10.

A Time of Surprises



IN THE CENTER OF THE IBERIAN PENINSULA, the blazing plain of La Mancha once stretched out as a no-man’s-land between Christian and Muslim. Beyond the abrupt mountains of the Sierra Morena, in the parched river valley of the Guadalquivir, rose the rich mosques and minarets of Al-Andalus, the most accomplished Islamic civilization ever to have gained a lasting bridgehead in western Europe. North of the Morena’s rocky divide stood the forlorn forward position of medieval Christendom, the brooding line of castle after castle that gave Castile its name.

In the year 1212, a host of 70,000 crusaders, led by four Christian kings, trudged across the dusty expanse of La Mancha to fight against the Almohad armies under the command of their new caliph, Muhammad al-Nasír. The Muslim forces fanned out over the jagged mountains until they thought all the passes through the Sierra Morena had been blocked or primed for sudden ambush. A local shepherd knew otherwise and guided the Christian hordes safely through a defile hitherto unsuspected by either side. Thus it was in Andalusia, not Castile, that on July 16, 1212, the two great armies met on a plain to join battle. Nearby was the village of Las Navas de Tolosa. The elite defenders of the caliph chained themselves to the tent poles of their monarch’s red silk pavilion, so that flight would be impossible if the day went against them. The Christians won a crushing, total victory. There would henceforth be no stopping the inexorable spread of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain.

The tidings from Las Navas de Tolosa set bells pealing across a continent. For Innocent, here at last was a crusade that had scored an unambiguous, untainted triumph. No sack of Constantinople, no holocaust at Béziers—just a clear-cut massacre of the heathen Moor. Even more gratifying was the news that the hero of the hour was King Pedro II of Aragon, whose inspired leadership of the army’s left wing proved decisive in winning the day. Pedro had brought thousands of his vassals to the fight, including some from his turbulent possessions in Languedoc. Simon de Montfort, as viscount of Carcassonne, had sent fifty knights to join forces with their Aragonese suzerain. Arnold Amaury, recently named archbishop of Narbonne, had once again shouldered his armor and ridden out to combat. He had shown the king that he, too, was now a worthy vassal of Aragon.

In victory Pedro became a secular saint, an untouchable paladin of the Church. His faithful annual payment to Rome, his respect for ecclesiastical rights, his warrior valor placed in the service of a holy cause—no cleric could now even try to tarnish the glittering reputation of the thirty-eight-year-old monarch of Aragon. Troubadours sang of his gallantry, monks of his piety, and ladies bestowed their favors on this most Christian of heroes. It came as a surprise, then, when the golden boy of orthodoxy demanded that another crusade, the one in Languedoc, be suspended immediately.

The king made the pope a proposition. He, Pedro, would act as a ward over all the lands of Toulouse for a few years. His brother-in-law, Count Raymond VI, would relinquish his territories in favor of his adolescent son, who would be educated in the court of Aragon in the ways of devout governance. When he attained manhood, Raymond VII could come into his inheritance, which would by then be cleansed of Catharism by the Aragonese king. The son should not pay for his father’s shortcomings.

Moreover, Pedro demanded that his vassals north of the Pyrenees—the counts of Foix and the neighboring mountain domains of Béarn, Comminges, and Couserans—be left in peace by the Church and its sanguinary servants. In Pedro’s view, Simon de Montfort had overstepped himself; having begun his career as an enemy of the Cathars and a spiritual athlete, he had become an outlaw. Simon had, in 1211 and 1212, attacked lands over which Pedro was suzerain, territories that had never been infected by heresy. Worse yet, according to the Aragonese’s reading of the recent past, Simon had taken advantage of Pedro’s absence in Andalusia on God’s business to launch his assault.

The crusader against the Moors was picking a fight with the crusader against the Cathars. At the Lateran Palace the 28 steps of the Scala Santa awaited Innocent’s troubled footfalls, for the pope now needed divine guidance.


