The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  In Toulouse of the same year, similar indignities outraged public sensibility. In an infamous incident, an old woman on her deathbed was tricked into admitting her heretical beliefs, inspiring the Dominican bishop of the city to have her lashed to her bed, hauled through town, and thrown on a bonfire. A Dominican chronicler witnessed the event and joyfully claimed it proof of divine intervention, or perhaps the action of the late St. Dominic himself, whose very first feast day was being celebrated on that afternoon of August 8, 1234. The friars, after dispatching the poor woman, returned to table for a hearty lunch, while one of their number was left behind to preach a sermo generalis to the dumbfounded crowd, which had just witnessed a harmless old woman at the very end of her natural life subjected to a cruel and inhumane death.

  Within a few months these Dominican hounds of the Lord had themselves been hounded out of town. Certainly, many Toulousains had something to hide, but the near unanimity of their opprobrium attests to widespread disgust at inquisitorial activity. Prior to quitting the city, the Dominicans had been, in effect, ostracized—no one showed up at their services, no tradesman supplied them with food or labor, no passerby greeted them in the streets, save to hurl epithets or rocks and refuse. The autumn of 1234 marked a dangerous moment of civic truculence in both Toulouse and Albi. That the Dominicans, albeit with the pope’s support, eventually dared return within a few years speaks not only of the disorganized nature of the resistance to them but also of the implacable, sincere determination of the friars to do God’s dirty work.

  The countryside was even less welcoming. In 1242, in the small settlement of Avignonet, a morning’s ride to the west of Carcassonne, two inquisitors and their party were set upon in the middle of the night and massacred. One of the inquisitors was Guillaume Arnaud, a feared Dominican; the other, Etienne de Saint-Thibéry, an unlucky Franciscan who had been appointed alongside Arnaud to allay fears among the populace of Dominican ferocity. Etienne was to be the good cop, but he did not live long enough to perform that function.

  The perpetrators, from the Cathar stronghold of Montségur, had believed that by killing the inquisitors they would kill the inquisition. This was to misunderstand the Dominican hydra: within a short time replacements appeared, and the action of the murderers proved, disastrously for them, to be the last straw for the Church. Money and an army were raised to reduce the almost impregnable mountain fortress of Montségur, a citadel of Catharism that previous prelates had quailed at the thought of attacking. The killing at Avignonet had provided the political will, and in March 1244, after a ten-month siege, Montségur surrendered and more than two hundred Good Men and Good Women were consigned en masse to the flames. Those not condemned to the stake were then interviewed by inquisitors.

  Languedoc licked its wounds and kept quiet. The Good Men vanished into thin air. The inquisitors, undaunted by their initial reception in the region, busied themselves with investigation, honing technique and expertise. They became sedentary, summoning suspects to headquarters rather than venturing into isolated and dangerous villages. King Louis IX had the Wall at Carcassonne constructed, and its dark chambers slowly filled with prisoners of conscience. Burnings were few, but inquisition registers grew, each passing year yielding a fresh harvest of names to retain and cross-reference. Many unfortunate families were undone, with the “doctors of souls,” as the inquisitors came to style themselves, dispensing cruel remedies for salvation in the hereafter, heedless of their consequences in the here and now. An active inquisitor, Jean Galand, conducted thorough investigations in the Cabardès, the rugged hinterland to the north of Carcassonne. Smoldering resentment glowed deep in the dark night.

  In the 1280s, three lawyers of Carcassonne appealed to the king to halt the depredations of inquisition in Languedoc. The two laymen in this impudent trio represented the new social order: literate clerks fed up with the Church’s disruptive role in civil society. They feared an unsympathetic hearing in Rome, so they turned to their sovereign to set matters to rights. The inquisition, they argued, was harming his subjects, weakening his kingdom, causing unrest. They demanded that the king’s agents in Languedoc cease helping the inquisitors undermine the peace and prosperity of his loyal province.

