The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Following Brother Bernard’s triumphant return to Languedoc from Senlis, the Order of the Friars Minor appointed him to a convent in Narbonne. If the transfer of the famous friar was meant as a diplomatic sop thrown to the Dominicans, it was entirely unconvincing. Bernard enjoyed a freedom of movement that could be granted only by the Franciscan leadership in Languedoc. Not content to rest on his laurels, he set about increasing his renown as the scourge of the inquisitors by going on extensive preaching tours to the smaller centers of Languedoc and Périgord. His public excoriation of the inquisition, now done with complete impunity, appalled the Dominicans and their allies, who heaped abuse on him from their pulpits.

  Despite this renewed activity, Délicieux’s campaign had, in fact, stalled. No amount of stirring oratory could hide the simple reality that the inquisition had survived to fight another day. It was hobbled, not eliminated. Men and women still suffered in the Wall. Cruel and punitive Christianity, of the kind promoted by the Dominican Moneta of Cremona, still overshadowed Bernard’s vision of the Franciscan ideal. He needed still more help, and that, he knew, could happen only if he could convince Philip to take more drastic action.

  Accordingly, in the early spring of 1302, Brother Bernard made the arduous journey north once again, picking his way up the Rhône Valley, then through the downs of Burgundy to the forests of the Île de France. With him rode the consuls of Carcassonne, Albi, and Castres, who had accompanied him the previous year to Senlis, and a delegation of women of Albi, the lonely wives of the men wasting away in the Wall. Such a voyage was a costly proposition—clearly the townspeople who raised the money to pay its expenses thought that King Philip had not gone far enough in punishing the inquisitors of Carcassonne and the bishop of Albi. Bernard had intended to bring along Jean Fresquet, a jailer of Albi willing to bear witness to the crimes of Bishop Castanet, but the man had died suddenly that spring under circumstances that were never fully elucidated. The people of Albi, however, had no doubt that Fresquet had been murdered on Castanet’s order, yet another black mark on the soul of their bishop.

  His embassy weakened by the absence of a valuable witness, Bernard deployed his other strength. Once settled near the royal court, Brother Bernard took the women of Albi to meet with Joan of Navarre, queen of France.* Her confessor, Durand de Champagne, was a Franciscan friar sympathetic to the cause of Délicieux and doubtless the instigator of the audience. Queen Joan comforted her visitors from Albi, listened as they evoked their conjugal plight, then sent them away with a sizeable cash gift, 1,000 livres. Bernard implored the queen to intervene with her husband, insisting that Bishop Castanet be punished more forcefully and removed entirely from the see of Albi, that the prisoners caught up in the shamefully hasty inquisition of 1300 be freed, that the Wall itself be shut down. At the very least, the Dominicans had to be deprived of the inquisition. Joan heard the friar out and, given his gifts of persuasion, must have been moved to compassion for her subjects in the south and a clear understanding of their grievances. Yet she alone could do nothing. At some point—the details are unclear—Bernard, the consuls, and the women of Albi were allowed into the king’s presence, but the meeting proved inconclusive, save for a further cash gift to the women and a modest increase of the fine on Castanet. Nothing more would be done, as the king was preoccupied with other matters of great moment.

  Bernard sent his disappointed allies home. He would see King Philip again, but at a distance, on the high altar of Notre Dame de Paris. Bernard had been delegated to attend the Estates General in place of the Franciscan provincial of Languedoc, a sign that his star was ascendant in the Order. In April, the friar sat in silence in the great nave as the assembly took up the matter of the king’s row with Boniface and listened to the royal chancellor, Pierre Flote, hurl outlandish charges at the pope. The concerns of Languedoc had never seemed more irrelevant. A man of the south, Bernard Saisset, may have sparked the fracas, but it had moved far beyond the confines of regional or even national conflict. Guillaume de Nogaret hovered in the background, ready to launch his final, historic offensive against the pope, while Saisset himself was eventually forgotten and allowed to go to the safety of Rome, where a forgiving hierarchy awaited him. Even if on this occasion Délicieux did meet the king’s ministers, which is more than likely given that news of his bravura performance at Senlis six months earlier had reached their keen ears, they would have told him the time was not right to take up the matter of the inquisition. The king had made enough enemies in the Church.

