The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  By early autumn, Picquigny was convinced. If not a co-conspirator, he was an active fellow traveler in the camp of the Carcassonnais and the Albigeois. To his mind, taking on the inquisitors and Bishop Castanet was not an act of rebellion against the established order—it was an action necessary to remedy a deplorable state of affairs, the sworn responsibility of a royal plenipotentiary charged with redressing the grievances of Philip’s subjects.

  Although powerful, he did not have enough power to set things aright on his own. For that he needed the approval of the highest authority in the land. Picquigny thus planned to go north to meet with the king, haul Bishop Bernard Saisset in front of him, and relate in detail the investigation that he and Richard Leneveu had conducted. The moment would be propitious for broaching the question of inquisitorial abuse in Languedoc, when Philip’s attention was turned toward the south of his kingdom and its Church. Hearing of his intention to meet with the king, the consuls of Albi and Carcassonne selected delegations, laid out the necessary funds—and approved Bernard Délicieux as their leader.

  In late September 1301 the men of the south made the journey north. On arrival, Picquigny immediately petitioned the king to accord them the privilege of a private audience. The request was granted. Some time in October—we are not sure of the precise day—Brother Bernard Délicieux of the Order of Friars Minor stood before King Philip IV of France. The momentous meeting occurred not in Paris but in a small town called Senlis.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE KING AT SENLIS

  THE TOWN OF SENLIS NESTLES IN THE PAST, alive with birdsong, its old houses and stone steeples a lovely medieval surprise just past the northernmost edge of the grimy suburban sprawl of modern Paris. Nowhere in the town is the pink of Toulouse and Albi or the russet brown of Carcassonne, just the gentle gray of northern France. Senlis has somehow retained its verdant character—all around stretch leafy forests harking back to the time when a sea of green covered the Île de France. The woods around Senlis were part of the royal domain, a place for huntsmen in the service of their great lord to maintain with plentiful supplies of game and to protect from the desperate poachers who straggled through the trees in times of famine. For Philip the Fair, the place was a respite from the intrigues of the Louvre, but, as in his other residences scattered throughout his lands, he could never really escape the turmoil of his kingdom. Many of his courtiers came with him when he removed to his hunting quarters, always ready to petition favor for their various clients.

  In the heart of the old quarter stands a quiet park with gravel drives that lead to several buildings standing in evocative Gothic ruin. They are called the Palais Royal. One building houses the king’s quarters; the other, the queen’s. The most impressive ensemble, however, is an empty shell, the stained glass long gone from its graceful embrasures and the sky alone supported by its ogive arches. This was the grand hall in which the king granted his audiences, and where Bernard Délicieux and Jean de Picquigny stood in October 1301.

  They had been accompanied to Senlis by several consuls of Albi and Carcassonne, who flanked Bernard as he spoke to the king. Just out-chapter side the hall a gaggle of worried Dominicans paced and prayed. This delegation included the inquisitor Foulques de Saint-Georges, smarting that the pestiferous Délicieux had been granted the privilege of a private audience. With Foulques outside the door was a fellow Dominican, Nicolas de Fréauville, the king’s confessor and, as such, enormously influential at court. That even he had not been admitted to the audience augured well for the men of Languedoc.

  The king already had an inkling of many of the complaints of his subjects. Comprehensive dossiers had been assembled by the disgruntled citizens of Carcassonne and Albi. The latter’s damning litany of grievance toward Bernard de Castanet verged on the encyclopedic. The Albigeois sought a royal ordinance to put an end to his extortion, his unlawful and inhumane incarceration practices, his abuse of inquisitorial procedure, and his arrogation of the king’s rightful authority. In later complaints about Castanet, which may also have spiced up the presentation at Senlis, the bishop’s enemies added a series of accusations concerning his sexual proclivities, eye-popping even by medieval standards. His residence, the Palais de la Berbie, was nightly the scene of shameless debauch, the loose ladies and unclad lads invited there to pleasure him appearing brazenly at the windows for all to see.* Darker still, the burghers alleged, his depravity ran so deep as to include molesting young girls; one had vanished into the Berbie, later to be found headless, floating in the river Tarn below the bishop’s palace of sin.

