back into the sea, a Muslim ambition since the crusaders had first arrived in Palestine at the close of the eleventh century.

  The Hospitallers stayed on in the region by moving to Rhodes. Not so the Templars. They had been content to retire to their commanderies and castles in Europe. They might have lost their raison d’ être but they most definitely still had their avoir. Two centuries of moneylending by the Templars—issuing letters of credit in exchange for deposits at home—and the constant acquisition of new properties and receipt of new bequests had left them immensely wealthy. Such wealth excited jealousy, but they were untouchable. Like the friars, they too answered only to the pope. Barons and kings might fume, but whenever they needed money it was to the Templars that many turned. No matter that they were crusaders in a lost cause, the Templars believed themselves to be indispensable, a belief that was to prove horribly wrongheaded within a decade of their traveling to Rome for the Jubilee.

  But doubtless the largest contingent shuffling across the Ponte St. Angelo was the laity, the ordinary people immortalized later in the fourteenth century by Chaucer and Boccaccio. Some would have been prosperous artisans in colorful tunics and hose, their womenfolk adorned with extravagances that a scandalized Church tried to curb through the encouragement of sumptuary laws. Western Europe had seen two hundred years of growth, what historians call the Commercial Revolution, and the thirteenth century had been devoid of invasion and major war. These pilgrims, then, were the products of that expansion, living at a time when the medieval period shone with a vigor that is even now underestimated. The humanists of the Renaissance did a good hatchet job on their predecessors—labeling their architecture barbarian, or “gothic”; relegating their era to intermediate “middle” ages that a dullard humanity had to endure between the glories of Antiquity and the Renaissance. Given that legacy, it is difficult to appreciate their achievements.

  In Brother Bernard’s day international trade was several orders of magnitude greater than it ever had been in the most cosmopolitan period of the Roman Empire. The medieval merchant and mariner were intrepid, their manufacturing counterparts prolific. Wind and water had been harnessed throughout western Europe, and from such booming textile centers as Bruges and Ghent great bolts of woolen cloth were ferried regularly down to the fairs of Champagne, where the Italians, laden with their own products and those originating in the East, would be awaiting them. Trade had exploded, capital had multiplied exponentially. And while the Crusades may have been a disaster for the West’s image in the lands of Islam, they nonetheless opened the eyes of Venetian, Pisan, and Genoan merchants to the bounties of places such as Aleppo and Damascus, way stations on the Silk Road from the far East. Even an event as abjectly unredeeming as the atrocity that kicked off the thirteenth century—the vicious Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204—did not come without benefits: for sixty years or so, Latin westerners ruled Greek Constantinople, and soon the Black and Aegean seas of its great hinterland saw the sails of Venetian and Genoan traders.

  If the emergence of the friars signaled spiritual vitality, then the activities of these merchants and townsmen showed remarkable creativity. Throughout western Europe the commune with its consuls—town governance by an association of all the wealthy traders of a city—became the norm, its participants truculent defenders of their rights, as set down in hard-won charters in the face of clerical and noble opposition. Banking was more or less invented in the years preceding the Jubilee. Medieval Italians pioneered accounting methods recognizable to a modern, and long-distance lending of capital soon became commonplace. The precious number zero, borrowed from the Arabs, who had borrowed it from the Indians, was embraced by the northern Italians of Lombardy, who set up shop in most major capitals. Almost every important European city still has its Lombard Street.*

  Bernard Délicieux’s world was not one of toothless oafs shivering in the shadow of their lord’s castle keep. Many of the mobile energetic masses on the bridge of the Jubilee, thanks to the exigencies of trade and commerce, were literate, no longer dependent on the priestly class to make sense of the world for them. Many were bankers, traders, skilled craftsmen, and lawyers—for the medieval era was as litigious as our own. While a wrenching century lay in wait for them, with its Hundred Years’ War, recurrent famines, and Black Death, the men and women of the year 1300 still had the wind in their sails.

  * By the Edict of Milan in 313, Emperor Constantine granted its legitimacy.

  * The fresco may have been executed by Giotto.

  * Among those excommunicated were, notably, the Poor Men of Lyon, or the Waldenses.

  * It would be too great a leap to say that Dominic consciously copied the Cathar clergy.

  * This was during the Fifth Crusade, in 1219.

  * Beijing got its first Catholic church in 1299.

  * St. Jean d’Acre is present-day Akko, Israel.

  * Boccaccio, according to tradition, was born in the rue des Lombards in Paris.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE KING’S MEN AT THE DOOR

  AT DAYBREAK THERE CAME A CRASHING at the door. In some places, a weighty metal door knocker thundered down again and again; in others, the wood splintered under the hammer blows of a great mace; in yet others, the portal swung open soundlessly, guided from within by a betrayer’s hand. All over France, in Paris, Troyes, Reims, Toulouse, Tours, Poitiers, and many isolated manors in the countryside, the king’s men at arms rushed through thresholds and rounded up startled knights. It was dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, the day of reckoning for the Knights Templar.

