The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TORTURE EXPOSED

  BERNARD NOW LABORED to make his victory permanent. The Wall had disgorged a valuable group of informants. These people had been tortured, made to accuse their neighbors, their enemies, their friends. Bernard, combining the instincts of an investigative reporter and an activist lawyer, set out to construct his own version of an inquisition register. He went to the towers of the Cité and interviewed the prisoners, beseeching them to scour their memories and recall the treatment they had received and the words they had spoken. In one part of this “register,” Bernard recounted the tortures awaiting those who fell afoul of the inquisition, specifying what had been done to whom, and when. The full panoply of cruel Christianity was laid bare.

  This torture section, given Bernard’s persuasive proclivities, must have been riveting. Although the document itself has not survived, the nearly indignant references to it contained in the formal charges against him at his trial suggest that, at the very least, it was distressingly colorful. Doubtless the friar evoked the torture in common use in his day, the strappado, the “queen of torments,” which was used to elicit confession, the “queen of proofs.” In this operation, the victim’s hands were tied behind his back and then, the loose end of the rope coil having been played across a ceiling beam, he was raised into the air, his outstretched, distended arms bearing his full weight. Heavy weights could be tied to his feet, to make the contortion even more unbearable. Depending on the whim of the torturer, the rope could be loosed for a split second, causing the victim to drop, then be reimmobilized in midair, the resultant jolt dislocating his arms or pulling them out of their sockets. The strappado might initially last only a few minutes—the time it took for the holy inquisitor to intone a prayer, it was suggested piously—before being renewed if the results proved unsatisfactory.

  The inquisitor had many other refinements, which Bernard would have taken care to relate in detail. For women and children, binding of the wrists tightly by coarse wet cord, then unbinding them and starting up the process once again, with even more force, was considered humane. Other extremities could be useful as well. Savagely beating the soles of the feet was fairly common. This sent pain rioting up through the body. For obdurate people, an inflammable liquid could be splashed on the feet and then set alight. This attention to the body’s extremities arose from the duty of the thoughtful jurist, then as now, to avoid causing major organ failure. Another common technique entailed sleep deprivation. Forty hours of enforced sleeplessness came to be considered the happy mean. Further treatments common in Carcassonne included the rack, other means of stretching and dislocating (which sometimes came accompanied by the judicious application of hot brands), and the shock of freezing cold water.

  In his complementary section, Bernard pieced together the confessions and accusations. He compiled a long list of names, organized by town, of people who were still blithely going about their business, unaware that the inquisitor had plans for them. They had been denounced as supporters of heresy. Were it not for Bernard’s and his allies’ ability to stymie the inquisitors in both Albi and Carcassonne, the persons bearing these names would have been manacled in the filth of the Wall, awaiting their next beating and strappado. His collating done, he had copies of his work made and disseminated far and wide.

  The Franciscan barnstormed the towns and villages between Carcassonne and Albi. He convened meetings at which he told the inhabitants of the brutality and deceit of the inquisitors; for the illiterate, he pointed to their names on his lists. He elicited the expected reaction: horror and anger. Donations flowed into his treasury—only Bernard Délicieux could permanently lift this plague from the land.

  Jean de Picquigny had more immediate concerns. Unable to countenance the injury done to the inquisition, Geoffroy d’Ablis had excommunicated Picquigny in September. The king’s man would burn in Hell for what he had done. In the same month, the beleaguered Pope Boniface VIII was shouting “E le cole, e le cape!” to the intruders in his residence at Anagni. The outrageous slap took place on September 7; the pope was dead on October 11. Guillaume de Nogaret then quickly joined Jean de Picquigny in the ranks of the excommunicated, an occupational hazard of working for King Philip the Fair.

  Whereas, incredibly, Nogaret then labored for seven years to have the dead pontiff disgraced and posthumously excommunicated, Picquigny took another tack. He appealed the sentence of d’Ablis. In October, he and Brother Bernard made the long journey once more to Paris. The Franciscan had been badgering Picquigny to make the voyage to see the king ever since the emptying of the Wall; he had suggested bringing along the prisoners who had been freed from it so that the monarch could see the marks of torture and mistreatment on the bodies of his loyal and blameless subjects. The king’s man, perhaps regretting how well he had been played by Délicieux, showed himself once again not to be entirely the friar’s creature. He refused to take the men of Albi with him, wisely wishing not to enmesh his master further in Bernard’s schemes. Picquigny had paid the price: now he was an excommunicate, with little chance of a speedy reprieve from Rome. He knew that the events at Carcassonne and at Anagni would hardly dispose the new pontiff to think fondly of the French. In any event, given the turmoil usually attendant on the conclave charged with electing a pope, several months, even years, could pass before the throne of St. Peter was once again occupied. The cardinals would not lift his excommunication in the interim.

  The Dominicans, not surprisingly, decided to exacerbate Picquigny’s difficulties. At a general chapter held in Paris in the fall of 1303, the leaders of the Friars Preachers in France proclaimed his appeal invalid and confirmed the sentence of excommunication. Brother Geoffroy d’Ablis, they declared, had done the right thing in throwing this godless hypocrite out of the sacred communion of the Church.