  Brother Bernard embarked on the long journey back to the south, the friar of carcassonne | 105 probably some time in late April 1302. He no doubt was discouraged by the failure of his ambitious delegation in the halls of power and his own fruitless stay in Paris for the Estates General. Crippling the inquisition without freeing its victims did not solve the problem, Bernard and his allies knew, and allowing persecution to continue guaranteed future strife. The king had to be brought around to seeing things their way, to be coaxed along a path to action that then seemed strewn with impassable obstacles. A few weeks later, the road ahead came clearly marked from the other extremity of Philip’s turbulent realm.

  * Saisset was not held in the royal prisons. Gilles Aycelin, the archbishop of Narbonne, kept him under house arrest for the king.

  * As usual, Philip kept on the move to enjoy the hunt. In 1302, Bernard and his delegation caught up with the court in either Pierrefonds or Compiègne, the king’s royal residences in Picardy, both a long day’s ride to the northeast of Paris.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE WEAVER OF BRUGES

  PIETER DE CONINCK, A WEAVER, lived in Bruges, an immensely wealthy town reliant on a steady supply of English wool to transform into Flemish cloth. Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres were the foremost weaving centers of Flanders, their blue dyes provided by the woad merchants of Languedoc, their bolts sold to the Italians in the fairs of Champagne.

  Philip the Fair had laid his heavy hand on Flanders in 1297, after its count had had the temerity to plump for the English forces in the French king’s struggle against them. The count’s decision seemed reasonable enough, given the firm economic ties binding England and Flanders together, but for Philip and his court, English political influence had to be diminished, as rich Flanders was a milch cow that could do wonders for the Capetian treasury. The barrier of language mattered little—Philip’s expanding kingdom encompassed a babel of peoples, as the remarks of Bernard Saisset about the Parisian bishop of Toulouse made clear. As well, a large contingent of speakers of the langue d’oïl (French) in Flanders welcomed the protection of Paris and, not incidentally, formed the wealthiest class of merchant burghers in the towns. They also wanted to curb direct English trade with the weavers, preferring to keep their privileged and lucrative positions as middlemen.

  Philip had annexed the region outright in the Jubilee year of 1300. When he took Queen Joan for a state visit to Flanders the following year, so sumptuously attired were the merchant wives and maidens watching the royal procession from the balconies of their magnificent gabled houses that Joan is said to have complained, “I thought that I alone was Queen, but here in this place I have six hundred rivals.” As it was the first visit of a monarch to his new province, medieval etiquette held it as a Joyeuse Entrée—but here the joy was to be remarkably short-lived.

  The atmosphere in the cities of Flanders was so explosive that the royal visit sparked off acrimony over who was going to get stuck with the costs of the festivities. The Flemings resented the traders and patricians not just for fawning over a foreign potentate but also for keeping their stranglehold on the communal governments of the towns. In the closing decades of the thirteenth century, the guildsmen of Flanders had risen regularly in revolt against the upper classes. The men ruling the towns, the men whose womenfolk caused the queen of France to marvel at their wealth, ignored the great changes that decades of broadening prosperity had brought. De Coninck and his ilk, for their part, demanded a say in th
eir destiny; instead they were excluded from the public square, saddled with onerous taxes, and forced to watch the distasteful spectacle of conspicuous wealth being flaunted by a small, condescending elite.

  Like Bernard’s Languedoc, De Coninck’s Flanders had not been immune to the spiritual ferment of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The mendicant friars had thrived there, imparting a sense that personal salvation was a matter that had to be attended to by the newly awakened sense of the individual. The guildsmen were not ants to be trod upon by their betters, or those who styled themselves as such. Many disagreed with even that: one itinerant preacher of Antwerp, echoing what must have been a popular sentiment, stated that the rich man, even if he be virtuous, was no better than a whore.

