The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  The next day dawned with the realization that this had been not a rabble led by lawyers of a possible heretical background, as in the past, but rather a riot incited by the Franciscans, the serene brothers of the Dominicans. The rivalry between the Franciscans, the Order of Friars Minor, and the Dominicans, the Order of Friars Preachers, had known verbal extravagance and invidious maneuvering, but physical outrage visited upon a Dominican in the precincts of a Franciscan sanctuary was something far more disturbing. It was akin to a Cathar Good Man swinging a broadsword or landing a haymaker—an act of violence once thought inconceivable.

  None doubted who had masterminded the muscular pushback. The Dominican Bernard Gui would write that Délicieux was “the commander and standard-bearer of the army of the forces of evil.” Other voices of an appalled orthodoxy would pour on further vitriol, as this new obstacle, all the more terrible since Délicieux came from within the Church itself, had emerged to imperil the Holy Office.

  Nicolas d’Abbeville, the inquisitor, pondered his options. The Dominicans were fully invested—professionally and spiritually—in persecution. Even Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the thirteenth-century friars, believed heresy to be a capital crime. To Brother Nicolas, doubtless, his Franciscan counterparts seemed not to be taking their mission seriously. Whether the Franciscans of Languedoc ran a safe house for targets of the inquisition is difficult to answer conclusively. Brother Bernard’s subsequent actions and statements showed that he had no faith in the integrity of the inquisitor and the veracity of his registers, so to him any accusations of heresy were baseless, or at the very least compromised by what he saw as a culture of abuse that had grown up around the inquisition at Carcassonne.

  Yet more fundamental and far more important than that objection was his approach to heresy in the first place. He was as dedicated as the Dominicans to its elimination, but the nature of his pastoral mission differed radically. Where the Friars Preachers wielded the heavy club of torture and imprisonment, the Franciscans in Bernard’s mold relied on the force of example and good works to change hearts and win souls. Their founder, Francis of Assisi, had garnered a large following among the laity for his kindness to his fellow man and his distinctly un-Cathar-like love of God’s creation. Although the brotherhood had grown into a complex, continent-wide apparatus, sometimes participating in inquisitions, most notably in Provence, there were many among the Franciscans who by century’s end had revived the purity of Francis’s example. These Spirituals, as they came to be called, were numerous in Languedoc, its long history of ostentatiously holy heretics acting as a magnet for like-minded men from the Order. They would show that a Franciscan could be as pure and poor as a Good Man. From Narbonne, in the 1290s, the influential theologian Pierre Jean Olivi dominated Franciscan intellectual circles in Languedoc and elsewhere, his philosophical works on the nature of poverty an overlooked landmark in medieval thought.* On his death, in 1298, he was revered locally as a saint, and though his apostles later came to be considered heretical themselves, a man of such gifts could hardly fail to have shaped the outlook of his fellow Franciscans in the South.

  Informed by Francis’ example and inspired by Olivi’s presence, the Friars Minor preached tirelessly, in an effort to persuade. God’s work would be a long process, and if, during that time, those yet unconvinced and unconverted called for help, they would come to their aid, not only out of Christian duty but also in the hope that their actions would demonstrate the rightness of their faith. Given this admirable commitment to patience and piety, the Franciscans of Carcassonne may have sheltered some heretical sympathizers from the wrath of the inquisitor. A present-day specialist nicely characterized Bernard’s viewpoint as widely at variance with that of the Dominicans: “He did not consider the Cathars as diabolical enemies but as Christians who sought salvation fervently, and whose choices, in the end, were not so different from his own.”

  Nicolas d’Abbeville did not accept this radical Franciscan line. As an inquisitor wielding real political power, he resolved to strike a blow at the Franciscans in the public arena. Shrewd inquisitors chose their battles carefully, sometimes waiting years before prosecuting, until the time was ripe and the payoff greatest. They had to be sure of their target and their timing. To begin a proceeding and then to have it thwarted, as had happened in the courtyard of the Bourg, diminished the power of inquisition, the Dominicans’ redemptive cudgel.

