The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  * When, at last, on July 6, 1304, the vicar of the Franciscan provincial of Aquitaine arrived in Carcassonne to arrest him: Duvernoy, Le procès: charge #49 of the sixty-item accusation drawn up by Gui (p. 45), testimony of Bernard Délicieux (p. 86).

  * the sheer number of people aware of the plot: Among those at the trial, in Duvernoy, Le procès, to have heard of the treasonous plot, aside from Délicieux himself: Arnaud Garsie, who believed King Jaume told Philip of the failed plot (p. 80), Pierre Vital (p. 154), Bernard Amat (p. 154), Jean Marsend (p. 159), Raimond Delpech (p. 161), Albert de Lavalette (p. 167), Philippe Perry (p. 169), Drouin de Montchevrel (p. 170), Arnaud Marsend, who believed Nicolas de Fréauville told Philip of the plot (p. 171), Guillaume Fransa (pp. 185–189), Bernard Trèves (pp. 203–204), Raimond Arnaud-Terré (pp. 209–210).

  * they somewhat impudently requested that she elicit some pillow talk from her husband: Duvernoy, Le procès: testimony of Arnaud Garsie (p. 83) and Guillaume Fransa (p. 186).

  * they, innocent or guilty, would later have to pay a huge bribe to Jean d’Aunay: Duvernoy, Le procès: testimony of Arnaud Garsie (p. 81) and Bernard Fenasse (p. 183).

  * The great Arnaud de Vilanova, whose advice Philip is known to have solicited in other matters: Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard Délicieux, O.F.M.,” 17, p. 206.

  * But a more plausible conjecture is the queen: Friedlander, in The Hammer (pp. 223–224), is of the same opinion.

  * Testimony at Bernard’s trial demonstrates that the seneschal Jean d’Aunay came across the plot independently of any royal instructions: The seneschal’s interrogations have not survived. But witnesses at Bernard’s trial revealed that Jean d’Aunay stumbled across the plot when Guillaume Brunel, a Carcassonnais called to testify about Bernard’s revolt, became so nervous and agitated that the shrewd seneschal offered him immunity if he would reveal the reason for his unease. Duvernoy, Le procès: Testimony of Albert de Lavalette (p. 167) and Bernard Trèves (p. 204).

  * a new grasping boomtown rose on the banks of the Rhône: The poet Petrarch, writing from the city at the height of the Avignon papacy in midcentury, famously confided his disgust to a friend: “Now I am living in France, in the Babylon of the West . . . Instead of holy solitude we find a criminal host and crowds of the most infamous satellites; instead of soberness, licentious banquets; instead of pious pilgrimages, preternatural and foul sloth; instead of the bare feet of the apostles, the snowy coursers of brigands fly past us, the horses decked in gold and fed on gold, soon to be shod with gold, if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury. In short, we seem to be among the kings of the Persians or Parthians, before whom we must fall down and worship, and who cannot be approached except presents be offered.”

  * He dispatched envoys to investigate the newly invigorated inquisition: This investigation of 1307–8 was conducted by two prelates favorable to Bernard’s cause: Bérenger de Frédol, his longtime protector from Béziers, and, interestingly, Pierre de la Chapelle-Taillefer, the former bishop of Toulouse so scathingly criticized by Bernard Saisset for being a Parisian. It seems that the northern bishop sided with the south in the matter of the inquisition and had perhaps gone native. This was also the investigation that uncovered Bishop Castanet’s anti-onanistic legislation.

  * Three powerful cardinals, friends and protectors of his, eventually felt compelled to take Bernard aside: Bérenger de Frédol, who would shelter Bernard in Béziers, Pietro da Colonna, of the family that had raided Anagni alongside Guillaume de Nogaret, and a cardinal of Bruges, Etienne de Suisy. Testimony of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 89.

  * Pope Clement had forgiven him all, as had King Philip: The king pardoned Bernard at Chartres in 1310, according to Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard Délicieux, O.F.M.,” 17, p. 463.

  19. CATHARS AND SPIRITUALS, INQUISITORS AND CONVENTUALS

  * “I’ll tell you why they call us heretics”: Testimony of shepherd Pierre Maury in Duvernoy, Le Régistre, pp. 924–926. Cited in Brenon, Pèire Autier, p. 259.

  * “Those who adore such images are idiots”: Testimony of Sébélia (Sibylle) Peyre in Duvernoy, Le Régistre, p. 580. Cited in Brenon, Pèire Autier, p. 261.

