Cathar

by Christopher Bland

  I have achieved great success through this approach, which recognises two things: that the Cathars believe themselves to be Christians, and that they will not swear an oath.

  Questioning on its own is not always successful, so I am not opposed to torture. The Pope in his Bull ‘Ad Extirpanda’ made it clear that this is a legitimate weapon in the battle against heresy. Torture, however, often achieves little more than the production of whatever the suspect believes will stop the pain. I subject many of my suspects to half an hour of the rack and the strappado without any questioning. This gives them a taste of what awaits them if they do not answer me fully and truthfully.

  Most of those who appear before us are convicted of heresy and rightly so, but relatively few, perhaps one in five, suffer the ultimate punishment. I regard it as my duty to attend the executions. The gleeful and vindictive mob who turn up in great numbers to watch the burnings need to know that it was I who sent the victim to the stake.

  ‘Does it not horrify you, the screams, the struggle to break free of the bonds, the smell of burning flesh?’ the Bishop asked me once over dinner. He was too fond of good food and a quiet life, and had been heard to express sympathy for elements of Cathar doctrine.

  ‘I am not unmoved, but my sorrow is for our failure to persuade a heretic back into the path of righteousness. It is medicine ordained by mercy. The pain of the stake is as nothing to the pain of eternal hellfire that awaits these unhappy men and women.’

  I said men and women, but where possible I avoid questioning the latter. I have in the past been often tormented by the sin of lust, and in my student days in Paris fell from grace only too often. Indeed, it was partly due to the need to remove myself far from temptations of this kind that I became a Dominican. In the enclosed world of the Abbey of Flaran I felt safe. I was safe, although the occasional succubus continued to appear in my dreams.

  In Carcassonne it was different. I saw women every day, and there were many who appeared before us accused of heresy. Fortunately most were old and ugly. The younger ones fell into two categories – those who would never forswear their beliefs, and those who would do anything to avoid punishment, and were able to make it clear to me, without speaking, what that might involve.

  It was a great temptation. The contrast between me, robed and sitting in the Inquisitor’s chair, and the trembling, weeping creature brought before me after half an hour on the rack, clad in the white shift that we give them, had a strong erotic force. I found that the best way to avoid such an occasion of sin was to absent myself from it, and to let one of my colleagues, either more thick-skinned or less concerned about the sin of lust, to take over. I often reminded myself of the words in Ecclesiastes, I find woman more bitter than death; she is a snare, her heart a net, her charms are chains. He is pleasing to God who eludes her. I knew how easily I might be ensnared, netted, enchained. I wanted to remain pleasing to God.

  Nevertheless I enjoyed my work, God’s work. I delegated the interrogation of the women that were brought before us, and in any case the great majority of suspects were men. I obtained most satisfaction from those cases where I was able to obtain not simply a confession of error but a genuine decision to return to the true path of faith, even though these were not common.

  The most interesting of the heretics was Baruch the Jew, who had been baptised, but subsequently returned to Judaism. Baruch’s original conversion was in Toulouse, when a gang of shepherds, who had killed 152 Jews, had been brought there for trial. The shepherds were freed by the mob, and together they rampaged through the streets to the Jewish Quarter, where, according to Baruch’s original testimony to the Bishop:

  ‘They arrived at my house shouting, “Death to the Jews. Be baptised or we will kill you.”

  ‘I replied I would rather be baptised than die. They took me to the Church of St Stephen, where I saw the mob kill the Jew Asser from Tarascon and two others. I was dragged before the priest at the font and told to say that I came in good faith to Baptism. So I said the necessary words, was baptised with water and given the name John.

  Then some priests took me home, and there I found my books torn to pieces, my money stolen and only seven pieces of cloth left. Some other pieces of cloth, which did not belong to me as they had been pawned, and my silk coverlet, had all been taken. The murder and pillage of the Jews went on until late that same night.’

