The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  Richard’s victories at Arsuf (September 7, 1191) and at Jaffa in early July 1192 recovered most of the coast for the Latin kingdom and dented Saladin’s reputation for invincibility. But it was clear by now how difficult it would be to reoccupy and defend the city of Jerusalem. Richard moreover needed to return to England in order to defend his domestic position against his brother John. On September 2, 1192 therefore Richard and Saladin signed the peace treaty that ended the Third Crusade.

  BELOW This contemporary illustration depicts Richard I (“the Lionheart”) being pardoned by Henry VI for his suspected complicity in the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, from the Liber ad honorem Augusti (A Book to Honor the Emperor) by Peter of Eboli, c.1196.

  A MUCH-REDUCED KINGDOM

  The kingdom of Jerusalem, with its capital at Acre, survived for another century after the end of the Third Crusade as a much-diminished entity extending along the coast from Tyre to Jaffa. Saladin died soon afterward, and his sons quarreled over his territorial legacy. The embittered nobility of the greatly-reduced feudal kingdom considered themselves abandoned by their Western patrons, and the descent of Saladin’s former realm into civil war caused its citizens to lament the lost opportunities of the past.

  Conrad of Montferrat was elected to the throne in April 1192 by the nobility of the kingdom, but was murdered by members of the Hashshashin sect a few days afterward. Leopold of Austria suspected the Lionheart of complicity in Conrad’s murder, and his resentment at the removal of his standard from the walls of Acre still rankled. Richard’s route back to England crossed Leopold’s territories, and while the king was making the journey the duke took the opportunity to arrest and then imprison him. Richard was then transferred to the custody of Henry VI, the German emperor. The Lionheart was only allowed to return to England two years later in 1194 on payment of a ransom of 150,000 marks.

  Conrad’s resilient, and pregnant, widow Isabella had married Count Henry II of Champagne, a political supporter of his uncle Richard of England, within days of the assassination. Guy of Lusignan, meanwhile, was given a consolation prize and allowed to buy the kingdom of Cyprus, which had been conquered by Richard on his journey to Acre. When Count Henry died in an accident in 1197 Isabella married Amalric of Lusignan, Guy’s brother. Conrad of Montferrat, who had wanted the Crown of Jerusalem so very badly, would nonetheless receive a posthumous reward. His daughter Maria of Montferrat succeeded to the throne in 1205 on the death of her mother Isabella and her stepfather Amalric.

  THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR

  Increasing numbers of pilgrims were drawn to the Holy Land in the wake of the success of the First Crusade, but as they traveled through the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem’s countryside they were often besieged by bandits. In c.1120 King Baldwin II of Jerusalem therefore approved the foundation of “The Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,” whose original and sole aim was to provide protection for the pilgrims.

  The 14th-century Roman de Godefroy de Bouillon shows Templar knights approaching Jerusalem.

  These first “Knights Templar” numbered some dozen soldiers who had embraced poverty, chastity and obedience on joining the new Order, and they observed a communal monastic discipline. Their headquarters was on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, raised—according to tradition—above the remains of the Temple of Solomon, and that location was evoked in the organization’s title.

  The pioneering knights gained the support of Bernard of Clairvaux, whose advocacy was instrumental in obtaining the Order’s official recognition by the Church in 1129. A rapid growth in numbers followed, and the knights’ status as the crusading movement’s shock troops ensured that land and money were given or bequeathed to them by supporters from all over Western Christendom. In 1139 the papacy decreed the Order’s exemption from obedience to local or national laws. This extraterritorial status, which included freedom from taxation, gave the Templars an international and self-regulating status. The individual vow of poverty remained, along with the requirement to hand over to the Order all of one’s personal wealth and goods. But the knights’ corporate wealth rivaled that of some European governments, and their financial and business interests were extensive. There was a Templar banking structure, originally developed to provide pilgrims with a safe deposit for their valuables while traveling, and Templar houses supplied the Order with local headquarters in the major European towns and cities.