  In subsequent months, the once-proud members of the Order were taken whimpering from their dark dungeons and viciously tortured. The rack, the leg screw, the hot iron—nothing was too inhumane to wring confessions from them. The charges? Spitting on the cross. Idola-tory of the goat Baphomet. Assassination of a pope. Sodomy. The obscene kiss. Heresy. Blasphemy. Usury. Lack of charity. And many more. The cascade of lurid accusation was meant to distract from the purpose of the whole operation: to destroy a competing center of power and comprehensively loot its fabulous treasury.

  Given the sordidness of the affair, the trial of the Templars, which dragged on for years, remained the subject of speculation long after their leaders were burned alive on an island in the Seine. Whether they were guilty of at least some of these charges or wholly innocent has enlivened centuries of historical and esoteric debate. Certainly they were no saints—“drink like a Templar” ran the conversational commonplace in medieval France—yet the grotesque tapestry of accusation hints at outright fantasy. Only very recently has a scholar found in the archives of the Vatican proof that the Church, for its part, did not find the Templars guilty of anything.

 
But there was, indubitably, a guilty party: the men who engineered the mass arrest. Like the pedestrian discipline on the Ponte St. Angelo, the event can be viewed as distinctly unmedieval, combining as it did careful planning, covert deployment, and simultaneous execution on a grand scale. For an era that saw mounted knight and wild-eyed mercenary regularly make sordid messes out of pennant-snapping battle orders, the arrest of the Templars stands out as a superbly coordinated act. To find its rival in the sudden, ferocious choreography of state terror, one would have to travel forward to the sixteenth century and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, or to the twentieth, with its Kristallnacht. The event was truly abominable, the act of very dangerous operatives. These were the king’s men.

  The king whose operatives took down the Templars was Philip IV of France, usually called Philip the Fair—for his tall, handsome bearing, not his character.* France had been fortunate in the thirteenth century to have had three outstanding, long-lived monarchs in the Capetian line: Philip Augustus (Philip II), Saint Louis (Louis IX), and Philip the Fair. The French star was on the rise. “France” may have consisted of a congeries of competing duchies, independent communes, and episcopal jurisdictions, but the royal domain nonetheless was growing and being consolidated. Brother Bernard’s Languedoc, for example, had come into the French fold only recently. On the death of the last Count of Toulouse in 1249, the land was held in what was called appanage, a sort of lifetime lease, by a member of the Capetian family. On his death, in 1271, Languedoc became incorporated into the kingdom, and France, improbably, now touched the Mediterranean. Not that the speakers of the langue d’oc felt fully French overnight; to the contrary, Bernard’s actions would have been impossible without widespread resentment of the new northern masters.

  The inexorable growth of the kingdom governed from Paris would change the course of medieval history. Prior to France’s rise, all eyes had been riveted on the Germanic emperors and their jockeying for power and land with the papacy in Italy and beyond. The greatest of them, Frederick II, had shaken up the first half of the thirteenth century by doing a credible imitation of the Antichrist: consorting with Muslims, warring with popes, adopting Eastern manners, engaging in philosophical speculation, indulging in oriental despotism, and just generally being an out-of-time genius of intrigue, learning, curiosity, vanity, and ruthlessness. His awed contemporaries, when not calling him the Antichrist, referred to him as Stupor Mundi, the Marvel of the World; on his passing at midcentury, the papacy wasted no time in crushing his descendants, its fierce and unprincipled determination to exterminate a great royal family ultimately debasing its claims to divinely guided leadership. Just as important, the 1268 beheading in the market square in Naples of sixteen-year-old Conradin, the last in Frederick’s line, constituted a pivotal event in ensuring that Germany would remain a patchwork of statelets unable to stride the world properly until long into the future.