  The first two appeals, in 1280 and 1284, fell on deaf ears. The documents themselves have been lost. But by 1286, circumstances had changed. On returning from a losing campaign south of the Pyrenees, in Aragon, the forty-year-old French king, Philip the Bold, contracted dysentery in the autumn of 1285 and died. This calamity occurred in Perpignan, close to the schemers of Languedoc. Perpignan was not then a part of France, a particularity that was to play an important role in the career of Bernard Délicieux.* The king’s body was therefore moved from Perpignan to the nearest French city, Narbonne. The lawyers of Carcassonne, or their sympathizers in the nobility, may have seized the opportunity to attend the funeral in Narbonne in order to determine whether the dead king’s successor, seventeen-year-old Philip the Fair, could be influenced to look favorably on a renewed appeal.

  In 1286, the men of Carcassonne wrote a petition to the hated inquisitor Jean Galand and the young king, identifying the flaws in the inquisitor’s ideal vision of what he was doing:

  We feel aggrieved in that you, contrary to the use and custom observed by your predecessors in the Inquisition, have made a new prison, called the mur [Wall]. Truly this could be called with good cause a hell. For in it you have constructed little cells for the purpose of tormenting and torturing people. Some of these cells are dark and airless, so that those lodged there cannot tell if it is day or night, and they are continuously deprived of air and light. In other cells there are kept miserable wretches laden with shackles, some of wood, some of iron. These cannot move, but defecate and urinate on themselves. Nor can they lie down except on the frigid ground. They have endured torments like these day and night for a long time. In other miserable places in the prison, not only is there no light or air, but the food is rarely distributed, and that only bread and water.

  Many prisoners have been put in similar situations, in which several, because of the severity of their tortures, have lost limbs and have been completely incapacitated. Many, because of the unbearable conditions and their great suffering, have died a most cruel death. In these prisons there is constantly heard an immense wailing, weeping, groaning, and gnashing of teeth. What more can one say? For these prisoners life is a torment and death a comfort. And thus coerced they say that what is false is true, choosing to die once rather than to endure more torture. As a result of these false and coerced confessions not only do those making the confessions perish, but so do the innocent people named by them . . .

  Whence it has come about that many of those who are newly cited to appear, hearing of the torments and trials of those who are detained in the mur and in its dungeons, wishing to save themselves, have fled to the jurisdiction of other kings. Others assert what is false is true; in which assertions they accuse not only themselves but other innocent people, that they may avoid the above mentioned pains, choosing to fall with dishonor into the hands of God rather than into those of perverse men. Those who thus confess afterward reveal to their close friends that those things they said to the inquisitors are not true, but rather false, and that they confessed out of fear of imminent danger . . .

  Likewise, and it is a shame to hear, certain vile persons, both defamed for heresy and condemned for false testimony, and, it is reported, guardians of the dungeons, seduced by an evil spirit, say with a diabolical suggestion to the imprisoned: “Wretches, why do you not confess so that you can be set free? Unless you confess, you will never leave this place, nor escape its torments!” To which the prisoners reply: “My lord, what do we say? What should we say?” And the jailers reply, “You should say this and this.” And what they suggest is false and evil; and those wretches repeat what they have been told, although it is false, so that they may avoid the continuous torments to which they are subject. Yet in the end they perish, and cause in
nocent people to perish as well.

  The authors of the petition had every interest in painting as bleak a picture as possible of the inquisition at Carcassonne. Yet the document speaks eloquently across the centuries of the indignation felt by educated people at the excesses of fanatical persecution. To brook the power of the inquisitor took courage—and Brother Jean Galand was a formidable figure, having spent more than a decade actively torturing and imprisoning people. Of the trio of lawyers behind these appeals, two would spend years in the Wall. The third, Raimond Costa, possessed survival skills so astonishing that he later became the bishop of Elne, near the Kingdom of Majorca’s capital, Perpignan, and thus was beyond the jurisdiction of the inquisitors in France. In this extraordinary environment of accusation and antipathy, defenders of Galand claimed that the appellants had tried to steal an inquisition register out of fear that they had been named as heretics.

