Cathar

by Christopher Bland

  Our position grew more obviously hopeless; two weeks after we had run out of water, Etienne and I were sitting in the armoury, searching for answers to our predicament and failing to find them. The sun was just beginning to rise, illuminating the pitiful supply of crossbow bolts and stones for our mangonel.

  ‘We could surrender, ask for terms,’ said Etienne. ‘They are not likely to be generous. Convert or burn, prison for the men, convents for the women. They know we’re desperate.’

  ‘We might as well go down fighting as die of thirst,’ I said, and then remembered that Etienne had a wife and unborn child to think about. An honourable death was an easier option for me.

  We were still talking when we heard shouts and the clash of steel on steel coming from the western wall.

  ‘It’s the postern gate,’ said Etienne; we were both in our chain mail, and had only to pick up our swords and run to the source of the noise. We were too late. The gate was open; two of our guards lay on the floor, both face down, one with a crossbow bolt through the body. One of the guards was dead, the other able to speak: ‘A traitor stabbed me in the back, shot Alain, let twenty crusaders through the postern.’

  We were not only too late, but in the wrong place. The enemy were able to cross both courtyards and unbar the gates before we could organise any proper resistance, and a hundred men rushed in. There was a good deal of confusion in the half-light, and it was at least ten minutes before enough of us had formed a little group, several still without chain mail, to slow down the assault. It was then that I was wounded, a deep cut just below my right shoulder blade that I hardly felt at the time, a cut that could have been inflicted by friend or foe, so great was the confusion and so close the combat.

  We managed to hold off the first assault, then retreated from the outer courtyard, and defended the inner courtyard as best we could. For a while a dozen of our crossbowmen on the ramparts were able to pick off several of the attacking crusaders from the flank, but our men were all dead after half an hour. The mêlée in the courtyard was fierce, but we were weak in body and low in numbers. We did our best to defend the keep, and formed a semicircle of perhaps thirty men around its gate. I was at the front of the semicircle, Etienne on my right, Geoffrey on my left. The crusaders didn’t press home the attack for a few minutes, believing that we would surrender once enough of their bowmen were up on the ramparts.

  There had been no sign of Armand since the gates had been opened. And then he appeared down the stairs and out of the door of the keep, in full armour, plumed helmet, armorial shield and long sword, for all the world as if he was going to a grand tournament. It was a magnificent, ridiculous sight. He pushed us aside at the front of our defensive semicircle and walked slowly towards the mass of our opponents.

  For a moment the crusaders were astonished at this apparition, and some of them began to laugh. Armand strode on and began to lay about him with his great sword, which stopped the laughter. He scattered the men-at-arms, killing several of them with sweeping blows and clearing a space around him. Then they regrouped and swarmed all over Armand, finding the chinks in his armour with their small swords. He was beaten to his knees, lost his great sword, then fell slowly backwards and lay dying on the blood-stained floor of the inner courtyard. I had to hold Etienne back as we watched while several of the crusaders ripped off Armand’s armour and began to squabble over the spoils. Then they turned their attention to us.

  By now dawn was breaking. Eleven of our knights and forty men-at-arms were dead and many more wounded, including Etienne and me; Etienne had an arrow through his left arm and a heavy blow to the head, and I was beginning to feel the gash below my shoulder blade. Geoffrey, the only one of our older knights still standing, told us ‘That’s enough’, stepped forward out of our semicircle, saluted his enemies with a final flourish drawn from his chivalrous past, laid down his sword and instructed us to do the same. We obeyed. So ended our resistance.

  The surviving Roqueville fighting men were penned and guarded in the stables, the women and children herded into the Great Hall. To celebrate their victory the crusaders brought their wooden cross up from the camp, erected it in our courtyard and held a Mass at midday. The chanting of their priests was hard to bear.

  After Mass they took all the surviving knights, nineteen of us, outside the curtain walls and made us sit in the moat, guarded by a dozen men with crossbows.

