Notes
USAGE AND PRIMARY SOURCES
I opted to anglicize most proper names. Some language groups have no problem with such blanket transformations (the French, for example, can call Michelangelo Michel-Ange without a twinge of embarrassment), yet making the switch for The Perfect Heresy meant defying present-day Occitan political correctness. May my friends in Languedoc forgive me, but the vagaries of spelling—I’ve seen the Occitan for Peter rendered as Peire, Peyre, and Pere—proved daunting. While it is true that the many Raymonds of the story might have styled themselves Raimon or Raimond or some other cognate, to my eye such unfamiliar spellings put up obstacles to understanding. (The names of the two troubadours I mention, however, have been left as found.) A few other exceptions to my linguistic imperialism occur, for reasons of euphony, nationality, or avoidance of the ridiculous. King Peire/Peyre II of Aragon became Pedro, not Peter or Pierre; the Italian Lotario resisted becoming Lothar; and Guilhabert of Castres simply refused to be called Wilbert. As for the numerous French figures in the text, there too I have anglicized names in the interests of easier comprehension. In this I am not alone: The thirteen-volume Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Scribners, 1989), has comforted me in many of my decisions. The French particule (i.e., de or des) is retained only when a long-standing convention has been established (e.g., Simon de Montfort) or when I have determined the name is a patronymic. Thus the murderers of Avignonet include a William of Lahille, a man from the village of Lahille near Fanjeaux, and a Bernard de St. Martin, whose last name appears to be just that—a last name. If my desire to make the text more accessible is an insufficient argument in the face of debatable judgment calls, I will gladly fall back on the excuse made famous by French Communists: “Ce sont mes contradictions!” (Such are my contradictions).
In the same arbitrary mood, I have embraced anachronism in geography. For our period, as mentioned in the introduction, it is premature to speak of France or England as established national states or governments, yet it would be tiresome to continue repeating “that patchwork of feudal arrangements that would one day coalesce into what we now call x.” A recent book on the Cathars adopts the following nomenclature: Carolingian France is referred to as Gaul; the area under the suzerainty of the early Capets is then termed Francia; and the confines of the state after King Philip Augustus is called France. Masterly distinctions; muddy waters. As long as it’s recognized as such, a little anachronism is better than a lot of confusion.
Readers should know of the principal primary sources for the Cathar drama before consulting the notes. First among equals is the thirteenth-century Canso, or, as it is now translated, The Song of the Cathar Wars. A 10,000-line Occitan-language chanson de geste—that is, a rhymed narrative song—the Canso has the peculiarity of being the work of two authors, both of whom witnessed many of the events of the crusade. The first third of the poem was written by the pro-crusade William of Tudela, a cleric assumed to have received the patronage of Baldwin, Count Raymond VI’s brother. When the traitorous Baldwin, a partisan of Simon de Montfort, was captured and hanged by his kinsmen shortly after the battle of Muret, William’s inkwell ran dry. The story from 1213 on was taken up by an anonymous continuator, who was ferociously pro-Toulouse in his leanings. The Canso thus switches sides. The last two-thirds of the poem brings the action up to 1219, as Toulouse is about to repel its third siege in eight years. The continuator, usually referred to as Anonymous, appears to have been a devout Catholic and, most probably, a companion of the young Count Raymond VII. Janet Shirley, in the introduction to her welcome English prose translation of the Canso (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996), distinguishes between the two writers: “Another and considerable difference between these two authors, one that is all but lost in translation, is that William was a good competent writer but his successor was a man of genius. William can tell a good story and is careful to leave us in no doubt that he was a well educated literary man… . The Anonymous, however, can toss showers of words into the air and catch them again.”
Another primary source of importance is the Hystoria albigensis, a Latin chronicle written by the pro-crusader Peter of Vaux de Cernay, a Cistercian monk. The nephew of a prelate who was a faithful friend of Simon de Montfort, Peter took part in many of the crusade’s actions and is a valuable, if unswervingly partial, eyewitness. At this writing, the definitive translation was to the French: Pascal Guébin and Henri Maisonneuve, Histoire albigeoise (Paris: Vrin, 1951). An English version of Vaux de Cernay’s chronicle, translated by W. A. and M. D. Sibly was published in 1998 (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell).
The last of the trinity of contemporary accounts was written at mid-century by William of Puylaurens, a notary for the Inquisition once in the employ of Count Raymond VII. Telegraphic in style, yet covering a greater chronological span, the Chronica magistri Guillelmi de Podio Lau-rentii backs up the detail found in the Canso and the Hystoria. Puylaurens appears to have spoken to the survivors of the crusade in their old age. The most commonly used translation from the original Latin was effected by the dean of French-language Cathar studies, Jean Duvernoy (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1976). The Chronica is not sympathetic to the Cathar cause, but neither does it spare the crusaders abuse for their often underhanded tactics.
The primary sources used for later periods of the Cathar story are discussed in the chapter notes that follow. Full publishing information on most of the books mentioned in the notes can be found in the bibliography.
The Perfect Heresy was written to be accessible to all readers curious about the past. For points of well-established fact and excerpts of medieval documents to be found in most studies of the Cathars, I did not think it necessary to credit the sources. Serious points of disagreement among them, however, are outlined in the notes, as well as any information that I deemed subsidiary, or distracting, to the flow of the narrative. Some of this “off-topic” information, I like to think, is interesting in its own right.
Introduction
4 There was nothing subtle about the appearance of Ste-Cécile: Lest any admirer of this peculiar church criticize me for neglecting the interior of Ste-Cécile, it should be mentioned that the side chapels and ceiling of the cathedral are a riot of colorful portraiture. Around the choir, occupying fully half of the nave, a pale lattice of carved limestone houses dozens of statues in its niches. This flamboyant Gothic rood screen is among France’s finest ecclesiastical treasures—a testament to the wealth of the see of Albi. At the back of the church, however, is an enormous fresco of the Last Judgment, four stories tall and as wide as the building itself. Commissioned by Louis d’Amboise, a late medieval bishop, it is a masterwork of the macabre, teeming with scores of figures in various stages of agony as reptilian demons and slimy toads torture them for eternity. Although the Cathars had long since vanished when Bishop d’Amboise had Florentine artists execute the work between 1474 and 1480, the fresco’s grotesque depiction of the consequences of sin seems less than innocent in this red-brick menace of a cathedral. Further queasiness is caused by another accident of art history. A bishop of the baroque era, Charles Le Goux de la Berchère, punched a huge hole in the center of the fresco to build a chapel in the base of the bell tower. In the top half of the painting—that part dedicated to the souls heading heavenward—the modification had the unfortunate effect of obliterating God, the judge of the Last Judgment. The solace of the divine is thus nowhere to be seen in this horror show, as if the painting sought solely to scare rather than to uplift. Again, given the history of the area, the result is almost too fitting to be a coincidence.
6 Whether Arnold Amaury actually uttered that pitiless order is still a matter for debate: “Kill them all, God will know his own” first appeared in the Dialogus miraculorum of the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, who wrote his admiring account of the crusade some thirty years after the fact. It had long been a historian’s reflex to shrug off the order as apocryphal and absolve Arnold Amaury of any such brutal eloquence. Recent scholarship, however, has pointed out that the wording echoes passages to be found in 2 Timothy (2:19) and Numbers (16:5). As the scrupulous Malcolm Lambert states in The Cathars (p.103): “This makes it a little more likely that these words from the mouth of an educated member of the hierarchy [i.e., Arnold Amaury] were authentic.” Whatever the truth of its birth, the expression continues to live on. Culture critic Greil Marcus, in his Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), claims that the expression “Kill ‘em all, God will sort ‘em out!” was a T-shirt slogan favored by fans of punker Johnny Rotten and, in a Spanish version, by members of Guatemalan death squads. The New York Times reported that Karla Faye Tucker, the ax-murderer executed in 1998 in Texas, used to wear a “Kill ‘em all” T-shirt in her bad girl days.
6 “a thousand years without a bath”: The mot is attributed to Jules Michelet.
6 “I’m gonna get medieval …”: Tarantino’s zinger about the Middle Ages is rivaled by the memorable couplet concocted in the 1960s by satirist Tom Lehrer about segregationist Dixie: “In the land of the boll weevil/Where the laws are medieval.”
13 the obscene kiss: Even though the tales of turpitude concerning heretics were borrowed from slanders that abounded in classical times (sometimes spread by pagan alarmists about the fledgling sects of Christianity), they were believed by many who should have known better. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX, the sponsor of the Inquisition, issued a papal bull, Vox in Rama, that breathlessly repeated old stories about feline orgies. A much-repeated slander was penned in the 1180s by Walter Map, a deacon of Oxford, who wrote the following of heretics: “About the first watch of the night… each family sits waiting in silence in each of their synagogues; and there descends by a rope which hangs in their midst a black cat of wondrous size. On sight of it they put out the lights and do not sing or distinctly repeat hymns, but hum them with closed teeth, and draw near to the place where they saw their master, feeling after him and when they have found him they kiss him. The hotter the feelings the lower their aim; some go for his feet, but most for his tail and privy parts. Then as though this noisome contact unleashed their appetites, each lays hold of his neighbor and takes his fill of him or her for all he is worth” (source: Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, pp. 60-61).