  In unconscious imitation of the strife besetting their Italian trading partners, the cities of Flanders of the first decade of the fourteenth century saw the birth of organized, bitter civic factions given to brawling and mayhem, the patrician Leliaert, or “Lilies” (so named for the fleur-de-lis of France), and the guild-friendly Clauwerts, or “Claws” (after the paws of the heraldic Flemish lion). In the spring of 1302, in the midst of upheavals between Lilies and Claws in many Flemish cities, a distinctly obstreperous Claw magistracy seized power in Bruges. Jacques de Châtillon, a Flemish nobleman who served as King Philip’s viceroy, raised a force of some one thousand men to occupy and punish the defiant town. He was, in the judgment of an eminent historian, “a violent and haughty man, a true representative of feudalism, harsh and disdainful toward the people, incapable of understanding the interests, aspirations and the power of the great cities subject to his government.” The French entered Bruges on May 17, 1302; De Coninck fled, knowing the fearsome Châtillon capable of terrible reprisal.

  Fatally, the French did nothing on that first day. Tradition holds that they passed a long evening in well-irrigated revelry, content to put off their repressive chores until the morrow. De Coninck took advantage of the lull to steal back to the city in the dead of night, at the head of a troop of Claws primed for murder. The signal was given just before dawn on the eighteenth, and the Flemings stormed the houses in which the French were sleeping it off. The morning turned into a full-scale slaughter, known to history as the Bruges Matins.* Very few of the soldiers sent out to chasten the city survived.

  The Bruges Matins were only a prelude. An alarmed King Philip raised a feudal host to teach the lowly Flemings a lesson, calling on the greatest of his vassals to gather their men and ride north. The finest flower of French chivalry, as the doom-laden catchphrase has it, met the foe near the city of Courtrai (Kortrijk in Flemish) on July 11, 1302. The greatest nobles of Artois, Picardy, and Normandy, caparisoned in splendor, trotted out into the clearing before their ranks then broke into a deafening charge of heavily mailed rider and warhorse. They bore down on the the motley infantry of the Flemish towns, then faltered. In the Flanders fields muddied by rains and overflowing streams, destrier and knight flailed and fell, the thick muck riddled with waterlogged traps set by the Flemish. The French riders pulled from their floundering mounts were beaten and hacked to death. As in the First World War, the mud of Flanders had won.

  Hundreds, if not thousands, of French perished, many of them great lords—including the aloof Jacques de Châtillon and Pierre Flote, the king’s chancellor, who was trampled to death. The Flemish had decided to dispense with the medieval custom of sparing the great in the hope of a large ransom. The grisly event came to be known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs, so called for the five hundred of these items retrieved from the fallen noblemen. The prizes, far from being melted down and transformed into yet more adornment for the ample bosoms of the Flemish burghers’ wives, were instead hung in a church of Courtrai as a sign of thanksgiving. At his home in Anagni, Pope Boniface VIII ordered all the town bells to peal in joyful cacophony. His mighty enemy had been mightily humiliated.

  The tidings from Flanders sent shock waves through the Kingdom of France. Rumors flew fast, far, and wide—the most fantastic of them holding that the terrifying Pieter de Coninck, his patronym the Dutch word for “king,” was now King Peter of Flanders. Less fanciful but no less astounding was the realization that the Capetian juggernaut had been tripped up by a rabble of commoners. A rich acquisition was slipping through the fingers of the most powerful French monarch since St. Louis, and Philip the Fair seemed unable to salvage the situation. Although he personally and courageously led the fight two years later, winning a tactical victory near the Flemish town of Mons-en-Pévèle, he eventually had to let Flanders go, holding on to only the prizes of Lille, Béthune, and Douai. Much of the north had, in effect, resisted incorporation into Philip’s kingdom.