  ‘They are going to kill us here,’ I said to Etienne. I did not feel ready to die; I remember how green the grass seemed on the edge of the moat, how unconcerned the sparrows that were nesting in the great, useless wall that towered above us.

  ‘Kill us in cold blood? In breach of every law of chivalry? Not even demand ransom?’

  ‘I don’t think they are in a chivalrous mood.’

  I stopped talking when one of the guards cocked and pointed his crossbow at me. We sat or lay there for three hours, the loudest noise the rasping breath of one of our number who had been wounded in the lung. Then they came and took us, one by one, back into the castle. I believed they would kill us there.

  Etienne was taken early and I said a final farewell. They left me to the last, and, as I walked through the gate, a soldier holding each arm, I tried to remember the words of the Consolamentum, with little success. My wound was painful; worse, I was very frightened.

  My fear was justified. As I was manhandled through the outer gate I heard a sound I had never heard before and hope never to hear again – the sound, somewhere between a scream and a groan, of men trying to hold on in the grip of unbearable pain. Once through the inner gate I saw the bodies of dead crusaders laid out neatly against the western wall, and the bodies of our own dead piled high around an unlit bonfire of wood in the middle of the courtyard.

  Against the eastern wall, sitting or lying, were our surviving knights, covered in blood. Now I understood the reason for the sounds I had heard. Each one of them had been blinded, each one of them had had his right arm cut off above the elbow. The severed arms lay, one still twitching, some palms open as if in supplication, around a wooden butcher’s block red with blood. I saw Etienne with his remaining hand over his eyes, over the place where his eyes had been. Geoffrey lay dead; he had not survived the torture.

  A few of the crusaders stood watching; most of them had taken off their armour, and one or two were leaning on their swords. We were no longer difficult to guard. A tall monk, standing a little apart from the soldiers, seemed to be in charge of the proceedings, although clearly he had not been involved in the fighting; he wore the habit of a Dominican monk, with over it an immaculate white tunic, a crusader’s red cross in its centre. Our victims at Avignonet had been similarly dressed.

  I struggled to break free, was too weak, shouted, ‘Call yourselves Christians? Where’s your mercy, where’s your chivalry? Bloody butchers, bloody…’ and was pushed to the ground. I lay there for a moment until my two guards brought me to the block and held my right arm down; the executioner took it off with a single blow then dipped the stump into a pot of warm pitch.

  The pain doubled that from the wound in my back, but this was as nothing to what followed. The executioner produced his dagger and thrust it into my right eye, and I made the noise I had heard as I came through the outer gate.

  He was about to do the same to my other eye – my knees were buckling and I could only stand because I was held up by my guards – when the tall monk stopped him.

  ‘He’ll need one eye if he’s to lead the rest to Montségur.’

  That afternoon I was revived with a bucket of water and forced to watch as the bodies of our dead comrades were consumed by fire. It was the first time I had smelled burning human flesh or seen the contortions, almost as if they were coming alive again, of the bodies of dead men in the flames. One corpse seemed to stand up and take a pace towards us before collapsing back into the fire.

  The Dominican who had spared my eye watched the burning with a dispassionate interest. As the fire burned down he walke
d over to our guards and gave them careful instructions. We were forced to our feet and the fifteen surviving knights, all blind, were lined up behind me. Our guards placed the left hand of each man on the shoulder of the man in front, prodded me, their half-blind leader, and told me to lead this procession out of Roqueville.

  ‘Take them to Montségur,’ the tall Dominican said to me. ‘Tell them God is not mocked. Tell them his vengeance is terrible.’

