God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  Some heresies sprang from academic debate and hardly left the lecture room; others from evanescent personality cults; others from wider social dissent and alienation. Many shared an element of biblical fundamentalism; all a rejection of church authority in favour of direct personal or communal appreciation of scripture and faith outside official norms, mediation and control. Often flourishing in areas of weak or disputed secular and ecclesiastical authority, few regions of western Christendom escaped entirely as church leaders strove to maintain control lest reform turned to licence and destroyed the institution it was intended to improve. Even traditional, conservative and closely governed England attracted its small crop of heretics in the 1160s.6 Boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy could be narrow and shifting; passage between the two was frequent, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric of mutual hate and demonization. Most heretical groups succumbed rapidly after the removal of a charismatic leader or through the customary factious divisiveness of the righteous. However, some established lasting identity in distinct theologies, liturgies, literature and organization. The most successful such group to challenge the institution as well as the theology of the Catholic church in this period were the Cathars, whose success in promoting their solution to the problem of evil in the area nominally under the rule of the counts of Toulouse provoked the Albigensian crusades.

  The word Cathar derives from the Greek katharos meaning clean or pure. The central insight of the Cathars explained the existence of evil as the result of creation being determined by two principles of Good and Evil. The Cathars were thus dualists, but, in common with the seventh-century eastern Christian dualist sect of Paulicians, Christians, unlike non-Christian dualists such as the Manichees and Gnostics of the late classical world. For Cathars, the material world was logically the creation of an evil creator, not the Good God, whose realm was of the spirit. Two identifications of this evil creator were proposed by different Cathar traditions. The so-called mitigated dualists saw the evil creator as a fallen angel, Satan, who had seduced numbers of the eternal angelic souls in heaven and imprisoned them in material bodies. Alternatively, according to the more extreme or absolute dualists who dominated western Catharism from the later twelfth century, the material world had been created by an co-eternal power of evil, in some texts Lucifer’s or Satan’s father, into whose material human bodies of fallen angels the Good God had breathed divine life. In both versions, the goal of man was escape from the material body though the ceremony of consolamentum (from the Latin for comforting). Ultimately, when all the angelic souls of humans had been released to rejoin their guardian spirits in heaven, the two worlds of Spirit and Matter would be restored to their entirely separate spheres. Given the burden of sin in the world, the journey of some souls to the consolamentum could involve periods locked in other material objects and animals.

  Cathar theology accepted parts of the New Testament and a few passages of the Old while radically reinterpreting them. The Catholic doctrine of the Trinity was rejected as, inevitably, was the Incarnation, although a reordered trinitarian hierarchy seems to have been accepted. By definition, God could not become material, and therefore the Crucifixion and Resurrection could not have occurred, except perhaps in some metaphorical or symbolic show in the spiritual world. The rejection of Catholic sacramental teaching was, consequentially, absolute. One appeal of Catharism may have lain precisely in this challenge to the increasingly prescriptive penitential and sacramental systems imposed by the church and the consequent perception of its growing intrusion and financial profiteering in social and private life. Cathars followed the Donatist heretics of the early church in arguing that the spiritual power of priests and the efficacy of their ministry depended on their own moral state, which made their own priestly hierarchy vulnerable to the slightest charges of hypocrisy, backsliding or corruption. Once again, this addressed current orthodox concerns. Gregory VII himself had flirted with similar ideas. Given the paucity of surviving Cathar texts, unmediated by hostile interpreters or the judicial formulae of the Inquisition, aspects of their theology and mysticism remain obscure, but its themes ran parallel to the concerns of orthodox theologians with sin, the means of salvation and the sacraments. In many respects the asceticism of the Cathars, the flight from the secular, the awareness of the snares of materialism and the sense of the reality of evil mirrored Catholic spirituality. The segregated Cathar communities of men and women found echoes in monasticism. Like Catholicism, Catharism was ‘a written church’, literate, founded on liturgical as well as theological and mystical texts.7 Unlike another tenacious contemporary heresy, the scriptural fundamentalist Waldensians, Catharism was not a discarded offshoot of the Catholic church but an independent Christian denomination whose theological antecedents and continuing intellectual affinities lay with similar churches in the Byzantine Balkans rather than in the west. Nonetheless, the flourishing of Catharism, even if in an apparently remote orbit, occupied part of the universe of western religious, intellectual and cultural revival and expansion known to historians as the Twelfth-century Renaissance.