Pedro’s support was manna to the Toulousains. Simon had outsmarted and outfought them for more than two years. Even with the awkward nature of his army, which bloated, then shrank as forty-day crusader tours of duty were undertaken and completed, Simon had smashed and burned his way across all of Languedoc. As far north as Cahors, as far west as Agen, as far south as the Pyrenees, the tireless successor to the Trencavels had stretched his grasp over most of the lands of the Saint Gilles and the lower-lying fiefs of King Pedro’s mountain vassals.

Simon may have been a gifted strategist, but his opponents helped him by their bumbling. What had been a peacetime boon—truculent independence—turned into a wartime albatross. Occitan lords, faidits, and citizen armies seldom acted in concert, even when the weight of their numbers would normally have beaten the often depleted ranks of the crusaders. In the autumn of 1211 at Castelnaudary, a town midway between Toulouse and Carcassonne, a small garrison under Simon held out for days in the face of a massed army of Languedoc knights and foot soldiers. When Bouchard de Marly and Alice of Montmorency, Simon’s wife, rumbled into the plain from Carcassonne at the head of a column of reinforcements and wagon loads of supplies, the knights of Raymond Roger of Foix immediately charged down to attack. Thousands upon thousands of their fellows watched the ensuing combat from a hilltop, waiting for the order to join the battle. It never came. Count Raymond of Toulouse, as wretched a general as can be imagined, dithered ineffectually in the Occitan camp. Seizing the moment, Simon made a daring dash out to rescue his would-be saviors, thereby changing certain defeat into victorious stalemate.

Not all of the south courted debacle so assiduously. The family of Foix, the crusade’s most feared foe, consistently acted with the belligerence it had shown at Castelnaudary and Montgey. When Simon, in his sole mistake of these years, attempted in June 1211 to besiege Toulouse with a force too small to encircle the city, Raymond Roger ignored Count Raymond’s pleas for caution and repeatedly rushed out of the ramparts to kill as many of the besiegers as possible. Simon, seeing his losses mount, lifted the siege within a fortnight. Roger Bernard of Foix, Raymond Roger’s son, then ventured into Simon’s territory on missions of mayhem. Near Béziers, well within the countryside pacified by the terror of 1209, Roger Bernard met up with a group of crusaders bound for Carcassonne, who naturally thought that any cavalcade of knights so deep in God’s country had to be supporters of orthodoxy. The subsequent attack came as an utter surprise, and the unfortunate northerners were dragged back to the castle at Foix, where they were tortured and torn to pieces.

Still, such reverses were the exception. In 1211 and 1212, Simon was free to cut a swath all around Toulouse. He gave the defiant, if disorganized, city a wide berth, but nonetheless penned off its access to the hinterland. He picked off one castle after the next, and his conquest soon came accompanied by further outrage. In the town of Pamiers, the new master of Languedoc drew up decrees in December of 1212 that effectively abolished southern law in favor of northern feudal practice. In many ways this was the unkindest cut of all, for time-honored systems of inheritance, justice, and civil procedure formed the touchstone of medieval identity. Simon’s statutes, among other things, forbade southern noblewomen from marrying suitors from Languedoc; henceforth, brides with fetching dowries would be compelled to wed only northerners. The desire to destroy, then colonize, became manifest.

The shifting nature of the conflict made the crusade stray from its original purpose. As Simon used his talents to carve out a kingdom for himself, fewer bonfires were lit. He had no time to winkle out the heretic hidden in the sheepfold when there were nobles in a nearby castle refusing to pay him homage. In any event, the devastating flames of Lavaur, Minerve, and other towns had shown that there was no safety in numbers. The surviving Perfect heard the word from Montségur: It was wiser to wait out the storm in the house of one’s family, or in a cave in the Corbières, than to gather in a castle or city that the invincible Simon de Montfort would eventually get around to storming. For those imperiled few still living in the midst of orthodox spies, a trek over the Pyrenees to the discretion of Aragon and Catalonia was always an option. For all his talk, Pedro the Catholic ignored the Cathars in his domains. No more than the counts of Toulouse and Foix, the king of Aragon was loath to persecute his own people.