  * “Oh no, it’s a fine thing”: Testimony of Sébélia Peyre in Duvernoy, Le Régistre, p. 581. Cited in Brenon, Pèire Autier, p. 262. Sébélia, a woman, did not have this said to her. She was present when Autier made the quip in answer to a question asked by the shepherd Maury. Spirited to the last, Sébélia, who was to be burned at the stake, then told the inquisitor-bishop Fournier that they had all had a good hearty laugh at the joke.

  * A large theoretical framework had been built around the notion of Franciscan poverty: David Burr, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of the Usus Pauperus Controversy, Philadelphia 1989. The foremost English-language specialist on the Spirituals, Professor Burr also hosts a very informative Web site: http://www.history.vt.edu/Burr/OliviPage/Olivi_Page.html.

  * Francis’ injunction to eat what was put before them: Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, p. 139.

  * “So it goes, there is no more religion”: Jacopone da Toda, cited in Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, p. 103. The details of the Conventual-Spiritual controversy are drawn from the two works of Burr cited here.

  * “saints of God and the foundation of His church”: The exasperated Dominican was Raimond Barrau, writing in the 1330s. Pierre Botineau, “Les tribulations de Raimond Barrau, O.P. (1295–1338),” Mé-langes d’archéologie et d’ histoire de l’Ecole française de Rome, 77, 1965, pp. 465–528.

  * The heterodoxy of the later Spirituals arose from a lush forest of apocalyptic and mystical thought: The scholarship on the subject is also a lush forest. Of particular use for my brief evocation of the topic was Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages, Oxford, 1969.

  * Stupor Mundi—who was christened in the same baptismal font in Assisi that had served to christen Francis: Julien Green, God’s Fool, p. 21.

  * That proceeding has come down to us because the transcripts of Fournier’s activities survived in the archives of the Vatican: The story of the villagers of Montaillou became internationally known with the publication of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s superb microhistory Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray, New York, 1978. Their story was brought to its bitter end by Weis, Yellow Cross.

  * And the last Good Man of Languedoc was lured across the Pyrenees: The story of the Good Man, Guillaume Bélibaste, is told in O’Shea, Perfect Heresy, pp. 239–246.

  * “quills upon a fretful porcupine”: H. K. Mann, Tombs and Portraits of the Popes of the Middle Ages (originally 1928), Whitefish, MT, 2003, p. 56.

  * “For poverty is good, and chastity is greater, but obedience is greatest of all”: Cited in Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, p. 196.

  * Two eyewitnesses left accounts of what happened next: Angelo Clareno and Raimond de Fronsac.

  20. THE TRIAL

  * Bonagratia de Bergamo, questioned and tortured Bernard throughout late 1317 on his relation to the Spirituals: Friedlander, The Hammer, p. 256.

  * 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: Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard Délicieux, O.F.M.,” 17, p. 474.

  * A second, more comprehensive list of sixty-four charges: Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard Délicieux, O.F.M.,” 17, p. 486.

  * “I will not respond to the question”: Declaration of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 52.

  * “Whereas inaction before those who cause harm to others must rightly be odious to all men of good sense”: Entered into the court record, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 33.

  * “You lie through your teeth!”: Testimony of Arnaud de Nougarède, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 192. Once again, as explained above, French “in your throat” has been changed to English “through your teeth.”

  * As the friar was expected to be available at almost all times during his trial, holding him here wa
s only a matter of convenience, as well as security: I am indebted to Cathar expert Jean-Louis Gasc for this insight. Jean-Louis took me on a tailor-made “Bernard Délicieux tour” of the Cité in the summer of 2009.

  * The trial at Carcassonne began on September 12, 1319, and concluded on December 8: Extremely useful to me in making sense of what is often a confusing document, especially with regard to procedural matters, was the introduction in Friedlander, Pro–cessus Bernardi Delitiosi.

  * had little time for the self-inflicted woes of the self-important mendicants: Etienne Baluze, a seventeenth-century French historian, minced no words in his 1693 work on the Avignon popes: “He [Fournier] obviously hated the mendicant orders. He promoted very few of them . . . He willingly listened to their quarrels, but he seemed strangely inclined to side with subordinates against their leaders.” Cited in introduction to Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 22.

  * Three men of Albi—those who were deposed in Avignon in June 1319—claimed to have been in Bernard’s presence in the spring of 1304: Duvernoy, Le procès: testimony of Guillaume Fransa (p. 63), Pierre de Castanet (p. 66) and Bernard Bec (pp. 68–69).

  * no bird could fly to Rome fast enough from Languedoc to see the pontiff alive: Comment attributed to Bernard Délicieux in all three testimonies cited immediately above.

  * As with the story of treason, Bernard made implausible denials. The book was not his, or perhaps it was: Testimony of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy, Le procès, pp. 54, 92–93, 122 (confession).

