The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Giraud de Meaux, a royal sergeant of Carcassonne, remembered the story of the unflappable man in more or less the same detail. However, his version of how Brother Bernard concluded his edifying tale differs somewhat:

  After that, Brother Bernard explained his words, by saying to the people, “Good people, if anyone calls you a heretic, defend yourself as best you can, because you have the right to defend yourself.”

  The Franciscan worked tirelessly in the week prior to the inquisitor’s riposte. He came in from the streets to give sermons in the parish churches of the Bourg, grave, accusatory orations in which he singled out individual congregants for opprobrium. He pointed the finger, threateningly, at those who had helped the inquisition in the past. Some of the accused fled the churches in consternation. They would later say at his trial that he encouraged the people to murder them, though their survival to give testimony would seem to contradict that assertion. There can be no question, however, that the friar’s campaign intensified as he steeled his allies for the inevitable confrontation.

  It came on or about Saturday, August 10, 1303. Criers ran through the streets instructing the people to assemble in the courtyard of the bishop’s palace to hear the explanations of Geoffroy d’Ablis, inquisitor of Carcassonne. At his side, significantly, would be the city’s bishop, of an old Carcassonne family, who had been conspicuously silent in the dispute between the brash Franciscan and his Dominican foes. In the distant but fondly remembered days of Carcassonne before the inquisition, his ancestor had been a famously live-and-let-live bishop who counted several Good Men and Good Women in his immediate circle of kinship. That a cleric of such sensible lineage should support the Dominican might be a sign that the inquisitor had some devastating information to impart.

  That information was the accord itself. Scholarly examination of what remains of the secret agreement of 1299 has determined that Picquigny was right when he declared at the meeting with the consuls that there was nothing terribly objectionable in the document. A secret list of a dozen or so townsmen who were to be jailed for heretical leanings could outrage but hardly surprise the people of the Bourg. They had lived in the dread shadow of the Wall all their lives: of course the inquisitors had demanded fresh bodies for its dungeons in exchange for lifting the excommunication.

  What did surprise the Bourg was the news that the document purportedly had the consuls, on behalf of everybody, abjuring heretical belief. The consequence of that clause was nothing less than disastrous, for if one renounced a belief, that meant that one once had held it—and in that case, one was guilty in the inquisitor’s eyes. Consequently, if one was guilty of once harboring heresy in one’s heart, punishment had to follow. Brother Bernard had said as much in his Sunday sermon.

  In this reading, the consuls had sold the townsmen down the river by abjuring heresy in the name of everyone. Knowing from experience the implacability of the Dominicans, the people of the Bourg could not possibly have expected them to refrain from using this admission as a weapon some day, vindictively prosecuting anyone who dared oppose them. Four years earlier, with the signing of the accord, they had thought themselves delivered from the inquisition; in fact, they had been delivered to the inquisition.

  The only discordant note in this mounting wail of panic might have arisen from the simple fact that the consuls had done no such thing. As a jurist of Carcassonne sniffed at Bernard’s trial: “He [Bernard] let it be known through his sermons and other ways that the act concluded between the inquisitors and the consuls . . . was very bad for the city and the people of the Bourg, whereas the agreement, which I have seen and read in my capacity as a jurist and a lawyer, was not in reality bad for the city, but actually good and useful, if given a fair reading.” In fact, the word abjure appears but once in the document, in a passage of ecclesiastical boilerplate. The men of 1299 had most emphatically not accused their fellows of heresy in any way. One needed only read the document to realize that.

  That, however, would have been asking too much. The rumor about the secret agreement reinforced a narrative that had been building for years, a narrative made possible by inquisitorial abuse. Even a levelheaded reading of the document had the consuls handing over some citizens to the inquisition, through a list of targets guiltily kept secret—thus they had collaborated and fully deserved public disgrace. But above all else, the inquisition, iniquitous and pitiless, still had license to torment the blameless. Given the strength of the townspeople’s revulsion, a public reading of the accord of 1299 would not have changed minds; the citizens of Carcassonne still would have believed that the consuls had called them heretics.