13 the heretics believed that no one could sin from the waist down: We have Peter of Vaux de Cernay to thank for this titillating fiction about the Cathars.
13 the thirteenth century’s culture of lawmaking and codification: It is a commonplace to compare the curiosity of the twelfth century with the reaction of the thirteenth. In a 1948 study of the Plantagenet kings of England, John Harvey summed up the historical consensus elegantly: “The thirteenth [century] was to witness the first riveting of the bands forged by scholasticism upon the minds of scholars, and the barren substitution of authority for empiricism. On the other hand, in the manual arts, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting, great strides were made by lay craftsmen who were sufficiently beneath the notice of the learned world of the schools to be able to carry on a living empiricism of their own. In certain other fields, notably those of law and administration, advances were made in the direction of unity by a process of codification and the hardening of earlier tentative formulae into settled rules of life” (source: J. Harvey, The Plantagenets [London: B. T. Batsford, 1948], p. 50).
13 historian R. I. Moore has provocatively seen… : In The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Moore argues that the persecuting apparatus was a natural but not inevitable outgrowth of the nascent state. He sees the years 1180–90 as a turning point in the development of oppressive institutions. His book, published in 1987, is still making waves.
14 Ironically, it took a twentieth-century Dominican friar, Antoine Dondaine, to dispel the fog: The banner year for understanding Catharism was 1939, when Dondaine discovered several important documents in archives in Florence and Prague: a Cathar catechism in Latin; a thirteenth-century philosophical treatise, The Book of Two Principles, written by a John of Lugio; and an exceptionally evenhanded description and rebuttal of Catharism, Contra Manicheos, written by Durand of Huesca, a Waldensian thinker who had been converted to orthodoxy during a debate with Dominic in 1207. Prior to these discoveries, Cathar theology had been pieced together solely from what their adversaries had written about the heresy and from two incomplete Occitan manuscripts found in Lyons and Dublin. Naturally, the enemies of Catharism had depicted the faith as a mass of superstition. From these documents it became obvious, especially in the case of John of Lugio (a Cathar scholastic), that the heresy was squarely in the tradition of Aristotelian rationalism. After centuries of being considered a fifth column for a Manichean revival, the Cathars could be studied for what they were: medieval Christians.
14 there were four contemporary chroniclers: For identification of these sources, see “Usage and Primary Sources” above.
16 the forces of American corporate imperialism: The novel in question is Le Christi, by René-Victor Pilhes. The author sees American economic leadership as a reincarnation of the totalitarian medieval Church, a view not uncommon in present-day France.
1. Languedoc and the Great Heresy
19 the outermost fringes of the Romance conversation: Occitan and its cousins were once squarely center stage. Before deciding on composing in his Tuscan vernacular, Dante Alighieri considered writing the Divine Comedy in Provençal.
20 often as weavers: Tradition holds that dualism was spread along the trade routes of the south by itinerant artisans. Foremost among these tradespeople were weavers, and for a while the Cathars were known as tisserands (weavers). Dissident scholarly opinion questions this occupational proclivity, by claiming that associating the Perfect with the rootless artisans was yet another way Catholic propagandists had found to slander them.
21 St. Félix en Lauragais: At the time, the village was called St. Félix de Caraman. I have given its modern name.
21 a Cathar International: The capitalized title for the meeting is my invention. As for the meeting itself, a vocal group of revisionists, led by historian Monique Zerner, claim that the heretical conclave never occurred. The skeptics’ argument rests principally on the fact that the sole source for the St. Félix meeting is a seventeenth-century document, whose author (Guillaume Besse) claimed to have worked from a now vanished manuscript of 1223. A colloquium was held in Nice in January 1999 to give the revisionists a hearing, yet the crushing weight of consensus among Cathar experts—Anne Brenon, Michel Roquebert, Malcolm Lambert, Bernard Hamilton, Jean Duvernoy, et. al.—continues to come down on the side of St. Felix having witnessed “the most imposing international gathering ever recorded in the history of the Cathars” (source: Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars, pp. 45–46). Some, however, argue that the meeting took place in the 1170s, not 1167. For an entertaining summary of many of the arguments pro and con, see Michel Roquebert, Histoire des cathares, pp. 58–62.
21 the believers overwhelmingly outnumbered … the Perfect: To my chagrin, I felt obliged to opt for the terminology coined by the Cathars’ persecutors. I have done this to avoid confusion, for the Cathars simply referred to themselves as Christians, good Christians, good men or good women, or friends of God. A Perfect is so called not because he or she is flawless; rather, one so labeled is a hereticus perfectus or heretica perfecta—”a completed heretic,” in the sense of one who has passed from the stage of sympathizer to the rank of the ordained. I have elected to capitalize the term so it will not be confused with the ordinary sense of “perfect.” The term for believers, credentes, was also coined by Catharism’s enemies.
22 a ritual response to the melioramentum: The exchange of greetings in the melioramentum emphasized the gulf between the simple, earth-bound believer and the quasi divine Perfect. Malcolm Lambert, in The Cathars (p. 142), draws on Y. Hagman’s doctoral work, “Catharism: A Medieval Echo of Manichaeism or of Primitive Christianity,” in describing the exchange: “In the most solemn form of the ceremony, three profound inclinations of the head on to the hands, so far as to kiss them, was accompanied by ‘Bless us’ (benedicte), ‘Lord’, or ‘good Christian’ or ‘good lady’, ‘the blessing of God and your own’, ‘Pray God for us’ and on the third inclination, ‘Lord, pray God for this sinner that he deliver him from an evil death and lead him to a good end.’ The perfect responded affirmatively to the first and second prayers and to the third at great length alluding to the consolamentum: ‘God be prayed that God will make you a good Christian and lead you to a good end.’ ”
22 leader of the Cathar faith in northern France: Not much is known of Catharism north of the Loire, save that it was repressed at an early stage and thus never came close to the success it enjoyed in Languedoc. The greatest concentration of dualist heretics in this region appears to have been in Champagne, an area crisscrossed by trade routes and host to the great medieval fairs where goods—and ideas—were exchanged.
23 The very last of the Bogomils: This nugget of surprising information is found in Friedrich Heer’s The Medieval World (p. 206). I have seen Bogomil also translated as “Deserving of the Pity of God.”
24 The Catholic precept of ex opere… : To believe that a corrupt priest cannot celebrate a sacrament is a heresy known as Donatism. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was merciless in combating the Donatists in his homeland of Roman North Africa.
26 heretical, by every definition except their own: Heresy is a slippery little devil. To label an idea heretical is to know exactly what it is you believe, and precisely what it is that you consider an unacceptable interloper into your patch of the divine. For the great majority of medieval believers, the line between heterodoxy and orthodoxy snaked all over the map. Christianity, like other faiths, was an ongoing argument, and the teachings and practices of the Church wandered in and out of deadend debates, picking up thoughts that would later be deemed repugnant, dismissing others that might subsequently constitute dogma. To the average Languedoc peasant, no doubt the Cathar holy men and women seemed to be completely orthodox in their piety, more orthodox than the village priest living with his concubine. Scholar Leonard George has nicely defined heresy as “a crime of perception—an act of seeing something that, according to some custodian of reality, is not truly there.” The word originates in the Greek hairesis, the noun formed from the verb haireomai (to choose). At base, heresy means consciously opting for a set of beliefs, and thus a heretic is—the anachronism is irresistible—pro-choice. It then came to mean choosing an incorrect belief system. Given the shifting sands of doctrine, finding the officially approved path to salvation frequently took deft spiritual footwork. Paul admonished his followers about heretics in an oft-quoted passage from the New Testament’s Titus 3:9–11: “But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that you may have nothing to do with him. You may be sure that such a man is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.” In another influential remark about heresy, the thirteenth-century English churchman Robert Grosseteste, one of the rare specimens of medieval humanity to have survived into his eighties, leaves implicit the notion of a single, approved truth. According to him, heresy is “an opinion chosen by human perception, contrary to holy scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately defended.” Again, choice and perception were paramount in this definition, with the added proviso of publicity. The wise old Grosseteste was saying that you wouldn’t be called a heretic if you just kept your mouth shut. The Cathars, famously, did not. Their creed embraced so many officially proscribed errors—Donatism, Docetism, dualism, Monophysitism, etc.—that to call them heretics seems an understatement. True, the Cathars thought the Catholics were heretics, but the Church, just as famously, won the argument. If the Cathars can’t be called heretics, we should just delete the word from our dictionaries. In the text I use the term in the sense of dissent, not depravity.
27 Ephemeral messiahs and cranky reformers: My quick review of colorful charismatics of the twelfth century should be supplemented by reading, in order of palatability, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, R. I. Moore’s The Origins of European Dissent, and Malcolm Lambert’s Medieval Heresy. The jungle of dissent is lush.