  The Bishop accepted this testimony without further questioning. He was only too willing to accept Baruch’s Baptism at face value. Six months later Baruch was arrested and brought before me, accused of reverting to his former faith. As he freely admitted to being a Jew there was no need to torture him. He claimed that his Baptism was invalid; it had taken place under the threat of death, so he had not been required to perform the ritual of purification to return to his faith.

  My interrogation and argument went on for many weeks. Baruch’s knowledge of the Scriptures was profound, almost the equal of mine, and he was genuine in his questioning and argument.

  Our longest and most difficult dispute was whether the Messiah promised in the Law had already come, and was indeed God and man, composed of divinity and true humanity. In the end Baruch, defeated by the force of my arguments, agreed. It was then easy to show him by the Law and the Prophets that Christ was conceived and born of the Virgin, that he had suffered death for us and our salvation, that he descended to hell and awoke the third day, was ascended to heaven and will come again to judge the living and the dead. Although he resisted the sacrament of the Mass for a while, and it was difficult to demonstrate to him the immortality of the human body after the Resurrection, in the end he consented to all of this.

  After three weeks, in a moment of triumph for the faith and for me, he said in front of the Bishop (whose earlier questioning of Baruch had proved entirely superficial) and the assembled dignitaries of the church and the city:

  ‘I believe and confess that the Catholic faith, its articles and sacraments are all true, and I abjure the Jewish perfidy, its superstitions and ceremonies and I will pursue all heretics, especially those belonging to the sect to which I held.’

  There was a spontaneous cry of Deo gratias from several members of the congregation when they heard these words. Afterwards at lunch the Bishop was less gracious.

  ‘Almost four weeks to obtain the so-called conversion of a single old Jew – it would have been simpler and quicker to send him to the stake.’

  I did not consider this remark worthy of a reply.

  In spite of this success, which became widely known among the faithful, progress was slow. The obstacles were many – the time required to conduct proper investigations, the poor calibre of some of my fellow Inquisitors, lethargy among the clergy. Denunciations were often motivated by spite or the desire to settle old scores.

  Perhaps the greatest obstacle was the attitude of many noblemen, who saw the Cathar heresy as the perfect justification to avoid paying tithes. The income of the Church in the Languedoc had diminished by a third in the twenty years before I arrived. Although it had begun to rise again it was still far below the level required to maintain bishops, priests, cathedrals and churches and pay a proper contribution to Rome. Many nobles resented the power of Toulouse, feared France and were in effect presiding over little kingdoms where they made their own laws. And their own religion.

  I was appointed soon after the Massacre at Avignonet. This was widely rumoured to be the work of Bernard de Roqueville, who had paid no tithes for fifteen years. He was the count in charge of the kind of little kingdom I have just described. The priest in his valley reported good attendance at Mass and no evidence of heretical practices. He told us that he had never seen a Perfect at Roqueville. This seemed unlikely, given Bernard’s aversion to tithes.

  The expedition after Avignonet, which I accompanied, was entirely successful; an earlier, smaller raid had only come back with cattle. This time we sent a force of over three hundred crusaders, commanded by Guy de Montfort, nephew of the great Si
mon. The show of force was enough to avoid bloodshed and obtain, through a negotiated settlement, all that was due to the Church from the last fifteen years in gold or in land. And I insisted that Bernard perform an appropriate penance in Toulouse, which almost brought the negotiations to a halt. I stood firm and eventually it was agreed.

  On the way back we installed one of our crusaders in a little castle called Beaufort, where the leader of the band responsible for Avignonet had lived; he died from his wounds not long after the massacre. Beaufort and his land were rightly forfeited. We were able to establish through some forceful questioning where the man had been buried.

  We dug up what was left of his body and for good measure that of his wife and burned the pair of them for the heretics they were. We used damp wood to make a great pyre, not because the pitiful bundle of bones and scraps of flesh required it, but because I wanted the smoke to be seen for miles around and recognised as the implacable retribution of the Church.