  The structure of the Cathar church reflected the rigorous austerity of its theology. Most adherents were unprepared or unable to comply with the denial of materialism and human comforts prescribed for the full initiates. The church was organized into dioceses, each led by a bishop and two assistants, called elder and younger ‘sons’, who constituted the order of episcopal succession, supported by deacons. Perfecti or perfectae, men and women who had taken the consolamentum, acted as the church’s priests, also known as Boni Homines, Good Men, sometimes itinerant, sometimes living communally in segregated houses, sometimes distinguished by the dark cloaks they wore as a sign of their status of purity. Major decisions affecting the church were discussed at diocesan or provincial councils. Before the beginning of the crusades in 1209, when such encounters began to court arrest, imprisonment or death, formal disputations were often conducted with Catholic preachers, another sign that the Cathar church was far from a nest of bucolic sectaries ministered to by an obscurantist order of hedge priests. There were numerous halls of residence for perfecti, and extensive networks of formal and informal study groups of believers, involving men and women of all social classes. There were even special Cathar cemeteries. Of central importance to the spread of informed belief, and to the impression of a genuinely popular as well as sophisticated religion, were the vernacular Cathar translations from Latin of religious texts, especially of the Vulgate version of the Bible and the Cathar liturgies.

  The attraction of Catharism to women is well attested, if equivocal. Although child bearing was considered evil, the Good God made no discrimination between the souls of men and women. Nature was diabolic, so women were no more so than men. Cathar women could, like their Catholic equivalents, preside over religious communities, except that they were able to attain the ranks of the perfects/priests that were denied Catholic nuns and abbesses. However, the undisguised Cathar hatred of female bodies spoke of entrenched misogyny. Perfectae were not permitted to act as deacons, ‘sons’ or bishops, nor were they customarily engaged in hearing confessions or giving the consolamentum without a perfectus present. Nor, it seems, were Cathar women, even perfectae, much engaged in transmitting or even reading texts, an activity which seemed, accidentally or not, a masculine preserve. The Cathar hostility to procreation, specifically pregnancy, may well have dissuaded lay women from believing: pregnant women were denied the right to receive the consolamentum, in theory even if in extremis during labour. Modern feminists see Catharism as actually off-putting for most non-aristocratic women because of the desexualized existence of perfectae, the ubiquitous condemnation of all carnality, the inequalities in hierarchical opportunities and the belief that salvation abolished sexual difference.8

  Lay Cathars, the large majority, were known as credentes, believers, who supported the perfecti financially and materially, and expected to receive the consolamentum when nearing death, a procedure reminiscent of Catho
lic extreme unction and the popular practice of deathbed admission into a religious order. On one occasion, a donor to the abbey of St Sernin in Toulouse was received into the order on his deathbed only for it to be discovered after his burial that he had also received the consolamentum, a neat double indemnity that revealed the Cathar habit of outward or occasional conformity, a trait that greatly worried the Catholic hierarchy. In this case the corpse was quickly dug up and burnt.9 While dual allegiance may have been prudent or simply sociable, it indicated how Cathars could coexist with a Catholic society, as did evidence of genuine conversions of the devout on both sides of the religious divide. Heresy and orthodoxy shared interests, anxieties and learning. In the 1170s, two perfecti were converted to Catholicism and promptly preferred to canonries in Toulouse. Two other thirteenth-century perfecti became prominent Dominican inquisitors into former associates, Rainier Sacconi in Lombardy, who composed an important description of his previous faith, and the brutal Robert le Bougre, i.e. the Bugger or Bulgar, a reference to where it was thought Catharism originated. Traffic also passed in the opposite direction. Theodoric, a leading Cathar theologian who disputed with Catholic preachers in 1207, had once been a canon of Nevers.10

  THE CATHARS IN LANGUEDOC

  Dualist Christianity in western Europe almost certainly derived from Byzantium, specifically the dualist Bogomil church (named after its founder) established from the early tenth century in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Thrace. Although the evidence is patchy, uncertain and much contested, while some Bogomil evangelists probably visited the west in the early years of the eleventh century, their greatest impact only began a century later, borne on the newly vitalized trade routes linking eastern and western Europe. One source of this proselytizing may have been the dualist church set up by western settlers in Constantinople in the years following the First Crusade. This distinct ‘Latin’ dualist community probably provided western converts with Latin translations of the Greek Bogomil texts including the consolamentum ritual and the New Testament, collated with the Vulgate.11 The first unequivocal signs of recognizably Bogomil/Cathar beliefs in the west date from the mid-twelfth century. Their geographical spread, including the Rhineland, Champagne, Lombardy and western Languedoc; institutional organization as early as the 1140s in Cologne, Champagne, and later Languedoc; as well as subsequent rapid expansion to Lombardy and Italy indicate the presence of well-grounded networks of evangelism. The initial Cathar conversion of Lombardy may have come from northern France and the Rhineland rather than directly from Bulgaria, Thrace or Constantinople, but the early leadership in the west seem to have remained in close touch with the mother churches to the east. By the 1170s at the latest, Cathar bishops had been established in ‘France’ (i.e. northern France), Albi and, probably, Lombardy. In common with elements of the Bogomil church, which was also in the process of evolving its doctrines, these western Cathars espoused mitigated, not absolute, dualism. With the conversion of the western Cathars to absolute dualism, the heretical church, especially in Languedoc, came more clearly into historical focus – and into the line of concerted orthodox Catholic fire.

