The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Picquigny was invited to speak first. He reiterated what he had told the king the previous October when he and Bernard had traveled to Paris: the inquisitions at Albi and at Carcassonne were corrupt and unjust, and he had been unreasonably excommunicated. He had just done his duty as a loyal officer of the crown and moved to correct what was a serious and dangerous situation. There were some in the Dominican order who had proved unworthy of the responsibilities given them by their superiors. The king’s subjects were restive, unhappy.

  At this point he was interrupted. Brother Guilhem Peire de Godin, the head of the Dominicans in Languedoc, stood to speak. The king nodded. The friar read from a document obtained from the desk of none other than Jean de Picquigny. It was a letter addressed but not yet sent to the king, a letter of unusually violent language, warning—even threatening—the monarch that unless he acted decisively against the inquisitors, the people would rise up as they had in Flanders. As one witness recalled at Bernard’s trial: “[Picquigny] had found the whole country to be in a very bad state because of the bishop and the inquisitors, and that unless his lordship [Philip] came down to the country to remedy the situation, the people of the country would make themselves a king the way the Flemings had.”

  The allusion to De Coninck and his rebellious allies sent a scandalized murmur through the hall. Some things were best left unsaid. The king could not have been pleased. Only a week or two previously, just a few steps from where this disputation was being held, he had been accorded a nearly rebellious reception in the streets of Toulouse—and now his officer had the temerity to invoke the disgraceful treason of Bruges and the Golden Spurs! Philip’s famously impassive demeanor turned icy. Faced with his master’s dark countenance, Picquigny set about making excuses, claiming the letter was merely a draft and that the inflammatory clause about Flanders was the result of a clerical error by an inexperienced scribe.

  Picquigny continued his presentation, but it was effectively over. He had lost the king’s attention and, no doubt, his own eloquence. The purloined letter had dealt a body blow from which he never recovered. As if he had displeased an even greater power, within eight months Picquigny was dead, succumbing to some sudden malady, an excommunicate to the end. At the time he was in Italy, desperately trying to make his case to the papal curia. He died disconsolate, not knowing that he would be posthumously pardoned four years later.

  After Picquigny meekly sat down, the provincial of the Dominicans in Languedoc rose once again to take the floor. Brother Guilhem cannot have been happy with Philip, given the actions taken by his agent in Carcassonne and at Anagni by the man who now sat, serene in his sinfulness, at the king’s right hand. Still, there was a silver lining to Nogaret’s action: Guilhem’s esteemed colleague Brother Niccolò had ascended to the papacy.

  As could only have been expected, Brother Guilhem launched into a rousing defense of his Dominican brethren and an equally rousing denunciation of their enemies. Unexpectedly, the Dominican superior then veered back to the case of Foulques de Saint-Georges, arguing that he had been badly treated. King Philip had publicly excoriated inquisitor Foulques and had spent months pressuring the Dominicans in Paris to relieve him of his post—which they eventually did. Now the head of the Dominicans in Languedoc had dredged up the affair all over again, as if to remind the king of how much the friars had enraged and defied him two years earlier. Possibly Brother Guilhem could not let any slight to his organization pass without comment. Or perhaps somewhere in a single-minded fanaticism lay a belief that he could change the monarch’s mind, make him view things the correct—Dominican—way. Whatever his reasoning, Brother Guilhem had shown himself devoid of diplomatic instinct, and his presentation turned out to be as ineffective as Picquigny’s, which he had so adroitly sabotaged.

  Bernard Délicieux then rose to speak. No doubt all in attendance expected, with either dread or delight, a performance worthy of his reputation. Once again the friar of Carcassonne did not disappoint.

  He began by picking away at something Brother Guilhem had apparently said either in his oration or at an earlier meeting. The head of the Dominicans in Languedoc had admitted there could be no more than forty or fifty heretics in all of the country around Carcassonne and Albi. Why then, Bernard asked, was an inquisition necessary? Why the horrendous architecture of repression, making multitudes unhappy, if there was only a handful of heretics still out there? Why were those innocent men of Albi still incarcerated? The king, Délicieux argued, was wasting resources, creating ill will, giving the impression of approving a brotherhood bent on prolonging pain, even as their provincial in Languedoc admitted that heresy was a fast-vanishing problem.

