The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Last, but most important, a word about research. Whatever else one may say about America, here in New England the sheer profusion of great libraries, digital archives, easy access to interlibrary loans and the like is nothing less than world-class, a true example of democracy in action. Many thanks to my research assistant, Jennifer Schneider, for attacking the stacks when I couldn’t. A recent graduate of Brown, Jenny was able to find just about anything at the libraries of her alma mater.

  Elsewhere, the staff at the Fox Point branch of the Providence public library system pulled some rabbits out of their hats, as did the friendly librarians of the Providence Athenæum. And for those mendicant obscurities unavailable anywhere else, I am indebted to Providence College and its research library, its stacks admirably open to the general public. I enjoyed slipping in there, with Brother Bernard hidden in my backpack, for Providence College is the only university in North America run by the Dominicans. It has a good men’s basketball team, the Friars.

  NOTES

  A narrative with a claim to immediacy on events long past necessitates a good deal of notes. As many, but not all, of the details about Brother Bernard’s activities come from his trial, I will point the skeptical reader frequently to Jean Duvernoy’s French translation of the trial transcript. Decisions and inferences made by me and others will also be discussed. Mundane matters of fact found in all his previous biographies will not be cited, as that would put everyone to sleep. Where the biographers differ, however, will be flagged.

  Also cited are sources not directly germane to Bernard, such as, for example, those dealing with the affair of the Templars. And I will also provide additional material in the notes that I could not somehow shoehorn into the main narrative. These digressions, I hope, may lead in a roundabout way to a better understanding of Délicieux and his place in history. Some are amusing, some appalling.

  Bibliographical detail in the notes is provided the first time a work is cited. After that, abbreviated entries are the rule. If you don’t want to lose your temper flipping back through the notes to see where such-and-such a book is first mentioned, save yourself the trouble and go to the bibliography. Last, the publishing date covers the edition I used.

  BROTHER BERNARD

  * Those who commissioned him sought to bolster local pride and regional identity, and to instruct and edify: Tastes changed and the history painting went out of fashion. The most memorable epitaph for the genre came from the savagely witty pen of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) in his story “The Reticence of Lady Anne”: “They leaned towards the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title. A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted ‘Bad News,’ suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to friends of duller intelligence.” The Complete Saki, London, 1998, pp. 46–48. For immediate gratification, the story can be found online: http://haytom.us/showarticle.php?id=119.

  * his three major biographers: Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau, Bernard Délicieux et l’ inquisition albigeoise (1300–1320), Paris, 1877; Michel de Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard Délicieux, O.F.M. Sa lutte contre L’Inquisition de Carcassonne et d’Albi, son procès, 1297–1319,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicam, 17, 1924, pp. 183–218, 313–337, 457–488; 18, 1925, pp. 3–32; Alan Friedlander, The Hammer of the Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Délicieux and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century France, Leiden, 2000. To these larger works must be added two invaluable monographs: Jean-Louis Biget, “Autour de Bernard Délicieux. Franciscanisme et société en Languedoc entre 1295 et 1330,” Revue d’ histoire de l’Eglise de France, 70, 1984, pp. 75–93; Yves Dossat, “Les origines de la querelle entre Prêcheurs et Mineurs provençaux,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 10, 1975, pp. 315–354. These scholars produced other works germane to Bernard’s story, but the five works cited here form the core material, aside from the transcripts of the trial. Their other works, and those of other scholars to treat the story, appear in the bibliography.

  * an American historian undertook the task of collating, transcribing and publishing: Alan Friedlander, Pro–cessus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Délicieux, 3 September–8 September 1319, Philadelphia, 1996.

  * rendered the Latin of the original into a modern vernacular: Jean Duvernoy, Le Procès de Bernard Délicieux 1319, Toulouse, 2001.

  * the memory of Brother Bernard Délicieux: The Franciscan is not universally revered. While inspecting the lower town of Carcassonne (called the Bourg in the main narrative) in the summer of 2009, I entered an old cathedral, St. Michel, which stands more or less unchanged since Bernard’s time. I was alone. I took notes, which I didn’t end up using, on the interior of this fine example of Languedocian Gothic. A figure approached from a side aisle, smiling, thirtysomething, in priestly attire. I asked him about his church, its past and present. He was very affable, knowledgeable, a learned clergyman affiliated with the Dominicans. His edifying explanations drawing to a close, he asked me why I was so interested in the church. I told him I was researching a book on Bernard Délicieux. It was if I had slapped his face with a large, wet fish. He recovered his smile, then snapped in premature parting, “On dit tout et n’importe quoi à son sujet!”—don’t believe what you hear about him.

  1. THE BRIDGE AT ROME

  * the drudges of his Wasteland: The passage is found in T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland: i The Burial of the Dead, 60–64. From T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962, New York, 1963.

  * the Ponte St. Angelo: The beautiful bridge still stands and is reserved exclusively for pedestrians, a measure enacted by Mussolini in the early 1930s.