  France was headed in another direction. Hitherto considered a fairly obedient child of the Church—“the Church’s eldest daughter,” went the customary piety—and the major source of manpower and money for crusades to Outremer, France had begun to flex its sinews and prepare itself to occupy center stage in European affairs, a position it would not relinquish for many centuries. The Commercial Revolution had been good to more than the thriving merchant republics of the Italian peninsula. France—or what was to consolidate as the unified country of that name—was a beneficiary of the boom, too, and, as Europe’s largest and most populous territory, it constituted a power to be reckoned with.*

  Its king was respected and feared, but not loved. Philip the Fair had been raised motherless, in a court filled with rumors of lethal scheming on the part of his stepmother and in the absence of his oft-warring father, Philip the Bold (Philip III). His biographers claim the career of his sainted grandfather, Louis IX, exercised a great influence on his lonely, suspicion-filled boyhood and came to serve him as an exemplar of Christian devotion and steady stewardship. Upon the death of his older brother, Philip became first in line for the throne and eventually ascended to it in 1285 at age seventeen. Surrounded by courtiers and the functionaries of the nascent Capetian state, the young king appeared from the outset a taciturn and difficult leader. He matured into a rather unpleasant man; in the words of one historian, “a captious, sternly moralistic, literalistically scrupulous, humourless, stubborn, aggressive, and vindictive individual, who feared the eternal consequences of his temporal deeds.”

  He was not entirely to blame. Kingship a hundred years earlier had principally involved trotting out on hawking parties trailed by one’s itinerant entourage—a few priests, noble advisors, bedmates, servants, jongleurs, and fools—with occasional stops in courtyard and castle to render judgment, rein in minor vassals, or ride in tournaments. Indeed, prior to the reign of Philip Augustus in the late twelfth century, the French king’s holdings in what we now call France were dwarfed by the French lands of his two greatest vassals, the king of England and the duke of Burgundy. By Philip the Fair’s day in the late thirteenth century, the kingdom had multiplied in size, and the business of managing it was much more complex. Not only did the monarch act as the God-appointed feudal supremo, he had also to govern.

  To meet the needs of this economic and political expansion, the great Capetians of the thirteenth century presided over the gradual building of a state ruled from the top. New law courts came into being, to rival those of the Church, and new taxes were levied to finance crusades and wars. The days of relying solely on a group of baronial vassals to scrounge up men at arms were coming to a close. Money was also needed for the ever-growing establishments of royal officials—tax collectors, judges, inspectors, soldiers—in Paris and the provinces. All this institutional novelty signaled a significant shift in outlook and functioning, one that would culminate, in the French experience, in royal absolutism and the divine right of kings.

  The newly fledged universities of France, particularly the Sorbonne (named for Robert de Sorbon, Louis IX’s confessor), were not, as is sometimes remarked, concerned with placing angels on pinheads. A fresh batch of Aristotle, much of it from the Islamic world via the translators of Spain, had landed on the desks of the schoolmen in the thirteenth century, with revolutionary consequences. Aristotle was mined not only for philosophical insight, in the delicate enterprise of reconciling Reason and Revelation, but also for his solid empiricism. Aristotle’s notion of natural law and of politics dovetailed with the new realities. The mendicant friars studied the philosopher and looked toward God, but many others did the same and looked toward the King. Political thinking—dangerous, secular, national—began to develop. In a very influential manual of such thought, De regimine principum (On the Government of Princes), penned by Giles of Rome for Philip the Fair in 1286, the blueprint for royal rule according to the dictates of reason and natural law was laid out. The just king bent his knee to no one, not even the pope. And within a couple of generations of Giles’ manual, another political thinker, Marsilius of Padua, baldly stated that the papacy’s possession of lands was inimical to the idea of Christian kingship and to the Church’s place in society.*

  Such sedition toward the older medieval order was not just the stuff of undergraduate shouting matches in the taverns of the Left Bank. It formed a necessary corrective to Pope Boniface’s failing dream of a continent-wide commonwealth. Men had to be found who were ready and willing to break with the past and venture into new territory. Fortunately, for the royal cause, the same schools that produced the theorists also produced the practitioners. This new class of educated laymen was suited to the challenge. Although not necessarily anticlerical, they used their elbows in getting rid of their literate priestly rivals in the growing administrations of law and the royal exchequer. Nor were they friends to the nobility, whose place at the king’s side they sought to supplant. As for the low station of the great unwashed, from which some of them had escaped, these clerks felt no nostalgie de la boue. To the contrary, disdain w
as their dominant feeling toward the illiterate peasantry, as in this prayer recited half in jest by the medieval bureaucrats: “O God, who has sown discord between clergy and peasant, permit us by thy grace to live from their work, enjoy their wives, cohabit with their daughters, and delight in their death.”

  What also marked them, beside this dubious sense of humor, was their loyalty to the monarch. There was a simple reason for this: their fate was yoked to the king’s. When fortune smiled on him, she smiled on them. When the king suffered setback, they felt it, too. If competing powers in the medieval free-for-all over jurisidiction—bishops, barons, burghers—gained the upper hand and encroached on the monarchy, the king’s men saw their power and their purview shrink. Thus it was in their personal interest—quite apart from the theory behind the new dispensation—for the king to succeed, to trounce his enemies at home and abroad, and to acquire the wherewithal to lavish largesse on his devoted functionaries.