  Opinion is divided over whether this actually happened, but given the importance the registers would assume in stoking la rage carcasson-naise in later years, the story cannot be discounted entirely. Certainly if their names appeared in the register, the would-be thieves had good reason to make it disappear—or at least find out what had been alleged about them. In any event, the theft did not occur. The accusers’ story held that when the bribed clerk of the inquisition had let agents of the Carcassonne agitation into Galand’s private chambers, they discovered, to their dismay, that the inquisitor, away on business in Toulouse, had shrewdly taken with him the key to the strongbox that contained the register. Even if not true, that friends of the inquisition could credit their foes with such audacity reveals how toxic an atmosphere existed between the citizens of the Bourg and the inquisitors of the Cité.

  Events in the following decade are as murky as Carcassonne’s cri de coeur to the king is clear. The monarch eventually had the citizens’ charges investigated and, in 1291, instructed his seneschal (his governor in the south) to have no further truck with the inquisitors. No royal official was to arrest anyone at the inquisitor’s behest, except in cases of notorious heretics, such as a Good Man or Good Woman whose spiritual deviancy was common knowledge and established beyond a reasonable doubt. Agents of the king were to judge whether a suspect should be apprehended—the Dominicans were not to be taken at their word. Young Philip, his dramatic conflict with the pope still in the future, no doubt wished to appease his angry subjects. In keeping with the course he charted throughout his reign, he felt no qualms at swatting away buzzing intermediary irritants—in this instance, the Dominicans—that interfered with the direct relation he sought to establish between ruler and ruled. Philip did not want the inquisition halted—heresy had to be stamped out—but neither did he want the Dominicans sowing havoc in his kingdom.

  The whip hand now lay in the hands of the king’s men in the south, many of whom hailed from the region (although the seneschal was usually from the north). A few came from families tainted with heretical connections, in a much more direct way than the heretical notoriety of their birthplace, as was the case with the powerful Guillaume de Nogaret. Given these dangerous ties of kinship and the king’s explicit ordinance, there must have been little incentive to go the extra mile for the inquisitors. When, in 1295, Philip renewed his injunction, the inquisitorial enterprise stuttered further.

  Soon events spun out of control. Few details exist, and those that do come largely from an important figure and prolific writer, Bernard Gui, future inquisitor at Toulouse, who was present at Carcassonne in these years, residing as an ordinary friar in the Dominican convent in the Bourg.* Gui coined the term rabies Carcassonensis to describe the tumult of recrimination that characterized these shadowy years. The people of the Bourg must have scented blood and moved in to shut the infernal inquisition down. In 1297, as a riposte, the inquisitor Nicolas d’Abbeville excommunicated the entire town, thereby rendering it an outcast in Christendom, to be shunned by trader and wayfarer. One can imagine the consternation at court in the north at this costly upheaval. Philip relented a little; in the following year, he issued an ordinance urging more cooperation with the inquisitors. The Carcassonnais took their case to Rome, to the imperious Boniface VIII. He refused to countenance their complaints—perhaps because the huge bribe promised His Holiness by the townsmen had been withheld, a witness would claim under oath years later.

  By 1299, exhaustion had set in and the two sides engaged in protracted negotiations that lasted months. The townspeople wanted the excommunication lifted, their transgressions forgiven. The inquisitor wanted to haul in the more notorious heretical sympathizers who had eluded him for years. Two of the lawyers behind the appeals of the 1280s were eventually handed over, and other prominent burghers were to be arrested once an agreement was reached. The deal was signed on October 5, 1299; its details were kept secret from the people of the town. They were informed only that by the terms of the agreement their sins of the previous few years had been forgiven and that they had been restored to the embrace of the Church. Another proviso obliged them to build a new chapel in the Dominican convent. The inquisitor Nicolas d’Abbeville, they were told, was being generous.

  What the inquisitor obtained in return, from the consuls signatory to the document, was a secret list of twelve names, all of them important citizens, who were to be exempt from the amnesty. After years of tribulation and frustration, the inquisitor was ready to make a move against them. He had the accord to back him up. He could now get on with his job.

  * Perpignan was the capital of the ephemeral Kingdom of Majorca, a Catalan entity that remained independent from 1276 to 1349 and included the Balearic islands, the Roussillon, some regions of the eastern Pyrenees, the city of Montpellier, and a part of the Auvergne.