  Brother Nicolas would eventually have his revenge—as always, it was a dish best served cold. At some point in the days after the ambush, the Dominican decided to quit Carcassonne for an extended period of time. He could not conduct an inquisition in the venomous atmosphere on the banks of the Aude, so he would conduct one on the shores of the Tarn. D’Abbeville traveled to do God’s work in the birthplace of heresy, to demonstrate the sanctity and power of the Holy Office in the town whose very name evoked the vile creed of the Albigensians. He had been summoned by the bishop of Albi to rid the town of its depraved dissidents.

  * He was known as Peire Jean Olieu to the speakers of the langue d’oc.

  1300

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE BISHOP OF ALBI

  THE BISHOP OF ALBI, Bernard de Castanet, is not remembered fondly, but he is most certainly remembered. Unlike Brother Bernard Délicieux, whose itinerary of revolt lay undiscovered for centuries, the bishop bequeathed an infamous and eloquent legacy: Albi’s Cathedral of Ste. Cécile, a redbrick monolith that is the most gloweringly belligerent Gothic church in all of Europe. Attached to it, and even more of a crimson terror, stands his personal residence, a cyclopean mass known as the Palais de la Berbie. Castanet did not live to see his great cathedral completed, but he bled his flock white to finance its construction.*

  As Nicolas d’Abbeville traveled north to Albi at the turn of the century to help out his episcopal ally, he could not have realized that the Church’s powerful response to heresy—inquisition—would one day seem ephemeral alongside the enduring physical presence of Ste. Cécile. Few now know of the persecuting sanctity of Moneta of Cremona, the vindictive brilliance of Innocent III, or even the sacred penitentiary of the Wall, but no one today can behold Albi’s cathedral and not sense the fathomless anger once felt by the Catholic Church toward the Cathars. The bishop did the world a service in immortalizing this fury. Just as the Basilica of St. Peter captures the pharaonic pretensions of Renaissance popes, Ste. Cécile displays in monumental fashion the horror in which the medieval Church held dissidents threatening its all-encompassing worldview. In a sense, to look at this church is to understand the inquisition.

  The man behind the monument was a theocrat. A native of Montpellier who conducted a distinguished career in coercive diplomacy for the papacy in Italy and Germany, Bernard de Castanet was awarded the see of Albi in 1276. At that time it had been vacant for five years, and previous bishops had seen their rights and privileges whittled away by the king and the town. Albi was, by long-standing custom and law, ruled by its bishop: he was the lord of the region, with all the temporal revenue and obligations that such a position entailed. Lax churchmen had let the once-splendid bishopric slip into the moribund margins of power; even the inquisition, after the rowdy reception given it in the 1230s, had not been active there.

  Castanet spent his entire tenure clawing back the money and temporal power that he believed was rightfully his. As for pastoral care of the souls in his diocese, one historian has drily termed his approach as “terrorist.” The bishop’s prison at Albi was renowned for its harshness—many inmates died quickly after incarceration there, an occurrence unusual in medieval jails. In some instances, the families of the deceased, left in the dark on the fate of their kin, continued to bring food and other comforts to the prison for years, all of which would be quietly confiscated by the bishop’s minions. Castanet declared war on usury, meting out capital punishment to its practitioners. He was known to intervene frequently in the courts, usually stiffening sentences—death, on one occasion, for a woman who
had stolen a loaf of bread. In his drive to regain lands and tithes, he showed particular ferocity. He refused Christian burial in consecrated ground to those who had died on lands withheld from him, decreeing instead that the corpses should be hung from trees ( funera per arbores) and left to rot for public edification. Even sex fell within his punitive purview. Invoking the specter of his prison, Castanet ordained that sexual congress had to be heterosexual, that only the missionary and sidewise face-to-face positions were permitted, and that ejaculation must occur in the vagina of one’s wife and nowhere else. Such attention to detail in these matters was rare in medieval France, but behind his zeal for prosecuting usury and regulating sex lay his targets: the rich men of the town who were skilled at making money through high-interest loans and adept at keeping inheritances large and families small through the usual methods of birth control. They sought to get out from under his thumb and find shelter with the king.

