The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  The jockeying to choose Clement’s successor lasted twenty-seven months, an indecorous pageant of riotous assembly and sordid deal making. The man who at last emerged from the fray was Jacques Duèse, who secured election as John XXII by promising skittish Italian cardinals to move the papacy back to Rome and assuring the conclave as a whole that, as pope, he would defer to their decisions. Of course he had no intention of keeping these promises. A man of Cahors, a town that in medieval times was synonymous with wealth and banking, John immediately took a hard look at Church accounts to ensure sufficient revenues for his person and entourage. Although able, learned, and active as leader, the second Avignon pope embodied the entire episode of the curia’s exile to the Rhône by embracing splendor throughout his pontificate, even to the very end. Inaugurating a new style for papal sarcophagi, John’s costly mausoleum stands as a mini-cathedral of Gothic daring—its stone forest of spires and towers later to be likened by Renaissance critics to “quills upon a fretful porcupine.”

  The new pope, above all else, wanted to put his house in order. Unlike Clement, whose adopted papal name befitted a man capable of compromise and forgiveness, John was impatient with division and disagreement—a trait of character that ensured him a rocky tenure riven with dissension. At the outset of his pontificate, no doubt exasperated by the clamor in the convents, he sought to bring the Spirituals to heel. A quiet phrase in a letter of 1317 summed up his view of the Franciscan imbroglio with deadly simplicity: “For poverty is good, and chastity is greater, but obedience is greatest of all.”

  At the end of April 1317, the dread summons came. The friars of Béziers and Narbonne were to come to Avignon to explain themselves. The pope had heard distressing reports of disobedience from the head of the Franciscan order, a Conventual with no love for his the friar of carcassonne | 185 Spiritual brethren. During the vacancy of the Holy See, attempts to install Conventual abbots in the convents of Béziers and Narbonne had been met with assault and injury. The pope demanded to know what had happened.

  The friars assembled for their journey, no doubt worried about the pope’s intentions. Wisely, given his gifts, they chose Brother Bernard to be their spokesman. For his part, Bernard entrusted his few belongings to a notary of Béziers, in the event his sojourn in Avignon turned out to be protracted. He knew he was taking an enormous risk.

  Fifty-four brothers traveled through Montpellier, Nîmes, and Arles en route to Avignon. At last they arrived at the famous bridge spanning one arm of the Rhône, late on Pentecost Sunday, 1317. The magnificent Palais des Papes that can be seen today was then still a twinkle in the eye of a venal curia, so the Languedoc Franciscans headed toward the door of the episcopal residence, where the pope had his headquarters. They were not admitted.

  It was a warm night and the friars were in a state of nervous excitement. They decided to sleep out in the square before the bishop’s palace. The following day, May 23, the men of Béziers and Narbonne were ushered into the pope’s presence. The audience chamber was packed with great prelates and cardinals as Brother Bernard stepped forward to speak.

  Two eyewitnesses left accounts of what happened next. The hostile witness, a Conventual, claimed that the famous Franciscan launched into an unreasonable and offensive tirade. The friendly witness, Angelo Clareno, a Spiritual, characterized Bernard’s opening remarks as the sweet sound of reason and humility.

  Which version of the event is correct matters not. Where the two men agree wholeheartedly is far more important. Both state that Bernard, early on, was interrupted. Many of his listeners stood up to hurl accusations and abuse at him. There was a storm of indignation, a collective shriek of protest. His past deeds were shouted out in anger; the pope was begged not to listen to the man. The audience turned tumultuous, out of control.

  John XXII signaled his guards. He had a choice: calm the exercised or remove the source of their displeasure. The pope ordered his men to seize Brother Bernard Délicieux. He was to be escorted down to the dungeon, where chains and manacles awaited.

  It had been a setup, a trap. As Bernard left the room, he may have turned back, in his very last instant as a free man, to see the triumphant smiles on the faces of his many enemies. The crows had come home to roost.

  * There were other, competing traditions that divided history into a different number of ages.

