The Blood of Toulouse

by Maurice Magre

  THE UNKNOWN MASTER OF THE ALBIGENSIANS

  The Unknown Master

  Was there an unknown master whose word gave birth to the Cathar verity?39 Did an instructor bring the eternal verities from the Orient to the Albigensians and Toulousans? Was he the man that a peasant from Rouergue encountered on the side of the road one evening when he was returning to his farm: the man who had, according to what the peasant reported to the tribunal of the Inquisition, in addition to a strange persuasive power, a Moorish visage and a blue-tinted aura around his hair? Was he the Pierre, a disciple of Abelard, who began to teach in the twelfth century? Was he one of those anonymous preachers who stopped at the crossroads of towns in order to tell simple men that the poverty that constituted their misfortune was the pledge of an immense bliss after death?

  Was the veritable initiate, the great propagator of Catharism, Nicetas, the Bulgar mystic who traversed the south of France several times, laid at Saint Felix de Caraman the foundations of a new church and confided to certain men he recognized as pure in spirit the book in which the spiritual doctrine was summarized? Nothing is known about him except the great impression that his passage left and the extension of the Cathar movement that followed his departure for Sicily.40

  The greatest masters remain hidden and one cannot discover with certainty at the origin of the Albigensians any sublime individual playing the role of initiator. Perhaps. by virtue of the expansive force of verity, heretical doctrines from the Orient traversed Europe to invade France and extended as far as Germany likes the pollen of a tree transported by the wind, which geminates everywhere that the soil is propitious.

  In Greece the monk Niphon, a man full of wisdom and virtue, is condemned to lose his beard by the patriarch Oxites, which is a very mild and slightly singular torture. He is also imprisoned, but he is freed by another patriarch. His beard grows back and his ardent preaching stimulates disciples who set out to spread his doctrines through the world.

  Near Turin, an exalted Contessa who lives in the Castello Monteforte forms a community with a mystic named Girard whose members try to live a perfect life. All men are equal there and property is held in common.41 No use is made of meat, for it is not appropriate to take the life of animals. Wine is not drunk, because its vapors obscure presence of mind. Life is a kind of penitence and of one does not want to reenter new bodies eternally it is necessary to arrive at the detachment from all things that alone permits reintegration with God. One ought, but only when one has attained a certain degree of perfection, refrain from marriage and the act by which life is perpetuated.

  The Archbishop of Milan directed an expedition against the Castello Monteforte. He captured the heretics and had them all burned. The historian of those facts notes that he would have preferred to let them live, without explaining why he did not.

  And then, the words that Girard spoke before dying are true:

  “It is not only me that the Holy Spirit visits. I have a great family on earth, which includes a great many men that it enlightens, on certain days and at certain hours, and to whom it gives illumination.”

  One sees that illumination manifest everywhere.

  An unknown woman arrives in Orléans, and after listening to her, all the canons of the collegial Church of the Holy Cross become heretics. Two clerics, Etienne and Lisoi, are the theologians of a new church in which it is taught that Jehovah, the God of the Bible, was a bad God who, after having had the imprudence to create, only occupied himself with punishment, a church in which baptism is rejected and remission from sins is only obtained by the perfection of life.

  On the orders of King Robert, those heretics are seized in a house in Orléans where they had gathered. They are taken to a church where Guarin, Bishop of Beauvais, interrogates them while a pyre is being built for them outside the city. Queen Constance waits at the portal of the church for the condemned to emerge and uses the end of her cane to put out one of Etienne’s eyes because he had been her confessor and had made her run the risk of hearing a false doctrine. The historian notes that one nun preferred to abjure her errors rather than perish on the pyre, without indicating the number of those who preferred to die rather than abjure.42

  The spirit blew at hazard, touching the extravagant as well as the reasonable. One day, when the Breton Eon de Loudéac was listening to mass in a church he fell asleep. The priest who was officiating had a resounding voice and that voice woke Eon by pronouncing the line of the liturgy: Per eum qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos.43 Eon thought that he had heard his name pronounced in the syllables Per eum. It was God who was inviting him to judge the living and the dead and to recognize the pure and the impure. He left the church precipitately and his mission commenced.

