The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Rabies Carcassonensis, la rage carcassonnaise, Carcassonne rabies, or, better still, Carcassonne madness. Such was the term to describe the febrile discontent in the Bourg as the year 1300 approached. Worse yet for the Church, the madness was to spread virulently through the placid woad fields of medieval Languedoc to the important city of Albi, infamous for lending its name to the Albigensian heresy, or Catharism, 150 years earlier.

  The root of the anger was a long-standing irritant in the cities and towns of the south: inquisitors. They had plagued Languedoc for seven decades. The year 1229 saw the end of the Albigensian Crusade, a twenty-year-long pageant of atrocity aimed at extirpating Catharism and breaking the backbone of a fiercely independent region. The Church realized that, while Languedocian independence was fatally injured, to the future benefit of the French crown, the feared heresy still had many adherents, even after the Crusade’s years of savage repression and devastation. In just one instance from the campaign that beggars the imagination, at the town of Lavaur midway between Toulouse and Albi, on a spring afternoon in 1211, some four hundred people were burned alive just outside its shattered battlements, as churchmen joyfully sang hymns and northern nobles looked on. Earlier in the day, these same nobles had torn the lady of Lavaur from her castle, thrown her down a well, and then hurled rocks on her as she lay dying in the dark. Then they hanged her brother. Given this behavior, and Lavaur was no exception, the madness in thirteenth-century Languedoc had not been confined to Carcassonne—or to the Church’s enemies.

  But Catharism, wounded and much reduced, nonetheless remained. Prior to the Crusade, the faith had been practiced openly; afterward, it went underground. The most important of the Languedoc nobles, the defeated count of Toulouse, Raymond VII, had by the terms of the peace treaty of 1229 pledged to continue the fight against the heresy. But his family, most notably his late father, had been notoriously loath to inflict punishment upon the people of Languedoc for crimes of conscience. Indeed, the competing power centers in medieval society, the rich town consuls, the merchants—even some of the local Catholic clergy—had family or friends of a heretical bent, or were themselves so. All of this was known only too well in Rome, so Pope Gregory IX forced Count Raymond to fund a university in Toulouse with the express purpose of defending the faith and training Dominican brothers. Dominic had founded his order in that city; it was only fitting to aid its expansion there. But Gregory had other, greater plans. These friars would go on to become inquisitors, answerable not to a bishop or a Dominican provincial, but to the pope alone. With the letter Ille humani generis in 1231 to a Dominican prior in Regensburg, he took the historic step of creating a papal inquisition, thereby ensuring himself a posterity of dubious distinction.* Two years later Gregory would write to the Dominicans in Languedoc instructing them to appoint inquisitors.

  Much has been imagined about inquisitorial practice as a sort of malevolent and centralized medieval Department of Homeland Security. In reality, there was no unified inquisition, just individual appointments in certain jurisdictions for varying periods of time. The phantasmagoric uppercase “Inquisition” owes much of its existence to nineteenth-century liberal historians whose ideological repugnance toward the practice also informed the work of history painter Jean-Paul Laurens. That inquisition subsequently leached memorably into popular culture—for example, as buffoonish broad comedy (Monty Python) or literary villainy (The Name of the Rose)—only makes clarification more necessary.

  At the outset, the rise of heresies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—or, rather, the detection and definition of these heresies—put the men of the Church in a quandary as to how to handle a laity forming its own opinion about man’s relation to the divine. When persuasion proved ineffective in bringing people back to orthodoxy, which itself was constantly undergoing modification and renovation, Rome looked back to old Rome, to the empire and institutions of which the Catholic Church came to feel itself the inheritor. Perusal of this authoritarian past focused on the inquisitio, a procedure by which the empire’s legists hunted down those who were thought treasonous, disloyal, or guilty of some form of classical lèse-majesté. The investigator in old imperial Rome—the inquisitor—searched for evidence, collected testimony, extracted (or didn’t) confession, passed judgment, and in some cases carried out the sentence. He was detective, prosecutor, jury, and judge all rolled into one. There were no adversarial proceedings, no real opportunity for mounting an effective defense or bringing down a prosecutorial argument. In effect, the plaintiff was the imperial state—and now, a millennium later, it would be the imperial Church. A streamlined, rationalized method of repression heretofore foreign to the medieval mind, an inquisition, or the Holy Office as it came to be called by its supporters, held out many attractions in the changed circumstances of the late twelfth century.