  * In the spring of 1304, Bernard predicted the death of Pope Benedict XI, which occurred in the summer of that year. In 1319, while being brought to Carcassonne for his trial, he predicted the early demise of Pope John XXII, who lived another dozen years. For the latter prediction he described to his captors a book of prophecy circulating among Spirituals.

  * At about the same time as these upheavals in Christianity, the Jews of Languedoc, especially on the littoral north and south of Béziers, were engaged in developing the Kabbalah.

  * The story exemplifies the poison spread by inquisition. The operative, Arnaud Sicre, agreed to undertake the treachery if Fournier would restore to him the property confiscated from his heretical mother, Sébélia Peyre, who was burned at the stake.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE TRIAL

  ALONE IN A DANK, dark cell in the dungeons of Avignon, Brother Bernard was beyond the reach of the network of friendships and alliances deployed to protect him in the past. So many were dead and gone. Queen Joan and Jean de Picquigny had vanished long before. More recently, Pope Clement V, King Philip the Fair, and Guillaume de Nogaret had passed. Bernard’s ally and Picquigny’s colleague in reforming Languedoc, Richard Leveneu, was gone as well, his last miserable days spent as a leper in a lazaretto of Béziers—a fate that the reliably unpleasant Bernard Gui celebrated in his memoir. The allies remaining to the Franciscan, the prelates of the Fré-dol family of Béziers, no longer had a voice in the affairs of the Church, as Pope John XXII viewed their complaisance toward Bernard’s Spiritual brethren as a badge of infamy. The leader of the Spirituals, Angelo Clareno, had fled to the relative safety of Italy. As for Bernard’s two brilliant friends, Arnaud de Vilanova had drowned in a shipwreck off Genoa in 1311 and the ever mysterious Ramon Llull died two or three years later, in either Palma de Majorca or Tunis.

  Though Bernard’s enemies now had him under lock and key, the challenge lay in what to do with him, and who should do it. The friar had angered so many in the course of his career that any number of people were eager to rough him up. The Franciscans got to the head of the queue. One of the leaders of the Conventuals, Bonagratia de Bergamo, questioned and tortured Bernard throughout late 1317 on his relation to the Spirituals, over whom the cloud of heresy had now permanently settled. In 1318, while still an agonized captive in Avignon, Bernard heard that four of his companions who made the trip with him from Languedoc had been burned at the stake in Marseille. The inquisitor was Franciscan, his victims Franciscans.

  Among the common people and, especially, the Beguins, news of the gruesome deed caused dismay. Burning a Cathar was one thing; killing a holy friar was quite another. Talk of martyrdom arose, of men who had embraced death rather than renounce their faith, like the saints of old who had sacrificed themselves before the brutish power of pagan Rome. No fool, the pope realized that he had to proceed more carefully from then on, and particularly in the case of Bernard Délicieux. Initial gloating over having landed such a big fish gave way to disquiet, for holding a prisoner of his stature came fraught with danger. Bernard’s web of protection may have been shredded, but his reputation remained intact—and his name was known throughout the entire Midi and beyond, among people of all stations in life. All knew that were he to be burned on pettifogging charges of Franciscan misbehavior unlikely to be understood outside the overheated confines of the convent, Bernard Délicieux would remain as much a threat to authority in death as he ever had been in life.

  Plans were made to snuff him out quietly—and in such a manner that no one could describe the process as a judicial murder or see its outcome as a martyrdom. Bernard’s Conventual tormentor,
Brother Bonagratia, was permitted to continue his cruel games with his captive, but the serious business of engineering the elimination of the prisoner was carried out elsewhere. The first step was taken by Bernard de Castanet, no longer the bishop of Albi but by then a respected member of the curia. During the last months of Cardinal de Castanet’s life in 1317, he drew up the initial list of forty charges against his Franciscan foe. Subsequently, over a period that stretched for months, depositions and evidence were sought from different parties throughout Languedoc by roving papal investigators. A second, more comprehensive list of sixty-four charges was then compiled—by, it is believed, Bernard Gui. An expert in prosecution and a champion of vindictiveness, Gui crafted his charges carefully. By the spring of 1318, the dossiers were ready and the judges, called commissioners in the transcripts, had been chosen. A haggard Bernard was haled before a court in Avignon to answer to the charges on Gui’s masterful list.

