The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  * a pivotal event: The extinction of the Hohenstaufen is not just marked as a key event in German history. There is a remarkable passage on its significance in Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World, trans. Janet Sondheimer, New York, 1961, an enduringly useful one-volume overview of the Middle Ages. Heer writes (p. 331): the Middle Ages. Heer writes (p. 331):

  The public execution of the last of the Hohenstaufen in the market-place of Naples was a revolutionary event, without precedent in the history of Europe; until it had happened anyone would have said it was unthinkable. In terms of “the logic of history” it may seem the “right” conclusion to the papal revolt against the Emperor. It was only papal approval and the tenor of papal propaganda over the past two centuries that made the deed possible. The Popes, by diminishing the status of imperial descent, had prepared the scaffold for future princes of noble birth (or of “divine descent,” according to popular belief ): for the execution Charles I and Louis XVI. It was fruitless for Popes of more modern times, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, to set themselves up as the sworn allies of “Christian princes” in the task of crushing “infamous rebellions” instigated by heretics and “the scum of society”; it was fruitless for papal ideologists to try to breathe fresh life and meaning into post-revolutionary attempts at restoration. The Papacy had encompassed the destruction of the Empire only by a revolutionary breach of the continuity of European history; the transformation of the popular image of the Christian monarch from a sacred and sacrosanct figure into a diabolical object of execration had called for the most blatant techniques of propaganda and political manoeuvering. Scarcely a generation elapsed after the execution of Conradin before the Pope was forced to pay the first instalment of the penalty for having degraded and dishallowed the highest office in Christendom apart from his own. In 1303 Boniface VIII was taken prisoner at Anagni by William of Nogaret, Councillor to Philip IV of France. Subjected to all manner of ignominy, the Pope’s pride and self-confidence were mortally wounded and he died in Rome only a few weeks after his release.

  * “the Church’s eldest daughter”: The expression, in the original, is la fille aînée de l’Eglise. It got a lot of play from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries as factions in the French church disputed its place vis-à-vis Rome. The party who saw their church as a national one were known as the Gallican wing, while those who looked south to the Pope for guidance formed the ultramontane wing, that is, “beyond the mountains”—the mountains in question being the Alps. In the square in front of the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris, recently made famous by Dan Brown, there is a fountain bearing statues of four prominent Gallican churchmen. They face the four cardinal points of the compass. Thus, with the usual Parisian love of wordplay, the fountain is known as Les Point(s) Cardinaux, which means “the cardinal points” with the silent s, but means “the not-at-all cardinals” (point cardinaux) without the s. As the four great Gallican churchmen favored the national church, their respective popes, all of whom had reason to be annoyed with them, never made them cardinals.

  * His biographers: I have used, primarily, Jean Favier, Un Roi de Marbre, Philippe le Bel, Enguerran de Marigny, Paris, 2005, and Joseph R. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, Princeton, 1980.

  * “a captious, sternly moralistic”: E. A. R. Brown, “The Prince Is Father of the King: The Character and Childhood of Philip the Fair of France,” Medieval Studies, 49, 1987, pp. 282–334.

  * the French king’s holdings . . . were dwarfed: Lucien Romer, A History of France, trans. A. L. Rowse, New York, 1953, p. 107.

  * penned by Giles of Rome for Philip the Fair in 1286: Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300–1450, London, 1996, p. 133.

  * another political thinker, Marsilius of Padua: Canning, Political Thought, pp. 154–61. 27 “O God, who has sown discord”: A good single volume on the fascinating rise of the secular class is Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1978.

  * a well-attended conclave of Cathars: Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy, London, 2000, pp. 17–31.

  * his grandfather had been a Cathar sympathizer: Yves Dossat, “Guillaume de Nogaret, petit-fils d’hérétique,” Annales du Midi, 53, 1941, pp. 391–402.

  * Philip’s expensive new palace: Nogaret did not live to see the building finished. Parts of it are incorporated into the magnificent Conciergerie complex on the Ile de la Cité, including the great hall.

  * Together they hatched extraordinary schemes: Information on the machinations of Philip and Guillaume is drawn from Favier, Roi de Marbre, and Strayer, Philip the Fair.