  5

  The Inquisitor and Blanche

  The Inquisitor

  THE WEEKS AND months after my success with Baruch the Jew were an anticlimax. My colleagues were slow to adopt my techniques of interrogation, preferring to rely on torture and brief questioning followed by the handing over of the heretic to the civil arm. True, not many heretics escaped detection, but there were few genuine conversions. The Languedoc remained a fertile breeding ground for heresy. In two years we had only succeeded in taking one so-called Perfect, Jean Tremiere, who quickly confessed and then had the audacity to challenge me to a public debate. This I declined, not because I feared losing, but because, as I told him, ‘The True Faith cannot be a subject of debate.’

  The Bishop slyly pointed out that I had been prepared to debate with Baruch the Jew; I told him there was a difference between a public debate and a private argument, an argument which I had conclusively won.

  There were several fiefdoms in which, our informers told us, the Cathar heresy was actively encouraged, Romieu, Roqueville and Montségur being the most blatant examples. The heresy provided an intellectual justification for their continued refusal to pay tithes and taxes. Roqueville was well known for having instigated the killing of two Papal Legates and subsequently harbouring the culprits. Although Count Bernard had paid hefty fines and done penance in Toulouse Cathedral, according to numerous accounts the valley had reverted to its former heretical ways. If, indeed, it had ever abandoned them.

  So we sent a young priest with an armed escort to demand the appearance of the new Count Armand, his mother and sister before us in Carcassonne. He returned with their defiant message and told us that he had been roughly handled. After a delay while permission was sought from Rome for the incentives of a Crusade – indulgences, the remission of past sins, the right to forfeited property – a strong force of over three hundred men was sent to Roqueville.

  The delay had given the heretics too much time to prepare for what they knew was coming, and our crusaders suffered early setbacks. Their advance guard was ambushed, their assaults by ladder all failed, and, worst of all, their great trebuchet was destroyed. When the news reached Carcassonne that Guy de Montfort was thinking of abandoning the siege, I decided I should go there in person.

  I found the camp in considerable disarray. The ruins of the trebuchet were a daily reminder of failure. And the conversations round Guy’s campaign table were not about the holy nature of the cause but about the extent and division of the land and treasure that would be acquired. If we succeeded, which, given the pervading air of defeatism, seemed unlikely.

  ‘They have enough food and a good well within the castle,’ said Guy de Montfort. ‘Our prisoners have confirmed that. We have no spies within their walls.’

  ‘What feeds the well?’

  ‘Underground springs.’

  I left the tent and went for a long walk up the River Baise. After four miles I was about to turn back when I noticed – and this was God’s work, I am sure – a small carrier flowing out of the Baise that disappeared underground after half a mile. I knew at once that this was the source of the castle’s water, knelt and said a Te Deum, then hurried back to the camp to tell Guy what I had seen. He was sceptical at first, perhaps annoyed that a monk had discovered what his soldiers had overlooked, but he had no alternative plan other than admitting defeat and returning to Carcassonne.

  ‘I suppose we have nothing to lose. We’ll divert the carrier and see what happens.’

  ‘And you’ll guard the diversion properly?’ I was aware that the site of the trebuchet had not been properly secure.

  ‘Of course,’ he said with a frown.

  Nothing happened for a few days. Then we captured a scout sent to discover what had happened to their source; he confirmed that their well was dry. We bribed him handsomely and told him to return to Roqueville. It was this man who let our small force in at the postern gate. Treachery is a powerful force in sieges of this kind, but I knew, as God knew, that it was the shortage of water as much as the money that persuaded the scout to turn his coat.

  Our attack took place just before dawn; their resistance was fierce but futile, ending in the bizarre appearance of Armand de Roqueville in full armour. He was quickly cut down by our troops.

  I went up to the castle when the fighting was over. I decided on condign punishment of the surviving knights, overruling Guy, who had some absurd notion that as they had surrendered the code of chivalry should prevail.

  ‘We should demand ransom,’ he said.

  ‘From whom? These heretics belong to God, and must be punished in His Name.’