  A blend of the monastic and the military shaped the organization’s administration, and each region of Europe and the Middle East with a significant Templar presence was ruled by a Master. At the apex stood the Grand Master, who was in overall control of military campaigning in the Middle East and of financial interests in the West. Dressed at all times in their white mantle with its red cross, the Knights Templar were easily recognized, and their code of behavior, forbidding physical contact with women and enforcing silence at meals, was designed to instill an austere communal identity. That solidarity was also the source of their reputation as formidable warriors: the red cross emblazoned on the knightly robes symbolized martyrdom, with an honorable death in combat meriting a heavenly reward. The Templars did not just consist of aristocratic knights, however. At the height of the Order’s influence, when its total strength was not much less than 20,000 men, the knights were a minority within that number. Within the Order, the sergeants were of a lower social standing, and they dealt with the more mundane details involved in running the Templars’ businesses and estates. The chaplains constituted a third clearly defined group.

  As the crusading ideal waned, so, too, did the fortunes of the Knights Templar. The loss of Jerusalem city enforced their withdrawal to Acre in the 1190s, and the Knights’ headquarters were relocated to Cyprus after the armies of the Mamluk Sultanate (then ruling both Egypt and Syria) seized the last remaining Templar fortresses in the north during the 1290s. By 1303 Mamluk forces had ejected the Knights from Cyprus. The Templars’ relations with the other knightly orders that emerged out of the Latin kingdom, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, were sometimes difficult, and a reputation for secrecy had always surrounded them. The Order’s initiation ceremonies were solemn occasions whose details were a closely guarded affair. But this secrecy was seized upon by the Templars’ enemies as a sign of something more sinister, and conspiracy theorists who mistrusted them on account of their wealth were provided with ammunition.

  The campaign of persecution that King Philip IV of France (1268–1314) launched against the Order in 1307 was a convenient way of expunging the massive debts owed by the French monarchy to the Templars, and confessions of idolatry, heresy and financial corruption were extracted under torture. In 1312 Pope Clement V formally dissolved the Order, having already instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to seize Templar assets. Most of the Templars who were tried in the papal courts were acquitted, and many members of the disbanded Order joined the Knights Hospitaller, an organization that had also taken over many of the properties once owned by their rival.

  THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

  1179–1244

  The papal-inspired crusades had a European as well as a Middle Eastern dimension, and expeditions launched in the 13th century secured the conversion of pagan peoples in the continent’s north, such as the Norwegians and the Swedes. From the 1230s onward members of the military Order known as the Teutonic Knights were also subjugating the Prussians—a Baltic people—and imposing Christianity on them. In Western Europe, however, the campaign (1209–29) to extinguish the Cathar heresy—a Christian religious sect that flourished in the Languedoc region of southwestern France—acquired a particular notoriety. These rebels of the Midi posed a direct and explicit challenge to the papacy’s interpretation of Christianity, and the methods used to crush them were correspondingly violent.

  The papal conviction that it could both identify heresy and had the right to extinguish it in the name of orthodoxy testified to the institution’s new self-confidence during this period. But the defeat of the Cathars
also had important political and cultural ramifications since it gave the French Crown a new authority in the southwest of the country. This was the region, including Languedoc, which was widely known as Occitania. The province had its distinctive customs that it shared with neighboring Aragon to the south, as well as its own Latin language (the langue d’oc). Many of these cultural features would survive for centuries, but the brutality of the Cathars’ extirpation meant that there would be no political expression to that regional identity. The military campaign launched against the heretics came to be known as the Albigensian Crusade and took its name from the French town of Albi, which was seen as a focal point for the Cathar movement. Although the town had a predominantly Catholic population, it was nevertheless surrounded by numerous Cathar strongholds.