  * which Philip’s men tossed into the fireplace: The bull-tosser was Robert of Artois. Martin Gosman, Les Sujets du Père: Les Rois de France face aux Représantants du Peuple dans les Assemblées de Notables et les États Généraux 1302–1615, Leuven, 2007, p. 155.

  * the document he held had been edited by royal lawyers: Gosman, Les Sujets, p. 161.

  * The pope . . . might even be a heretic: Lambert underscores the novelty of a king charging a pope with heresy (Medieval Heresy, p. 198). He then goes on to detail Nogaret’s cynical use of the inquisition in declaring the Templars heretics.

  * Many were brave enough to go: Boniface’s and Philip’s actions at this time are well discussed in a small, annotated anthology of articles: Charles T. Wood, ed., Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII, New York, 1967. Of Boniface’s summons to the French clergy, Wood writes in a footnote (p. 52): “Boniface had summoned seventy-eight French bishops; thirty-six actually attended. That so many obeyed the papal summons is largely explained by the extent to which men viewed Courtrai [the Golden Spurs] as a judgment of God on Philip’s policies. This was particularly the case because the three men Boniface had specifically accused of being the cause of royal hostility—Pierre Flote, Robert of Artois, and the Count of St. Pol—were all slain on the field of battle.”

  * a military catastrophe dealt to Philip: The Battle of the Golden Spurs, July 11, 1302.

  * “E le cole, e le cape!”: The chronicler is William of Hundlehy, “William of Hundlehy’s Account of the Anagni Outrage,” trans. H. G. J. Beck, Catholic Historical Review, 32, 1947, pp. 200–201.

  * “new Pilate” . . . “two thieves”: Dante, Purgatorio, xx, 87–90.

  * the same Dante who despised Boniface: On Dante’s going into exile, banished from Florence by Charles of Valois, the pope’s ally: banished from Florence by Charles of Valois, the pope’s ally:

  As he rode on, shocked and anguished, he reviewed in his mind what had occurred. He knew that Charles of Valois had been charged to respect the constitution of Florence and to function justly as peacemaker. It was now obvious that he had had no intention of doing so. This was deliberate treachery and Dante would later refer to him contemptuously as being “armed with the lance of Judas.” But he saw clearly now that the real villain was Pope Boniface, who had all along schemed and intrigued to gain control of Florence, even to the point of preventing Dante, the most able of the deputies, from putting his fellow Whites on their guard. A fierce hatred, never to be extinguished, flared up in Dante’s heart and would ultimately fuel the great work he was to write.

  Barbara Reynolds, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, London, 2006, pp. 43–44.

  * a council of the Church: Council of Vienne, 1311–12. The council, called by Clement V, dealt primarily with disbanding the Templars and dealing with the Spiritual Franciscans.

  * a delegation arrived before the King Philip the Fair: This occurred in Senlis, in October of 1301.

  3. THE HOLY OFFICE

  * Its mass of old stone and fortification fires the imagination of the susceptible: Never once have I visited the Cité in the summertime without coming across little boys dueling with plastic swords in the principal square. For all I know, they could be municipal employees.

  * Bastide St. Louis: On its fourteenth-century reconstruction: Louis Fédié, Histoire de Carcassonne, ville basse et cité (orig. pu
b. circa 1890), Nîmes, 2000, pp. 98–103.

  * England’s Black Prince: Known in his lifetime (1330–1376) as Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales. Commanded, at age sixteen, one of three English divisions at the Battle of Crécy (1346), then was victorious again at Poitiers (1356), this time as the brilliant commander in chief.