  Perhaps more important than the confiscation of land and gold, although these took precedence in the Bishop’s mind, was the public humiliation of Bernard de Roqueville in the Cathedral in Toulouse. Almost naked, he had to crawl from the entrance to the high altar, all the while being thrashed by the Bishop, who plainly enjoyed his work.

  I was one of those watching. Most of the onlookers, who drowned the prayers and chanting by their shouts, were moved not by religious fervour but by the same voyeur’s instincts that made them turn out in great numbers to watch a burning. In this case they had the added pleasure of watching a nobleman reduced at the end of his crawl to a bleeding, whimpering wreck. It was an exemplary punishment, and Bernard died a year later, as much from shame as from illness.

  In the Cathedral I stood opposite Bernard’s wife Blanche, their son Armand, Stephanie, their daughter, and twenty of his knights, all of whom had been forced to watch. I studied Armand de Roqueville closely; he showed no signs of remorse or repentance, but stood clenching and unclenching his fists, muttering to himself. I doubted these were prayers.

  Blanche and her daughter shut their eyes after the first blow, and covered their ears when Bernard cried out. Blanche de Roqueville was a famous beauty, much praised by the troubadours, and, I could see, rightly so. Even in distress her face was beautiful, and I had to turn away my glance, close my own eyes and pray for forgiveness for the sin of lust, not for the first time. Nor the last.

  Despite the fines, despite this penance, despite the death of Bernard, the rumours that Roqueville was a nest of heretics continued and strengthened. I decided to send for the valley’s priest, in spite of his regular reports that all was well. He arrived looking sleek and confident; all that vanished after an hour on the rack. He admitted what we had long suspected – that although attendance at his church was excellent no one took the Sacrament and he never heard Confessions.

  He also said that there were regular visits to the castle by Guillaume Authie and other Perfects. He knew they were expected when fish from the stew ponds were brought up and he was told that his presence at dinner was not required. He said that the most fervent Cathar was Blanche de Roqueville.

  He was a pathetic, craven creature when we had finished with him, concerned only to save his own skin. He asked to return to Roqueville.

  ‘By all means,’ I said. ‘But only after ten years of repentance in the dungeons. Think yourself lucky to avoid the fire, and prepare yourself through prayer and penance for the next world.’

  His evidence made it clear that Roqueville was a hotbed of heresy and could no longer be ignored. We sent a messenger demanding that Armand and Blanche present themselves to us for questioning; the messenger returned, having been rudely treated, with the reply that neither had any intention of complying. This was no surprise, and led to our decision to capture Roqueville and deal decisively with the Cathars in that heretical valley. For too long we had allowed the Church to be undermined and cheated.

  *

  The Bishop

  I FOUND OUR DOMINICAN difficult to fathom. He was tall, dark-haired, a beaky Norman nose, and he had, I noticed both at the table and in prayer, long and well-kept fingers, which he would clasp and unclasp as he spoke.

  He had been a good Abbot at Flaran, and there was never a breath of scandal about that abbey. His scholarship flowered there. He engaged in writing and disputation at a level that, to be honest, was well above my head, and it was that intellectual rigour that made him my predecessor’s and Rome’s choice to lead the Inquisition in the Languedoc.

  It was said that he had been wild when a theological student in Paris, and I could see, by the way he looked at them, that he loved women. As do I, though my shape and button nose, Deo gratias, spared me the occasions of sin that often presented themselves to our Inquisitor through the nature of his work.

  He always seemed tightly controlled. He took little pleasure in food or wine, and I always felt silently criticised when we dined together, as he would drink only water, push away his plate half finished and watch in silent disapproval when I drank a second or third glass of our excellent wine.

  ‘You might as well be Cathar,’ I once said to him. ‘They believe that our world was created by the Devil, and has no substance, although they seem to survive well enough.’