  The times called for the lawyerly, given the explosive growth of different and competing bureaucracies and courts in the High Middle Ages. States and institutions were aborning, needing to define themselves and their place in the world. The sheer number of heretics had become a major problem, a threat to a worldview of a Christian commonwealth ruled from Rome. And the times were turning toward persecution, not only by the Church but also by agents of kings and their barons. This “formation of a persecuting society” was a deliberate, conscious choice driven by social change and the entry of new actors, particularly literate lay bureaucrats, into the arena of power. The Church was far from immune to these currents of thought. A “Christianity of fear” pervaded the period. As one example, the notion of Purgatory, perfected in the thirteenth century, changed from a sort of benign cotton-cloudy waiting room for souls still sullied by minor sin to a place of unspeakable physical and spiritual torment rivaled only by Hell itself. As a French historian writes: “Burdened with the weight of oriental apocalyptic literature, a literature full of fires, tortures, sound and fury; defined by Augustine as the site of punishments more painful than any earthly pain; and given its finishing touches by a Church that dispensed salvation but only in fear and trembling, Purgatory had already veered in the direction of Hell.” The thought experiment of Hell itself had been heightened during the same period into a horror show so vivid and terrifying as to stand as impressive testament to the demons resident in the human psyche. A Dominican scholar of the thirteenth century, Humbert of Romans, whose biography of Dominic became the officially sanctioned life story of the saint, also penned a work in praise of the utility of Hell, entitled On the Gift of Fear.

  Thus the time was propitious for inquisition, which is not at all to say that papal fiat could make it arise full-blown. A late twelfth-century pope issued a bull enjoining bishops to become inquisitors, but many lacked the expertise, willingness, revenue, or stomach to launch open-throated campaigns of heretic elimination. Further, the idea was a novelty, so it could hardly be expected that these episcopal inquisitions could suddenly Christianize what was a practice from antiquity. Time was needed to make the adjustment, to lay the sacerdotal groundwork, to find the necessary rationalizations.

  Some of these last arose from the belief in the pope’s firm hand on the tiller of Christendom. In the first fifteen years of the thirteenth century, with the pontificate of Innocent III, a brilliant man imbued with a sense of papal supremacy and capable of organization on a grand scale—as shown in the legislative overdrive of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215—heresy at first proved resistant to argument. The Church’s second rejoinder came as a brutal recourse to arms, as the unfortunates of Lavaur and other Languedoc towns were to learn to their sorrow. Innocent approved of the innovative founders of the mendicant orders: he dreamed Francis would rejuvenate the Church, and he appointed Dominic to debate the Cathars prior to launching the Albigensian Crusade. While the latter’s mission bore little fruit in the short term, the long-term bequest of Dominic’s actions provided the Church, and future popes, with a cadre of Dominican friars ideally suited to undertake the third, and final, response to heresy: sy
stematic, painstaking inquisition. It was from the Dominicans rather than the Franciscans that the greater number of inquisitors came. Through them and their police work the Church would prevail. The word had been tried first, then the sword—it was now the turn of the law.