  * older medieval Bourg: A clarification is necessary here, which I thought too tiresome to include in the main text. Prior to 1240, there had been a hodgepodge town in this area. When the last of the Trencavels, Raymond, besieged the Cité in an attempt to win back his inheritance at midcentury, the inhabitants of this lower town sided with him. He lost, and French royal revenge was taken. Louis IX (St. Louis) ordered the town razed. This situation obtained for several years until, toward the end of the 1250s, Louis ordered the town rebuilt in a fortifiable, grid-like fashion. It would be populated by burghers, not nobles, beholden to the king. The Cité was royal; the Bourg was to be royal. It was also to be the French king’s main city in Languedoc. At the time the other two main centers of the region, Toulouse and Montpellier, escaped royal control, the former held in arm's-length appanage by the Capetians (it would not become fully French until 1271), the latter held by the Kingdom of Majorca, based in Perpignan (Montpellier would not be French until 1349). Louis thus envisaged two distinct royal Carcassonnes: the military Cité and the commercial Bourg. He endowed the latter with impressive churches, two of which (St. Michel and St. Vincent) still stand; invited in the mendicants; and encouraged commerce. This is the Bourg in which Bernard Délicieux lived, and which the Black Prince destroyed in 1355. Last, Louis’ logic in this matter coincided with his maritime strategy: lacking a port on the Mediterranean, he ordered the construction of the magnificent Aigues-Mortes in the Camargue. Thus the Bourg of Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes stood as testament to his desire to consolidate his hold on the newly acquired lands of the Midi. Fédié, Histoire de Carcassonne, pp. 25–58.

  * a marine infantry parachute regiment: 3e Régiment de Parachutistes d’Infanterie de Marine. Settled in Carcassonne in 1962, at the conclusion of the Algerian War, in which it saw a lot of action. Deployed to southern Lebanon in the late 1970s. As of this writing, elements of the regiment are in Afghanistan. On June 30, 2008, it caused a national uproar during a military demonstration in Carcassonne watched by civilians: a soldier playing a terrorist infiltrated the crowd, toward which eight soldiers then advanced, guns firing. But one of them had mistakenly loaded his assault weapon with live ammo. Result: seventeen wounded, some gravely, including two children. Then, less than two months later, its brother parachute regiment, the 8th, based in nearby Castres, had ten killed and twenty-one wounded in a Taliban ambush in the Uzbin Valley near Kabul on August 18, 2008, the worst single day for the French army since deploying to Afghanistan in 2001. The French, apparently, thought the sector was quiet, not having been informed by their NATO predecessors in the area, the Italians, that the Italian secret services had been paying large bribes to rebel leaders. The event, especially subsequent photos published in Paris Match of Taliban wearing French insignia and uniforms as trophies, set off a political firestorm in France. Together the two incidents, coming one after the other, caused heads to roll at the top of the French military hierarchy.

  * fortress of the royal governor: It is more usually called the Château Comtal, after the Trencavel viscounts who lived in it prior to the Albigensian Crusade. I call it the governor’s (or seneschal’s) fort because that is who resided there in the time of Bernard Délicieux. It is now a museum.

  * as it may have been seven hundred years earlier: There is considerable uncertainty as to whether the right bank of the Aude between the river and the Cité had been built up in Bernard’s time. Certainly we know the Wall and the King’s Mill and several religious buildings were there, but there could have been a type of no--man's-land, or a pastoral area, between the two Carcassonnes that eventually filled up with usual medieval mishmash of huts and lean-tos. Today it is an interesting, arty-immigrant area—www.trivalle-carcassonne.com—hardly ever glimpsed by the three million or so who come to the Cité every year. The neighborhood is also called the Faubourg St. Laurent.

  * attacked here in the hot summer of 1209: For a reconstruction of those dreadful days, O’Shea, Perfect Heresy, pp. 89–103; Michel Roquebert, L’ épopée cathare, 1198–1212: L’ invasion, vol. 2, Toulouse, 1970, pp. 267–278.

  * tabula rasa: The blank slate revealed some of its secrets just prior to the construction of the parking garage in 2007. Archaeologists were allowed in during the winter of 2006–7 to dig up the remains of the convent in order to assess its considerable size and importance in the medieval period. Several dozen sepulchers and skeletons were unearthed—no surprise there, given the outlandish story of Castel Fabre to figure in this present work. The convent stood near the Porte des Cordeliers, with lands between the town’s fortifications and the left bank of the Aude (Cordelier is another name for a French Franciscan, supposedly from the corde liée, or knotted cord, adorning their simple habit). The land there was a fertile floodplain, so the Franciscans had gardens and orchards aplenty. Bernard’s convent was burned to the ground by the Black Prince in 1355; its successor was a victim to France’s sixteenth-century Wars of Religion. By the eighteenth century the place had become a wood and coal market, with the Franciscans living elsewhere in the Bourg. Following the Revolution, it became the place Ste. Cécile, then the Square Gambetta. Agnès Bergeret, Isabelle Rémy, and Hélène Réveillas, “Carcassonne, Le couvent des Franciscains,” Archéologie du Midi médiéval, 25, 2007, pp. 166–170.