As the year 1213 dawned, Innocent grappled with the contradictions of the holy war he had launched four years earlier. Simon’s forays into the lands held by Pedro’s vassals smacked more of temporal ambition than of spiritual devotion. A genie had been unbottled at Carcassonne when Simon was allowed to usurp Trencavel. Innocent sympathized with King Pedro, his vassal and his champion, qualifying his ambassador to Rome as an “extremely cultivated” man. Moreover, now that the Moors were on the run and the Cathars weakened, Innocent wanted to turn the attention of Christendom eastward, to the reconquest of Jerusalem. In a letter to Arnold Amaury, the pope claimed that a new crusade to Palestine must take precedence over any further action in Languedoc. Accordingly, Innocent prepared a surprise of his own: In stern letters sent out in January of 1213, the pope announced that the Albigensian Crusade was over, effective immediately.

Before this stupefying news arrived from Rome, the situation in Languedoc had worsened. In a tense meeting at Lavaur, Pedro and Arnold Amaury brought their irreconcilable views out into the open. One wanted the preservation of the southern nobility; the other, its destruction. Since Pedro’s failed intercession at Carcassonne to save the young Trencavel, Arnold had never once backed down in the face of pressure from the Aragonese king. If anything, Arnold had always upped the ante, changing unacceptable offers into insulting ones. The novelty this time came from Pedro, who no longer meekly walked away from Arnold’s provocations. The victory at Las Navas de Tolosa had made of him an equal, if not a superior, to the legates in the construction of Christendom’s future. He could now show his hand, and, like Arnold, Pedro did not disappoint.

In February 1213, he convoked the quarrelsome lords of the south and had them swear to let him govern their possessions during these times of emergency. Languedoc was now his protectorate. With his brother, Sancho, who was the count of Provence, Pedro created in one fell swoop a vast new entity, the makings of a protostate that, had it survived, would have dramatically changed the course of European history. From Saragossa in Aragon and Barcelona in Catalonia, their holdings now stretched in a great unbroken arc around the Mediterranean almost as far east as Nice, encompassing Toulouse, Montpellier, and Marseilles. Pedro aimed for nothing less than the unification of the Occitan- and Catalan-speaking peoples under one monarch.

The pope’s men, reeling from such audacity, then received Innocent’s letter. The pope had written Arnold, “Foxes were destroying the vineyard of the Lord … they have been captured.” To Simon de Montfort, he was more explicit: “The illustrious king of Aragon complains that, not content with opposing heretics, you have led crusaders against Catholics, that you have shed the blood of innocent men and have wrongfully invaded the lands of his vassals, the counts of Foix and Comminges, Gaston of Béarn, while the king was making war on the Saracens.” Both letters ordered an end to the crusade.


Arnold Amaury rebelled. A decade’s worth of preaching, scheming, prosecuting, burning, hanging, and warring was in danger of being undone. He rode across Languedoc, rallying the bishops of the south to mutiny and dictating their letters of dismay to Innocent. A frantic embassy left for Rome. Preachers who had gone north to whip up enthusiasm for the crusading season of 1213 were instructed to continue their work, regardless of what the pope had said. Simon de Montfort, the jigsaw of his conquests the missing piece in Pedro’s master plan, brusquely renounced his bond of vassalage to Aragon. By doing this unilaterally, he was once again breaking the feudal rules. Understandably, the man intent on establishing French dominion of the south would not be at home in some sort of Greater Occitania.