  * Dante commanded his underworld denizens: Dante, Inferno, xviii 27–32:

  come i Roman per l’essercito molto,

  l’anno del giubileo, su per lo ponte

  hanno a passar la gente modo colto,

  che da l’un lato tutti hanno la fronte

  verso ’ l castello e vanno a Santo Pietro,

  de l’altra sponda vanno verso ’ l monte.

  de l’altra sponda vanno verso ’ l monte.

  I used in the narrative the verse translation of Pinsky, Inferno. It is clear. A more stately, but not altogether transparent, translation of the passage was made by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published to great fanfare in 1867:

  Even as the Romans, for the mighty host,

  The year of Jubilee, upon the bridge,

  Have chosen a mode to pass the people over;

  For all upon one side towards the Castle

  Their faces have, and go unto St. Peter’s;

  On the other side they go towards the Mountain

  The Castle is undoubtedly Hadrian’s mausoleuem, aka the Castel St. Angelo. The Mountain or mount is the Gianicolo (Janiculum), the tall, distant ridge beyond the Borgo of central Rome and another bend of the Tiber. It is not one of the Seven Hills.

  * “Day and night two priests stood at the altar of St. Paul’s”: The chronicler is William Ventura, cited in Paul Hetherington, Medieval Rome: A Portrait of the the City and Its Life, New York, 1994, p. 79.

  * he was moved to undertake his Nuova Cronica: Rome impressed him so much that he thought of Florence: “It was the most marvellous thing that was ever seen . . . Finding myself on that blessed pilgrimage in the holy city of Rome, beholding the great and ancient things therein, and reading the stories and the great doings of the Romans, written by Virgil and Sallust and Lucas and Titus Livius and Valerius and Paulus Orosius, and other masters of history . . . I resolved myself to preserve memorials . . . for those who should come after . . . But considering that our city of Florence, the daughter and creature of Rome, was rising, and had great things before her, whilst Rome was declining, it seemed to me fitting to collect in this volume and new chronicle all the deeds and beginnings of the city of Florence . . . an
d to follow the doings of the Florentines in detail.” Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, viii 36. From translator Rose E. Selfe, Villani’s Chronicle, Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani, London, 1906, p. 321. In this section Villani estimates a crowd of 200,000 pilgrims is present every day of that year in Rome.

  * his massive marble tomb . . . apostolic deputy: Both details in Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias, Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim, New Haven, 2000, pp. 215–16. 13 The expansive pope had called the Jubilee to celebrate the commonwealth of Christendom: Like Christianity itself, the notion of Jubilee is derived from Judaism. The traditional Jewish jubilee, like the timing of the Sabbath, was connected to the number seven. Thus, every forty-nine years—that is, seven times seven years—was a jubilee year. Kessler and Zacharias, Rome 1300, p. 2.

  * a despairing Pope Celestine: Details of the papal politicking are found in many of the books consulted. I found most useful to have at hand: J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, Oxford, 1986; Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, London, 2003.

  * the old man dutifully died: Celestine’s imprisonment and demise had two important consequences: it would be used by Guillaume de Nogaret to accuse Boniface of murder, and in the eyes of radical Spirituals and Joachites, Celestine became the “angel pope” foreseen in apocalyptic prophecy.

  * a newly completed fresco: Kessler and Zacharias, Rome 1300, p. 30.

  * Holy beggars stripped to the waist, fakirs at fairgrounds: The literature on the rise of heresy and the notion of apostolic poverty is very large and very entertaining. The bibliography should be consulted. I especially recommend two excellent one-volume works: R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent, Toronto, 1994; Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, Oxford, 2002.

  * It had excommunicated orthodox proponents of poverty: The Waldenses were the subject of a bull of excommunication issued at Verona in 1184 by Pope Lucius III. The followers of a certain Valdes, or Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyon who gave away all his wordly wealth, the Waldenses were, in fact, no more radical than the Franciscans were at the time of their foundation. Innocent III was shrewd enough to embrace the mendicant movement; Lucius lacked his acumen and needlessly expelled the Waldenses. According to historian Jonathan Wright: “Sometimes people like Valdes were denounced as heretics; sometimes very similar people were lauded as pious harbingers of a new and better age. This only goes to show how hard it was to draw the line between heresy and challenging, acceptable Christianity. There is no better proof of this than the story of Valdes’s close contemporary, Francis of Assisi, who did many of the same things but, instead of being persecuted, ended up being revered as a saint.” Jonathan Wright, Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church, New York, 2011, p. 137.

  * Giovanni Francesco di Bernadone: His second name is thought to have been given him as a token of his father’s respect for France. Francis spoke French and most certainly attended the fairs of Champagne in his father’s company.

  * other sons of affluent traders: C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, London, 1990, p. 248.

  * the Ayyubid sultan, Malik al-Kamil: The remarkable meeting occurred near Damietta in 1219. The sultan was a supremely intelligent man, as proven by his negotiations with Emperor Frederick II (Stupor Mundi), which allowed the latter to take the title of King of Jerusalem and hold the holy city on a fixed-term lease. The arrangement scandalized both Christendom and the lands of Islam, but through it the bloodshed of yet another Crusade was avoided. The two rulers showed exceptional judgment and statesmanship in the matter. For more on this agreement: Stephen O’Shea, Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World, London, 2009, pp. 238–239.