  He started to preach. He attached the wealth of prelates and the harshness of the powerful. All those who possessed anything were the dead. He, Eon, conferred life by the imposition of hands. He judged, as God had prescribed for him, by addressing himself to him directly. He exposed the Cathar doctrines that had reached him mysteriously and his sincerity, allied with a kind of folly full of delight, rendered him popular wherever he went. Disciples grouped around him and their number increased. Having traveled through Brittany Eon headed southwards. He camped with his troop on heaths and in forests. He organized a Church of priests in accord with God, who possessed nothing, and went almost naked, followed by an immense cohort of devotees.

  The Archbishop of Reims succeeded in dispersing the menacing flood of those pure men. Pope Eugene III came to preside in person over the council that judged Eon, but to all interrogations Eon responded that he was the one who ought to judge the living and the dead, because of an order from God.

  In Flanders it is Tanquelin who speaks to sinners like Jesus. He enthuses the populations of the North by proclaiming that the sacraments are unnecessary and that women ought to be held in common because of the vanity of the pleasure they procure. But success causes him to lose his reason. He allows himself to feast with his disciples. He recovers the taste for wealth that he began by proscribing. The former apostle of simplicity dress in the costume of a prince, surrounds his hair with gold bands, and is betrothed one day to the Virgin Mary before a statue.

  But it is in the regions of Albi, Carcassonne and Toulouse that the mystical revolution takes place. There is Pons in the Périgord, Henri in Toulouse, Guillabert in Castres, but they are literate men and philosophers who explain the wisdom of Catharism in writing. The Roman dogma had closed its iron door and elevated the forever-immutable walls of its principles. With the Cathar philosophy, many minds welcomed the possibility of seeing the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures opened by free research and the metaphysical questions that had always haunted the minds of the intelligent resolved. The others, those who did not read books but who saw and were indignant at the sumptuousness and immorality, listened to ascetics at crossroads because they had souls similar to those of the first Christians and they found in their words the pure doctrine of the master Jesus.

  What the Church called “the abominable epidemic leprosy of the Midi” was manifest as an epidemic of disinterest, a communication of goodness, a chain of sacrifice.

  A rich bourgeois of Carcassonne wakes up in the night because he can no longer abide the idea of his wealth, when there are so many poor people who have nothing. An interior voice tells him that it is necessary not to lose a minute and that he must obey it scrupulously. He loads his precious furniture on to his shoulders and transports it into the street so that anyone who is passing can take what he wishes. As the night is dark the lights two candles outside his door to facilitate the choice of the passers-by, and as the street is deserted he picks up a trumpet and blows it in order that people will know that his property is no longer his, that they will hasten to deprive him of it and that the rising sun will illuminate his redemptive poverty.

  In Lavaur, a stammerer strives to speak and becomes eloquent by virtue of the desire to tell his brethren that there is not only a single li
fe of dolor but that it is necessary to be reincarnated endlessly in new human bodies if one cannot escape that inexorable wheel by becoming perfect in one life.

  In Montauban a man of Quérigut scandalizes the town by abandoning a wife whom he loves tenderly and leaving her to another man by whom she is loved. He retires to a hill in the vicinity haunted by wolves, nourishes himself on fruits and roots, sleeps joyfully on the bare ground, because, he says, one is educated by the companionship of wolves, and he more the body suffers, the more the soul is elevated, the more one triumphs over human amour and the more one gains divine amour.