Arnold assembled his arguments. Unlike his gagging of Raymond, a decision that dangled by the thread of technicality, an honest point could be made this time: that King Pedro had been disingenuous in his representations to the pope. His Pyrenean vassals, contrary to his claims, had tolerated heresy in their domains for more than fifty years. Thus, argued Arnold, it was a Christian’s duty to bludgeon them into obedience, which was precisely what Simon de Montfort had been doing. The crusade could not be finished, for the very simple reason that the Cathar enemy was still standing, not least of all in the largest city of the land. The abbot of the monastery at St. Gilles, never a friend of Count Raymond’s, wrote to the pope of “the most putrid city of Toulouse, its viper’s bloated belly stuffed with rotting and disgusting refuse.”

Innocent spent the spring listening and reading. Pedro argued from feudal custom; Arnold, from canon law. Both men were right. Innocent III was many things—noble, lawyer, priest—but above all else he was the one and only supreme pontiff of Christendom. The choice before the vicar of Christ was clear: secular order or spiritual uniformity, the law of the land or the law of the Church, tolerance or bloodshed, peace or war, Pedro or Simon. The old house of the empress Fausta at the Lateran waited for its occupant to exercise his free will.

On May 21, 1213, a papal letter informed the world at large that the crusade against the heretics of Languedoc had been reinstated. Innocent had made his historic flip-flop.


In the early evening of September 11, 1213, Simon de Montfort and his men reached the bank of the Garonne opposite the town of Muret. The sky, chroniclers related, was clear, after a torrential rainstorm had nearly swamped the crusaders in a gulley the night before. Muret, its 200-foot-tall castle keep visible from Toulouse, twelve miles to the north, would be the site of the fateful encounter. Simon, who had made his last will and testament that morning, led his army across a bridge and into the eastern gate of the city. There was no resistance, for Muret, like so many other settlements on the periphery of Raymond’s capital, had been cowed into submission by the crusade. Its location was ideal because the small group of loyal northerners garrisoned there could easily disrupt communications between Toulouse and Foix.

In Simon’s forced march from Carcassonne, he had summoned every knight available to him, stripping his other fortresses of all but a skeleton force. He was faced with a great menace, and, ever the warrior, he was riding out to give battle. The off-again, on-again nature of this crusading year had not supplied him with a steady stream of manpower from the north, but he had still managed to assemble a fighting host: 800 heavily armed horsemen and 1,200 foot soldiers and archers. From the castle where Simon was housed that night, there was an unobstructed view to the west. Immediately outside the city walls were the masses of common soldiers from Toulouse who had been laying siege to Muret since August 30. Two miles away, farther off to the northwest, began a waving expanse of gold and blue and red—the banners of the Catalan, Basque, Gascon, Occitan, and Aragonese nobility. All the lords on both sides of the Pyrenees had rallied to the call of King Pedro. The south had finally united against the north. The crusaders were outnumbered, it is estimated, twenty to one. Pedro, who had insisted that the soldiery of Toulouse desist from storming Muret earlier in the day, wanted Simon to fall into a trap.

As night fell, the churchmen with the crusaders engaged in last-minute diplomacy between the two camps. Bishop Fulk and the legates had long lobbied for a definitive confrontation; now that it seemed inevitable, they did not like the odds. The mounted clerics galloped back and forth in the gathering gloom, before finally admitting to themselves that the time for talking was over. Simon spent the night with his confessor; Pedro, according to a memoir written years later by his son, relaxed with his mistress. Pedro had let Simon enter Muret unmolested so that the crusader would be faced with a stark choice: venture out to attack against overwhelming odds, or remain behind the ramparts and face inevitable defeat in a long and painful siege. Simon, whose skill as a general had been proved in Languedoc, had accepted Pedro’s terms.

In the morning of September 12, Pedro summoned a war council. He exhorted his fellow Aragonese to show the same courage that had earned them glory at Las Navas de Tolosa a year earlier. Each knight was invited to distinguish himself for his valor on the field of battle. Count Raymond, the oldest man present, begged to differ, suggesting that it would be more prudent to fortify their camp and wait for Simon to attack. The quarrels of the crossbowmen, Raymond argued, would soften the crusader charge, and then the southerners could use their superior numbers in a counterattack.