  At this point, Bernard switched from extemporaneous commentary to the rhetorical assault he would have prepared in advance. Up until this moment, Bernard had delivered his tirades solely for the edification of the laity, the townspeople and villagers of Languedoc and the king and his court in France. At this meeting he was face-to-face with the people he wished to destroy and who wished to destroy him. He condemned the inquisition in front of the inquisitors. While Bernard’s speech in Toulouse went well beyond the particularities of his story to teach a universal lesson in courage, within the constraints of his own times it was a remarkable moment. One can only imagine the expression of amazement—perhaps even admiration—on the face of Guillaume de Nogaret, that master of backroom treachery, as the Franciscan launched his very public attack.

  At his trial Bernard recounted the scene. On October 10, 1319, some fifteen years after this speech, after being tortured and knowing full well that he might face death, he continued to stand by what he argued to the king, his court and the inquisitors:

  I said that if Saint Peter and Saint Paul were alive today and that if that they were accused of adoring the Perfect, and if they were proceeded against as certain inquisitors have proceeded against so many people, they would have no way of defending themselves. Because if they were asked about their faith, they would respond as Doctors and Masters of the faith. But when they were told they had adored the Perfect, they would ask who had said this—and they would be given only last and Christian names so common that Saints Peter and Paul would say, “We do not know them. Tell us where they’re from, when they came here, where they went, what their language is, their appearance, their occupation?” And they would be told nothing that would allow them to know who were the Perfect that they had been accused of adoring. If they then asked when this adoration took place, they would not be told the day, the month or the year; if they asked the names of the witnesses, they would not be given them, and no one could say that these most holy apostles could defend themselves of such a charge before such men, all the more so since anyone coming to their defense would be suspect of supporting heresy. . . . So that’s what I said then.

  The manner of delivery of Bernard’s speech in Toulouse, given his flair for the theatrical, must have been incandescent. In the sober setting of the trial fifteen years later, he spoke dispassionately, clearly describing the workings of an infernal machine. The imposture of the Carcassonne inquisition, worthy of Kafka, was fully laid bare. And in portraying the two greatest figures of early Christianity as powerless before the inquisitor, the Franciscan’s argument strangely anticipates Dostoevsky, before whose Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov even Jesus Christ himself is helpless. Paul, Peter, and Jesus could have done nothing before the implacable injustice of inquisition.

  The meeting in Toulouse was not going the way the king and his ministers had planned. The archbishop of Narbonne held up a hand to silence Délicieux. Gilles Aycelin, who at Senlis had acted for the king in investigating the competing claims of Jean de Picquigny and Foulques de Saint-Georges, rose to his feet and looked directly at the fiery Franciscan. The king, he reminded the friar, had addressed the problems brought to his attention. He had taken the temporal offices away from Bishop Bernard de Castanet and made sure the unsatisfactory inquisitors were removed from office.


  Speaking as the king’s proxy, Archbishop Aycelin was, in effect, telling Bernard Délicieux what Philip and his counselors had already decided to do. The inquisitors, Aycelin continued, would still be under the control of their local bishops. No arrests would be made without the assent of parties outside the Dominican order. An inquisitor could no longer act with impunity. The senior royal officials of the district had to be consulted and give their approval for any proceeding to move forward.

  Bernard realized that the proposed policy constituted a return to the concessions won in the 1290s by the lawyers of Carcassonne. It notably did not wrest control of the inquisition from the Dominicans. The Wall would stand. And the men and women transferred from the Dominican dungeon the previous summer would remain incarcerated.

  Surely these conditions were satisfactory to the people of Albi and Carcassonne, the archbishop concluded. The inquisition, which had been charged by the Holy Father to stamp out the leprosy of heresy, would be surrounded by safeguards to ensure that no further abuse was possible.