  Buddhist renunciation becomes a moral law, which spreads with astonishing rapidity. From Bordeaux to the limits of Provence, in bitter Languedoc, under the chestnut trees of the Albigensian region and the heaths of Lauragais, the roads are full of ascetics who travel barefoot and are avid to inform their brethren of what the spirit has revealed to them. And it is always the humble who are inspired. The spirit is driven away by the magnetism emitted by the gold of churches. On the other hand, it enters willingly into a hut isolated on a hill, the little house of an artisan backed up against the ramparts of a city or a placid monastery on the banks of the Ariège or the Garonne. In the path lined by poplars and the stone cloister where a hundred men with shaven heads circulate, it sometimes blows with a force so communicative that it causes the door to be closed, the garden and the chapel abandoned, and changes the copyists of manuscripts and illuminators of missals into the errant prophets of the new heresy.

  At the end of the twelfth century the word of the Pelagians—Christ had nothing that I have not; I can divinize myself by virtue—appears essential to the majority of the people of the Midi. Increasingly estranged from the God of the churches—the God who has excessively gilded images on excessively magnificent pedestals; the God of rich prelates and pitiless lords—they honor the interior God whose light is all the more visible because it leads to a purer life more filled with love for their fellows.

  The crime of disinterest and love! There cannot be any greater in the eyes of egotistical men. The hatred that moral superiority provokes is always pitiless. The Christian Church, with its priestly hierarchy, its fraternities of richly endowed monks, its powerful abbeys, cannot forgive the Cathars for setting an example of an asceticism greater than its own. There is no tragedy in history crueler that that of the almost complete annihilation of the southern race by the King of France and the Pope, by the Barons of the North and the Church of Jesus.44

  The Crusade

  In those days, the land that extended from the sea of Provence and the towers of Fréjus to the maritime pines of Guyenne was, after the savant Spain of the Arabs, the most civilized on earth. The light of Athens and Alexandria still illuminated it with a radiance that did not want to be extinguished. The thermes and the Imperial triumphal arches had not fallen into ruins in its cities and there was no hill on which the whiteness of a Roman statue did not stand between the vines and the olive groves. Aristotle and Plato, who had been translated into Latin in Granada, were the nourishment of the literate. The cities had municipal liberties unknown in the cities of the north. In Toulouse, the power of the Capitouls elected by the people tempered that of the Comtes. The immense literature of the troubadours flourished even in remote villages in the Pyrenees. And the Saracen invaders had left behind when they departed theorbos that came from Damascus and on which the music of the Orient still resonated.45

  But the men of the south then seemed to the men of the north what they still seem today: a loquacious, vain and idle race. Their joyful levity was a lack of seriousness and their mysticism could only be heretical. Memories of paganism were more alive there than elsewhere, and liberty of thought was greater, translated in the satirical verses of poets, the proclamations of monastic preachers and in popular movements so audacious and disrespectful that Saint Bernard, after a triumphant tour of France, was jeered by the Toulousan crowd. The crusaders who came back from Constantinople and Palestine, and who disembarked at Fréjus and Marseille in order to go home, could not help perceiving a strange resemblance between the bronzed and thin southerners with excessively prominent bones and overly long faces and the infidels that they had fought with such pious ardor and such a great thirst for pillage.

  It is true that the seigneurs of Provence and Gascony had been their companions. But in traveling up the Rhône in order to reach the forests of Armorica or the heaths of Flanders, they saw excessively bright cities whose architecture differed from their own, cities that distantly resembled those they had just besieged and before which so many knights avoid for riches had fallen for an insufficient booty. They saw the detestable residues of the Saracen invasion. Not far from Saint-Tropez was the mass of the Château Fraxinet, from which the infidels had commanded the Mediterranean coast for such a long time, the fortifications of Narbonne with dentellate towers and the Abbey of Saint Donat near Grenoble and its octagonal towers on the heights, guardians of the passages and crossroads, which testified to the sojourn of the Moors arrived from Spain. The robes of the women were too colorful and had something Oriental and immodest about them. The language had a barbaric resonance. The cities contained a large number of Jews, and not only did they practice their religion freely but they maintained a prosperous commerce, professed letters and medicine, and were honored by an insouciant nobility.