For voicing this proposal, the count of Toulouse was ridiculed. Victory had to be won with panache or not at all. The chronicler who recorded the conference had a Catalan grandee remark woundingly, “It is a great pity that you who have lands to live on should have been such cowards as to lose them.” Raymond left the meeting to confer with his closest vassals. He and his men would form the reserve, or third corps of cavalry, whose job it was to stay in camp until an emergency arose.

In Muret at the same time, Simon de Montfort ordered his knights to burnish their armor and get ready for battle. At a meeting with his lieutenants, Simon’s assessment of the situation agreed with Raymond’s in the other camp. The crusaders had to risk a pitched battle in the open countryside, or they were lost. A chronicler reported Simon saying, “If we cannot draw them a very long way from their tents, then there’s nothing we can do but run.” The northern nobles prepared themselves for almost certain death. Masses were said, confessions heard. According to Peter of Vaux de Cernay, who was an intimate of the crusader leader, Simon headed to the terrace of the castle to arm himself, in view of the thousands of Toulousain militiamen encamped outside the town in expectation of plunder. Had his piety been tinged with superstition, he might not have ridden out to battle, for bad omens came in quick succession. First, he genuflected at a chapel door and broke the belt holding up the chain-mail chausses on his legs. A new belt was found. When his squires helped him atop his massive destrier, the girth securing the armored saddle snapped and he was forced to dismount. As a new one was being cinched into place, the horse reared up in alarm, delivering a blow directly to Simon’s head. He staggered backward, stunned. A wave of laughter wafted up from the watching soldiery of Toulouse.

Simon ignored the worried looks from his entourage and rode with recovered dignity to the hundreds of knights waiting in the lower town. Bishop Fulk appeared with a relic, a chunk of wood from the True Cross, and implored the soldiers of Christ to kneel and kiss it. As each man took his turn awkwardly dismounting and clanking over in full armor to the prelate, it became obvious that the ceremony would take too much time. Horses and men grew impatient. A bishop from the Pyrenees grabbed the relic from Fulk’s hands and gave a collective blessing to the assembly, assuring that those who died in battle would go directly to heaven.

Simon’s cavalry filed out a gate and picked its way along a towpath between the bank of the Garonne and the walls of Muret. The militia and the southern nobles were on the other side of town, to the west. Once beyond the fortifications, the crusaders headed northward, hugging the riverside’s west bank, as if slinking off to safety. They formed their three corps as they rode: the first, under William of Contres; the second, under Bouchard de Marly; the third, under Simon.

A long way off to the left, a mile or so distant in the west, the knights of the Occitan coalition cantered out into the plain. In the first corps of the southern cavalry were Raymond Roger of Foix and his fellow highland counts, as well as a large contingent of Catalans and Basques determined to show their individual prowess. We do not know if there was a leader to this large group. Behind them was a smaller corps, made up of the Aragonese under the command of their king. Pedro had switched armor with another knight so that he would not be singled out and taken hostage during any fighting. And back at camp, in reserve, were the forces of Count Raymond. The 30,000 auxiliaries—the militia in front of Muret, the archers, the crossbowmen, the infantry—were not involved. Out in the field, then, the numerical superiority of the southern cavalry was slightly less than two to one.

The crusaders wheeled left and charged. If siege warfare in this era was a science, pitched battle had all the finesse of a freight train. William’s heavy cavalry rumbled across the wet grass, slowly picking up speed, followed by the squadrons of Bouchard and Simon. Soon the French knights were in full cry, bellowing out the name of their patrons. “Montfort!” “Auxerre!” “Saint Denis!” A chronicler relates: “Across the marshes and straight for the tents they rode, banners displayed and pennons flying. Beaten gold glittered on shields and helmets, on swords and hauberks, so that the whole place shone.”