  The inquisitor Geoffroy d’Ablis thought otherwise. The learned Dominican was a man of the north, from the town of Ablis, to the southwest of Paris. He had been educated at the venerable school in Chartres, becoming a master of theology. Yet his considerable intellectual achievements did not stand him in good stead at this moment, for he clearly underestimated the degree of hatred he faced. He had arrived in Carcassonne in January 1303, but by that late date too many people had been imprisoned, too many lives snuffed out, too many bodies broken, too many fortunes looted, houses confiscated, children disinherited, conjugal beds emptied, and long lonely nights made sleepless by the ever-present specter of sudden and unmerited punishment. Geoffroy seemed unable to fathom the resentment. He believed that the people had only to be informed of how fundamentally benign the accord of 1299 actually was, and the fever would break.

  The bishop and the inquisitor stood before the façade of the episcopal palace in the Cité. In front of them, in the courtyard, the people of the Bourg awaited. The moment for disclosure had arrived. Geoffroy d’Ablis announced that the accord would be read aloud, in full. He motioned for a lawyer on his staff to begin. The man read out a passage in the original Latin, then translated it into the vernacular langue d’oc. The crowd listened, brooding, silent.

  The lecture went on for a time, but then came the first hisses, the first whistles and catcalls. The inquisitor-theologian had gambled on the sweet voice of reason, but it was too late for that. The people of the Bourg would not listen. The sight of the inquisitor and his men only inflamed them. A hothead in the crowd surged forward and demanded to see the accursed document for himself. The jostling began. There were no unflappable men present. Within minutes the riot was on.

  The inquisitor and bishop stepped smartly through a doorway behind them to escape the mayhem. But the crowd had other targets, no doubt suggested by Hélie Patrice and his men, who did not want the people running amok to no good purpose. The rioters ran down from the Cité and spread through the Bourg, calling for death to the traitors and seeking the townhouses of the wealthy consuls of 1299. Their dwellings stood vulnerable, inviting. Windows were smashed, fiery brands thrown in. The mansions of the great burned under the August sun, a black choking thunderhead drifting over the city. Carcassonne had erupted. Within the Franciscan convent, Bernard Délicieux heard the commotion, but was able to finish his prayers with a clear conscience. He hadn’t started the riot; the inquisitor had.

  * Questioned about these weeds at his trial, Bernard gamely responded that he had been referring to heretics, not inquisitors. He was not believed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE WALL

  COHAC ! COHAC !” Everywhere they went the Dominicans heard the mocking cry, the raucous call of the crow. The people of Carcassonne were jubilant, sardonic, intent on inventing their own exemplum. In their view, the Dominicans, enrobed in their black scapulars, were no better than crows, feasting on carrion, poking out eyes with razor-sharp beaks. Ravens swooped and hopped around the gallows set up in every medieval town, coveting their revolting repast, cawing in excitement. So too the Dominicans. For too long had the burghers put up with their rapacious behavior, their digging up and shaming of the dead, their snatching of the living and burying them in the Wall. Those dark times were over, the mocking cry announced.

  The rough mistreatment continued a
s the hot days of August wore on. Small boys ran after the friars in the streets, cawing in derision. Matrons about their business barreled into them, brusquely shoving them aside. Masked men burst into their church, smashing windows and statuary. But the culprits who had spread terror were not now the friars being terrorized: Geoffroy d’Ablis and his staff had prudently fled to Toulouse, leaving their Dominican brethren unconnected to the inquisition to bear the brunt of the people’s anger. For the moment, the discomfort of any Dominican had the townsmen crowing in delight.

  Bernard Délicieux must have enjoyed the spectacle, but his pleasure was diminished by growing impatience. The king’s viceroy was slow in returning to Carcassonne, perhaps out of an understandable reluctance to deal with the mess. When, at last, Jean de Picquigny came to the Bourg, he was accompanied by an impressive retinue of soldiery and magistrates. He had heard that even the seneschal’s underlings had been manhandled by the mob; anyone, in fact, who had been party to the 1299 agreement, whether a king’s man or not, could expect no forbearance from this latest, most serious manifestation of the rage carcassonnaise.