  Carcassonne’s grievances, while not quite as lurid as Albi’s, also painted a picture of a town on the verge of despair. The corruption of the inquisitors had so corroded the attachment of the people to their monarch that the potential for revolt was great if the king’s justice was denied them. The falsity of Registers X and XI had to be brought to the monarch’s attention, the abuse of power revealed, the prisoners freed immediately. Last, the moral disgrace of Foulques de Saint-Georges, similar in nature if not in degree to that of Albi’s evil bishop, merited a full airing.

  The problem for Bernard Délicieux, as spokesman and lobbyist in Senlis, lay in how to present these arguments to Philip in a way that would win him over. The king’s advisors no doubt warned Philip that he was soon to be at loggerheads with the pope over the Bernard Saisset affair; thus he might be inclined to court the support of members of the French Church, including the French Dominicans, to shore up his position. The king was no longer the mystery boy attending his father’s funeral in Narbonne. The mature Philip the Fair was now known—and feared—for keeping a poker face in front of petitioners, announcing his decision after letting slip no “tell” about his intentions. Less anachronistic French tradition styles him le roi de marbre and le roi de fer (the marble king, the iron king), each sobriquet indicating a different aspect of his character, respectively, impassiveness and implacability. But Bernard possessed a trump, in the person of Jean de Picquigny.

  The magistrate was no stranger to the king’s humors and caprices, having dealt with Philip many times during his career. The king’s man and the friar could not have failed to confer extensively on how to handle this meeting, for the stakes were too high. Although few disputed Bernard’s abundant abilities as preacher, orator, and persuader—the last conclusively proved by Picquigny’s allegiance to the Franciscan’s cause—the gifted friar had to avoid rubbing the king the wrong way, or giving the impression of issuing threats or dispensing advice. He had to rein in his commanding personality, on conspicuous display in the tumultuous two years leading up to this crucial interview, and learn the devious ways of the courtier. If one considers Bernard’s own recollections in 1319 of the push-me-pull-you beginning to his presentation in 1301, it seems likely that the two men had hit upon a strategy worthy of a courtroom drama, an elaborate choreography of deception.

  Picquigny, Délicieux, and the men of Albi and Carcassonne entered the great hall in Senlis and made the customary obeisances to their lord. Doubtless Philip greeted his faithful servant Picquigny with some familiarity. Then he looked at the man about whom he had heard so many clamorous rumors, and bade Bernard Délicieux speak.

  The friar began hesitatingly, saying that he would not have been in his majesty’s presence had not his magistrate, Jean de Picquigny, ordered him to come. Picquigny would have nodded on cue. The king inquired as to what had brought the men of Carcassonne and Albi to Senlis. Bernard replied that it was too awful to relate, too disturbing . . . he did not want to upset the king with such horrible tales.

  At one moment Picquigny commanded the Franciscan to speak. Bernard refused, again saying he could not. He was too afraid. Other Franciscans had tried to tell the king’s loyal servants in the south of the evil being done to the kingdom, but they had been dismissed as tale-tellers intent on diminishing the Dominicans. Laymen over the years had tried as well, lawyers of Carcassonne, but they ended up in the Wall, falsely accused of heres
y. He feared that if he spoke out, then he too would feel the pain of Dominican fury.

  Whether Bernard then gestured to the door, on the other side of which chafed the angry Dominicans, is unknown, but the temptation to do so for someone as histrionic as Délicieux must have been considerable. Neither do we know how long this pantomime of reluctance continued, only that it came to a rather dramatic end.

  Stony-faced, the king pondered the men before him. They had traveled at great expense up to the north, encouraged in their suit by one of his most trusted enquêteurs, then obtained an audience with him—yet they dared not speak. Philip rose from his chair and crossed the short distance separating him from Bernard Délicieux. He placed his right hand on the friar’s tonsured head. The king swore that no harm would come to him no matter what he said or whom he accused. He gave his word, the king’s word—a royal guarantee of safety—and commanded Délicieux to speak.

  The moment had come, and the friar of Carcassonne seized it. He launched into his arguments, doubtless using all of the rhetorical and predicatory weapons at his disposal. The king was told that the inquisition thwarted his subjects at every turn. Whenever they defended the king’s prerogatives, acted in the king’s interests, tried to fulfill their duties and obligations to the king, they were attacked by the inquisitors and the bishop of Albi. These men actively undermined the Kingdom of France and, by their actions, led Philip’s subjects to the extremities of dangerous despair. An inquisitor had even preached that heresy had spread through the malevolence of the king of France.