27 revered him so much that they drank his bathwater: The charge against Tanchelm’s followers, complete with details of how they adored his toenail clippings, may or may not be true, given the partisan nature of the pro-Catholic medieval sources. What is more certain is that the tale, even if it is a canard, continues to intoxicate with its perverseness. In the New Yorker of November 29, 1999, John Updike writes about Shoko Asahara, the head of the cult that released nerve gas in Tokyo subways: “His followers were also privileged, when he was at liberty, to kiss his big toe and to pay upward of two hundred dollars for a drink of his used bathwater.”
29 Mystical, anorexic, brilliant, eloquent and polemical: The mention of anorexia may surprise, but the great Bernard was voluble about his ills, imagined or real. An entertaining depiction of the man—and of his nemesis, Peter Abelard—can be found in Christopher Frayling’s Strange Landscape, in which he devotes a chapter titled “The Saint and the Scholar” to their famous twelfth-century feud. Frayling writes (p. 123) of Bernard’s gastric troubles: “Bernard was permanently ill—which was hardly surprising given the way he punished his body and the damp surroundings he lived in. He seems to have suffered from a form of extreme anorexia nervosa—rejecting food so regularly that he was sometimes paralysed through lack of nourishment; and he stank continually of stale vomit. ‘I have a bad stomach,’ he wrote, ‘but how much more must I be hurt by the stomach of my memory where such rottenness collects.’ ”
29 The great man was laughed out of town: The story is alluded to in Geoffrey of Auxerre’s medieval Life of Saint Bernard and expanded upon in the first chapter of William of Puylaurens’s chronicle.
30 dualists were sighted everywhere: Perhaps the strangest incident of heresy detection in the twelfth century occurred near Rheims, when a cleric named Gervase of Tilbury, out riding with the archbishop and some senior prelates, spotted a pretty girl working alone in a vineyard. A chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall, relates: “Moved by the lewd curiosity of a young man, as I heard from him myself after he had become a canon, he went over to her. He greeted her, and asked politely where she came from, and who her parents were, and what she was doing there alone, and then, when he had eyed her beauty for a while, spoke gallantly to her of the delights of love-making.” She turned him down, saying that she would always remain a virgin. His suspicions now aroused as well, Gervase learned that the peasant girl believed, on heretical religious grounds, that her body must not be corrupted. He tried to get her to change her mind, in the timeless manner of one who will not take no for an answer. Their arguing finally attracted the attention of the archbishop, who rode over and soon became scandalized. Not by Gervase’s conduct, but by the girl’s faith. He had her arrested and brought back to Rheims for questioning. The farm girl refused to recant, and she was burned. (Source: R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy, pp. 86–88.)
30 labeled the unfortunates Cathars: The name originated in Eckbert of Schönau’s Thirteen Sermons against the Cathars, written in 1163. Eckbert also called the Cathars “wretched half-wits.”
30 the question of oath taking: The refusal to swear oaths was frequent among heretics, and not just of the Cathar variety. One justification is found in Matthew 5:33–37: “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago: ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’‘No;’ anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”
31 Cathar dioceses were drawn up: Among those who concede that the St. Félix meeting took place, there is further argument about what happened there. Some believe that Nicetas (often styled Niquinta) laid down the dualist law, convincing the Languedoc Cathars to move from “mitigated dualism” to “absolute dualism”—the latter being a more hard-core belief positing an almost co-equal evil divinity. Others hold that the tale of Nicetas’s dogmatic authority is baseless, caused by a misreading in the 1890s (by historian Ignaz von Döllinger) and repeated unwittingly by generations of historians throughout the twentieth century. What is certain is that Nicetas warned the Languedoc Cathars against divisiveness and approved their diocesan organization.
2. Rome
33 the pontiff’s superiority over all the crowned heads of Christendom: The chutzpah of Gregory VII can still take one’s breath away. In a volume of his correspondence, historians found a list that contains the following statements: “The pope can be judged by no one; the Roman church has never erred and never will err till the end of time; the Roman church was founded by Christ alone; the pope alone can depose and restore bishops; he alone can make new laws, set up new bishoprics, and divide old ones; he alone can translate bishops; he alone can call general councils and authorize canon law; he alone can revise his own judgements; he alone can use the imperial insignia; he can depose emperors; he can absolve subjects from their allegiance; all princes should kiss his feet” (source: R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, p. 102).
37–38 the church of SS. Sergio and Bacco: The church of Lotario’s cardinalate no longer exists. Neither does the tower that was erected on top of the arch of Septimius Severus.
37 The church was a treasure house of relics: There may be a six-or seven-year anachronism in the list of some of the relics to be found at the Lateran in 1198. A lot of relics came on the market following the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204; thus some of the objects listed may not have found their way to Rome until after that event. For example, Enrico Dandolo, the wily old doge of Venice, brought back from Constantinople the lions that stand in front of St. Mark’s, as well as a piece of the True Cross, the arm of St. George, a vial of Christ’s blood, and a chunk of John the Baptist’s head (source: Marc Kaplan, “Le sac de Constantinople,” in Les Croisades, ed. R. Delort).
38 it was he who definitively nudged the papal court to … the Vatican: Innocent would eventually wind up back at St. John Lateran, however, when a disgruntled nineteenth-century papacy moved his body to the church as a symbolic riposte to constitutional liberalism. He now lies in the transept, his recumbent stone effigy a study in lordly calm, guarded by a pair of statues depicting women. One holds the light of wisdom; the other, the banner of crusade. It is rumored that his remains were transferred from Perugia to Rome in the suitcase of a seminarian traveling in the second-class compartment of a train.
38 Lotario must have absorbed the lesson behind that beatification: There is no documentary evidence proving that the young Lotario was impressed by the canonization of Thomas Becket in neighboring Segni. It is, however, a fairly reasonable assumption and one that is repeated by several of Innocent’s biographers. Jane Sayers, in her Innocent III, states that Lotario toured the saint’s shrine in Canterbury on a student visit to Britain (p. 19). Historian Edward Peters, in “Lotario dei Conti di Segni becomes Pope Innocent III” (from Pope Innocent III and his World, ed. J. C. Moore) dates the visit at 1185 or 1186 (p. 10).
38 5,000 ounces of gold: In Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity (p. 267), the visit in 1511 of the Dutch scholar Erasmus to the shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury is evoked: “Erasmus’s account makes it clear they were deeply shocked by what they saw. The riches which adorned the shrine were staggering. Erasmus found them incongruous, disproportionate, treasures ‘before which Midas or Croesus would have seemed beggars;’ thirty years later, Henry VIII’s agents were to garner from it 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of plain silver and twenty-six cartloads of other treasure.”
3. The Turn of the Century
40 “To be always with a woman …”: This nugget of misogyny is quoted in R. W. Southern’s classic Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (p. 315). Southern makes his point about the Church turning its back on women with other selected quotations. One of the most remarkable was penned by a Premonstratensian abbot: “We and our whole community of canons, recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than that of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals.”
42 “… We cannot. We have been reared in their midst.”: The Catholic knight who made this oft-cited admission to Bishop Fulk was Pons-Adhemar of Roudeille. The anecdote is related by William of Puylaurens.
42 entirely free of the prejudices of its time: Peter Autier, the leader of the Cathar revival in the early 1300s, taught that one had to be a male in one’s last incarnation if one was to join the good god. The idea that women were sinks of corruption and carnality, an oft-repeated theme in medieval Catholicism, appears to have cropped up in Catharism during the time of its persecution. For a levelheaded and exhaustive examination of Cathar beliefs, see Anne Brenon’s excellent Le Vrai Visage du cathar-isme.
43 Noblewomen, especially, founded, managed, and led Cathar homes: Again, the work of historian Anne Brenon should be consulted, especially her Les Femmes cathares. The role of women in Catharism, long neglected by Catholic and Protestant historians feuding over the doctrinal implications of dualism, is now seen as one of the most remarkable sociological aspects of the heresy. Of the great Cathar matriarchs, Blanche of Laurac was undoubtedly the most notorious. On becoming a widow, Blanche and her youngest daughter, Mabilia, received the consolamentum and ran a Cathar home in Laurac, the town that gave its name to the Lauragais region. Another daughter, Navarra, left her husband, Stephen of Servian, when he repented of his heresy to Dominic. Navarra moved to Montségur. Another of Blanche’s daughters, Esclarmonde, married into the Niort clan and became the mother of the most dangerous family in Cathar history. The last of Blanche’s daughters was Geralda of Lavaur, a Cathar believer murdered by the crusaders in 1211. Blanche’s only son was Aimery of Montréal.
44 the elder man invited a bevy of prelates to sniff out Catharism in his capital of Toulouse: The unsuccessful mission of 1178 included the head of the Cistercians, Henry of Marsiac, a powerful cardinal, Peter of Pavia, as well as the bishops of Bourges and Bath. Marsiac returned in 1181, at the head of an armed force and captured the town of Lavaur, a settlement between Albi and Toulouse that had a reputation for heresy. Although Marsiac’s occupation of Lavaur was fleeting, an ominous precedent had been set.