  * The placid woad fields of medieval Languedoc: In Bernard’s time, this was a specialty of Languedoc. Indeed, the splendor of Toulouse can be attributed to the revenues of the woad (French: pastel ) trade for cloth dyeing. With the latter-day expansion of Europeans to tropical and subtropical climes, particularly India, and the discovery and commercialization of the “true” indigo plant, which yields the same tincture but in greater concentration, woad cultivation in Languedoc fell off dramatically. (True indigo was later replaced with synthetic dyes.) Still, Languedoc can claim a face-saving victory: the blue of blue jeans is indigo, and the name given its type of cloth, denim, derives from serge de Nîmes, where it was first produced.

  * The year 1229: The Treaty of Meaux-Paris, signed by Count Raymond VII, after a humiliating flagellation at Notre Dame, and by King Louis IX, with his mother, the formidable regent Blanche of Castille, acting in his name. Under its terms, Raymond gave his daughter Joan of Toulouse to the king’s brother Alphonse of Poitiers. The couple thus held Languedoc in appanage for the Capetians, and on their death, childless, in 1271, the region became a part of France proper. Raymond also gave up his lands in Provence, some of them to the papacy, which later became the Comtat-Venaissin in which the Avignon papacy was based (the Church had to fight to wrest these lands of Provence from the crown, only gaining real possession of them in 1274). The last Count of Toulouse was also obliged to found a university in Toulouse in 1229, and to pay its faculty for the first ten years. This institution became a breeding ground of inquisitors.

  * the lady of Lavaur . . . her brother: Respectively, Geralda of Lavaur and Aimery of Montréal. Their mother, after raising her children, became one of the most famous of the Cathar Good Women, Blanche of Laurac. Her three other children also became Good Men and Good Women. Neither the murdered Geralda nor the hanged Aimery, however, had received the consolamentum.

  * no unified inquisition: As mentioned in Usage, there is a scholarly fashion afoot claiming that the Inquisition itself never existed. As there is no institutional paper trail concerning a well-organized, duly chartered inquisition, the argument runs, there was no inquisition, just inquisitors. Richard Kieckhefer, “The Office of Inquisition and Medieval Heresy: The Transition from a Personal to an Institutional Jurisdiction,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46, 1995, pp. 36–61. This does not mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Peop
le at Bernard’s trial—judges, accused, witnesses—referred repeatedly to the inquisition. And Bernard was convicted for interfering with the inquisition. The “Black Myth” of the Inquisition should be countered, not the existence of the inquisition itself.

  * The phantasmagoric uppercase “Inquisition”: To cite all the works propagating this myth over the centuries would require the destruction of too many trees. The best one-volume historical examination, in English, of how inquisition became a byword for evil remains Edward Peters, Inquisition, Berkeley, 1989.

  * leached memorably into popular culture: The two examples given are television’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus and its 1970 sketch, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” and Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver, New York, 1983.

  * Perusal of this more authoritarian past focused on the inquisitio: Peters, Inquisition, pp. 12–17.

  * “formation of a persecuting society”: R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250, Oxford, 2007. This is the latest edition of this landmark book in medieval studies.

  * “Burdened with the weight of oriental apocalyptic literature”: Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, 1984, p. 205.

  * Humbert of Romans . . . On the Gift of Fear: Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 2009, p. 215.

  * A late twelfth-century pope issued a bull: Lucius III, Ad abolendam, 1184.

  * the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215: For an efficient and entertaining account of the momentous and much-studied meeting: Brenda Bolton, “A Show with a Meaning: Innocent III’s Approach to the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Medieval History, 1, 1991, pp. 53–67.

  * the Dominicans had decided to make the world their monastery: Ames, Righteous Persecution, p. 146. She develops this point also made by André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider, Notre Dame, 1993, p. 72.