  THE CATHAR DOCTRINE

  The Cathars probably derived their name from the Greek for purification, katharsis, and their beliefs, along with their secretive initiation rites, placed them in a long tradition of religious dissidence that starts with the Gnostics of the early Christian centuries. Catharism considered the world of matter to be intrinsically evil and opposed to the world of the spirit in which love predominated. The intensity with which the distinction was drawn explains why the movement’s adherents are often described as dualists—a position that attracted the hostility of orthodox Christianity, which emphasized the redemption of the material world through the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. As believers in pure spirit, the Cathars denied that Christ could have become incarnate in mankind and still remain God. And they probably considered the Christian God to be a malevolent agent since, in the Church’s own view, he had created matter. The early 13th-century Catholic Church, with its riches, great buildings and taste for political power, seemed to the Cathars to be the very embodiment of matter’s pride, pomp and wickedness. These were just about the most dangerous set of beliefs it was possible to hold in medieval Europe.

  RIGHT A depiction of Tannhäuser, the poet, clad in the habit of the Teutonic Order of Knights, in the Codex Manesse of 1340.

  Distinctively Cathar beliefs could be detected in the towns of the Rhineland and of northern France during the mid-12th century. By the late 12th century Cathars were well established in northern Italy and Languedoc, and in both of these regions they formed communities of believers who maintained that they were Christ’s true followers and the true preservers of early Christian belief. The Church correctly identified the Cathars as a rival body, since they were organized in an ecclesiastical fashion with their own sacraments and services, bishops and clergy. Those called the perfecti (the perfect ones) were separated from mainstream society and constituted the heart of the movement. Those known as the credentes (the believers) attended religious services but otherwise lived normal lives in the everyday world. This, then, was a secret society whose adherents could not be identified easily, and that uncertainty contributed to the persecution’s paranoid attitude toward them. Withdrawal from the flesh was extreme for both types of Cathars, and procreation was frowned upon since it meant creating more matter—and hence more evil. The perfecti therefore abstained from sexual intercourse. This was, however, permitted to the credentes as long as they restricted themselves to anal sex. Cathars refused to take part in wars, opposed capital punishment and were hostile to the tithe system that supplied revenue for the Church. They also refused to take oaths of any kind, claiming that such agreements subjected the spirit to the world of matter. These beliefs were unsurprisingly viewed by the authorities in both Church and state as an anarchic threat to the very foundation of civilized order.

  The territory of what is now southwestern France was divided in the mid-12th century between the kingdom of Aragon and the county of Toulouse. By the standards of contemporary Europe it was densely populated and contained a large number of towns. Those Western European areas in which Catharism flourished tended to be urbanized, and by the mid- to late-12th century a high proportion of the Languedoc population seem to have embraced the heresy. They proved to be very tough nuts to crack. A papal legate arrived in the area in 1147 charged with converting the dissidents, and Toulouse saw the arrival of two more such Church missions in 1178 and 1180. Official condemnations were promulgated at the Council of the Church held in Tours (1163) and then at the Third Council of the Lateran (1179). None of these initiatives had any impact. Moreover, the Cathars seemed to be not only well entrenched and protected by the local nobility but also very popular as individuals among the population at large.

  LEFT A 15th-century painting by Pedro Berruguete (c.1450–1504) showing the miracle of Fanjeaux. The legend maintains that Cathar and Catholic books were burned, but Catholic books floated up, unharmed by the fire.

  PREPARING FOR AN ANTI-CATHAR OFFENSIVE

  The long papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216) saw a vigorous assertion of the universal nature of papal authority in relation to secular princes and a renewed emphasis on crusading activity. In 1198 Innocent decreed the Fourth Crusade, which was designed to recapture Jerusalem. He was also particularly exercised by Catharism. The pope considered the Languedoc’s bishops to be obstreperous, and they certainly resented the powers given to papal legates sent to combat heresy in the region’s dioceses. In 1204, therefore, the pope suspended a number of these bishops, and in the following year he appointed the dynamic Folquet de Marseille, a former troubadour poet, to be bishop of Toulouse.

