The Blood of Toulouse
Page 27
21 The narrative of this execution became one of the most oft-repeated and widely-commemorated; the alleged site of the well is still commemorated by a stele bearing the emblem of the Cathar dove.
22 Author’s note: “The King of Aragon had come to the aid of the Comte de Toulouse with a considerable army. They attacked Simon de Montfort near Muret. It was there that the fate of the Midi was decided.” The battle of Muret, in which Simon de Montfort’s forces defeated the Toulousan militia, allied with forces sent by Peter II of Aragon—Raymond’s brother-in-law—was fought on 12 September 1213. The inexperienced Aragonese cavalry was crushed by Simon’s seasoned troops and Peter was killed, whereupon the rest of his forces fled; the Toulousans also attempted to retreat but were overtaken and slaughtered.
23 Author’s note: “This is the commencement of the charter of investiture that Philippe-Auguste signed in June 1216 in Melun. Simon de Montfort was recognized thereby as Duc de Narbonne, Comte de Toulouse and Vicomte de Béziers and Carcassonne.”
24 Author’s note: “Simon de Montfort had ceded to Foulque’s insistence and was about to destroy Toulouse, which then had more inhabitants than it does today. It was his brother Guy and some of his barons who dissuaded him.”
25 Author’s note: “The Château Narbonnais was not situated within the city itself but outside the ramparts.
26 This word appears thus in the text, presumably intending the English meaning.
27 Simon de Montfort’s skull was smashed by a stone hurled by a catapult during the siege of Toulouse on 25 July 1218. It was reported that the stone had been launched by one of the women assisting the warriors in the city’s defense, and the assertion became a matter of legend.
28 Author’s note: “The origins of the Albigensian religion are obscure. One of the less well-known hypotheses is one that attributes it the first foundations of the heresy to the apostle Bartholomew.”
29 Author’s note: “He never would be. The chronicler Aymeri de Peyrat claimed, in the fourteenth century, that the Comte’s cadaver was eaten by rats. The coffin was still in the same place in the sixteenth century. Bertrandi, the author of Gestis Tolosanorum, saw the bones then and reported that a fleur-de-lys was designed on the posterior part of the skull. He judged it to be a natural mark and a presage that the Comte de Toulouse ought to be united with the French crown.”
30 Author’s note: “Bishop Foulque had become so rich that when the King of France came to lay siege to Toulouse he was able to receive him and his entire army at Verfeil.”
31 Author’s note: “Bishop Foulque died peacefully in his bed, in 1232. His final days were devoted to writing poems to the Virgin.”
32 Author’s note: “The tribunal of the Inquisition commenced functioning in Toulouse in 1233. The first autodafé provoked a popular uprising. A little later, the Council of Narbonne was obliged to ask the Inquisitors to reduce condemnations because material were lacking in all the cities in the Midi for the construction of prisons.” Although Magre does not cite Étienne de Lamothe-Langon’s 1829 history in his bibliography, he does cite H. C. Lea’ History of the Inquisition, which drew its accounts of events in Toulouse from Lamothe-Langon’s partly-invented history, and he probably obtained these data from that tainted source..
33 Author’s note: “In 1229 the Treaty of Paris consecrated the fall of Raymond VII. He submitted to the Pope and the King of France. He beat himself with rods at Notre Dame as his father had done at Saint Gilles. He received absolution. His Estates reverted to the crown on his death.”
34 Author’s note: “Women charged, at the moment of marriages, with determining whether the fiancés were well-constituted.”
35 The massacre of the Inquisitors in Avignonnet took place on 28 May 1242. It was followed by a brief insurrection, which son petered out, and the massacre was the pretext for sending Pierre d’Arcis’ army in 1243 to destroy Montségur, to which those responsible had fled.
36 Strictly speaking, an Endura was a kind of penitential fast undertaken by Cathars, which often led to death, rather than an active suicide.
37 Author’s note: “Not all the prisoners of Montségur were burned. A small number, including Raymond de Pérelha, were sent to the prisons of Carcassonne, where the denunciation of other Albigensians was extracted from them by torture.” The burning of the captured Albigensians took place on 16 March 1244.
38 Author’s note: “This grotto is now called the grotto of Lombrive, near Ussat in Ariège.”
39 Author’s note: “The origin of the word Cathar is obscure. Derived from the Greek, cathari would signify those who tend toward perfection and to be the name that the members of the sect originally gave themselves. Pronounce Cazari it might designate the inhabitants of Cazères, a small town near Toulouse that was a center of the heresy and, in the same fashion as the word Albigensians, was subsequently extended to all the heretics of the Midi.”
40 Author’s note: “It is worth noting that after Nicetas’ sojourn in Sicily a group formed of the Faithful of Amour, whose doctrines had much in common with Catharism. Frederick II, a protector of heretics, was said to be an initiate. One of the masters of that group was Guido Cavalcanti, a friend and initiator of Dante.” Magre’s account of Nicetas is based on Napoléon Peyrat, who appears to have invented it, but Nicetas became sufficiently renowned in the wake of Peyrat’s championship that he now has a highly fanciful Wikipedia entry that identifies him as the Bogomil Bishop of Constantinople. The second reference is to the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily Frederick II (1194-1250), who was frequently at war with the papacy and was excommunicated four times, named as the Antichrist by Gregory IX.