  A supremely political man, the bishop seemed concerned less with heresy, even though the Cathars were called Albigensians for good reason, than with power. Castanet’s first foray into inquisition occurred in the 1280s, when the beleaguered inquisitor Jean Galand arrived from Carcassonne, then thick with appeals to the king, denunciations of his methods and, he claimed, plots to steal inquisition registers.* Together, Galand and Castanet cherry-picked their way through the bountiful ranks of wealthy Cathar sympathizers in Albi and its surrounding countryside. Only a handful were convicted, but Castanet got what he really wanted: accusations against many of his foes, several dozen names in all. This was a bludgeon to use in his struggle for control of the town, another threat he could deploy to get his hands on more power and money.

  The unkinder among the townsmen called it extortion. Factions arose within Albi opposed to the bishop’s overweening authority. In this, they were aided by royal officers, to whom the townsmen turned for protection. Prisoners being led to Castanet’s jail yelled out to the royal officers in the streets—in several instances, they were then physically wrested from the bishop’s control and transferred to the more humane custody of the king’s justice. In Albi and nearby towns such as Cordes, many of the king’s servants, men of the region, were openly sympathetic or had ties to heresy.

  As the century dawned, Castanet made a new year’s resolution: his papal patron may have been calling a Jubilee, but he would organize a purge. He would also be doing a favor for the inquisitor at Carcassonne. By coming to Albi, Nicolas D’Abbeville, like Jean Galand before him, was escaping serious embarrassment. D’Abbeville had been woefully, perhaps naively, inept in taking on the Franciscans immediately after the signing of the accord of 1299. From the coordination and discipline exhibited by the mob in repulsing his envoys, his opponents were clearly well organized—and had no doubt been taking orders from Bernard Délicieux long before the Franciscan cropped up in the historical record. The inquisitor would learn from the experienced bishop the wisdom of laying the political groundwork before taking any action.

  Castanet provided the equivalent of a master class in politics, for the two men were able to proceed with remarkable alacrity, taking just weeks to dispatch one after another of the heretical sympathizers. Normally trials could last months, but the Albi inquisition kept up a breakneck tempo in dispensing holy justice, as the bishop’s torturers busied themselves. The pace was so fast that dread had no time to take hold, only sudden terror. Dozens were haled before the inquisitor and the bishop, torn from their homes and wives and livelihoods by a soldiery galvanized by the threat of excommunication and imprisonment. Ste. Cécile might have been still a work in progress, but its uncompromising message was delivered in that terrible winter and spring of 1300.

  The Franciscans of the Albi region, aware of the individual tragedies occasioned by this repressive whirlwind, sent the sad tidings to their brethren in Carcassonne, where the absence of the inquisitor was being savored. The more farsighted of the Carcassonnais, including Bernard Délicieux, might have feared a similar recrudescence of inquisitorial activity in their own city, especially on learning the scope of the final verdict. In the end twenty-five men of Albi were sentenced to life imprisonment in the Wall of Carcassonne. Their property was confiscated, their lives ruined. Almost all of those convicted for some sort of tenuous association with the Cathars—none was a Good Man—were prominent, wealthy burghers, the leaders of the town, precisely the class that Castanet wanted to crush under his episcopal heel. Brother Nicolas’ sermo generalis at the mass sentencing must have been triumphant, given the display of inquisitorial power shown in bringing a rebellious city to its knees.*

  Nicolas d’Abbeville returned to Carcassonne in the late spring of 1300 with his haul of rich men to lodge in the Wall. His exalted position, so badly battered by the ambush of 1299, had been restored. His prisoners were his trophies.

