The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  The meeting with Peyre-Cavaillé forged in Geoffroy d’Ablis a steely new determination. Circumspection in the conduct of inquisition was no longer an option: to act timorously was now a dereliction in the exercise of his sacred function. There had to be a return to the days of burning. From that moment on, and for the rest of his career, the inquisitor at Carcassonne mounted a ferocious offensive against spiritual dissent. He would soon be joined by inquisitors of even grimmer determination and greater talent than his own: the Dominican Bernard Gui in Toulouse and the Cistercian bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier. Together, d’Ablis, Gui, and Fournier became avengers of scandalized orthodoxy through a sustained and coordinated campaign of arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, torture, punishment, and execution. The indignities visited upon the inquisition by the rage carcassonnaise were but pinpricks in comparison to the injuries now in store for Languedoc.

  Campaigns, like wars, have starting points. The inquisitor’s began in September 1305. Summoned to Limoux by the treacherous Peyre-Cavaillé, two Good Men of the Cathar revival—one of whom was Peire Autier’s charismatic son—fell into the trap set by Geoffroy d’Ablis. In the same period, squads of soldiery accompanied by Dominicans made raids on dozens of dwellings and manors in the countryside. One of the most remarkable moments in this opening salvo of repression concerned Verdun-en-Lauragais, a village of several hundred souls, where the entire populace was arrested and thrown into the Wall of Carcassonne. Restraint was no longer required. Contrary to what the king’s churchman, Archbishop Gilles Aycelin, had smoothly assured Bernard Délicieux at the great disputation in Toulouse the preceding year, the king no longer placed a brake on the inquisition. There was no authority to oversee the Dominicans; there was only complicity.

  D’Ablis knew also that the Bourg would offer no resistance whatsoever to his vigorous persecution. His enemies had been silenced by the royal seneschal. From a gibbet high above the waters of the Aude swung the lifeless bodies of Hélie Patrice and fourteen other consuls of Carcassonne. Found guilty of treason, they had been hanged on September 20, 1305, after being flogged mercilessly and then tied to horses, to be dragged facedown through the streets to the gallows. They would be left there for weeks, to edify the Bourg. Not everyone would turn his head in revulsion. In the words of an eminent historian: “As Bernard Gui observes with savage exultation, those who had croaked like ravens against the Dominicans were exposed to the ravens.”

  Gui’s happiness, however, was not complete. For among the eyeless corpses submitting to the pecking of the crows, there was no man of the cloth dangling in the wind, no Franciscan.

  Remarkably, the return in force of the inquisition did not spell the end for Bernard Délicieux. Nor did the exposure of the plot to secede from France. Nor did the enmity of Pope Benedict XI. Given this array of menace, Bernard’s itinerary from 1304 to 1310 can be seen as a feat of survival as unlikely as his brave but ultimately failed campaign to chase the inquisitors from Languedoc.

  The most immediate threat was dealt with first. The Franciscans had proved dilatory in executing the pope’s order to haul Délicieux to Rome, perhaps because the pontiff was a Dominican, but more likely because Brother Bernard was a valued and respected member of the Order, protected by senior friars and cardinals and revered by common man and wealthy burgher alike. When, at last, on July 6, 1304, the vicar of the Franciscan provincial of Aquitaine arrived in Carcassonne to arrest him, Bernard, guarded by Patrice’s rough-and-ready militia of the Bourg, simply refused to go with him. Given his quarry’s muscular entourage, the vicar thought better of insisting.

  The next day, the heretofore hale Dominican pope dropped dead, at age sixty-three, of acute dysentery, in Perugia. Luck had intervened, spectacularly—too much luck, his enemies would say at his trial fifteen years later. Bernard had been heard predicting Benedict XI’s untimely demise in the spring of 1304. Charged with the pope’s murder, Bernard had to convince his judges he had no hand in the felicitous disappearance of his greatest enemy.

  Whatever the truth behind the rumor, the sudden demise of the Dominican pope—and the subsequent vacancy of the Holy See—took the pressure off Bernard at precisely the moment when he needed to concentrate on an even graver threat: the wrath of King Philip the Fair. In the fall of 1304, ominous news came from Brother Durand de Champagne, Queen Joan’s Franciscan confessor: the king had caught wind of the aborted plot to make Prince Ferrand of Majorca sovereign of Languedoc. Who informed Philip is not known, but the sheer number of people aware of the plot, not least King Jaume II, suggests he heard it from multiple sources.