  Picquigny viewed this intervention in his appeal process as gratuitous, malicious, and infuriating. In a letter he asked for support from the consuls and townspeople of Toulouse, Carcassonne, Albi, Cordes, Pamiers, Montauban, Béziers, Gaillac, and Rabastens. It is an extraordinary document, so vehement in its language that it was included in the transcripts of Bernard’s trial. One can divine the reason for this odd inclusion, for the excerpt below, even given the shroud of translation, leaves no doubt as to the identity of Picquigny’s ghostwriter:

  There are no words, no expressions that We could use to convey just how spitefully, irreligiously, monstrously and deceitfully some lying, perfidious, iniquitous men, who are ravening wolves disguised as lambs, have falsely denounced Us before our lord the king, our lady the queen and all the great of their court. Namely, Fr. Geoffroy d’Ablis, inquisitor, along with other friars, who in reality do not preach, but rather breach divine law and infallible truth. Repaying us evil for good, hate for love, in their distress at seeing our lord the king, his advisors and other men of good faith refusing to believe, as they had hoped, their poisonous words, they struck out higher and higher, reaching at last the weapon of excommunication. Abusing power, forsaking truth and embracing error, like madmen and dullards, they declared in a public sermon at the Dominican house in Paris that We were de facto excommunicate, thus offending our lord the king, madame the queen and their privy council, and that We were a supporter of heretics and a notorious troubler of the office of the Inqusition—this, after and in spite of a canonical appeal that We have submitted to the Apostolic See . . . [Their action] constitutes a manifest attack on the truth and an offense to justice.

  The blistering missive had its desired effect. The good burghers of Languedoc opened their purses to fund Picquigny’s defense. But by October 29, the date of this letter, news may already have reached Paris of what had transpired in Rome four days earlier. Contrary to custom, a new pope had been elected with remarkable dispatch, prompted by the unprecedented insult administered to the papacy at Anagni. The process had taken but eleven days.

  The new pontiff called himself Benedict XI, in tribute to Benedetto Caetani, t
he late, great Pope Boniface VIII. Prior to his elevation to Christendom’s highest perch, Niccolò Boccasini had lectured in theology and written commentaries on the Psalms, Job, Matthew and Revelation. He had then gone on to other, more prestigious positions. For the previous seven years, he had been the Master-General of the Order of Friars Preachers. The new pope was a leader of the Dominicans.

  Other startling news quickly followed. Although the nature of Brother Bernard’s conversations with the king in October of that year has not survived the passage of time, we do know that at one point Philip informed Délicieux and Picquigny that their oft-extended invitation had finally been accepted.

  The king wanted to see for himself what was going in Languedoc. King Philip and Queen Joan would come to Toulouse on Christmas Day, 1303.

  1304

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE KING AND QUEEN IN LANGUEDOC

  TOULOUSE SPREADS ITS PINK EMBRACE over both banks of the river Garonne. The capital of Languedoc in the time of Bernard Délicieux, the modern city still has an immense old quarter filled with a hodgepodge of half-timbered houses, medieval towers, and Renaissance mansions. Its basilica, St. Sernin, is the largest and loveliest Romanesque church in southern France. Across town and nearer the river, its splendid Gothic grace notes given their finishing touches in Brother Bernard’s day, rises the Church of the Jacobins. Now a public monument, the sanctuary possesses a quiet cloister that was home to meditative Dominicans and an impossibly lofty nave that soars high above the golden casket of Thomas Aquinas.

  This is not to suggest that Toulouse’s history has been as harmonious as the city appears at first glance. Like its lesser sisters in the region, la ville rose has had its moments of tensions and unrest. Early in the thirteenth century, Toulouse had been a protagonist in the Albigensian Crusade, stoutly resisting occupation by the invading northerners and, on one memorable afternoon in 1218, catapulting a rocky payload directly through the skull of the French leader of the Crusaders then besieging the city. That murderous event, and others of its kind, is remembered in a profusion of giant tableaux executed by history painter Jean-Paul Laurens and hung in the city’s grand Capitole, the town hall from which the capitouls—consuls—once governed their prosperous fellow citizens.

  In a great city with such a long and checkered history, there cannot help but be layers of memory on any given street. One such place is the southern entrance to the old town, where the Narbonne Gate once stood. So called for the road leading to the Roman provincial capital of Narbonne, by medieval times the gate stood in the shadow of the similarly named Château Narbonnais, a hulking, impregnable fortress astride the city’s fortifications that lodged the family of the most powerful lord of the moment. That château is long gone, its inhabitants replaced by the Parlement, a dispenser of the king’s justice—Martin Guerre, the famed identity thief, was tried here—and nowadays of French republican law.