  It was a curious way to frame the complaints of a Languedoc still indignant at the deprivation of its independence, but Bernard had crafted his presentation for an audience of one. After having established what was at stake for Philip and his realm, he moved on to the particulars of the case: the iniquitous registers, invented Good Men, scandalous prosecutions, unconscionable extortions, unjust incarcerations, inhuman torments, the reign of terror. Given what contemporaries said of Bernard’s powers, the king must have opened wide his eyes—like an owl, perhaps.

  No detail was spared. The men of Albi chimed in with their condemnation of Bishop Castanet. Bernard cited the swath cut by Foulques de Saint-Georges through the honest womanhood of Languedoc, who submitted to his lust for fear of his power. The inquisitor showed a keen interest in torture, rolling up the sleeves of his cassock to take an active part in inflicting pain and then, if the victim was female, lifting up his skirts to rape. Foulques, this so-called man of God, had fathered several children, and a woman, Navenias, who had borne him a daughter, had traveled with them to Senlis and was willing to expose her shame before the king if he doubted what they said. Foulques de Saint-Georges, the inquisition’s opponents consistently maintained throughout these years, was a far more objectionable and unsavory fellow than even Nicolas d’Abbeville, who had done such harm to Albi.

  The spell Bernard had cast on Jean de Picquigny and Richard Leneveu now enveloped the divinely appointed sovereign of France. Through the force of his personality he had won the king over, planting the idea in Philip’s mind that corrupt inquisitors consituted a grave danger to his realm.

  The message had been driven home with mesmerizing conviction. The men of Languedoc left the Palais Royal, passing on their way out the agitated Dominicans eager to make their case before the king. Shaken by what Brother Bernard had told him, the king did not consent to receive the Dominicans until five days after the friar’s speech; Délicieux testified that when they had tried to enter the hall earlier, the king shooed them away with an angry gesture.

  When at last the Dominicans did get to see their agitated monarch, they launched into a full-scale attack not on Délicieux but on Picquigny. This was a mistake, as the latter had the full confidence of the king. Summoned to defend himself, Picquigny protested his innocence, proclaimed his integrity, and repeated the charges against Foulques de Saint-Georges. Judiciously, Philip set up an ad hoc committee of two to look into the character assassination proffered by each side. The constable of France and the archbishop of Narbonne, Gilles Aycelin, a high-placed prelate always ready to do the king’s bidding, were charged with the investigation.

  It took but a few days. The constable and the archbishop found in favor of Picquigny. The king then acted accordingly. Brother Bernard had made it rain.

  Fr. Foulques, of the Order of Friars Preachers, who pretends to be the inquisitor of heresy in the region of Toulouse, trying rather to sow (than to uproot) those errors and vices it was his duty to destroy, who under the pretext of the law violates the laws, who under the semblance of piety commits impious, utterly inhuman acts, and under the guise of defending the Catholic faith commits evil deeds abhorrent to the human mind . . . through his trials and inquisitions, by capture and tortures of the utmost refinement, has extorted confession from helpless people whom he declares, according to his whim, to be stained by the crime of heresy . . . (and convicts) through the power and the fear of torture and the suborning of false witnesses . . . Whence throughout those regions scandal plainly has arisen as has the fear of an uprising of the people, unless steps are taken swiftly to correct the situation.

  The words came not from Délicieux but from King Philip. The monarch had become an ally of the friar. Never before and never again would the inquisition face such overt wrath from a king of France. The angry letter cited above, sent in December 1301, was occasioned by the foot-dragging of the Dominican Order in dismissing Foulques de Saint-Georges. He had been moved from Carcassonne to Toulouse, but he had not been removed from the office of inquisitor. Given the subsequent behavior of the king and Guillaume de Nogaret in the affair of the Templars, Philip could hardly shriek like an outraged virgin at the specter of torture and injustice, yet the indignation of his letter bespoke a monarch determined to justify his actions: he singled out one friar, but intended to punish the Dominicans.