  On receiving this distressing intelligence, Bernard Délicieux went on the offensive. True to form, he urged a subscription from the burghers of Carcassonne, Albi, and other towns to fund a delegation. It would be headed by him and travel north to confront the king and beat down the accusations. The townspeople, many of them innocent of involvement in the plot yet terrified of indiscriminate royal vengeance, raised the funds for Brother Bernard’s last mission to the north.

  Once at court in October 1304, the men of the south immediately entreated Brother Durand to intervene with the queen on their behalf. According to testimony given at Bernard’s trial, they somewhat impudently requested that she elicit some pillow talk from her husband that night as to whom, exactly, he had in his sights. Queen Joan obliged, reporting the next morning that only the men of Carcassonne had been accused. Delighted to be off the hook, the men of Albi packed up and went home. They were free—though they, innocent or guilty, would later have to pay a huge bribe to Jean d’Aunay, the corrupt seneschal of Carcassonne, to squelch any further investigation of them.

  Uncertainty shrouds the question of whether Bernard ever saw the king, or when the men of Carcassonne returned to the south. However, during the winter of 1304–5 the king did not lift a finger to punish the plotters. Hélie Patrice and his doomed fellows went about their business in the south, unaware of the ugly fate awaiting them the following summer. Bernard seems to have stayed in Paris, untouched and, in all likelihood, engaged in rallying surreptitious support at court for his survival.

  There are several possible explanations for the curious royal inaction. The king simply may have been too busy with the various crises besetting the kingdom to deal with a quixotic plot that had failed before even getting off the ground. Royal distraction—which had been Bernard’s bane at the Estates General of 1302—may have worked in his favor. Another reason behind the king’s delicacy could have had something to do with the memory of Anagni. Three years previously, the last time the king had arrested a prominent member of the clergy, Bernard Saisset, all hell had broken loose. Bernard Délicieux was nothing if not a prominent clergyman, a hero in some quarters, a respected colleague in others. The great Arnaud de Vilanova, whose advice Philip is known to have solicited in other matters, counted the Franciscan among his peers. Brother Bernard, an important member of the Franciscan order, had friends in high places.

  Thus it is not unreasonable to assume that someone entreated the king for mercy behind closed doors. Perhaps it was Guillaume de Nogaret, then nearing the height of his power, who may have formed a bond with his fellow southerner and who, it is important to note, was one of the few at court with enough clout to stay the king’s hand. But a more plausible conjecture is the queen.

  Throughout the agitation led by Délicieux, he and Jean de Picquigny repeatedly appealed to Queen Joan. Her Franciscan confessor, Durand de Champagne, admired Délicieux; she herself met with him several times, once in the company of the women of Albi. During the visit to Carcassonne in the winter of 1304, she visited their menfolk freed from the Wall but still incarcerated in the Cité. She then graciously accepted the gift of the silver vase, returning it only when ordered to by Philip.

  A compassionate and vivacious woman, admired by her subjects in a way that her husband was not, Joan may very well have been Bernard’s advocate in the royal apartments. If the king made a promise not to harm him, he
upheld it during his years of mourning for the wife he seems to have loved sincerely—for in April 1305 Joan died, age thirty-two, in childbirth, it is thought. The trial and hanging of Hélie Patrice and his allies later that year, significantly, did not take place at the behest of the king. Testimony at Bernard’s trial demonstrates that the seneschal Jean d’Aunay came across the plot independently of any royal instructions and prosecuted its perpetrators. All of which suggests that Bernard’s survival, alone among the prominent plotters of Carcassonne, can be laid at the feet of Queen Joan. Certainly there is something attractive, even romantic, in a whispered vow of clemency from a stern king to his doomed young queen, but however elegant that may be as explanation, the truth of the matter will forever remain elusive.