  The Dominican mendicant friars, unlike earlier monastic movements, chose to live in the world, amidst the laity. Thus they were already, in a sense, walking the beat. And while the impulse to live among the people might at first blush seem laudable, there was a flip side to the notion: by shunning the unworldly, isolated monastery of the past, the Dominicans had decided to make the world their monastery. The laity became members of that monastery, with their consequential obligations and obediences clearly delineated. This view of spiritual discipline dovetailed nicely with the job of hunting heretics. While other churchmen might cite scripture about heretics being “foxes in the vineyard of the Lord,” claim heresy to be lèsemajesté toward the pope, or put forward any other of a number of arguments to justify persecuting dissident Christians, the Dominicans could see heresy as an affront and a danger to their monastic community, which englobed all men and women and stretched into the afterlife. And as the Dominican order itself, in the narrower sense, practiced robust corporal punishment and incarceration of backsliding friars—most convents had a jail—importing such tactics into the inquisitio hereticae pravitatis, inquisition of heretical depravity, was but a small step to take.

  The Dominicans were the Order of Friars Preachers, and they melded that vocation into their new assignment as inquisitors. At the outset of an inquisitio generalis (or fact-finding inquisition) in the early days after Gregory IX’s letter, the inquisitor and his scribes, notaries, and servants would leave the Cité of Carcassonne and descend on a village they had targeted. First a sermon would be delivered to the assembled populace, in which the inquisitor took care to explain through the use of exempla—parables about animals were a medieval favorite—why Cathars were wolves in sheep’s clothing, why heresy was the worst crime of all, and how tolerating heretics of any description, whether Cathars or Waldenses, in the midst of a community endangered everyone’s eternal soul. For the problem, explicitly recognized in Dominican literature, lay precisely in perception. The people of Languedoc, whether orthodox or not, could plainly perceive that the Cathar clergy, the ascetic, gentle, pacific Good Men and Good Women (or perfected heretics—the Perfect, as they were termed by their enemies) had all the trappings of holiness. The preacher/inquisitor faced an uphill battle in what amounted to convincing people not to believe what they could see with their own eyes. He had to establish the idea of a counterfeit holiness, condemning all who tolerated it to the fire and brimstone that often came as the stem-winding finale of his initial sermon.

  The villagers were informed that they enjoyed a grace period of a few days before a formal summons to appear before the inquisitor might be served upon them. If, before that time, they came of their own accord and owned up to their depravity, a certain measure of clemency would be shown. They had to tell the inquisitor if they or any of their neighbors, kinsmen, or other acquaintances had ever given material or spiritual support of any kind whatsoever to the Good Men and Women. It was a crime to withhold any information germane to the eradication of heresy. And if they, or any people they knew, were Cathar believers, they had to recant their heresy and endure a penance before being welcomed back in the bosom of the Church. Depositions were taken confidentially—no one but the inquisitor ever knew who said what about whom. Further, should the inquisitor receive at least two credible depositions about someone believing in, supporting, or giving comfort to the Good Men and Women, charges could be laid. That created the mala fama, the infamy necessary for investigation. Derived from old Rome, the notion held that a person’s own reputation ( fama) functioned as his accuser, exempting him from normal legal protection. A powerful and pliable tool of coercion, inquisitors came to use just general public notoriety, rather than denunciations or confessions, to start a proceeding against someone. In all cases, the accused never knew who his accusers were.

  One can imagine how the sermon’s listeners felt on returning home for whispered discussions over whether to cooperate. Would they be denounced, and by whom? By one of their enemies, with whom they had had a land or livestock dispute years back? If innocent, would they be falsely accused? Should they settle old scores by accusing someone falsely before he accused them? Did they really have to squeal on heretical neighbors and kin whom they liked? The inquisitor’s sermon, in short, contained a recipe for tearing village life apart, the customary friction of antipathy and affinity within a living community giving way to a deadening, dread-filled atmosphere of revenge and betrayal. This indeed was a Christianity of fear, in practice as well as in theory.