  For the agitators of Languedoc, lessons lay in abundance on the sodden ground of Flanders. However different the circumstances in the north and south, the Flemings had demonstrated that the kingdom of France was not an adamantine entity, immune to division and schism. And although no Lilies and Claws clashed in the alleyways of Toulouse and Carcassonne, there were similarities between the two extremes of Capetian territorial ambition. Like the Flemings, the southerners, too, had links to England—neighboring Guyenne was an English possession and trade ties were strong. The south also bordered the power of Aragon, just beyond the Pyrenees; talk of enlisting its aid to regain independence was not idle jabber. In addition, the people in the south, like the northerners, had a lingustic bone to pick with their overlords, for they spoke not the langue d’oïl of France but the langue d’oc of the Midi.

  Philip was shaken by the reversal in Flanders, knowing it to be a setback of an unusual magnitude. Important lessons could be drawn from the episode, the foremost of which was the folly of siding with the Lily oligarchs in their struggle with the Flemish guildsmen and laborers. He realized he could not neglect local grievance and factional friction in the distant reaches of his kingdom.

  With Pierre Flote dead on the battlefield of the Golden Spurs, the mantle of power passed to Guillaume de Nogaret, a man of the south. Nogaret, soon to become wholly occupied as the king’s attack dog in the conflict with Boniface VIII, no doubt counseled his master to tread cautiously. The king could, and would, organize a military campaign to try to repair the damage in Flanders, but his advisor urged him to remember that sedition thrived elsewhere. He need only repeat the vile words of Bishop Bernard Saisset. Nogaret had grown up among such people and understood the deep unhappiness in the south exacerbated by the inquisitors. It may be an overreach to assume that Nogaret, his family’s Cathar baggage his biggest liability, advised the king to go even easier on heresy to keep the south calm, but that was the de facto result of the Bruges Matins. The king was willing to let the remaining Cathars remain unmolested in return for a precious few months of stability.

  If Nogaret had indeed met with and taken the measure of Bernard Délicieux in Paris just prior to the Bruges Matins, he could not have been surprised by the subsequent developments in the south, for the astute friar had taken away several important insights of his own from the uprising in Flanders. Like others in his camp, he would have viewed the event as a mixed blessing: on one hand, it distracted attention from the cause of Languedoc even more, but on the other, it focused the king’s mind on the frightening reality of revolt. But the most important element imparted by the weaver of Bruges would not have eluded a student of politics as gifted as Délicieux. The Flemish guildsmen had attacked French and Flemish supporters of the merchants; the ordinary men of the town had struck a blow against the interests of the consuls, the governing elite. In the end, the riot had been sparked by class resentment, the type of civic hostility rife in the elbow-rubbing familiarity of the medieval city. After two centuries of rapidly increasing trade and wealth, there were now many conflicting, important interests in the life of any city. De Coninck knew how to exploit such divisions in his native Bruges. Brother Bernard would prove to be equally expert in stirring the resentments lying dormant in the breast of Carcassonne.

  * Evo
king the monastic hours, the name given the Bruges revolt echoed a similarly termed massacre of the French twenty years previously in Palermo, the Sicilian Vespers.

  1303

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE SERMON

  FOR CARCASSONNE, THE PRECEDING FOUR YEARS had been a whirlwind sown by Bernard Délicieux and the inquisitors, a confusing period of strife, sudden action, and long spells of uneasy calm. Looking back, the townsmen may have had difficulty in making sense of it all, in finding some meaning behind the upheaval and, more important, some spur to clarity and future action.

  The signing of the secret accord of 1299 offered Bernard Délicieux the chance to dispel the uncertainty. Of all the events to have taken place during the quadrennium at the turn of the century—ambush at the Franciscan convent, inquisition at Albi, appeal on behalf of Castel Fabre, audience with the king—the occurrence to have the greatest consequences for Carcassonne came first. In skillful hands, the accord was made to seem an injustice, a nefarious agreement pitting rich against poor. Bernard Délicieux found in it the same basis for class resentment that had brought revolt to Bruges.