  Picquigny learned firsthand of the new arrangements. On reaching the gate of the Bourg, Hélie Patrice’s sentries gruffly inspected him and his companions. The cries of joy at his arrival then turned to howls of dismay when the townspeople saw that Picquigny’s company included a lawyer who had advised the consuls in 1299. He immediately became the target for brickbats and stones, barely escaping with his life.

  Picquigny had hardly settled in when Bernard began hectoring him to do something about the Wall. The town was on fire; only freeing the inquisition’s prisoners would put out the conflagration. As always, the king, through the agency of his representative, was expected to protect his loyal subjects from harm, in this instance the relentless persecution visited upon them by the diabolical Dominicans.

  Picquigny listened, perturbed. He knew that if he acted according to Bernard’s wishes, he, not the Franciscan, would feel the full wrath of the Church, and he would be risking his immortal soul. But if he didn’t act, the belligerence of Carcassonne might spread throughout Languedoc. The Bruges Matins and the Golden Spurs had happened only the previous year, and the king’s face-saving battle at Mons-en-Pévèle would not occur until the following August. In the summer of 1303 his master certainly did not need another rebellious province on his hands, and the king would not have looked kindly on his viceroy for letting matters get out of hand. Only if he marshaled the mob to act under his orders could Picquigny co-opt the dangerous movement and, afterward, claim that it was on the king’s initiative that the inquisition prison had been emptied.

  Yet he hesitated. It was a momentous step to take, almost as serious as Guillaume de Nogaret’s action in Anagni a fortnight later. For one thing, the Wall was the property of King Philip. His sainted grandfather had built it and the royal treasury underwrote the expenses incurred in maintaining it. If Picquigny attacked the prison, some wise heads in his entourage doubtless pointed out, he would be attacking the king. Yet the Dominicans staffing the prison were unlikely to give it up without a fight or some other kind of resistance. Counsels of caution were aired, leading to agonizing indecision. Another consideration to make resolve waver came from the larger opponent the Dominicans represented. To confront the Church head-on, violently, was to flout a long-held taboo and invite the disapprobation of all of Christendom. This would not be a police action of minor moment; this would reverberate across the continent. There is no indication that Jean de Picquigny craved that sort of notoriety.

  By the third week of August, the Bourg’s ugly equanimity began souring. While it was amusing to rough up the Dominicans of the Bourg, the eyesore on the Aude—the Wall—remained untouched. The voluble Bernard Délicieux seemed to have abandoned his faith in the persuasive power of the word. News reached Picquigny that the Franciscan convent had welcomed several dozen guests from Albi, strapping fellows invited to Carcassonne by Brother Bernard neither as potential novices nor as legal scholars. Their presence made a point without the expenditure of a breath.

  Picquigny at last gave the go-ahead. Although the exact date cannot be established, the operation most likely took place during the last week of August 1303. In a country famous for just such an event in 1789, a prison was about to be stormed.

  The Wall stood in a no--man's-land between Cité and Bourg, having been built into an outer fortification on the right bank of the Aude. Viewed from the Bourg, it loomed in the middle distance at the foot of the hill crowned by the Cité. Several witnesses at Bernard’s trial vividly remembered the morning. Picquigny marched across the old bridge at the head of a company of pikemen and royal sergeants at arms. Behind them came a great gaggle of exuberant townsmen, armed with cudgels, halberds, sticks, clubs, swords, daggers, whatever they could get their hands on. Seeing their number, guards at the outer fortifying wall let the motley soldiery stream through a gate.

  The door to the prison was shut tight, locked and bolted. Picquigny called up to a barred window on an upper story that no one would be harmed if the warden opened the door to him. The shouted negotiations stalled, the armed liberators grew restless. The townsmen of Carcassonne called for the Wall to be razed—not especially difficult, for the prison was built not as a fortress, to repel attack, but as a strongbox, to keep people from escaping. No deadly arrow slits hid archers, no wall walk swarmed with armed defenders.

  The standoff could not continue. Picquigny ordered his pikemen to ready themselves for assault. As they were assembling, voluminous parchments wafted into the air from the windows above. They floated downward in the puzzled silence, eventually settling on the cobbles at the attackers’ feet.