  In a flurry of royal ordinances issued at about the same time as his heated missive, Philip stipulated that henceforth his agents would proceed with no arrests on suspicion of heresy until the inquisitor had cleared his request with the local hierarchy—the bishop and senior secular officials. In case of dispute, the matter would then be referred to the leaders of the Dominican convent in Carcassonne and their Franciscan counterparts. The leadership of the Friars Minor could include, of course, Brother Bernard Délicieux. This was a stinging slap in the face of the inquisitors. Overseen by its greatest foe, the inquisition at Carcassonne was now hamstrung.

  That did not mean that the office of inquisitor had been abolished, as Délicieux was only too aware. Philip would not go that far—even if Guillaume de Nogaret could willingly have found his master some flimsy pretext for stepping on the pope’s toes so egregiously. The king wanted a harmless inquisition, at least for the moment, so that the sulfur of revolt hanging over his southernmost province would dissipate. His interlocutor at Senlis had impressed on him the dangers of unrest. Civic peace became the king’s goal.

  * In the type of palimpsest at which France excels, the Berbie now houses a gallery of similar ladies painted by Albi’s most famous son, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

  1302

  CHAPTER TEN

  AFTERMATH

  BISHOP BERNARD DE CASTANET SPENT much of the winter in Toulouse, complaining to his fellow churchmen. Following the masterly presentation by Délicieux at Senlis, the king had been especially harsh with Castanet. In addition to having levied a fine in the staggering amount of 20,000 livres, Philip had taken the temporal offices away from the bishop, arrogating them and their revenues to himself. Now the bishop was just the bishop, not the lord, of Albi, his treasury looted by the royal ordinances. Philip may well have wanted to have the man arrested as well, but Bernard Saisset, already in custody, was giving him headaches enough with Pope Boniface.* Two detained bishops would undoubtedly trigger an instant excommunication. More important for the people who had embraced Délicieux as their spokesman, the king’s displeasure with their bishop wa
s so great as to render any further inquisition in Albi unlikely.

  Castanet, although diminished and embattled, was determined to fight the royal decrees, appeal to the pope, and, in the meantime, reinforce his authority over his troubled see. In February, he made the decision to leave Toulouse and return to Albi. Fearless but not foolhardy, he took with him a contingent of armed bodyguards for his entry into the city. His flock awaited him in the square before the construction site of Ste. Cécile. The mood was ugly, sullen. Truncheons in hand, the townspeople blocked the way to the bishop’s palace.

  Castanet’s men ordered the mob to disperse. No one moved. The standoff grew tenser, as shouts of “Death!” echoed louder through the square. Clubs were raised, the mob advanced. The bishop’s men at arms, greatly outnumbered, unsheathed their swords, ready to wade into the townspeople. Then, at a sharp word from their master, Castanet’s men lowered their weapons. Another order, and the phalanx of bodyguards parted. The mob now had a clear path to the bishop. He waited for death, his face a mask, daring them to come and kill him, a bishop of the Holy Church.

  The moment passed. Resolution began to falter. No one had the courage to strike the first blow. The crowd eventually melted away and the bishop regained the Palais de la Berbie.

  The Dominicans of Albi did not receive such a gift of faintheartedness. From overhead the outer doorway of their convent, the portraits of St. Dominic and St. Peter Martyr were torn down by a mob, to be replaced by likenesses of the architects of the friars’ humiliation: the king’s envoys, Jean de Picquigny and Richard Leneveu, and the consuls from Albi and Castres, Arnaud Garsie and Peire Pros, who had traveled north for the momentous audience in Senlis.

  The change in portraiture hardly constituted the only insult, for the period following the decision at Senlis passed as an unrelieved calvary for the Dominicans of Albi—the prolific memoirist Bernard Gui recorded their tribulations for posterity. Their convent became an eyesore, its herb and vegetable gardens uprooted and destroyed. Windows were smashed in the night. The friars scarcely dared venture out of the convent’s protective confines, so enthusiastically were they manhandled, pushed, shoved, and taunted in the narrow streets of Albi. Whenever their prior summoned the king’s officers to view the latest outrage, they did nothing, except perhaps suppress a smile. The Order of the Friars Preachers became, effectively, a prisoner in the pink city on the Tarn.