  The inquisitor, for his part, gauged if the town was going to be a tough nut to crack. The first collaborators might arrive quickly, perhaps under cover of night to avoid neighborly scrutiny; or they might not—some brave villages observed an omertà that took years to grind down. Further on in the thirteenth century, the inquisitor was able to examine records of past inquisitions held in the locality. These were carefully guarded in bound registers, containing scores of transcripts of interrogations and sentences handed down. Fairly uncharacteristically for document-keeping practices of the era, the registers were systematically organized, cross-referencing individuals and allowing archival retrieval of damning detail that might otherwise have been lost or forgotten. They were, in essence, a collective database designed for a sole user—many a time an inquisitor confounded individuals with contradictory testimony they had given years earlier. Not unsurprisingly, an inquisition register first brought la rage carcassonnaise to a boil.

  Further reading for the visiting Dominican investigator were materials concerning heresy itself. At the Council of Tarragona in 1242, the assembled prelates spelled out an entire taxonomy of dissent, yet another testament to psychology, this time to the mind’s capability to create neat hierarchical mountains out of complex human molehills. One can almost see the lips of the novice inquisitor mouthing the different categories as he rehearsed the Tarragona checklist: “heretics,” “believers,” “suspects”—acting “simply,” “vehemently,” or “most vehemently”—along with “concealers,” “hiders,” “receivers,” “defenders,” and “favorers.”

  The Dominican likely also would have possessed an example of a supremely peculiar self-help genre, the inquisitor’s manual. The first was written in Carcassonne in 1248. These manuals compiled admonitions, tip sheets, descriptions of different forms of heresy, and tactics of interrogation. Years of questioning people with something to hide had given the authors of these manuals insights into the dodging and weaving tactics developed by heretics and their sympathizers. Nicolas Eymerich, a Dominican of the fourteenth century, listed ten different techniques of evasiveness that the exasperated inquisitor should be on the lookout for when questioning heretics. They ranged from artful casuistry to blatant excuse-making:

  The third way of evading a question or misleading a questioner is through redirecting the question. For example, if it is asked: “Do you believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?” he replies, “And what do you believe?” And when he is told, “We believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,” he replies, “Thus I believe,” meaning, “I believe that you believe this, but I do not.” . . .

  The eighth way of evading a question is through feigned illness. For example, if someone is interrogated concerning his faith, and the questions having multiplied to the point that he perceives he cannot avoid being caught out in his heresy and error, he says: “I am very weak in the head, and I cannot endure any more. In the name of God, please let me go now.” Or he says, “Pain has overcome me. Please, for the sake of God, let me lie down.” And going to his bed, he lies down. And thus he escapes questioning for a time, and meanwhile thinks over how he will reply, and how craftily he will conduct himself. Thus
they conduct themselves with respect to other feigned illnesses. They frequently use this mode of conduct when they see that they are to be tortured, saying that they are sick, and that they will die if they are tortured, and women frequently say that they are suffering from their female troubles, so that they can escape torture for a time.

  There were heretical Christians, particularly the Waldenses, who believed that capital punishment was prohibited under any circumstance, no matter what the claim of legitimacy might be. Any qualms that Dominican inquisitors, as followers of Jesus Christ, might feel in condemning people to death were countered in Dominican literature. The Order’s saintly founder, Dominic, came to be seen above all else as an inquisitor, even though he died a full decade before Gregory IX declared judicial war on heresy.

  Many saints, particularly those who founded orders, were subject to what might be termed sedimentary hagiography—layers of successive biographies ascribing miracles or modes of exemplary conduct to the subject long after his or her death. These were often added with a specific agenda in mind. The technique was by no means confined to Christianity: for instance, the hadith, or tales of Muhammad’s life appearing nowhere in the Qur’an, have guided and shaped Islamic piety and practice for centuries. The astute Dominic is reputed to have said on his deathbed that he would be far more useful to the brothers dead than alive.

  Dominic’s transformation from compassionate preacher to merciless inquisitor was effected within a few generations of his death in 1221. The Miracle of Fire at Fanjeaux became in later biographies a judicial proceeding in a neighboring town called Montréal, and, in this telling, the document that refused to burn was in all probability an inquisition register. The humane and flawed holy man that Dominic must have been in reality (his first biographer had him admitting to preferring the conversation of younger women to that of older ones) became idealized as a persecutor.