  The Avignon investigation, unlike the subsequent and more thorough 1319 trial in Carcassonne, is not rich in documentation. We know some of its activities—particularly the reading into the record of Castanet’s and Gui’s lists of charges—because portions of the proceedings were folded into the larger transcripts of the later and final trial. What can be determined with certainty from the fragments is that the three commissioners—all middle-level clerics with careers to further—had mixed success with the defendant. His enemies seem to have forgotten that, among other things, he was a master tactician. Taking the measure of the monstrous machination that had been building against him during his year of harsh confinement, Bernard refused on numerous occasions to answer to the charges.

  On June 28, 1318, Bernard stood up and sternly proclaimed that the three men before him were not qualified to judge him: “I will not respond to the question . . . because the commissioners are simple men of a lowly station . . . I hereby demand that my judges be strong and powerful officials, cardinals who knew of the inquisition affair during the time of My Lord Pope Clement.” Bernard also said to their faces that they were stooges in the service of his enemies in the cardinalate, particularly the late king’s Dominican confessor, Nicolas de Fréauville, whom he had accused in the Toulouse disputation almost two decades earlier of treasonous activities with the Flemish. These so-called commissioners, Bernard insisted, were unworthy of judging a man of his eminence and sorely lacking in knowledge of what had transpired in Languedoc at the turn of the century. Shrouded by ignorance and inexperience, they could not be trusted to render a fair verdict.

  The friar’s foes, in their scrupulous preparations to bring down such a towering figure with as little commotion as possible, had forgotten one other thing: Bernard knew he was a big fish, and had astutely identified the weaknesses in the pope’s position. Anything less than the appearance of impeccable fairness worked in Bernard’s favor. He had supporters everywhere. A hasty trial conducted by his enemies’ flunkies would not look good at all, no matter how well prepared the paperwork. He demanded to be tried by his peers, churchmen of distinction, in the place where his actions were known, in Languedoc.

  The commissioners, showing their own resolve, did not buckle before the great man’s scorn. They excommunicated him on the spot. To return to the body of Church, Bernard had to agree to cooperate, which, apparently, he did. The historical record then goes dark, with very little in the way of documentation until the hearing of witnesses in Avignon the following spring.

  Despite his grudging cooperation in the face of excommunication, Bernard had nonetheless fired a loud warning shot. Pope John XXII heard it. One can imagine an annoyed but admiring shake of the papal head on learning of Bernard’s insults. Even after months of torture and a year of solitude in the darkness, fed on the meagerest of fare, the friar of Carcassonne was yet a shrewd, dangerous adversary. The seventy-five-year-old pope from Cahors, a no-nonsense town of cash and credit, realized that exceptional men would have to be found to take him down.

  The trial was moved to Languedoc. Lest anyone at that destination dare forget what the pope expected, his letter preceding the transfer stated at the very top:

  Whereas inaction before those who cause harm to others must rightly be odious to all men of good sense, the sanction of justice here must be most severely pursued against those who, although having submitted to the vows of an Order, acted as wolves in sheep’s clothing and wore the raiment of holiness and good works all while seeking the destruction of others through hateful machinations.

  Thus condemned in advance, Bernard was taken from Avignon under guard in late August. His traveling companions, prepped on the nature of the charges against him, tried to elicit damning admissions from him in the course of casual conversation, which they would later repeat at his trial. Bernard, freed from the cold stone of his cell and able to breathe in the warm air of his beloved homeland, became expansive, voluble even, as the journey progressed. He freely admitted to being a Spiritual, versed in Joachite prophecy. He explained to his escort, by means of describing a figure in a book, how John XXII was fated to die soon. He did not take the bait and declare the inquisition corrupt, but he did not hide his feeling that many inquisitors had behaved corruptly. When an interlocutor questioned him about rumors of corruption on his side, about how Jean de Picquigny had accepted bribes to work with the Bourg, Bernard snarled at the man: “You lie through your teeth! Picquigny was a honest man!”