  Less murkiness clouds the fate of Brother Bernard following his mysterious reprieve. As his name echoed loudly in the torture chambers of the royal seneschal during the trial of Patrice and the others in the summer of 1305, the king had little choice but to take some action with regard to the Franciscan. Tellingly, Philip chose the mildest course possible—he requested that the Franciscans in Paris keep Bernard under house arrest. The gentleness of the punishment suggests, once again, an unspoken commitment on the part of the king. When a new pope, Clement V, was finally chosen in the autumn of that year, Délicieux was moved to the custody of the papal court and the charges against him were eventually dropped.

  As events transpired, Bernard’s new captivity did not mean exile to Rome. His change of fortune came during an epochal moment in the history of the Church. The riotous influence of urban mobs and rival sister cities in the affairs of Rome finally took its toll, and the rising power north of the Alps could no longer be resisted. For the next seventy years, starting in 1309, the papacy was to be French, centered near the mouth of the Rhône in the Comtat Venaissin, a patchwork of feudal principalities held by the pope and his vassals. In choosing Avignon as his capital, its population (five thousand or so) paltry even in comparison to other towns of the Comtat, the pope signaled the need for a fresh start and for the complete independence of his institution. In reality, his new lodgings sat squarely in the long shadow cast by Paris, and seven successive vicars of Christ, all of them French, became entwined in the very material affairs of the kingdom. The medieval imperial pontificate was over; a new grasping boomtown rose on the banks of the Rhône.

  The first of the Avignon popes, Bertrand de Got, came from near Bordeaux, from the Gascon nobility whose feudal overlord was, technically, the king of England. As Clement V, he distinguished himself for over-the-top nepotism in an age of nepotism: five of his kinsmen were made cardinals and, on his death, the papal treasury was bequeathed to his family, sparking an unseemly lawsuit from his successor. However magnificently flawed, and unceasingly pressured by Philip and Nogaret in the affair of the Templars and the posthumous persecution of Boniface VIII, Clement seems to have been a judicious man who attempted to steer a middle course through the choppy waters of his fractious Church. He dispatched envoys to investigate the newly invigorated inquisition in Languedoc, to make sure that conditions of incarceration were humane and that there was no overzealousness on the part of Dominican inquisitors electrified by the discovery of the Autier revival of Catharism. As a result of this embassy, dozens of prisoners were released from the Wall, and steps were taken to correct the grotesque conditions of the bishop’s jail in Albi. Clement lifted the excommunication of the deceased Jean de Picquigny. Behind these actions may have been the hand of Brother Bernard, who was present in the curia in the early years of Clement’s papacy.

  Clement did not decide definitively to move to Avignon until 1309, and even then the move was considered provisional. His court traveled around France for four long years. As the curia moved from town to town, Délicieux nipped at the pope’s heels, reminding him of past injustice, calling for the disbanding of the Dominicans. In principle a captive but in reality a free and noisy advocate, Bernard attended the pope’s coronation in Lyon and followed him to Mâcon, Nevers, Bourges, Limoges, Périgueux, and Bordeaux. In Poitiers in 1307, the Franciscan stationed himself outside the pope’s residence in the hope of buttonholing the visiting King Philip. On successive days as the king entered the building Bernard badgered him about injustice done at the trial of Carcassonne and about inquisitorial abuse—and was stonily ignored. Three powerful cardinals, friends and protectors of his, eventually felt compelled to take Bernard aside and tell him in no uncertain terms to let sleeping dogs lie. Do not provoke the king or the pope. Theirs was a clear echo of the moment during the great meeting at Toulouse three years earlier when scores of glances had implored Bernard to step back. It was also a variation of Nogaret’s warning in Béziers in the same year, 1304, to wait until circumstances were ripe. At Poitiers, the combative Franciscan at last stepped back.

  In the years following this retreat, Bernard fought to wriggle out of the tight embrace of the curia, to which he was repeatedly summoned after sojourns in Languedoc. He could not have been a welcome sight to all of the cardinals, especially to those affiliated with the Dominicans. His presence was an affront, a source of painful memories. Bernard could not have been happy as a hanger-on in the acquisitive snakepit of Avignon; his subsequent activity suggests that the spectacle of power helped him come to a decision on how to further his view of the way in which the Church should conduct itself. The king would not help him, the pope took half measures, and his allies in the cities were either dead or cowering in terror. He resolved to take the route he himself had shunned during the days of rage at the turn of the century: to work from within the Church, at ground level, to effect the change he saw necessary. He would adhere to his long-held view of spirituality to work a revolution.