45 a troubadour named Peire Vidal: Vidal was by no means the only troubadour in Raymond’s court. Indeed, the count’s secretary for many years was Peire Cardenal, a troubadour who was an accomplished composer of sirventes—rhymed songs that usually skewered the enemies of the man who commissioned them.
46 hotly contested sources of money: The splintering effect of partible inheritances that worked wonders for low-maintenance female Perfect was disastrous for their petty noble kinsmen, on whom Raymond should have been able to call for support. By the first decade of the thirteenth century, many towns and villages had thirty to fifty “co-lords”—fifty in Lombers, thirty-five in Mirepoix (source: Walter L. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250, p. 52)—the result of successive pie splitting, and thus everyone involved was more or less broke or quarreling with each other over a few far-flung acres of vines. Not many nobles could stable a military establishment. The recourse to freelance routiers (armed mercenaries) as a means of resolving disputes only added to the anarchy. These routiers, often landless younger sons from the neighboring kingdom of Aragon, were notorious for overstaying their welcome and wreaking havoc with a terrified peasantry.
46 approximately 150 in all at the turn of the millennium: The estimate stands for the year 975 (source: Michael Costen, The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, p. 5).
46 led the Christian armies into Jerusalem: Raymond IV of Toulouse wrote to the pope of the holy massacre perpetrated by his crusaders on storming the mosques and synagogues of Jerusalem in 1099: “And if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.” Christian sources put the number of victims at 10,000; Arab sources claim 100,000 were killed. (Source: Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World, p. 135.)
51 “The chief cause of all these evils is the archbishop of Narbonne …”: Innocent’s famous feud with Archbishop Berengar lasted well over ten years. The corrupt prelate, who used mercenaries to collect his tithes, was able to hang on to his lucrative post so long in the face of papal displeasure primarily because of his splendid family connections. He was the illegitimate son of a count of Barcelona and the bastard uncle of King Pedro II of Aragon.
51 “I’d rather be a priest.”: The anecdote is told by William of Puylaurens in his prologue to the Chronica. William, perhaps exaggerating the plight of the Church in order to justify the subsequent calling of a crusade, went on to say: “When the clergy showed themselves in public they concealed their small tonsures by combing the long hair forward from the back of their head” (source: Zoé Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montségur, trans. Peter Green, p. 54).
52 Stadtluft macht frei: The expression also had the literal meaning of freeing serfs. In Germanic custom, any serf who took up residence for one year and one day in a town would automatically be exempted from his former manorial obligations (source: Charles T. Wood, The Quest for Eternity, p. 88).
52 “for reason of adultery …”: For scholarly evaluations of medieval Toulouse’s remarkable climate of freedom, see the work of J. H. Mundy, particularly his Men and Women at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars.
4. The Conversation
56 “O dolorous case …”: The lamentation comes from William of Puylaurens. His chronicle is the major source for our knowledge of the debates.
56 “Go back to your spinning, Madame …”: Scholarly opinion is divided over whether the female Perfect so rudely addressed was Esclarmonde of Foix. Proponents of the “Cathar country” myths outlined in the epilogue naturally assume that it had to be Esclarmonde who was doing the talking. Others believe that it was her cousin.
56 “the mother of fornication and abomination”: In a debate of 1207, Arnold Hot loosed an impressive volley. The St. John to whom he refers is not the evangelist but John of Patmos, the mystic who authored Revelations: “[The] Roman Church is the devil’s church and her doctrines are those of demons, she is the Babylon whom St. John called the mother of fornication and abomination, drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs… . neither Christ nor the apostles has established the existing order of the mass” (cited in Joseph R. Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades, p. 22).
57 Innocent attempted again and again to organize a punitive campaign: Historian Michel Roquebert has effectively exploded the notion, long held by the apologists of orthodoxy, that Innocent’s hand was forced by the murder of Peter of Castelnau. In fact, Innocent was trying to organize a crusade against Languedoc from the very outset of his pontificate. See Michel Roquebert, L’Epopée cathare, vol. 1, pp. 132–33.
63 The paper then wafted upward, charring a ceiling beam: When I visited Fanjeaux in the summer of 1998, a Korean Dominican nun kindly showed me around her convent and indicated where the miracle had taken place. As I was leaving, she asked me to sign the guest book. I saw that the last visitor had been a Spaniard, whose entry dated from several months previously. He/she had written: “Te perdono, Domingo, burro, no supiste lo que hacías” (I forgive you, Dominic, you mule, for you knew not what you did).
64 “the conversation of old ladies …”: Dominic’s deathbed admission about liking the company of pretty young women is related in Georges Bernanos’s Les Prédestines, p. 77.
64 The Spaniard’s ceaseless wanderings … brought him deep within dualist country: Those old enough to remember the warbling Belgian nun who performed a hit song of 1963 about St. Dominic may be surprised to learn that one verse dealt with the Cathars. The chorus and verse in the original French: “Dominique, nique, nique/ S’en allait tout simplement/ Routier pauvre et chantant/ En tous chemins, en tous lieux/ Il ne parle que du bon Dieu/ Il ne parle que du bon Dieu…. A l’epoque ou Jean-sans-Terre/ D’Angleterre était le roi/ Dominique, notre Pere/ Combattit les Albigeois.” The same again, in the English version: “Dominique, nique, nique/ Over land he plods along/ And sings a little song/ Never asking for reward/ He just talks about the Lord/ He just talks about the Lord.... At a time when Johnny Lackland/Over England was the king/ Dominique was in the backland/ Fighting sin like anything.” Unfortunately, Noel Rigney’s English adaptation neglects the mention of Albigeois found in the original. Then again, finding a snappy rhyme for the English equivalent—Albigensian—is not terribly obvious.
64 “I should beg you not to kill me at one blow …”: Dominic’s first biographer, a Dominican friar named Jordanus of Saxony, emphasized the Spaniard’s saintly pacifism. Others were not so sure. Stephen of Salagnac, a Dominican from the middle of the thirteenth century, wrote that an exasperated Dominic once preached at Prouille: “For several years now I have spoken words of peace to you. I have preached to you; I have besought you with tears. But as the common saying goes in Spain, Where a blessing fails, a good thick stick will succeed. Now we shall rouse princes and prelates against you; and they, alas, will in their turn assemble whole nations and peoples, and a mighty number will perish by the sword. Towers will fall, and walls be razed to the ground, and you will all of you be reduced to servitude. Thus force will prevail where gentle persuasion has failed to do so.” Whether Dominic actually said something this prescient can only be a matter of conjecture. It sounds like the invention of someone who is looking back on, and perhaps trying to justify, the Albigensian Crusade.
5. Penance and Crusade
67 the northern chronicler who recorded the episode … must have been pleased to see Raymond so thoroughly humiliated: There can be no doubt that our source, Peter of Vaux de Cernay, would have been delighted at Raymond’s predicament. Elsewhere in his Hystoria albigensis, the chronicler calls the count of Toulouse “a limb of Satan, a child of perdition, a hardened criminal, a parcel of sinfulness.”
68 an unsolved murder mystery: The question of who, if not Raymond, ordered the killing of Peter of Castelnau can still inflame some imaginations, in much the same way that Oliver Stone got overheated with JFK. In Jean-Jacques Bedu’s historical novel, Les Terres de feu, the conspiracy theory circulating in neo-Cathar circles is clearly outlined. The accused stands as none other than Arnold Amaury, Peter’s colleague. If Arnold was at Peter’s side on that day—as some believe—then why did the murderer kill just one legate? And how did the murderer know who to stab? And why didn’t he get rid of the witnesses? Who sprang the perjury trap so that Raymond could not clear his name? And why wasn’t Raymond charged? Finally, who profited most from the murder? Certainly not Raymond. Who, as a result of the murder, got to lead a crusade, crush the Trencavels, and use armed force to place himself in a very lucrative position as archbishop of Narbonne? Arnold Amaury. It’s not impossible, though no jury outside of Languedoc would convict.
68 Innocent called for a crusade: The clergy did not use the term crusade. It was known as negotium pacis et fidei (the enterprise of peace and faith).
70 “naked in front of the tomb of the blessed martyr …”: The source is Vaux de Cernay. The tomb can still be viewed.
73 the Christian city of Zara: It is now known as the Croatian port of Zadar.
73 European Jewry, in particular, was subject to slaughter: The First Crusade initiated what would become a sorry tradition. In marching across Europe in 1096, the crusaders murdered 12 Jews in Spier, 22 at Metz, 500 at Worms, and 1,000 at Mainz (source: Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, p. 245).
73 “You ask us urgently …”: This duplicitous scheme of Innocent’s was followed to the letter. The correspondence is cited in most works on the Cathars. I have used Joseph R. Strayer’s translation from The Albigensian Crusades, pp. 58–59.
6. Béziers
75 he had rebuffed Count Raymond’s proposal of a defensive alliance: The deviousness of Raymond of Toulouse was not bottomless. In the winter of 1208–9, he tried to reach a common defensive agreement with Raymond Roger Trencavel, but, for reasons unknown, the negotiations broke off and each man went his own way. Whether Count Raymond was sincere in trying to form this alliance still divides historians of the crusade.