  So, when, under the orders of Pope Innocent III, the monks of Cîteaux spread out throughout France to preach the war of extermination against Raymond VI, Comte de Toulouse and against the entire Midi, they found the ground prepared. The operation was a thousand times more profitable than the one they had attempted by going overseas under the pretext of liberating the tomb of Christ. The same spiritual advantages were assured by the Church—the redemption of sins, and even eternal life—and the material advantages were immediate and known: the wealth of the châteaux, the beauty of the women and the abundance of the wine. It was to be a work blessed by God to invade that land as ocher as a landscape of Palestine, to put to death the turbulent and rebellious men of Oc, and to possess their perverse spouses, like daughters of Satan, amid Moorish fabrics.

  Three terrible figures dominated the great Albigensian massacre. For that massacre to be possible, it required simultaneously the extraordinary genius of violence, organization and hypocrisy incarnate in three men equally devoid of pity and perhaps equally sincere in their hatred of heresy and their love of the Church.

  It was Pope Innocent III who wanted and decided the crusade with an obstinate determination. The assassination of the legate Pierre de Castelnau was only a pretext. All historians are unanimous in glorifying the genius of that Pope. The great men of history are those who do something, who exert a powerful will toward a goal. No one is preoccupied subsequently with whether the goal was sublime or vile, and success provides the measure of genius.

  Scarcely has he been elected Pope than Innocent III begins to talk in all his speeches about “exterminating the impious.” That is the dominating idea of his life and he has realized it fully. He thinks with a powerful conviction that any man who tries to formulate a personal opinion about God discordant with the dogma of the Church ought to be pitilessly burned.

  He goes even further. He deems that the cadavers of heretics, whose heresy was undiscovered while they were alive, ought to be disinterred, in order to deprive them of a peace to which they have no right. “In 1206 he excommunicates an abbé of Faenza who refused to allow the remains of a heretic laid to rest in the Abbatial cemetery.”46 “It is necessary that the skillful investigation of Catholics,” he says, reveals the crime of those who pretend to lead a Christian life in order to lead opinion astray.”

  In a decree addressed to the bourgeois of Viterbe he asserts that “the divine sentence punishes the sons as well as the fathers, and canonical laws sanction that disposition.”

  He is very well informed about the purity of the mores of the Albigensians and Cathars, and yet he calls them “lascivious
sects that, seething with libertine ardor, are nothing but slaves to the sensualities of the flesh.” He exhorts his envoys unscrupulously to deceive the Comte de Toulouse by promises that are not kept because, for a cause as just as the destruction of a people, all means appear good to him.

  He finds in Simon de Montfort the iron instrument that is to serve his apostolic fury.

  Simon de Montfort is a noble and poor warrior. He is a sexagenarian when the crusade begins and deprived of the desire for women that might incite a leader to indulgence when he sees the massacre of a city’s inhabitants.47 His mores are austere. He cannot read and does not think of learning. Perhaps, in fact he could not; he is astonishingly myopic. When he fights he cannot see the enemy he strikes. His sword-thrusts are haphazard and he laughs noisily afterwards with his knights at having been able to kill blindly. His eyelids are perpetually closed and he is known as the eyeless knight. Perhaps a part of his cruelty comes from the fact that he never sees the expressions of despair on the faces of his victims.

  He obeys the Pope’s orders blindly. He is animated by an inconceivable cupidity, but he is prodigal with the clergy. He can see to further than his nose but he has the gift of seeing riches through walls and when he has traversed a city he knows which inhabitants he ought to accuse of heresy in order to confiscate his wealth for himself. He ignores the chivalric honor of his era. It is as if he is possessed by a destructive fury, a cold passion for razing châteaux, slaughtering prisoners and spreading devastation. For the ten years that the war lasts no one can report a hint of pity on his part. He is devoured by hatred of the lands he conquers and of which he is named suzerain. He does not even like his own allies. When he lifts the siege of Toulouse he abandons the wounded that he could have taken with him.