Seeing the flashing phalanx coming closer in the sunlight, the southern knights in the first corps spurred their mounts forward, heads bowed in anticipation of the nearing collision. William’s wall of men and metal grew ever larger, their massive warhorses covering ground at full tilt. The shock of impact was tremendous. Count Raymond’s son, then sixteen years old and safe in the Occitan camp, would later liken the sound of the crash to “a whole forest going down under the axe.” The compact core of William’s crusaders hurtled through the southerners like a cannonball. Men and horses went down, screaming. Swords swung, maces flailed, as the warriors from the north pressed the advantage gained by their punishing charge. The melee was well under way when Bouchard de Marly’s hundreds of knights smashed into the pack, dealing a second, decisive hammer blow to the disorganized southerners.


The battle of Muret


A: Camp of Pedro II and his allies; B: probable location of the cavalry combat;
C: crusaders’ cavalry; D: allied cavalry; E: militia of Toulouse; F: graveyard.
The crusaders left Muret (1) and rode along the river, out of sight of the besiegers
(10). Once on the plain, they wheeled left (3) and drove straight toward the allied
tents (4). The first two crusader corps crashed into the allied corps (6).
While the allies fled toward a small river (7), the third crusader corps
charged the allied reserve (8,9).



After the cavalry combat (1), the crusaders fell on the allied camp (2) and doubled back on the militia besieging Muret (3), which fled in disorder (4).


The crusaders were trampling and dispersing the foe when the banners of the king of Aragon were seen fluttering over a second corps of southern cavalry. Bouchard and William must have hollered over the tumult, for soon the disciplined crusaders regrouped for another charge. They galloped over a meadow toward the approaching Aragonese. Another sickening concussion ensued, and a clanging, clamorous fight began. The crusaders, according to the chronicles, hacked their way to the man wearing Pedro’s armor; somewhere in the confusion, unheard by the northerners, the real monarch had revealed himself and shouted, “I am the king!” Whether it was a cry of defiance or an admission of defeat has never been known. A sword cut through the air, and King Pedro of Aragon fell to the ground, dead.

At the camp, Raymond’s reserve had not budged, and the disaster was total. Bloodied survivors of the battlefield fell back, spreading the incredible news of Pedro’s death. The army started to disintegrate, as men packed up hurriedly for a dash to safety.

Then Simon de Montfort and his knights, the third corps of the crusading cavalry, barreled into view and pounded headlong toward the demoralized southerners. The panic was general: Those who could, rode or ran away; those who couldn’t, died.

The citizen soldiery from Toulouse before the walls of Muret heard a fatally false rumor: Simon’s men had been routed by the brave king Pedro. Heartened, the thousands of lightly armed besiegers continued to harass the defenders on Muret’s ramparts, believing that the town would soon fall. From the west came the thunder of hooves. The Toulousains turned and looked. It was the crusaders, bearing down on them in the full feral majesty of warriors who had fought their way out of the shadow of the valley of death. The Toulousain militia scattered in abject terror, the majority racing northeast toward the Garonne, where their barges were moored.

There was great sport for the crusader cavalry as the men of Toulouse sprinted across the open countryside. They were ridden down like wild animals, pursued and skewered during one long afternoon spent in the madness of a manhunt. The town of Muret emptied as Simon’s soldiers charged out to kill the wounded. Hundreds of the desperate threw themselves into the river, drowning their floundering comrades in the struggle to stay afloat. It was an epic butchery, unseen since Beziers. The low estimate is 7,000 killed outright—a mass grave would be unearthed in the nineteenth century—in this postscript to the main encounter. Toulouse, the great city on the Garonne, went into mourning.

The horror of the battle’s closing stages did not overshadow Simon de Montfort’s achievement. He had won a miraculous victory yet again. The surprise was total. Count Raymond and his son fled to London, to the protection of their kinsman, King John. Pedro of Aragon, the one man who could resist the ambitions of Simon and the legates, of France and the French, was gone. The death knell of Muret sounded on both sides of the Pyrenees.