  Across a small triangular plaza from the modern Parlement building stands a modest medieval house, of an unremarkable reddish brown color punctuated by curious half-moon windows on its upper floor. This is the Maison Seilhan, so named for the man who gave this dwelling in 1215 to St. Dominic. The building then became the headquarters of the inquisition in Toulouse. The ordinary Dominicans lived near the Church of the Jacobins; their persecuting brethren practiced their nonroyal, nonrepublican form of jurisprudence here.

  The layering of memory increases in complexity as the triangular plaza, called place du Parlement, gives way to a slightly larger and more regular square, place du Salin. The salin refers to the salt tax, which was collected here by agents of the king housed in the Maison du Roi, on the square’s north side, well in sight of the inquisitor’s offices. The Gothic royal house, however, has been a Protestant church since 1911, a metamorphosis that no doubt would have the defenders of the faith across the way tearing at their tonsures in confusion.

  Yet distant posterity has not been altogether unkind to inquisitor Bernard Gui and his fellows. In 1988, the Maison Seilhan—which had undergone many uses over the centuries, including housing a spice shop—was purchased and lovingly restored by a group associated with the modern-day Dominican order. The rehabilitation of the house of the inquisition did not go unnoticed. Several years later, on a traffic island close to the Maison Seilhan, a signpost was installed bearing an inscription that reads, in part (in French):

  Homage

  To the precursors of the Enlightment

  Victims of obscurantism

  Who studied or taught at Toulouse:

  Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619)

  Italian philosopher, burned alive on this spot for atheism on

  February 9, 1619

  Etienne Dolet burned in Paris (1509–1546)

  Michel Servet burned in Geneva (1511–1553)

  Giordano Bruno burned in Rome (1548–1600)

  They prefigured free thought and reason

  The matter in the sky is no different from that of a man or a beetle

  (G. C. Vanini, Amphitheatrum)

  This showdown in the present is discreet, a faint but distinct echo of the resentments associated with the area ever since the Maison Seilhan became home to the inquisitors. Indeed, the traffic thunders through the two squares, heedless of past commotions. Such a carefree passage was impossible on Christmas Day, 1303. On that occasion, King Philip IV of France rode through the Narbonne Gate, past the Château Narbonnais on his right and the Maison Seilhan on his left, amidst a scene of indescribable chaos.

  The progress of the king and queen to their southern possessions was stately in the late autumn of 1303. The king made this journey only once in his thirty-year reign. The towns on the monarchs’ itinerary had received them with the deference due their exalted rank. None of the swank that had greeted them two years earlier in Flanders was on display, just a dignified solicitude toward this feared lord and his much beloved lady. They undertook the extended tour to dispel fears of further weakness in the wake of the Flemish debacle. The king would attend to Flanders; his people need only support and trust him. There may also have been the matter of a much-needed ordering of the royal establishment. Perhaps as a result of Philip’s preoccupation with the late pope, or, more likely, through the usual human frailties, corruption seems to have run deep in the king’s administration. In the months and years to follow this tour, several senior officials were dismissed and replaced, and the chancery in Paris regularly issued royal ordinances promising to root out abusive practices. The Dominicans were not the only irritants in the provinces—other grievances could spark revolt.

  The orchestrated stateliness of the tour evaporated instantly once the royal party reached the great city on the Garonne. Philip installed Queen Joan in the Château Narbonnais before heading into town on Christmas Day. At once, he was met by a near hysterical mob, the handiwork of Délicieux. The people of Albi, Cordes, Carcassonne, and other towns had been recruited to join with the Toulousains in calling for action. They cheered vociferously, yelled out their desire for justice, begged the king to put an end to their woes.

  Bernard had used near-riot to good effect before, by making Jean de Picquigny’s return to Carcassonne the previous August frighteningly raucous. Now it was Philip’s turn to receive the same treatment. The commoners pressed in on their king, waving clubs and jostling his escort. The clamor deafened, the horses reared. Whether the crowd welcomed or threatened was at best ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so.

  The king was not amused. A biographer of the great Capetian monarch states that Philip had two religions, Christianity and sacred kingship—and that the latter was more important to him than the former. Thus Philip could indeed really believe that the pope was a heretic, the Templars traitors, the inquisitors dishonest, the Lombards treacherous, the Jews extortionate, if the action of any of these parties somehow impeded the exercise of his divine office. Such a view accorded a great place to the dignity of the king’s person, which had been seriously ill-used by the Chri
stmas scrum in the streets of Toulouse. Bernard’s rabble-rousing tactic had clearly been a mistake. The king was shaken and furious, not intimidated.

  Philip’s ministers called a meeting in early January 1304 to hear all sides in the ongoing struggle for the soul of Languedoc. This was not to be an audience of one. Dominicans, Franciscans, bishops, royal officials, and a delegation from Carcassonne and Albi led by Délicieux were invited to a large hall in the Château Narbonnais. However grandiose the setting, the atmosphere cannot have been relaxed. The king was surrounded by his counselors, including Guillaume de Nogaret, who had directly joined the royal tour after making historic mischief in Italy. Thus, the churchmen in attendance had to put up with the presence of two notorious excommunicates, Nogaret and Jean de Picquigny.