78 one of them, William of Tudela, conceded: The three chroniclers for Beziers were Tudela, Vaux de Cernay, and Puylaurens. None of them was an eyewitness to the events. In this chapter, unless otherwise stated, the fullest account—that of William of Tudela in the Canso—forms the basis of the narrative. I have used Janet Shirley’s excellent translation (pp. 19–22) for direct quotations about the incidents at Beziers.
79 222 names: Debate rages over whether this list included all of the Cathars of the town or just the Perfect. Most believe that the number is too low to encompass all the credentes of Béziers, which was a fairly sizable town at the time. Notations appear alongside a couple of names indicating that some of the heretics sought may have been Waldensians rather than Cathars.
80 Mary Magdalene had an even better reputation among the gnostics: As described in Elaine Pagels’s landmark The Gnostic Gospels, the ancient writings unearthed in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, attest to the wide range of Christian beliefs that were squelched by the emergent orthodoxy of Rome. Of particular interest concerning the Magdalene’s status as the first of the apostles are the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, and Dialogue of the Saviour, the last stating that Mary was “the woman who knew the All.”
85 Not even Count Raymond: There is a rock-solid consensus among historians that Raymond did not participate actively in the actions of the crusaders. Given his subsequent military incompetence, it is unlikely that he saddled up and rode anywhere when battle beckoned. Also, he seems to have been universally beloved in Languedoc; had he joined in the massacre at Béziers, there would have been Occitans who bore him a grudge. Lastly, Raymond always showed a reluctance to harm fellow southerners.
7. Carcassonne
90 “To horse, my lords!”: The direct speech is reported by William of Tudela, author of this section of the Canso (p. 22 in Janet Shirley’s translation). Unless indicated in the text, the quotations are from the Canso.
90 Peter Roger of Cabaret: Cabaret is now called Lastours, after the ruins of the four castle keeps (towers) that dot its hillside.
90 “stupider than whales”: The expression is William of Tudela’s. Translator Shirley wryly states in a footnote: “La balena, the whale, is the rhyme word; there is no reason to suppose medieval whales were a byword for stupidity” (p. 20).
95 “In Jesus’s name, baron …”: Again, the direct speech is reported by William of Tudela in the Canso.
100 the discretion of the pro-crusade chroniclers: Although all sources skate suspiciously fast over the incident, they are at variance over what precisely was offered to Raymond Roger. In the Chronica, William of Puylaurens states it was the young Trencavel who lost his nerve and agreed to be held hostage. Peter of Vaux de Cernay, who makes no mention of King Pedro’s failed attempt at mediation, implies that the crusade always intended to keep the viscount a captive indefinitely. The Canso seems to be missing a passage at this crucial juncture. For a full discussion of the incident, see volume 1 of Michel Roquebert’s L’Epopée cathare, pp. 275–78.
8. Bad Neighbors
104 “Et ab joi li er mos treus …”: The Occitan text is taken from Ernest Hoepffner’s Le Troubadour Peire Vidal, sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961). The French translation is in Michel Roquebert’s L’Epopée cathare, vol. 1, p. 314. The English translation, from the French, is my own.
106 the grotesque march: Some of Simon’s defenders, most recently Dominique Paladilhe in Simon de Montfort et le drame cathare (pp. 115–19), point out that it was not the northerner who started this awful practice of mutilation during the crusade years. In the winter of 1210, a particularly ferocious Occitan noble by the name of Gerald of Pepieux cut off the facial features of a handful of crusaders he had captured. The sheer scale of Simon’s riposte at Bram—as well as his presence at the sack of Beziers—has usually silenced those who seek excuses for his behavior.
107 Simon’s fourth son, another Simon de Montfort: It is the younger Simon de Montfort who is better known to students of British history. A leader of the baronial party opposed to the foreign adventurism and spendthrift ways of King Henry III, Simon got his monarch to agree to the Provisions of Oxford (1258) and the Provisions of Westminster (1259), which held that a council of nobles would exercise some control over the treasury and royal appointments. The king broke the agreement, and civil war ensued in 1264. Before being killed in the decisive Battle of Evesham in 1265, Simon began summoning lesser knights and townsmen to his parliament—thereby initiating the institutional practice that would mature as the House of Commons.
107 a great mane of hair: The champion of homoerotic Montfort idolatry is without a doubt Peter of Vaux de Cernay. The author of the Hystoria albigensis speaks of Simon’s “elegant face,” his “broad shoulders,” “muscular arms,” “gracious torso,” “agile and supple limbs” (source: Paladilhe, Simon de Montfort, p. 25).
115 the more zealous northern pilgrims complained: In a nice lexical coincidence, the leader of the grumblers who were worried that the heretics might escape was a French baron, Robert of Mauvoisin, a name that resembles that of the infamous trebuchet, Malvoisine. Unless indicated in the text, all of the incidents and speeches following the surrender of Minerve are attributable to the Hystoria.
115 Three of the women, however, abjured the dualist faith: Curiously enough, the person responsible for changing their minds was Mathilde de Garlande, the mother of Bouchard de Marly, the crusader held captive in Cabaret. Mathilde apparently yanked them off the bonfire as the flames were just getting going.
9. The Conflict Widens
118 the Toulousains left for Rome: Before going to Rome to complain to the pope, Raymond had gone to Paris to complain to the king. Philip Augustus gave him a sympathetic hearing but did nothing to help out the beleaguered count.
119 “foxes in the vineyards of the Lord”: Innocent was not the only churchman to use this image. It was a fairly common trope for heresy in the Middle Ages, echoing a passage from the Song of Songs (2:15).
126 tears welled up in the count’s eyes: Peter of Vaux de Cernay notes the tears of Raymond but is quick to attribute them to “rage and felony” rather than “repentance and devotion.”
127 King Pedro of Aragon tried to prevent the war: Pedro bent over backward to keep the peace and, in the process, keep both sides off-balance. He offered his son in marriage to Simon’s daughter. War would break this betrothal. At the same time, he wed his sister to Raymond’s son. Since Raymond VI was already married to another sister of Pedro’s, he (Raymond) and his son became brothers-in-law—a relation which raised a few eyebrows. In the Trencavel matter, Pedro behaved as decently as could be expected. In exchange for getting Simon to agree to pay a pension to Agnes of Montpellier—the widow of Raymond Roger Trencavel—Pedro recognized Simon’s legitimacy. Agnes and her infant son Raymond then moved to Aragon, where they lived with the royal family. The disinherited son would twice roar back over the Pyrenees and try to reclaim Carcassonne after he had grown to manhood.
128 Arnold did not disappoint: Arnold’s outrageous offer occurs only in the Canso, leading some historians to question the reality of the proposal. One of the more influential doubters is Joseph R. Strayer, who, in The Albigensian Crusades, calls William of Tudela a “not entirely trustworthy writer” (p. 78). In the same passage, however, Strayer concedes that the general tenor of the demands makes sense.
129 Enguerrand of Coucy: The great barons of the crusade of 1211 included Robert of Courtenay (a first cousin of Raymond VI of Toulouse), Juhel of Mayenne, Peter of Nemours, and Enguerrand of Coucy. The last should be familiar to readers of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, her account of the Coucy family in the “calamitous 14th century.” The Enguerrand at Lavaur is an ancestor of Tuchman’s hero of the same name. It was our Enguerrand who, in 1225, began the construction of the great castle at Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique that figures so prominently in Tuchman’s tale. The Coucy fortress—the grandest medieval castle in France—was blown up by the Germans during their strategic retreat from the Noyon Salient in 1917, in one of the most devastating, and gratuitous, acts of vandalism of the Great War.
130 under the direction of Bishop Fulk of Toulouse: The number of Fulk’s contingent of singers and soldiers swells according to the sources consulted, from a few hundred to 5,000. What is certain is that these men were firebrands of orthodoxy. In a nettlesome question of usage, I have opted to follow Joseph Strayer’s example and have referred to the bishop throughout as Fulk. He appears in some histories as Foulquet when a troubadour and Foulque or Foulques in his later incarnation as bishop.
130 Montgey: The mass murder at Montgey deeply shocked chroniclers and churchmen throughout Europe. For one, it was the only slaughter en masse of pilgrims during the entire twenty years of the crusade. Also, the job of mutilating and finishing off the wounded was left to peasants and villeins—which was an almost intolerable transgression of the social order. This might, if one were disposed to make excuses, account for Simon de Montfort’s savagery toward Lady Geralda and the eighty knights at Lavaur, which violated all customary practices toward captives of noble birth. Near Montgey today, there is a plaque at a roadside calvary in the village of Auvezines, memorializing the lost column of armored pilgrims. To embrace anachronism for a moment: The plaque must be unique in France for deploring the demise of an invading German army.
130 The leader of the defeated defenders was Aimery of Montréal: The village of Montréal bears no relation to the great city on the St. Lawrence River. First garrisoned by the Romans, the gentle height became a village in the ninth century and owes its name to a corruption of the Latin Mons Regalis (royal mount) or Mons Revelatus (bare mount). Its sister in Catharism, Fanjeaux, is said to derive its name from Fanum Jovis (temple of Jove). The tale of Aimery’s hulking corpse bringing down the gallows originates in the Hystoria of Vaux de Cernay. The average height of the warriors of thirteenth-century France was five-foot-two or five-foot-three. As for Geralda, a later Catholic chronicler claimed that she and Aimery had several children borne of their incestuous couplings, a fairly standard libel leveled at heretics.