  The bishop sat down. The king, Nogaret, and the entire court looked at the lone figure in front of them. The message delivered by this collective gaze was simple: Délicieux should step back. Too much was at stake here. The king had narrowly escaped excommunication in his struggle with the late pope. The new pontiff had to be given a peace offering. The French monarchy could not attack the Dominicans when a Dominican wore the papal tiara. The politics of the day were complex. There were rebels in Flanders, restive burghers in different reaches of the kingdom, problems of finance and diplomacy, swirling intrigues, rumors of war. The king could not afford another major crisis.

  Bernard Délicieux considered his options. Picquigny had crumpled when challenged, and his message went unheard. The Franciscan had labored so long and so hard to have the Dominicans ousted—and now that prospect was slipping beyond his grasp. He knew only too well that Pope Benedict XI, as a Dominican, would one day come after him, and that this moment was his last chance. A streak of fanaticism may have played in his mind as well, leading him to think that with one more effort he could bring the king around to see things from the correct—Franciscan—point of view.

  He resumed his speech. After the first few words, the assembly knew that Délicieux had chosen to ignore Aycelin’s conciliatory message and the unspoken supplication of those now looking at him. His trust in the wisdom of the king and his court, Bernard stated bluntly, was shaken. In deciding this policy, they were acting neither competently nor rationally. If the inquisition was so blameless, he asked his king rhetorically, then why should there have been a need to take any action at all? He turned witheringly sardonic: if the inquisitors were just and good men, then they should be rewarded. Even at his trial, in recollecting this speech, he could not resist sarcasm, saying that these supposedly good inquisitors “should be congratulated in many ways, honored like golden candelabras of the church, to the sound of trumpets.” Why shame them in the people’s eyes by installing bishops to look over their shoulders?

  But if they had done wrong, then what precisely was the point of these half measures? Evil men will evil do. When a doctor was faced with a sick man, Bernard argued, he had to determine the type of disease afflicting his patient. Common sense called for the physician to find out exactly what was wrong and then take drastic action to combat the illness. And Languedoc was gravely ill, Bernard declared; the sickness of Dominican inquisitors afflicted the land, a sickness that demanded a drastic cure. His voice rose, his temper flared.

  It was a wonder, he exclaimed, that the people of Languedoc did not rise up against the French who ruled them and shout as one: “Get out!” The last he spat out in the langue d’oc.

  The king started in anger. Nogaret crossed the room and stood before the friar, who was to speak no more. Délicieux had said the unforgivable. He had committed the trespass of Bernard Saisset, treating the sacred rule of Philip over Languedoc as a foreign occupation. Jean de Picquigny, who had been the Franciscan’s midwife in court manners at Senlis, must have looked at his protégé in astonishment. He had worked so diligently on behalf of the people of Albi and Carcassonne—he must have wondered if Bernard’s talk of the king’s loyal subjects in the south had all been a tale told to a fool.

  The Franciscan regained his seat. He added his voice to the chorus of whispers that followed the abrupt termination of his speech. He sought the ear of a man of Albi who was to speak next, Arnaud Garsie, his longtime confederate and fellow advocate in Senlis. Arnaud, whose mocking likeness still adorned the Dominican convent in Albi, must have winced as Bernard whispered to him an outlandish accusation and instructed him to repeat it in front of the king. The Franciscan believed it to be his trump card, to be played as part of a last-ditch effort to shake the king from his complacency about the Dominicans. Since Bernard had shattered a taboo about southern resentment toward the northerners, he no doubt thought he could bring up again the forbidden topic of Flanders. The extraordinary meeting held one more extraordinary surprise

  Arnaud bowed to his monarch, who knew him from Senlis, then announced that the king’s inner circle harbored a traitor. He pointed to a Dominican, Brother Nicolas de Fréauville, the king’s personal confessor and one of the most powerful men at court. Arnaud had it on good authority that Brother Nicolas was in the pay of the Flemish rebels. Every word uttered in court about the king’s plans to put down the rebellion reached their ears, thanks to their spy in high places.