  * He told a lengthy and entirely credible story of a Dominican friar, no less, warning a prelate of Narbonne of their outright falsehoods: Testimony of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy, Le procès, pp. 106–107, 109. Bernard stated that the Dominican friar Jean Marty, in the 1280s, warned Archbishop Pierre de Montbrun that something was terribly awry with the inquisition at Carcassonne. Other Dominicans, according to Bernard, suggested that the Order be relieved of inquisitorial duties until the culprits were removed. The archbishop did not act. Bernard stated that the matter was raised again with Pope Clement V by other scandalized Dominicans.

  * Bernard named the inquistion clerks he believed behind what was essentially a scheme to keep the inquisition active in Carcassonne: Testimony of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 109. The clerks were southerners, Jean Falgous and Guillaume de Malviès. Bernard claimed that Jean Marty, the Dominican pleading with the archbishop of Narbonne, believed these men decided to hoodwink the credulous northerner, inquisitor Jean Galand, with invented tales of widespread heresy—all in the interest of keeping the inquisition alive and their positions intact.

  * He enumerated once again his complaints about imaginary Good Men, then recited a devastating taxonomy of the type of people whom the inquisitors of the 1280s and 1290s convicted and despoiled: Testimony of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 108. It is a magisterial demolition. We can conjecture that Fournier must have seen that Délicieux was on solid ground here. There had indeed been reason to take action against the inquisitors.

  * anyone who causes to be released from the custody of the inquisition any duly convicted prisoner . . . is automatically, as a result of that action, excommunicated: The written “monition” of the judges to Bernard, in Duvernoy, Le procès, pp. 122–123.

  * “to ensure the inquisition was completely paralyzed and persuade the king of France to abolish it altogether”: Testimony of Bernard Bec, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 67.

  * who, at time of the disputation of Toulouse in 1304, were the inquisitors at Carcassonne and Toulouse?: Questioning of Bernard Délicieux, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 130. Adroitly detecting and underlining the importance of this seemingly trivial question is Friedlander, Processus Bernardi Delitiosi, p. 22.

  * “[The judges], seeking and attempting to effect the conversion of Brother Bernard and the salvation of his soul, warned him once, twice, thrice”: Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 138.

  * “Despite the justifications and excuses put forth by me in my statements and responses on favoring and obstructing, I now admit my guilt”: Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 138.

  * On Saturday, December 8, 1319, crowds jammed the market square of the Bourg of Carcassonne: Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard Délicieux, O.F.M.,” 18, p. 18.

  * there were prelates and noblemen and notables in their splendid finery, among them: Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 146. The list of distinguished guests is included in the final judgment.

  * “Having finally assigned him to strict confinement in the Wall”: The request for mercy appears at the end of the final judgment, in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 147.

  * “He [Bernard] committed or encouraged others to commit many great and shameful crimes”: The royal appeal is included with the court documents, in Duvernoy, Le procès, pp. 148–150.

  * The pope had no such scruples: I use the word advisedly. In institutional settings, particularly one as fraught with intrigue as the medieval papal curia, scruple can mean one thing—and its opposite.

  * “My Lord the Most Holy Pope John XX II”: Duvernoy helpfully added this information in a footnote at the end of the trial document. Le procès, p. 151.

  AFTERWORD

  * “It should be noted that in all the arguments put forth by the reformers”: Hauréau, Bernard Délicieux, p. 27.

  * he was no saint, either: At Bernard’s trial, a consul of 1299, and thus a foe of the friar, testified that the Franciscan had enjoyed the favors of a mistress—until reprimanded by his superior. Despite its source, I find the accusation plausible. A commanding man in his late thirties, adored by the crowds, at the height of his powers: the nature of many men makes such dalliance possible; the nature of many women, for whom the cassock or collar presents a challenge, even more so. However, all the specialists of Délicieux—–Biget, Dmitrewski, Dossat, Duvernoy, Friedlander, Hauréau—ignore or dismiss the allegation. (Testimony of Guillaume de Villeneuve, in Duvernoy, Le procès, pp. 161–162.)

  * “This little book contains many characters”: Cited in the final judgment (sentencing), in Duvernoy, Le procès, p. 144.

  * John Paul II, felt compelled . . . to apologize on behalf of the Church for the excesses of its inquisitors: On March 12, 2000, in Rome. The pope also let it be known he was alluding to the Crusades, anti-Semitism, and a few other matters large and small. In the very next breath, however, he pardoned those who had attacked the Church over the centuries. So John Paul’s extraordinary initiative pioneered a new genre: the forgiving apology.

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