  * Gui is also the villain in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

  Part II

  The Years of Revolt

  1299

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE AMBUSH AT CARCASSONNE

  SOME WEEKS AFTER THE SIGNING of the accord, probably at the same time as the first of the Jubilee crowds headed for its rendezvous on the Ponte St. Angelo, the inquisitor’s Dominican deputy, Brother Foulques de Saint-Georges, accompanied by a representative of the king and two dozen of his sergeants at arms, marched out of the inquisition headquarters in the Cité and through a western gate. Below them was the Bourg.

  In all probability they took the Trivalle down the slope, with the Wall and the King’s Mill rising up on their left. They crossed the Aude and walked smartly through the narrow, congested streets toward the gate of the lower town’s fortifications. People would have snatched children out of their way; eyes followed them from open windows, watching, waiting. The armed contingent’s destination was the tabula rasa of today, then the Franciscan convent at Carcassonne. Within its walls, the Dominican Brothers Nicolas d’Abbeville and Foulques de Saint-Georges believed, two prominent heretical sympathizers had taken shelter. Their names figured on the list of the doomed dozen that the consuls of the town had given up in the secret agreement. In the inquisitors’ view, the freshly signed accord not only provided a chance to clean up the last of the Cathar vipers but also gave the Dominicans a golden opportunity to humiliate the Franciscans. As this was the first initiative taken by Brother Nicolas after the agreement had been reached, its target suggests that the Order of the Friars Minor had been no friend of the inquisitors in the years of sporadic strife leading up to the truce.

  The party arrived at the outer portal of the convent, knocked at it repeatedly, and demanded entry. The great door eventually swung open, and they streamed into the courtyard. A second locked door gave entry into the convent proper. The king’s representative pounded on the door. The Dominican then read out, loudly, the names of those he sought.

  After a silence, a bell began ringing frantically, and torches blazed into life atop the building. The men at arms looked at each other, bewildered at the growing bedlam: the sound of distant shouts, then footfalls, dull thuds, and metal clanks,
soft at first, but getting louder and louder.

  The soldiers in the courtyard turned to the outer doorway they had just passed through. In the street leading to it an armed mob ran toward them, converging on the convent. The leader of the sergeants bellowed for the outer door to be closed. It was slammed shut and made fast with a great wooden bolt.

  Crossbowmen appeared on the roof. A rain of missiles whizzed down into the courtyard. Rocks were thrown from windows in the upper gallery. At one of them, hurling stones and bellowing orders, was the ringleader of the ambush, a friar of Carcassonne named Bernard Délicieux. The trapped men hunched over instinctively to protect themselves.

  “Traitors!” Bernard roared, urging the crowds to shout the same. The meaning was clear: those who cooperated with the inquisition betrayed the people of Carcassonne. There could be no better clarion of what the future held. The inquisitors may have signed an agreement with the consuls, but the disgruntled townsmen had at last found a dangerous leader, one who was fearless even before the power of the king—for Philip would soon hear that his agents had been called traitors. Willing to brave his displeasure was an unusual friar, heretofore a shadowy figure, a student in Montpellier, an obedient novice, then an accomplished, devout Franciscan whose talent, learning, and gifts at preaching had been recognized by the superiors of his Order. This exemplary friar clearly reveled in the risk, egging his Franciscan brothers to throw whatever they had at hand down at the soldiery, yelling up to the bowmen to keep up their fire, and, doubtless, cursing liberally at the trapped Dominican. This was the opening salvo of a campaign unlike any other in the history of the inquisition.

  The day concluded as memorably as it had begun. Judging the courtyard to be a death trap, a sergeant lifted the bolt and swung open the friar of carcassonne | 67 the outer door of the convent. His men formed a wedge of slashing blades to protect the Dominican and the royal officer, hacking and fighting their way through the streets toward the river. As they reached the left bank of the Aude, the affray came to an end. The townsmen lowered their clubs and returned home, sated and no doubt immensely pleased with themselves. The party of the inquisitor, bloodied and battered but nonetheless alive to tell the tale at Bernard’s trial twenty years later, crossed the river and staggered up the slope to the embrace of the Cité. Nicolas d’Abbeville’s hope that the city had been pacified by his deal-making was shattered.