  Their families left behind in Albi could only wring their hands in despair. They had no champion to defend them, no advocate to take a stand against the iniquity of their dispossession. As Carcassonne stared agog at the long line of manacled wretches, once the high and mighty of its sister city on the Tarn, stumbling past the fortifications to the torments of the Wall, Brother Bernard Délicieux decided to make their cause his own. The spectacle over, the twin settlements on the Aude—the Bourg and the Cité—settled into nervous anticipation as spring turned to summer.

  * In a long-overdue nod to Castanet’s dynamism, Ste. Cécile and the Berbie were selected in 2010 (as was the Cité of Carcassonne in 1997) for inclusion on Unesco’s list of World Heritage Sites.

  * Galand was accompanied by his subordinates: Dominican inquisitors Guillaume de Saint-Seine and Jean Vigouroux.

  * A witness from Albi at Bernard’s trial, Peire Pros, claimed that the rich men convicted could not possibly have been heretics who secretly met at night and shared meals—they all hated each other too much!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE DEAD MAN OF CARCASSONNE

  NICOLAS D’ABBEVILLE AND Foulques de Saint-Georges pored carefully over the registers bequeathed to them by their predecessors. The momentum won at Albi would not be allowed to slow, leaving the depraved of Carcassonne untouched by divine punishment.

  By late June they had their man. The faces of the Dominicans must have lit up as they made their decision, so perfectly did their intended victim meet their need for justice and revenge. The registers revealed that one Castel Fabre, a rich burgher of Carcassonne, had had intimate contact with the heretics. His was a high-profile name, his family one of the city’s most prominent. Fabre had been the royal seneschal’s treasurer in Carcassonne; his son Aimeri was a prominent trader and probably a heretical sympathizer as well. Punishing a Fabre would have the added benefit of sending a clear message to the consuls and the merchant class that the inquisitor had not been intimidated by recent events.

  According to the registers, Fabre had received the Cathar sacrament, the consolamentum, from two Good Men, Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès, on his deathbed in 1278. The ceremony involved the laying on of hands by a Good Man, the recital of the Lord’s Prayer, and the promise to live an unblemished life of exemplary asceticism. Thus “hereticated,” in the Church’s lexicon, the person in receipt of the sacrament became a Good Man or a Good Woman.

  This ritual was commonly administered as a last rite to Cathar believers. To expire in the state of holiness conferred by the consolamentum meant that the individual could at last escape the cycle of return to the world’s garden of evil and be joined forever with the good God in the hereafter. Once Catharism was forced underground, the sacrament had to be be performed surreptitiously, away from the eyes of the inquisitor’s informers. Naturally, then, vigils at deathbeds were watched with interest in Languedoc—when dying, especially, a person showed his hand.

  The grave of Castel Fabre was in the grounds of the Franciscan convent. To strike two blows at once, Nicolas d’Abbeville planned to disinter and burn his remains—and punish anyone connected to his depravity.

/>   In July 1300, the Dominicans announced from the pulpits of the Bourg that an inquisitio concerning the late Castel Fabre had confirmed his suspected involvement with vehement heretical depravity. The import of the proclamation would have escaped only the dim-witted. Fabre had entrusted his mortal remains to the Franciscans, no doubt in the hope that he would be spared posthumous indignity were the Dominicans ever to accuse him of heresy, on either real or trumped-up charges. He had given a large bequest to the Franciscan convent. If the friars proved powerless to protect him, the Dominicans knew, other burghers of Carcassonne would hesitate before entrusting themselves to the Franciscans, for fear that they too could be molested, their families ruined, their remains incinerated, never to be resurrected on Judgment Day. They would decide that the charity strategically dispensed at death’s doorstep was best directed elsewhere.

  Worse, if the Friars Minor were shown to have sheltered a heretic, they too were guilty of abetting heresy, and thus contact with them endangered one’s immortal soul. Fabre had been watched by six praying friars for weeks as he lay dying: had they just stood aside when the Good Men Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès paid a visit to hereticate him? D’Abbeville’s accusation called into question the spiritual respectability of all Franciscans.