  The documents lodged protests at the outrage about to take place. They contained formal appeals to the pope to reverse the injustice of this day. As with Brother Bernard’s magisterial handling of the Castel Fabre matter three years earlier, the Dominicans of the Wall wanted to establish a conspicuous paper trail. These appeals would make Picquigny’s action the object of a formal proceeding. The event, far from being a spontaneous calamity, was now duly noted and would one day, the robed jailkeepers hoped, be overturned and avenged in court.

  The prison door swung open and Picquigny stepped across the threshold, accompanied by several of his men. The tenor of his conversation with the Dominicans is unknown, but he shortly afterward emerged back out into the yard accompanied by scores of prisoners, blinking in the sunlight. A great cheer went up; hugs were no doubt exchanged between husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins. The eyewitnesses disagree over whether Bernard Délicieux was present in the crowd, but acquaintance with the workings of the human heart dictates that he must have been there. The day was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign by the agitator of Languedoc, a campaign brilliantly carried out before king, court, magistrate, inquisitor, congregation, and mob. To have missed this moment would have been unthinkable.

  Yet the prisoners were not freed. Picquigny showed uncharacteristic indifference to the friar’s opinion and instead had them moved to royal custody in the Cité, where they were housed in humane and generous conditions in the towers of the fortifications. The burly ruffians hosted in the Franciscan convent now headed home, to be hastily replaced in Carcassonne by another contingent from Albi—the wives who had complained to the queen of their loneliness.

  In keeping the prisoners, the king’s man performed an odd act of diplomacy. He had not questioned the verdict of the inquisitors; if he had, he would have set everyone free. Rather, he was addressing the problems of the conditions of detention and possible abuses of legal procedure. That nicety may have amounted to shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted, but the administrative fiction was necessary. His action had effectively placed his king in opposition to the inquisition and the Dominican Order. Already another of the king’s ministers, Guillaume de Nogaret, had accused the pope of heresy and was preparing to lead a squad of mercenaries to the pap
al residence in Anagni. Picquigny would not throw oil on the fire by declaring the whole enterprise of inquisition to be a sham and thereby set up the king for charges of abetting heresy.

  From the larger perspective, what Délicieux made happen on that day, no matter what the status of the prisoners, stands as a landmark in the course of medieval history. He had bucked the tide. To a culture of increasing persecution, of a developing Christianity of fear, of a renewed intolerance of Jews, of a nascent fear of witchcraft and sorcery—ultimately, to a culture intent on demonizing dissent and difference—the man who pried open the Wall had said no. Brother Bernard saw violent persecution as incompatible with his religion. It was a stark and simple position. He refused to allow the arguments of expediency and institutional loyalty to construct a worldview fundamentally at odds with his point of departure, as some Dominicans had done in their elaboration of a system of sincere persecution, righteous torture, and judicial killing. A century after Bernard’s time a German bishop, horrified by the schism afflicting the Church in the wake of the Avignon exile of the papacy, would write: “When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.”

  Bernard Délicieux could never condone such sentiment. He and a few kindred spirits stood up and decried the direction their church was heading. It had joined hands with the torturer and the executioner, effectively seconding the argument that Cathars had put forth for nearly a century: Roma was the opposite of Amor. The Franciscan could not have known that inquisition, once in the control of men far less scrupulous than the medieval Dominicans, would plague Catholic Europe and Latin America for centuries, but he could already see with his own eyes the spiritual corruption it brought in its wake. Bernard was exceptional in that he actually took effective action against this sickness of spirit. Somewhat as the amoral German bishop had advised for the defense of his Church, Bernard had used guile, politicking, demagoguery, oratory, persuasion, perhaps bribery, and even the threat of force to achieve his objective, but he had nonetheless done the unthinkable: overturn the inquisition. And, in contradistinction to the bishop, he had accomplished this without the effusion of blood or the flash of swordplay. He was a man of peace, true to Francis of Assisi. As one simple woman of Carcassonne is said to have exclaimed on hearing him speak: “Behold, the Lord has sent down an angel to help us!”