  At some date either in 1167 or, more likely, between 1174 and 1177, a council of western Cathar perfecti and perfectae was held at the village of St Félix de Caraman south-east of Toulouse. An earlier Languedoc Cathar assembly had been held in 1165 at Lombers south of Albi, where heretics held a futile theological disputation with local Catholic partisans. The St Félix gathering attracted an international attendance, including the Cathar bishops of ‘France’, Lombardy and Albi as well as members of the churches of Carcassonne, Agen and Toulouse. A representative of the Cathar church of Constantinople, papa Nicetas, persuaded the assembly to adopt absolute dualism, established three new dioceses, of Carcassonne, Agen and Toulouse, and consecrated their new bishops as well as reconsecrating the bishops of France, Lombardy and Albi and giving all a renewed consolamentum. Nicetas had previously converted the Lombard church to absolute dualism on his way to Languedoc. The theme of his address to the St Félix assembly emphasized the importance of unity, a necessary reminder in the face not just of the incipient fragmentation and factionalism of religious groups but also of the split in dualist ranks between Nicetas’s own absolute dualist church of Thrace and Constantinople and the continuing moderate dualism of the Bulgarian Bogomils. Almost immediately, the Italian dualist church was divided by a mission from the Bogomil Petrach.12 However, the Languedoc churches remained united and thrived.

  By the beginning of the thirteenth century there may have been between 1,000 and 1,500 perfecti in the region centred on the area between Toulouse and Carcassonne but stretching north to the Lot valley and the Cahorsin and south to the Pyrenean foothills.13 The number of credentes is impossible to gauge accurately, partly because of the nature of the surviving records but partly because their faith only revealed itself unequivocally through receipt of the consolamentum, by its nature often a hurried private ritual conducted at the bedsides of the sick and dying. More generally, credentes merged into a wider spectrum of response to Cathar belief, from the commitment of the perfectus, lay belief, general sympathy and familial or social contact through hedging religious bets and indifference to distaste, suspicion, opposition and persecution. The fact that each Cathar diocese of Languedoc geographically covered a number of Catholic ones, while reflecting cheaper running costs, may indicate a relatively limited scale of adherence. Languedoc did not become a Cathar province. Donations and recruits to Catholic religious orders continued, the heretics operating as just one of a number of manifestations of piety and religious enthusiasm. The suggestion that Catharism somehow especially embodied a distinctive Languedoc culture is fanciful. For instance, none of the great magnates and few if any of the local troubadours, however critical of the church authorities, were heretics. At least two prominent troubadours, Bertrand of Born and Fulk of Marseilles, became monks, Fulk ending as the anti-Cathar bishop of Toulouse. However, the Cathar church retained hierarchy, structure, organization and funding even beyond the period of the crusades. The raw numerical strength may have been less significant than the quality and social status of many believers and the implications of the mere existence of these organized radical anti-clerical beliefs. The nature of Cathar threat perceived by the Catholic authorities was famously indicated by a knight, Pons Adhemar of Roudeille, in 1206 or 1207. In reply to Bishop Fulk of Toulouse asking why he did not expel heretics from his lands despite admitting the superiority of Catholic theology, he confessed ‘we cannot; we were brought up with them, there are many of our relatives amongst them, and we can see that their way of life is a virtuous one.’14

  The prevalence of heresy in Languedoc should not, therefore, be exaggerated. Neither should the geographical, political or cultural identity of the region be assumed. Although it is now fashionable to talk wistfully of the lost glories of Occitania, the land where people spoke the langue d’oc included such diverse regions as the Limousin in the north, the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south and the Alps in the east, the wastes of the Camargue in the Rhône Delta, the volcanic outcrops of Le Puy, the Massif Central, the Provençal hills and the commercial Mediterranean towns of Narbonne and Montpellier. Even within the part of region more commonly now understood as Languedoc, roughly from the lower Garonne and Dordogne valleys eastwards and southwards to the Pyrenees, Mediterranean and Rhone valley, largely associated, often very tenuously, with the county of Toulouse, geography contradicted politics. Toulouse, although less than 100 miles from the Mediterranean, sat on the Garonne, whose waters flowed into the Atlantic, for much of its course though lands ruled by the Angevin kings of England, who, until the early thirteenth century, as dukes of Aquitaine controlled most of the region from the Loire to the Pyrenees as well as Normandy and Anjou. The twelfth-century counts of Toulouse had to resist Angevin attempts at domination and continued to hold the Agenais as an Angevin fief. Much of the region to the south and east of Toulouse, which drained into the Mediterrane
an, looked more to Catalonia and Aragon than northern France or even northern Languedoc; the king of Aragon was overlord of the viscounts of Béziers and Carcassonne, as well as parts of the Gévaudan and the Pyrenean counties such as Foix and Comminges. East of the Rhône in Provence, suzerainty lay with the distant German emperor.