  Stupefaction greeted this revelation. The king ordered one of his ministers to question Arnaud, which was done in a tone of peremptory skepticism. The brave man of Albi did not reveal the source of this tale—Bernard Délicieux, who had in turn heard it from a high-placed cardinal in Paris the year before. Arnaud did admit, however, that the story of Fréauville’s alleged treachery was hearsay, which earned him a swingeing rebuke from the king. He too would not be allowed to speak again.

  A last speaker from Castres, Peire Pros, finished the proceedings, but the serial uproars of the day worked to drown out whatever he said. King Philip had heard quite enough for one afternoon: first Picquigny threatening him with a Flemish-like revolt; then the Dominican returning to the matter of Foulques de Saint-George; then the insolent Franciscan daring to lecture his king on the nature of his rule and even suggesting he ruled illegitimately; and this last outrage, sordid gossip about his confessor from a desperate, unscrupulous man. The impassive roi de marbre must have shown his displeasure for all to see. The king’s patience had been tried to its limits—from the moment he entered Toulouse, tribulations had beset him. His decision was made and it would be enforced.

  A sad, almost comical, cavalcade crossed the wintry countryside in the opening months of 1304. The trees were barren, the vineyards a parade ground of shriveled stumps, their last spindly growths already snapped off and stored to dry for the fire in the hearth. A few dark stands of cypress bent under the February wind. The king and queen, accompanied by their retinue of lords, ladies, and ministers, took to the old Roman thoroughfares and rode through the villages of Languedoc to hold court in each of its major towns. Following them, at a safe distance, came a swarm of petitioners and hangers-on, hoping to get the ear of the powerful for a few precious minutes. Among these were the men of Albi, Castres, and Carcassonne and the disappointed Franciscan, mulling over what to do next.

  The first stop was Carcassonne, which had been decked out in finery to celebrate the arrival of the royal couple. The little king, Hélie Patrice, seems to have learned nothing from the real king’s displeasure at the antics of his subjects in Toulouse on Christmas Day. Annoyingly overfamiliar, Patrice dogged the king’s heels as the monarch approached his troubled city, offering advice and veiled threats. One witness claimed Patrice said to the king, “My lord, you must do us justice quickly, else we will turn toward another lord.” Even if he had not been so foolish to say this, which was a variant of the Franciscan’s ill-advised cry of “Get out,” Patrice could not have
been a welcome presence to the king. Philip’s seneschal had told him that Patrice’s militia controlled the Bourg and showed no aversion to disarming the king’s officers and roughing them up. And if, as is speculated, the little king rose from the lower ranks and usurped the power of local nobles and respectable burghers, Philip would have been even less well disposed to have the ruffian as constant companion.

  The inevitable at last occurred at the governor’s palace of the Cité. As Philip mounted the monumental stairway, an exasperated Patrice yelled out from the bottom, “Lord! Lord! Have pity on your wretched city which suffers so!”

  The king turned and addressed his sergeants, gesturing toward Patrice and his men: “Throw them out of here!” Disgusted, Patrice got on his horse and rode down to the Bourg.

  The townspeople awaited the good news of his royal interview. Instead, Patrice ordered them to rip down the garlands and banners and tear them apart, to give this king no sign that his subjects bore him any love whatsoever. Carcassonne was soon as bare as its surrounding orchards and vineyards. The queen subsequently made the conciliatory gesture of visiting the men of Albi held in custody in the Cité, but no move was made to release them. Still, that the queen of France had visited these prisoners, convicted sympathizers of heresy, was remarkable in and of itself, proof that the monarch still believed what Bernard Délicieux had argued. The problem lay in the fact that the king was not going to do anything about it at this time.

  Further indignities followed as the cavalcade set off again toward Narbonne, then Béziers. Witnesses at Bernard’s trial tell a strange tale of two large silver vases, paid for by civic subscription, that were to be offered to the king and queen as a token of the city’s gratitude. They had not been ready in time for the monarchs’ stay at Carcassonne, but the silversmiths delivered them to the townsmen during the journey eastward. At Béziers, Queen Joan accepted hers. Philip did not—and then ordered his lady to give back her vase. The men of Carcassonne now looked, as one historian notes, “ridiculous.”