  Folquet worked closely with the Spanish priest Dominic de Guzman (St. Dominic), one of the great religious figures of the age, on an extensive conversion program, and a series of public debates were held between Cathars and Catholics. Few Cathars, however, were converted, and Dominic’s experiences led him to establish in 1216 the Order named after him, the Dominicans. They exercised a preaching ministry specifically designed to combat heresy using well-honed arguments and exposition. But Dominic had also identified an important feature of the Cathars: many of those he had met in Languedoc were well-informed and cultured people rather than ignorant fanatics. As he told the papal legates who returned to Rome in 1208, having failed yet again to convert the Cathars:

  “It is not by the display of power and pomp, cavalcades of retainers … or by gorgeous apparel, that the heretics win proselytes; it is by zealous preaching, by apostolic humility, by austerity …”

  The Church hierarchy needed to show the same qualities, but in defense of a stronger case: “Zeal must be met by zeal … false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching falsehood by preaching truth.” Confronted, though, by the reality of what had turned into a mass movement of opposition, the Church hierarchy and its political allies chose another way.

  Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, was the region’s most powerful noble and a significant Cathar defender. Toward the end of 1207 he was challenged by Pierre de Castelnau, the papal legate and former Cistercian monk who had been active for some years in the anti-Cathar mission. De Castelnau was the central figure in Pope Innocent’s newly energized campaign, and several local nobles had already been excommunicated because of their support of the Cathars. Raymond is supposed to have threatened de Castelnau with violence after the legate accused him of being a heretic, and the count was subsequently excommunicated. On January 15, 1208 de Castelnau was attacked and murdered while traveling back to Rome, and the pope, along with many others, concluded that the knight responsible for the assassination was acting on Raymond’s orders.

  * * *

  THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

  1179 At the Third Council of the Lateran, Catharism is condemned as a heresy.

  1205 Folquet de Marseille is appointed bishop of Toulouse by Pope Innocent III and is charged with combating Catharism.

  1208 Murder of the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau, member of the anti-Cathar mission and adversary of Raymond VI, count of Toulouse.

  1209 Simon de Montfort is appointed military commander of the Albigensian Crusade. Beziers is destroyed after a siege and Carcassonne surrenders.

  1213 King Peter II of Ar
agon is killed at the Battle of Muret. The lands of the conquered county of Toulouse are granted to Simon de Montfort.

  1217 Raymond VI retakes the city of Toulouse.

  1218 Simon de Montfort is killed.

  1229 Raymond VII signs a peace treaty. The House of Toulouse is dispossessed of most of its fiefdoms.

  1243–44 The Cathar fortress of Montségur surrenders to the bishop of Narbonne’s army.

  * * *

  Pope Innocent now had an excuse for war, and he wrote to King Philip II Augustus of France requesting his support for a crusade that would crush Catharism. Rather than take part himself, the king sent Simon de Montfort, an adventurous, militarily skillful and conventionally pious aristocrat, to the south instead. De Montfort’s reputation for extreme brutality in warfare was well justified, and in 1209 his fellow nobles on the Albigensian Crusade elected him to be their leader. The French Crown was experiencing great success in asserting its authority in the north, and strategic calculation on its part dictated de Montfort’s nomination to lead the crusade, while also allowing him to commit multiple murders during the campaign. King Philip Augustus also saw the crusade as an opportunity to deflect the energies of some of his more ambitious nobles, and he allowed them to claim southern territories. Quite apart from its religious dimension, therefore, the Albigensian Crusade was an attempt by the monarchy and northern French nobility to subjugate the hitherto independent-minded Midi. The region’s hilly terrain, along with its mass of fortified towns, nonetheless frustrated the military strategies pursued by both sides and made for a prolonged campaign in which as many as half a million people, and possibly even more, may have died.