  I devised their punishment, and decided that the surviving knights, blinded and one-armed, should be sent as an awful warning to Montségur. I saved the single eye of the last young knight, who was thus able to lead them there, although he was an angry blasphemer. We burned all the dead heretics, including Count Armand, gave our own dead Christian burial, and sent sixteen knights on their way to Montségur. We marked our triumph with a Mass and Te Deum in the castle courtyard, although I noticed that many of the men-at-arms and even a few knights were absent, ransacking the castle for the spoils of war.

  After Mass, Lady Blanche and her daughter were escorted out of the keep and into the cart that was to take them to Carcassonne. The cart was laden with two heavy chests that contained the Roqueville silver and even a little gold. I insisted that this belonged to the Church, although Guy de Montfort was far from pleased.

  As Blanche walked across the courtyard I was struck, not for the first time, by her beauty and composure; I had first seen her when her husband performed his penance in Toulouse. She held her head steady, her eyes looking neither to right nor left but into the distance, not glancing at the heap of ash and bone where we had just finished burning the body of her son. The smell of the pyre still hung in the air.

  She was wearing a long red gown, her hair tied up in a knot from which a few strands had escaped. Her feet were bare, and covered in dust and ashes by the time she climbed the makeshift steps into the cart. As she did so I made the Sign of the Cross, but whether in blessing or as exorcism I could not tell.

  Her daughter followed a few steps behind, pregnant, bedraggled, a pitiful sight if an unrepentant heretic can be said to deserve pity. She stopped by me, looked back at the pyre and said, ‘Where is my husband? What have you done with Count Etienne?’

  ‘We have sent him to Montségur with the other knights.’

  As the cart pulled out of the great gate neither woman looked back. I watched Blanche until she was out of sight.

  I returned to Carcassonne a day later. I knew that I had to delegate the questioning of Blanche, but I did interrogate the daughter. Stephanie agreed, without the need for torture, to abandon her heretical ways and I sent her to the civil power for sentencing with a recommendation for mercy. Not because she deserved it, as her conversion was unconvincing, but because she was carrying an unborn child that could in due course become a child of God.

  Then my deputy, an earnest Dominican from Spain, fell ill, and I was unable to avoid Blanche. I was well aware of the danger. I had dreamed of Blanche several times walking across the courtyard, but in my dream she stopped, turned and came towards me.

  In the real world Blanche was brought in by a single guard to the small hall we used for interrogation. She wore a smock of coarse brown cloth that reached below her knees. Her hair had been cut short and her feet were bare; her ankles had been chained together, and I could see the red marks where the iron fetters had chafed the s
kin.

  I sat on my throne-like chair, raised on a foot-high dais, flanked by my secretary taking notes. It seemed appropriate that our prisoners should have to look up to the voice of authority. I tried to be brisk and businesslike and did not offer Blanche a chair. All our prisoners were made to stand, unless they were so weak from recent torture that they had to be seated. Blanche had not been tortured.

  ‘You acknowledge you are a heretic, a Cathar,’ I began.

  She replied in a surprisingly clear, strong voice, the first words I had heard her speak, ‘I am Cathar. I am only a heretic in your eyes.’

  ‘Not just in my eyes, but in the eyes of the Catholic Church, the source and guardian of the True Faith.’

  ‘It is we who are the true, the Good Christians. There can be no heresy in truth and goodness.’

  ‘So you profess. I can demonstrate through Holy Scripture that you are wrong.’

  ‘I have heard such arguments many times before.’

  ‘Not from a proper theologian. Will you listen to me?’

  She made no reply, looked at and through me, then closed her eyes and seemed to pray for a moment. There was a long silence; I nodded to her guard and she was taken away.

  Later that morning I took my customary walk around the square. I was troubled by Blanche’s unshakeable faith, and by her distance from her surroundings and from me. Normally an hour on the rack would have removed all traces of such remoteness, but I was not yet ready to send her down that path. I found her physical beauty, despite her shorn hair and bleeding ankles, utterly compelling. It was a compulsion that an hour on my knees in our little chapel failed to remove.