41 This assertion is derived from Carl Schmidt’s Histoire et doctrine de la secte des Cathares ou Albigeois (1849) which is one of the sources listed in the bibliography of Le Sang de Toulouse.
42 The notorious trial of several clerics, including two named Stephen and Lisois, of which this is a garbled account, occurred in 1022, and seems to have been a politically-motivated stitch-up. Magre seems to have based his version on an account included in Gabriel Daniel’s history of the church, published in 1755. Daniel expressed the opinion there that it was the residue of the “cult” in question that gave birth to the Albigensian heresy.
43 “By him to whom it belongs to judge the living and the dead.” Éon de l’Étoile, as he became known, castigated the wealth of the church but was accused by his enemies of accumulating a fortune by pillaging churches and abbeys between 1140 and 1148—accusations that had also been leveled at the next charismatic preacher he mentions, Tanchelm of Antwerp, a.k.a. Tanquelin, who flourished a generation earlier, before being murdered by a priest in 1115. After being captured and tortured, Eon died in captivity in 1150; most of his followers were burned.
44 Author’s note: “All the histories of France are histories of the unity of France and not the impartial history of that land. The idea of unity is used to oppose the most elementary justice. The war against the Albigensians seems to have served the future unity of France, so it only provokes an incomplete indignation among those who relate it. Everywhere, it is summarized hastily; people want to forget it; it is inconvenient. Even Michelet, the apostle of right, cannot prevent himself from letting show through the scorn that has always been inspired in the men of the North by ‘the eaters of garlic, oil and figs.’”
45 The kind of lute known as a theorbo was a product of the sixteenth century; in the novel Magre substituted the much older darbuka, a kind of drum, as the symbolic transmitter of Oriental culture; the ancient Oriental stringed instrument ancestral to the European lute was the oud.
46 Author’s reference: “Luchaire, Innocent III.” The reference is to a six-volume biography by Achille Luchaire (1846-1908), published in 1904-08, which is still in print. The second volume is devoted to the Albigensian crusade.
47 This estimate of Simon’s age is highly dubious, although estimates by other historians that Simon was born circa 1175, and was ther
efore in his twenties when the crusade was launched, also seem a trifle dubious, given that his marriage to Alix de Montmorency took place in 1190.
48 Author’s note: “Michelet, desirous of finding some virtue in him, speaks ‘of his courage, his severe mores and his invariable belief in God.’ He also recounts with admiration a story reported by all the chroniclers. Simon de Montfort once helped several of his soldiers to cross a river, at the peril of his life. And Achille Luchaire calls him ‘a diplomat full of resources and a skillful organizer of conquered lands,’”
49 Author’s note: “Not being able to believe in that astonishing longevity, some historians have wrongly claimed that the consuls who succeeded one another after his voyage to Palestine were his sons.” The original details of Magre’s version of the story of Pierre Maurand are ultimately derived from Lamothe-Langon, who gives as a reference the non-existent Annals on which many of the more colorful details of his history are supposedly based, although it was certainly his own invention. In the actual Annales de la ville de Toulouse published in 1772 and in the history of the city published by Jean Raynal in 1759, only the name appears.
50 This word, the equivalent of the English ribald, normally signifies debauchery, and both here and in Le Sang de Toulouse Magre seems to have taken it literally, substituting truand—the equivalent of the English truant—in the novel and referring to le roi des truands, the title attributed to the leader of a legendary Medieval association of thieves and professional beggars, rather than le roi des ribauds, which was the title given in jest to the commander of a special guard of soldiers created by Philippe II, King of France from 1180-1223, which was actually responsible or forcing the gate of Béziers.
51 The Latin “original” of this notorious comment, which Magre refrains from including in the novel, was credited to the Cistercian abbot Arnaud Amalric by his fellow Cistercian, Caesarius of Heisterbach, one of the chroniclers of the crusade, as an item of hearsay.
52 Although Amalric did report in a letter to the pope that the entire population of Béziers had been slaughtered, estimating the death toll at 20,000, some later historians have doubted the assertion—although, as Magre points out, they might have had reasons of their own for trying to minimize the incident.
53 The earliest easily-traceable reference to the improbable story of this tunnel is in Jean Benoist’s Histoire des Albigeois et des Vaudois (1691), from which numerous subsequent accounts, including Napoléon Peyrat’s—where Magre presumably found it—appear to have copied it.
54 The idea that Esclarmonde de Foix was an Albigensian, and the entire substance of her legend as reported and further embellished here, appears to have been invented by Napoléon Peyrat.
55 Author’s reference: “Napoléon Peyrat, Histoire des Albigeois.”
56 The legend of the grotto of Ornolhac as a “new Montségur” was invented by Napoléon Peyrat. Magre’s comments are a paraphrase of his. Two years after the publication of Magiciens et illuminés, however, the cave was visited by the unorthodox German historian Otto Rahn, subsequently an officer in the SS, whose writings helped to repopularize the legend.
57 This story is another Peyrat invention. The remainder of this highly speculative section is, however, save for one acknowledged citation, the syncretic product of Magre’s own imagination.
58 Author’s reference: “N. Peyrat, Histoire des Albigeois.”
59 By the time he wrote Le Sang de Toulouse Magre had obviously discovered that the cagots antedated the Albigensian crusade.
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