  He looked shocked. ‘My abstinence isn’t a turning away from the real world, which I know God created. I see abstinence as a gift to God, and as a way of disciplining myself. The Cathars believe – well, you know what they believe.’ To prove me wrong, he poured himself a glass of wine, although I noticed it remained unfinished at the end of the meal.

  He was a patient and thorough Inquisitor, rarely relying on torture, preferring to use the considerable powers of his intellect to reason heretics back into the path of righteousness. This was impressive, though time-consuming – as I pointed out, half an hour on the rack produced a conversion in a morning, whereas he would happily take several days to achieve the same result.

  His great disputational triumph over Baruch the Jew took even longer, took weeks. Time wasted, in my opinion, and I told him so.

  ‘I would have let him burn.’

  ‘I have saved him from the flames of this world and from the fires of hell in the next,’ and he smiled, then quoted those overused words from St Luke’s Gospel: There is joy over one sinner that repenteth, more than… I didn’t allow him to finish.

  Nevertheless, irritated though I was, I admired his intellectual rigour, his dedication and his self-control. When he later fell from grace I was glad that after all his feet were made from the same clay as mine, and yet deeply disappointed that he was no better a man than me.

  Of course in some ways I was just as forceful as the Inquisitor in defending the Faith, although my methods were less reliant on intellect and the powers of persuasion. My greatest success was as effective as his conversion of Baruch. I had received a message from Esclarmonde de Fauga, widely rumoured to be a heretic, that she was on her deathbed and wished to see the Bishop. When I called on her the same day it was clear that a mistake, fatal for her, had been made. She expected the Cathar Bishop, was horrified to see me and stubbornly persisted in her heresy.

  So I sent for the magistrate, who pronounced summary judgement on her. She was carried on her bed to the Pré du Comte and forthwith burned at the stake. This was more effective as a warning of the dangers of heresy than Baruch’s conversion had been, and took less than a day, not weeks, to achieve. I did not attend the burning, but returned to the refectory, gave thanks to God and to St Dominic and ended a good day’s work with an excellent meal. We had oysters from northern France, lamb from the Pyrenees and grapes from my own garden, all gifts of God.

  4

  The Siege

  Francois

  AS ARMAND HAD predicted, a messenger arrived a month later from Carcassonne. On behalf of his masters he demanded that Armand and Blanche present themselves before the Inquisition to answer allegations, ‘from many reliable witnesses’, that they were
both Cathars and had encouraged the practice of heresy in and around Roqueville. There was no mention of our unfortunate priest in the summons, but the messenger told us that he had confessed and was now in the hands of the civil arm for sentencing.

  The messenger was not treated with the normal courtesy shown to our visitors. He and his four armed guards were kept in the courtyard, refused food and drink and told to water themselves and their horses in the river.

  Armand’s reply to the summons was brief.

  ‘Tell your masters,’ he said, ‘that I and my mother have no intention of coming to Carcassonne. We have seen what happens to those who appear before the Inquisition, and we have no intention of joining their number. My father’s penance and the gold and land you extracted from him should have settled matters for good. Get you gone.’

  I watched Blanche as Armand spoke; she looked proud of her son. The messenger, a young priest of about my age, appeared frightened and expected further punishment. He was relieved when he was allowed to depart unharmed, although we heard later that he claimed he had been beaten.

  Immediately we began preparations for the siege we knew must come. It was late summer, so we had time to fill our grain stores and slaughter more cattle and cure more meat than usual. To my great sorrow, all but a dozen of my pigeons were killed and the stew pond emptied. I was able to persuade Armand to let me take those birds that were spared to an old disused dovecote in the top of one of Roqueville’s four towers. They became used to their new surroundings after I had confined and fed them there for three weeks, and they later began to breed.

  All our meat and fish was dried, salted and hung in the long storerooms that flanked one of the walls of the inner courtyard. Rough huts were erected for all those who lived outside the castle walls. I was given my old room, but I had to share it with two others; later I would move into the former stables.