  In early September, an initial audience of the full court was held in Castelnaudary, a town between Toulouse and Carcassonne. The setting proved unsatisfactory, perhaps because a great number of witnesses still to be called resided in Carcassonne. It was, after all, the scene of the crime. The entire retinue—one lone accused man surrounded by a host of hostile guards, notaries, lawyers, and judges—then decamped to the city on the Aude. Bernard was probably not thrown in the Wall there, where he would have had a poignant reunion with the surviving men of Albi, who had never been released. In 1305, when the seditious plot of the Carcassonnais had been uncovered, these poor pawns had been transferred from royal custody in the Cité back to the Wall, where all would eventually die.

  For his captors, however ardently they wished that fate for Bernard Délicieux, the Wall was in all likelihood not the place to confine their celebrated prisoner. For one thing, escapes from that prison were not unknown, especially for high-profile captives with rich and powerful friends. In the days of the Autier revival, four Good Men had managed to escape the Wall through the judicious greasing of palms. Although all were eventually recaptured and burned, and the prison’s corrupt wardens replaced at the behest of Pope Clement’s investigators in 1308, the lesson had been learned—no chances were going to be taken with Brother Bernard.

  Further, the trial was to take place in the Cité, in the bishop’s palace. Between that residence and the fortress of the seneschal stood the headquarters of the inquisition. The baleful registers were hung high on the inner wall of a great round tower of the fortifications there. Its neighboring tower, square in shape, also belonged to the inquisitor; it contained several chambers and, at its base, a handful of cells replete with manacles and other restraints. In the center of this area the torturer plied his trade. As the friar was expected to be available at almost all times during his trial, holding him here was only a matter of convenience, as well as security. This was Bernard’s home in Carcassonne for the last public act of his life.*

  The trial at Carcassonne began on September 12, 1319, and concluded on December 8. For the very first session in the Cité, Bernard was seated in front of his judges. Originally Pope John had named three to preside, but one, the archbishop of Toulouse, had begged off, claiming an administrative burden too great to permit him to do a thorough job. He was politely allowed to shirk the difficult task of tackling Brother Bernard. That left two.

  Of those two, neither was a Dominican. One was an intimate of the pope’s, Raimond de Mostuéjouls, the bishop of St. Papoul, a diocese to the northwest of Carcassonne. He was a reliabl
e, efficient servant of the pope. The other judge came from farther south, from the shadow of the Pyrenees. His diocesan see was Pamiers.

  Bernard Délicieux sat down on that first day under the steady gaze of Jacques Fournier.

  The people of Carcassonne began their autumn of unease. Brother Bernard was back among them at last, but now, for the first time, he was unseen and unheard. Visitors arrived from far and near, summoned to testify at the solemn trial being held in the Cité. The inns of the Bourg reverberated with rumor, as strangers from Perpignan, Albi, Castres, Limoux, and Alet told of what they had seen and what they had said. More common in these months of September and October was the sight of men of Carcassonne crossing the bridge over the Aude and then mounting the path of the Trivalle to the gate of the fortress-city that led to the bishop’s palace. Dozens from the Bourg were called to remember days nearly twenty years distant. As they took their oath to tell the truth, they had to meet the eyes of the defendant, Bernard Délicieux, present in the hall. Almost daily, then, a small drama of reunion took place, between enemies, acquaintances, friends. For some, revenge hung in the air, for slights suffered at the hands of Bernard’s allies so long ago, but so too did compassion, for a great man brought low, ensnared in the awful gears of ecclesiastical justice. Yet this was no inquisition trial. Bernard saw who accused him, heard or read some of their testimony. He knew what the charges against him were. And he was allowed to defend himself, repeatedly, and in writing. Whether the trial was legitimate in the first place is another question entirely.

  The charges against him can today be grouped under four headings: adherence to the Spirituals, treason against Philip the Fair, the murder of Pope Benedict XI, and obstruction of the inquisition.