  By the beginning of the second decade of the fourteenth century, Bernard had finally slipped the soft shackles of his confinement. Pope Clement had forgiven him all, as had King Philip. The pope declared any lingering excommunications delivered in the years of strife by angry Dominicans to be invalid. Délicieux was given permission to go to whichever Franciscan convent he pleased.

  The friar returned home to Languedoc. He chose the convent at Béziers. The city was the base of his most powerful cardinal protector in the curia, Bérenger Frédol, and, more important, the rebellious star of the Spiritual Franciscans shone truest there. No quiet retirement, Bernard’s personal itinerary now merged into the larger currents of thought that played themselves out in the effervescent Languedoc of the early fourteenth century.

  * Specifically, expenses incurred for food during his most recent imprisonment in the Wall.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CATHARS AND SPIRITUALS, INQUISITORS

  AND CONVENTUALS

  POVERTY AND SALVATION, or wealth and damnation—for the people of Languedoc, the question burned bright in the soul. The opening of the fourteenth century may have differed considerably from the opening of the thirteenth, as attested by the nature of the crowds on the Ponte St. Angelo, but a constant of the medieval period concerned the welfare of the individual before God. Like their predecessors, Bernard’s contemporaries asked plaintively where their Church had gone in this time of spiritual need. The pope was no longer in Rome, surrounded instead by moneychangers at his temple on the Rhône. The Holy Land was delivered to the infidel, and its protectors, the Templars, had been declared heretics. To some, the promise of the mendicant movement seemed teetering on the verge of collapse. Too many friars were worldly now, their convents and churches as large and lavish as those they had once decried. Brothers were bishops, cardinals, popes, their vow of poverty long forgotten. For the clear-eyed in Languedoc the friars were agents of hatred and cruelty who hunted, maimed, and killed. They said they were saving souls, yet they promised fire and brimstone from their pulpits. The Church and its robed brotherhoods seemed concerned first and foremost with spreading fear, all in the service of inculcating a cowed obedience. However much the fruits of labor satisfied, the ties of family comforted, the pleas
ures of love transported, the streets of the city stimulated, people were told again and again to be afraid: of God, of Jesus, of Hell, of Purgatory, of the Church, of inquisitors. Of strangers. Of neighbors. Of their own humanity.

  For some the reappearance of the Cathars came as a ray of light. The Good Men were, indisputably, holy and poor. They fasted often, comforted the sick and the dying, asked for nothing in return. Their message, unlike the threats and warnings thundering under the great naves of Languedoc, was hopeful: There was no Purgatory, no Hell. One was fated to take on a material tunic in successive lives until ready to find the moral fortitude necessary to join the ascetic ranks of the Good Men and Good Women in one’s final incarnation on this earth. Then one would join the Good God in eternal bliss. So in the meantime believers should be kind to one another, live well, find contentment, and ignore the lies. The ferocity of the inquisitor was proof of the rightness of the cause. As Peire Autier preached:

  I’ll tell you why they call us heretics. It’s because they hate us. And it’s no wonder that they hate us, since they hated Our Lord, whom they persecuted along with his apostles. We are hated and persecuted because we firmly uphold His law. Those who are good and wish to remain true to their faith must let themselves be crucified and stoned to death when they fall into their enemies’ power, just as the apostles did.

  The magnificence of the Church was a siren song of delusion; praying before its statues was an occupation for fools. “Those who adore such images are idiots,” Autier said bluntly. “Because they are the same people who made them, those statues, with their axes and metal tools.” As for the cross, the object of veneration, the instrument of Christ’s martyrdom, the ever-present icon of a living faith, the Cathars saw it as a Roman instrument of torture and nothing more. The cross did not symbolize Christianity, it symbolized death—which was Rome’s message, not that of Jesus. When asked by a shepherd whether it was wrong to make the sign of the cross, if only to deflect suspicion, Autier advised: “Oh no, it’s a fine thing. In summer, it’s a very good way of shooing the flies away from your face. As for the words, here’s what you can say: ‘This is my brow, this is my beard, this is one ear and this is the other.’ ”