  * hotbeds of recruitment and brotherly achievement: The mendicants were by no means welcomed to the universities with open arms, as the competition for students and their fees, faculty positions, and comfortable quarters was fierce. Guillaume de St. Amour led the charge of the secular faculty in Paris and managed to have the friars expelled for a time. The first half of the 1250s were particularly trying for the friars, as Pope Innocent IV sided with their critics. Their rights and privileges were reinstated by his successor, Alexander IV, in 1256.

  * The saint’s first biographer: Thomas of Celano. For an edifying treatment of the life of this remarkable man: Julien Green, God’s Fool: The Life and Times of Francis of Assisi, trans. Peter Heinegg, San Francisco, 1985.

  * They were discharged from their duties . . . because of their venality: David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis, University Park, PA, 2001, p. 5.

  * the evangelization of Bosnia . . . was held up for several years as Franciscans and Dominicans fought: Dossat, “Les origines de la querelle,” p. 318.

  * metanoia: Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism, p. 239.

  * “the greater jihad”: Islamophobes may be surprised, but the “lesser jihad” is the struggle with others. The struggle with one’s self, in striving in the way of Allah, is considered the greater and more important task.

  * Commercial Revolution: This passage on the vigor of the medieval economy covers ground explored by many historians. For the general reader, I recommend the widely available Joseph and Frances Gies, Life in a Medieval City, New York, 1981, a wonderful evocation of life circa 1250 in Troyes, Champagne. Another, more general treatment is found in Francis Oakley, The Medieval Experience, Toronto, 2005. The chapter “Making and Doing: The Nature of Medieval Economic Life” (pp. 73–107) is a particularly deft introduction to the complex subject.

  * Latin westerners ruled Greek Constantinople: The so-called Latin Empire of Constantinople lasted from 1204 to 1261. The Paleologus family, an old and powerful Byzantine clan, reasserted Greek control after a lengthy siege.

  * The precious number zero: Its promotion in the Latin West is commonly attributed to Fibonacci (1170–1250), the son of a Pisan merchant. He learned of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system during extended stays in Algeria, where his father ran a trading post for the Republic of Pisa. He subsequently became a honored guest at the Sicilian court of the ever-curious Stupor Mundi, Emperor Frederick II.

  2. THE KING’S MEN AT THE DOOR

  * the day of reckoning for the Knights Templar: The Templars have spawned entire libraries of speculative and historical literature. The best of the recent works for the general reader is from the reliably clearheaded Piers Paul Read, The Templars: The Dramatic History of the Knights Templar, the Most Powerful Military Order of the Crusades, London, 1999. The opening of King Philip’s order for their arrest reads: “A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing which is horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear of, a detestable crime, an execrable evil, an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed set apart from all humanity.” Cited in Michael Haag, The Templars: History and Myth, London, 2008, p. 216.

  * the obscene kiss: This involved the rear end of a cat. It was a common charge leveled against heretics, who were thought to perform this particular osculation as part of their nocturnal orgies. Indeed, the word Cathar may not originate from the Greek for pure, katharos, but from the Low German for a cat lover, Ketzer. As for other specifics of the heresy charge: “It was claimed that new initiates were required to deny Christ three times and spit on a crucifix. Then, having stripped naked, they would be kissed on the mouth, the navel, and the spine by their superiors: a foretaste, it was suggested, of the life of sodomy and bestiality that awaited them. A life, so the accusations continued, that was punctuated by the despoiling of sacraments and the worshipping of idols—including jewel-encrusted human skulls.” Wright, Heretics, p. 124.

  * “drink like a Templar”: Alistair Horne, La Belle France, New York, 2006, p. 59: “For centuries after their demise ‘Boire
comme un templier’ was common currency in France, while the old German word Tempelhaus became synonymous with a house of ill repute.”

  * Only very recently has a scholar found in the archives of the Vatican: Barbara Frale, “The Chinon Chart, Papal Absolution to the Last Templar, Master Jacques de Molay,” Journal of Medieval History 30, 2, 2004, pp. 109–134.

  * long-lived monarchs in the Capetian line: Philip II (Philip Augustus) reigned 1180–1223; Louis IX (St. Louis) reigned 1226–1270; Philip IV (Philip the Fair) reigned 1285–1314.

  * Stupor Mundi: Frederick II is a singular figure in European history and has received considerable well-deserved scholarly attention. The modern foundation text of Frederick studies is Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194–1250, trans. E. O. Lorimer, New York, 1957. Norman F. Cantor devotes a chapter to the odd Hitlerian backdrop behind Kantorowicz’s scholarship in his entertaining, if controversial, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century, New York, 1991.

  * the 1268 beheading: With the execution of Conradin, the once-mighty Hohenstaufen line became extinct. The event was romanticized in later centuries in a sort of homoerotic haze. Genre paintings show the beautiful Conradin in the company of his dearest friend, the nineteen-year-old and equally beautiful Frederick of Baden, calmly playing chess in their prison cell in Naples as they are informed that death is imminent.