10. A Time of Surprises
132 led by four Christian kings: Kings Alfonso VIII of Castile, Sancho VII of Navarra, Alfonso II of Portugal, and Pedro II of Aragon.
141 his historic flip-flop: Innocent threatened Pedro at the end of his letter dated May 21, 1213: “Such are the orders which your Serene Highness is invited to obey, in every last detail; failing which … We should be obliged to threaten you with Divine Wrath, and to take steps against you such as would result in your suffering grave and irreparable harm” (source: Zoé Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montségur, p. 163). It is amazing that Pedro should have gone from being Christendom’s hero—the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa took place in July 1212—to the pope’s nemesis, all in the space of ten months.
141 Simon … had made his last will and testament that morning: Peter of Vaux de Cernay recounts this telltale act on the part of a nervous Simon. Much of our information about the actions of Simon comes from his chronicle. It should be noted that from January 1213 to May 1214 Vaux de Cernay was in France; thus he was not present for the fateful battle. However, he would have spoken to Simon and his men about the events once he had returned to Languedoc and rejoined the crusade.
142 Pedro … relaxed with his mistress: There are two dubious historico-erotic tales told of Pedro’s actions before the battle. The first has Pedro writing a letter to a married lady of Toulouse in which he proclaims that his sole reason for fighting is to impress her enough to get into her bed. Vaux de Cernay tells of Pedro’s letter being intercepted by a prior in Pamiers and shown to Simon de Montfort as he marched to Muret. There is much tut-tutting by Simon about the indecency of the king’s motives. Historians, while not doubting the existence of the intercepted letter, believe Pedro’s missive was a standard, poetic greeting couched in the courtly language of the day, and addressed to one of Pedro’s sisters in Toulouse—it will be remembered that Raymond the elder and Raymond the younger had both married into the Aragonese royal house. Vaux de Cernay, significantly, does not give the identity of the addressee. The other rumor has Pedro so tired after his amorous activities on the eve of the battle that he can barely stand up in the morning. This originated in the Llibre dels feyts, a chronicle that Pedro’s son commissioned when he had reached manhood and become King Jaume (or James) the Conqueror. Although delightful (and unlikely), the story is thought to be the invention of a Catalan chronicler who wanted to explain how the otherwise unbeatable Pedro could have been slain on the field of battle. The poor fellow was exhausted, so it wasn’t a fair fight.
143 “It is a great pity that you who have lands to live on should have been such cowards as to lose them”: The insult is recorded in the Canso. Just prior to Muret, the chronicler known as Anonymous (see “Usage and Primary Sources” above) takes over from William of Tudela. The man who spoke so woundingly to Count Raymond was Michael of Luesia, who died fighting alongside Pedro later in the day.
143 Simon de Montfort ordered his knights to … get ready for battle: The prelude and aftermath of the battle are rich in contemporary accounts. There is, however, a remarkable paucity of sources concerning the actual fighting at Muret. There is also a remarkable lack of agreement about where exactly the batde took place and how the forces were arrayed. The work of Michel Roquebert, in the second volume of his L’Epopée cathare, is exemplary for its exhaustiveness and its evenhanded consideration of different theories. His conclusions, including a set piece on the battle (pp. 167–236), guided my brief evocation of the fight. The route taken by the crusaders along the towpath, for example, is Roquebert’s hypothesis.
143 “If we cannot draw them a very long way from their tents …”: Simon’s speech is set down by Anonymous in the Canso.
143 Masses were said, confessions heard: Pious legend—backed up by a plaque in the main church of Muret—has Dominic inventing the Catholic prayer cycle known as the Rosary during the vigil before the battle. Church historians have long since proved, alas, that Dominic was not among the clergymen at Muret on that fateful September day.
146 “Across the marshes …”: The descriptive passage is from the Canso (in Janet Shirley’s translation, p. 70).
148 A mass grave would be unearthed in the nineteenth century: The riverside spot is called Le Petit Jofréry. Floods of 1875 and 1891 uncovered makeshift cemeteries and thirteenth-century armor (source: Dominique Paladilhe, Les Grandes Heures cathares, p. 154).
11. The Verdict
150 the vicar of Christ stalked out of his cathedral: For the events at the Lateran Council, I relied on the work of Brenda Bolton (“A Show with a Meaning: Innocent Ill’s Approach to the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Medieval History 1 (1991), pp. 53–67), which in turn led to S. Kuttner and A. Garcia y Garcia’s article “A New Eyewitness Account of the Fourth Lateran Council,” Traditio 20 (1964), pp. 115–78. There was another eyewitness, the chronicler Richard of San Germano.
153 A chronicler told of how the session …: The chronicler is Anonymous of the Canso. It is possible that he attended the Lateran Council in the entourage of the Raymonds. At the very least, he talked to many of the principal participants. The speeches are all to be found in the Canso and are widely thought to give an accurate picture of the verbal sparring that must have occurred there. The version used is Janet Shirley’s translation.
156 “you take away Montauban and Toulouse …”: Montauban, a city on the River Tarn to the northwest of Toulouse, was the only other major center to resist Simon de Montfort’s rule.
12. Toulouse
158 Any unlucky besieger captured … according to a chronicler: In his Hystoria albigensis, Peter of Vaux de Cernay lists an impressive number of atrocities committed by the Toulousains. There is no reason to disbelieve him.
161 “When the count entered through the arched gateway …”: The eyewitness here is not Vaux de Cernay but Anonymous. In this chapter, the direct quotations relating to the siege are taken from the Canso, but much of the background material is found in the Hystoria and the Chronica. All three sources are prolix about the great siege of Toulouse; only the Canso, however, has women operating the mangonel that killed Simon de Montfort. That twist of fate is too lovely not to be repeated.
167 As was the custom: It is William of Puylaurens who states that the boiling of the corpse was a French funerary custom.
168 “The epitaph says …”: The epitaph to which this remarkable passage refers has been lost. As for the funerary stone depicting Simon de Montfort, now affixed to a wall in the transept of Carcassonne’s St. Nazaire, it is now considered a hoax. Experts from Toulouse established in 1982 that the stone was carved between 1820 and 1829, at the behest of Alexandre Dumege, a local historian with an overheated romantic imagination (source: Michel Roquebert, L’Epopée cathare, vol. 3, p. 143).
13. The Return to Tolerance
169 Every man, woman, and child in Marmande: The massacre provoked almost as much comment as Beziers and became a staple among northern chroniclers. Anonymous, in the Canso, lets out all the stops in his description: “But clamour and shouting arose, men ran into the town with sharpened steel; terror and massacre began. Lords, ladies and their little children, women and men stripped naked, all these men slashed and cut to pieces with keen-edged swords. Flesh, blood and brains, trunks, limbs and faces hacked in two, lungs, livers and guts torn out and tossed aside lay on the open ground as if they had rained down from the sky. Marshland and good ground, all was red with blood. Not a man or a woman was left alive, neither old nor young, no living creature, unless any had managed to hide. Marmande was razed and set alight” (Janet Shirley’s translation, pp. 188–89).
170 “Roma trichairitz …”: The troubadour’s song appears, with a translation by Roger Depledge, in Yves Rouquette’s Cathars., pp. 162–63.
176 his body was denied a public Christian burial: Discredited legend long had it that the remains of Raymond VI were left to rot outside a cemetery gate, picked over by rats, but the truth of his ultimate fate may yet turn out to be less unseemly. Just before Christmas 1997, some 775 years after the count’s death, workmen restoring a medieval building in old Toulouse discovered a hitherto unsuspected hollow in a wall containing the hidden sarcophagus of a thirteenth-century nobleman. At this writing, DNA tests are being done to determine whether its occupant is the long-vanished Raymond, and the ever loyal city of Toulouse has formally petitioned the current pope to lift the excommunication that still hangs over his soul. There is a slim hope that the bones found might turn out to be, plausibly, those of Raymond VI. In the side of the great church of St. Sernin in Toulouse is a portal known as the Counts’ Door, where tenth- and eleventh-century members of the Saint Gilles clan had been laid to rest. Some of these sarcophagi have been pried open, and the jumble of 900-year-old bones therein is being genetically mapped. If some of these bones produce a familial “match” to the jumble found in 1997 in the sarcophagus hidden in the niche of the former Toulouse headquarters of the Knights Hospitallers (later the Knights of Malta), then the metropolis on the Garonne will no doubt build a worthy mausoleum for its beloved count. Toulouse’s mayor, Dominique Baudis, is somewhat of a Cathar enthusiast. His novel, Raimond “le Cathare,” tells a first-person story of Raymond VI and, on its publication in 1996, was fairly well received in neo-Cathar circles. One such group based in Toulouse, La Flamme cathare, circulated a petition—Manifeste pour la Réconciliation—asking Pope John Paul II to come to the church of St. Sernin in the year 2000 and apologize to Languedoc for the actions of his predecessors. The first signatory of the petition was Mayor Baudis. The pope never came.
177 through diplomacy, guile, and feats of arms, he had subdued his enemies: As his barons were helping out Simon de Montfort, King Philip Augustus had been thrashing his enemies in the field. In the year after Muret, he repelled an English force under King John, who had used the upheaval of the Cathar struggle to try and enlarge his holdings in northwestern France. In the decisive battle of Bouvines on July 27, 1214, the French routed the forces of Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Germans were neutralized; the English thrown into disarray.
178 Amaury had, in fact, lost everything given to his family nine years earlier in Rome: In a bar at Montségur, I was assured by several patrons that un amaury or un maury is a local dialect word meaning “a loser.” Alas, I was unable to find a similar entry in any regional dictionaries of the Midi.
14. The End of the Crusade
181 in 1216, Louis had briefly accepted the crown of England at the invitation of the barons: On the death of King John of England in 1216, his successor, the future Henry III, was only nine years old. The ever-rebellious barons of Britain saw their chance to unseat the Plantagenets by inviting in Louis.
183 Michel Roquebert has argued convincingly… : Roquebert makes his case for a collective panic in chapter 22 (“Le Printemps de la grande peur”) of volume 3 of his L’Epopée cathare.
185–86 Romano and Blanche sharing more than just prayers: The long-lived rumor was apparently spread by the irreverent students of the Latin Quarter. Romano’s power at the Louvre and in the Cité was resented by the schoolmen of the Left Bank. The rumor was reported by the English chronicler Matthew Paris (source: Krystel Maurin, Les Esclarmonde, p. 88). In any event, Blanche, as a mother of eleven, might have grown leery of the consequences of close male company.
186 Gregory IX, a nephew of Innocent III: It is almost certain that Ugolino dei Conti di Segni was Lotario’s nephew. More in dispute is his birthday. In the past, historians have relied on information provided by the chronicler Matthew Paris, who held that Gregory was nearing his hundredth year at his death in 1241. It is now thought more likely that the nephew of Innocent was ten years younger than his uncle, which would place his birth year at around 1170.
188 “It was a great shame …”: The comment is from William of Puylaurens, who was once in the employ of Raymond VII. Of the three main chronicles about the Cathars, his is the only one that covers these years.
190 the county of Toulouse automatically became a part of France: Perhaps the most astounding clause of the treaty concerned the future of Languedoc. Raymond’s daughter Jeanne was forced to marry Louis’s brother Alphonse of Poitiers. They were to inherit at Raymond’s death—even if Raymond had fathered other children. Succession would then pass through the Capets. Raymond died in 1249, after having spent the last twenty years of his life trying to find a way to beget a legitimate male heir—who, in any case, would have had to fight to regain his birthright. Toulouse was then governed in absentia by Count Alphonse. He and Jeanne died childless, within three days of each other, in 1271, and Languedoc was definitively annexed to the royal domain.
190 a university was to be established: The university, founded in 1229, is still going strong. The city of Toulouse counts a postsecondary student population of about 100,000.
190 Eleanor of Aquitaine: The justly celebrated Eleanor shaped the dynastic politics and culture of twelfth-century Europe. The granddaughter of the first troubadour, William of Poitiers (Guilhem de Poitou), and endowered with the immense duchy of Aquitaine, she first married King Louis VII of France. She bore him two daughters, accompanied him on the disastrous Second Crusade preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, then, on returning to France, had her marriage annulled on grounds of consanguinity. This ruse to get rid of an unwanted spouse was common practice among noblemen—Eleanor pioneered its practice among women. She then married Count Henry of Anjou, eleven years her junior, who became King Henry II of England. She bore him a brood of children, fiercely guarded her independence, and eventually left England to preside over a brilliant court for troubadours and scholars in Anjou. Her life has inspired a flood of scholarship and art. In Norman F. Cantor’s Medieval Lives, a series of imagined vignettes with emblematic figures of the Middle Ages, the chapter devoted to Eleanor (“The Glory of It All”) demonstrates her importance in an entertaining fashion. Her connection to the Cathar drama is fairly straightforward: Her daughter Joan of England married Raymond VI and produced Raymond VII; another daughter, Eleanor, married Alfonso VIII of Castile (who fought at Las Navas de Tolosa) and produced Blanche of Castile. Raymond and Blanche were thus first cousins. Their children, respectively Jeanne of Toulouse and Alphonse of Poitiers, were married under the terms of the treaty.
15. Inquisition
191 a wealthy old lady of Toulouse: This story is told by the Dominican William Pelhisson in his Chronica, translated into English by Walter L. Wakefield as The Chronicle of William Pelhisson in Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250, pp. 207–36.
195 “It often happens that bishops …”: Innocent’s stern sermon is quoted in Friedrich Heer’s The Medieval World (p. 220). Heer also finds a passage in Innocent’s De contemptu mundi, written before he became pope, in which he complains of bishops who “by night embrace Venus and next morning honor the Virgin Mary.”
195 Robert le Bougre … Conrad of Marburg: There seems to be a consensus among historians that Conrad was a dangerous sociopath who burned many innocents. Heer, a German-language historian writing in the 1950s, makes an implicit comparison between Conrad and Hitler. The evidence against Robert le Bougre, instigator of a massive bonfire at Mont Aime, in Champagne, is slightly more ambiguous. As Malcolm Lambert states in The Cathars, “Acquittal of Robert as an arbitrary, wilful inquisitor is not yet justified: a verdict of not proven best fits the existing evidence” (p. 125).
196 “We marvel …”: Pope Gregory’s disingenuous missive is quoted in Heer, The Medieval World (p. 217).
197 “The accused shall be asked …”: From Bernard Gui’s Practica Inquisitionis, cited in Zoé Oldenbourg’s Massacre at Montségur, pp. 307–8.
200 Qui aytal fara… : This lugubrious chant is related by William Pelhisson in his chronicle.
16. Backlash
201 John Textor lay in chains: The imprisonment quickly became a cause célèbre in Toulouse, inciting formerly quiescent citizens to denounce the actions of the inquisitors. Awkwardly, the average-Joe John Textor publicly converted to Catharism while in prison—receiving the consolamentum from a captive Perfect—and thus made his erstwhile defenders appear foolish. William Pelhisson, who tells the story, fairly chortles at the embarrassment of Textor’s partisans. Many of them were subsequently jailed, or worse.
202 At the behest of the city’s conservative Jews: The bonfire of 1234 in Montpellier may have been the only instance of the Inquisition doing anything for the Jews. By 1240, the wind had definitively turned; the Talmud was tried, found guilty, and burned in Paris. This was a mere prelude for several centuries of anti-Jewish activities by inquisitors (sources: R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, p. 10 and L. Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 1, From Roman Times to the Court Jews, London: Elek Books, 1966, pp. 68–70).
204 Stephen of St. Thibéry: The appointment may also have been an attempt to wrest the institution of inquisitor away from the Dominicans. In later years, the Dominicans and the Franciscans would engage in unseemly turf wars that would stall the cause of doctrinal purity. In the Balkans in the thirteenth century, the competing friars quarreled bitterly over precedence for nearly a decade before an inquisition was set up.
208 On May 28, 1242, Stephen of St. Thibery and William Arnald stopped in Avignonet: The story of Avignonet, like most events to follow in the narrative, was culled from Inquisition interrogations, in this instance those of Brother Ferrer, the inquisitor who questioned the survivors of the siege of Montségur some two years afterward. The story of Brother William’s skull comes from the same source.
17. The Synagogue of Satan
212 Henry had made landfall in the southwest with a derisively small force of knights: Still, some did make the journey. One of the barons who sailed to fight the French, and thereby indirectly help Raymond VII, was the English king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort. His father, the Simon de Montfort of the Albigensian Crusade, and his oldest brother, Amaury, who had died in 1241 after a decade’s service as High Constable of France, were no doubt spinning in their graves at this switch in allegiance.
213 Raymond and Louis signed a treaty: The Treaty of Lorris.
215 In the spring of 1243… : The most scrupulous examination of the siege of Montségur, without recourse to the mythmaking that usually shrouds the citadel of “Cathar country,” is, once again, the work of Michel Roquebert: Montségur, les cendres de la liberté.
217 A chronicler relates that at sunrise… : The Gascons’ retrospective fright is reported by William of Puylaurens.
219 These companions of the last hour came from all stations of feudal society: Not all of the credentes to join the Perfect of Montesegur on the bonfire were saintly. William of Lahille had been one of the three faidits to lead the murderous posse into the inquisitors’ quarters at Avignonet. Lahille was the son of a Perfect noblewoman whom Guilhabert of Castres had consoled, along with Esclarmonde of Foix and two other high-ranking ladies, in the well-attended ceremony at Fanjeaux in 1204. Lahille was grievously wounded at Montségur just before the surrender and decided to accompany his Perfect aunt, India, into the afterlife. One of his accomplices, Bernard de St. Martin, also elected to receive the consolamentum and thereby doom himself. The third leader of the Avignonet raid, William de Balaguier, had been captured in the lowlands well before the siege of Montségur. For his complicity in the murders, he had been dragged behind a horse, then hanged. See Jean Duvernoy’s annotations to his translation, Guillaume Pelhisson Chronique (1229–1244), pp. 103–04.
18. Twilight in the Garden of Evil
222 a Cathar believer named Peter Garcias: Extended quotations from the hidden friars’ testimony—a well-documented event in these years of treachery—may be found in Carol Lansing’s epilogue to Joseph Strayer’s The Albigensian Crusades, pp. 225–28.
225 “Heretics are those who remain obstinate in error… : The litany of crime was compiled at the Council of Tarragona. Translated and cited by Edward Peters in his Inquisition, p. 63. Peters argues that the actual Inquisition was not nearly as fearsome as the myth of the Inquisition created by Enlightenment and romantic imaginations. He lowercases inquisition when describing the historical institution and capitalizes the word when discussing the myth. I have elected to follow accepted usage and capitalize the word throughout.
228 “the bread of pain …”: The felicitous expression, adapted from Kings 22:27, by inquisitor Bernard Gui, cited in Laurent Albaret’s L’Inquisition: Rempart de la foi? p. 53.
230 the murder of a respected inquisitor: A cult quickly grew around the victim, Peter of Verona, a Cathar-turned-preacher-turned-inquisitor. A speaker of great charisma and a miracle-worker, Peter was assassinated by credentes near Milan. Legend has it that as he lay dying, he wrote out the word credo in his own blood. One of the most popular medieval saints, he was venerated as St. Peter the Martyr. This book, I should add, was written while I was living in a very old Occitan farmhouse called Mas D’En Pere Martre. To my enduring embarrassment, it took me at least a year to realize that my address contained the name of the most famous figure in Italian Cathar history.
230 The year 1300 saw the papacy institute the jubilee: For details of the jubilee, I am indebted to Paul Hetherington’s Medieval Rome, pp. 78–81.
234 The 1,000 or so households won back to the illicit faith: This estimate, arrived at by historian J. M. Vidal in 1906, is cited in Malcolm Lambert’s The Cathars (p. 259). Lambert considers the number too low but concedes there is no way of determining a precise head count. See his chapter “The Last Missionary” (pp. 230–71) for the best account, in English, of the Autier revival.
238 Fournier also discovered that its randy priest: The surviving Inquisition registers of Jacques Fournier were translated into the French in their entirety by Jean Duvernoy in the 1970s. Using Fourniers’s registers, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie delivered a memorable portrait of the social, religious, and sex lives of fourteenth-century peasants in Montail-lou. On the Web site of San Jose State University, Nancy P. Stork has helpfully translated some excerpts from the Fournier register into English; they can be accessed directly at www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/Fournier/jfournhm.htm. For immediate gratification of prurient curiosity, go to the testimony of Béatrice de Planissoles.
19. Bélibaste
239 There was now one Cathar left… : The remarkable detail it is possible to employ in telling the sad story of Bélibaste is due, once again, to Inquisition registers. The transcript of Bélibaste’s questioning has not survived, but the debriefing that Arnold Sicre gave Fournier in October 1321 provides a wealth of detail. So too does the testimony of the shepherd Peter Maury, who had been rashly released by the men who arrested Bélibaste in Tirvia. Maury was recaptured on Majorca two years later. The story of the last Languedoc Perfect was transformed into an accomplished French-language novel, Bélibaste, by Henri Gougaud.
246 the castle at Villerouge-Termenès: The castle still stands today and has not been much modified since the days of the Cathars. The picturesque village holds a well-attended medieval weekend every July, during which poor old Bélibaste is burned in effigy.
Epilogue: In Cathar Country
247 “Les chevaliers cathares …”: The song appears on Francis Cabrel’s album, Quelqu’un de l’intérieur. The translation is my own. The roadside art is also called les chevaliers d’Oc.
249 bouffeurs du curé: Napoléon Peyrat’s anticlerical credentials were severely dented when, shortly after his death, his widow, Eugenie, made a very public conversion to Catholicism. Still, he is making a comeback, as witnessed by the collective scholarly work devoted to Peyrat in 1998: Cathares et camisards—l’œuvre de Napoléon Peyrat (1809–1881).
250 The Catholics argued that the Cathars were not even Christians: The nineteenth-century position staked out by Catholic historians has found a frequent echo in the twentieth century, to wit, that the Cathars were adepts of the religion founded by Mani, the self-proclaimed messiah from third-century Babylon. Many of the Cathars’ medieval opponents referred to any dualists—indeed, any heretics—as Manichees, and the affiliation was taken for granted. The masterly 1947 work of Steven Runciman in The Medieval Manichee, which traced a direct line from gnostic to Manichean to Paulician (ninth-century dualists of Armenia and Thrace) to Bogomil (tenth-century dualists of the Balkans) and thence to the early medieval heretic, is now seriously questioned by historians of Cathar thought. Contemporary consensus holds that the Cathars were Christians, that dualism has always been an “underground” strand of Christian thought, and that proving a direct link between the dualists of antiquity and those of the Middle Ages is an impossible, if not irrelevant, task. The thrust of debate now is over whether Catharism constituted a church, that is, an independent hierarchy with coherent rules, dogma, and organization.
250 an Occitan equivalent, Esclarmonde of Foix: For a thorough examination of the Esclarmonde myth, as well as the place of other female historical figures (Blanche of Castile, Etiennette de Pennautier, Agnes of Montpellier, Alice of Montmorency, and others) who appear in the neo-Cathar delirium, see Krystel Maurin’s immensely entertaining Les Esclarmonde.
251 “our wild Capitoline …”: Cited in Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “D’Augustin Thierry à Napoléon Peyrat: Un Demi-siècle d’occultation,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 14 (1979), p. 161. My translation.
251 “Montségur was an Essenian Zion …”: Cited in Jean-Louis Biget, “Mythographie du catharisme,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 14 (1979), p. 279. My translation.
252 “One day they had nothing left…”: Cited in Michel Roquebert, “Napoléon Peyrat, le trésor et le ‘Nouveau Montségur’ ” Hérésis 7 (1998), p. 365. My translation.
253–54 A neognostic church was founded: For a full discussion of this weird fin-de-siècle bloom, see Suzanne Nelli, “Les Néo-gnostiques. Jules Doinel évêque de Montségur,” Hérésis 7 (1998), pp. 121–29.
254 Joséphin Péladan: Peladan-Sar’s 1906 Grail work was titled Le Secret des Troubadours: De Parsifal à Don Quichotte (The troubadours’ secret: from Parsifal to Don Quixote). It is out of print.
255 Emile Novis: The pedantic might say that Emile Novis is not an anagram of Simone Weil. It is close, and works phonically in French. Weil’s association with Roché is briefly evoked in Biget’s “Mythographie du catharisme,” p. 317.
255 Magre also took the time to skewer the enemies of the Cathars: Magre was not alone in constructing an imaginary portrait gallery of historical figures that became particularly vivid when women were the subjects. Krystel Maurin, in Les Esclarmonde, examines the pride of place given to Esclarmonde of Foix in neo-Cathar mythology, but also gives a description of the secondary female characters to fall on one or other side of the Cruella/Cinderella divide erected in pro-Cathar novels and plays. Among those particularly vilified, aside from Alice of Montmorency, were Agnes of Montpellier and Blanche of Castile; the women glorified were Geralda of Lavaur, Loba, and Béatrice de Planissoles.
255 Otto Rahn: The definitive work on the bizarre trajectory of Otto Rahn is a 400-page book of painstaking research by Christian Bernadac, Montségur et le Graal. A more concise summing up of the phenomenon is Marie-Claire Viguier’s “Otto Rahn entre Wolfram d’Eschenbach et les néo-nazis,” Hérésis 7 (1998), pp. 165–79. The speech of the Aryan Perfect, taken from Rahn, appears in Viguier’s article (p. 179). My translation from the French. The rumors about Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s attachment to Montségur were principally spread by Nouveaux Cathares pour Montségur, a quasi-historical novel about Rahn published in 1969 by the extreme-Right French writer Marc Augier under the pseudonym of Saint-Loup. The story of the 1978 incident involving German boy scouts and stolen stones from Montségur is well told by Charles-Olivier Carbonell in “Vulgarisation et récupération: Le Catharisme à travers les mass-média,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 14 (1979), pp. 361–80.
260 The short answer is that he had masterminded a system of mail-order fund-raising: In fact, the mysterious country priest, Bérenger Saunière, had a simony-by-correspondence racket, whereby he would place ads in small publications throughout Catholic Europe offering to say—that is, sell—masses. He raked in the cash. The story of his discovery of a treasure is decisively debunked in Rennes-le-Château, autopsie d’un mythe, by Jean-Jacques Bedu, who pores over Saunière’s account books. As for The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, it heavily embroidered on a 1967 work, L’Or de Rennes, by Gérard de Sède, a prolific author of occult works who found credulous readers throughout France. Holy Blood internationalized Sède’s hoax and, to the delight of everyone involved, called into question the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization.