CRUSHING THE CATHARS
Raymond-Roger Trencavel was the first Languedoc aristocrat to fall victim to the crusader force as de Montfort and his northern barons moved into the south. Although not himself a Cathar he had tolerated the faith’s diffusion across his territories, and his own position showed how the crusade involved a pattern of feudal loyalties while also seeking to combat religious heresy. As viscount of Beziers and Albi, Raymond-Roger was a vassal of the county of Toulouse, and as viscount of Carcassonne he owed allegiance to his feudal overlord, Peter II, who was king of Aragon and a notably orthodox Catholic monarch. De Montfort was granted the Trencavel lands by the pope and paid homage for them to the king of France, thereby angering King Peter, who had previously been neutral. There was also conflict between the French Crown and the papacy following Innocent’s official decree that Cathar lands could be confiscated. This angered not just the southern nobility but also King Philip II Augustus, since he remained the ultimate suzerain of lands that the papacy had declared to be open to seizure and spoliation.
BELOW The fortified city of Carcassonne was a Cathar stronghold during the Albigensian Crusade.
Up until 1215 it was the crusaders who won the more significant victories, and the siege of Beziers, with its subsequent loss to the Cathars, in July 1209 was particularly bloody. The mass of its population, both Cathar and Catholic, was killed and the city itself destroyed before the crusaders moved on to Carcassonne, which surrendered in mid-August. Raymond-Roger, having led the defense of his city, was taken prisoner at Carcassonne, with de Montfort possibly involved in his murder while he was under supposedly safe conduct. By 1213 Catholic forces were in control of most of the county of Toulouse, at which point Peter II, king of Aragon, intervened in defense of Raymond VI, who was his vassal as well as his brother-in-law. King Peter’s defeat and death at the Battle of Muret (September 12, 1213) led to temporary exile for Raymond, and the lands of the county of Toulouse, having been seized by the French Crown, were granted to de Montfort along with the territories of the dukedom of Narbonne. Peter II’s defeat at Muret had a major long-term strategic impact, since it spelled the end of any southern French ambitions for the Aragonese kingdom.
ABOVE A 14th-century illustration from the Chronicle of Saint Denis depicting the crusaders massacring Cathars.
During the next two years the Cathars and their aristocratic protectors were subjected to systematic campaigns of subjugation. Raymond VI, accompanied by his son who shared his name, returned at the head of an army in 1216. The future Raymond VII seized Beaucaire in the lower Rhone valley and defended it successfully against de Montfort’s forces. In the following year his father retook Toulouse and entered the city in triumph, following which de Montfort mounted a prolonged siege in the course of which he was killed (June 25, 1218) after a stone launched from a projectile within the city smashed his skull to pieces. In subsequent years the Albigensian Crusade faltered and the Cathars retook formerly besieged centers. From 1226 onward, however, the French monarchy regained the initiative, and the treaty that Raymond VII was forced to sign at Meaux in April 1229 both ended the war and extinguished regional autonomy. The House of Toulouse was now dispossessed of most of its fiefs, and the Trencavels, lords of Beziers and Carcassonne, lost all their fiefdoms.
But the official end of military operations did not mean that the Cathars had gone away. One key result of the Albigensian campaign was the establishment of Inquisitions—formal bodies answerable to the papacy and staffed with clerical professionals charged with discovering error through cross-examination. These mobile institutions were very active in southern France from the 1230s onward. The Cathars were now taking refuge in their few remaining strongholds, and for a whole year from the spring of 1243, the remote Cathar fortress of Montségur was besieged by the archbishop of Narbonne’s army. Over 200 Cathar perfecti were burned by their captors after the castle fell on March 16, 1244. From then on the Cathars lacked aristocratic support, and their few survivors lived as rural fugitives. There were sporadic attempted insurrections in southwest France but these were pathetic affairs. The Inquisitions had now become very powerful and the perfecti, when captured, were invariably burned. But the credentes could survive provided they recanted, and during the period following their official statement of repentance they were forced to wear yellow crosses sown onto their clothing as a sign of past error. A new chapter had opened in the history of persecution in Europe.
OCCITANIA
Occitan is a Romance language and, like its close linguistic cousins French, Italian and Catalan, it evolved out of vernacular forms of Latin during the early Middle Ages. Spoken today by over a million people in southern France, the Aran valley in the Spanish Pyrenees and along the Franco-Piedmontese border, Occitan is a remarkable linguistic survivor and offers a direct link with the culture of medieval Western Europe.
Although Occitan also flourished in Navarre and Aragon during the central Middle Ages, it was displaced in these regions by Navarro-Aragonese, another Romance language, during the 14th century. The first texts written in standard Occitan date from the tenth century, by which time the language was already being used as a medium of literary and scientific communication as well as in works of jurisprudence. Written forms of Occitanian dialects, which include Provencal, Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin and Auvernhat, can be dated to at least the eighth century.
It was Dante, in his De vulgari eloquentia (1302–05), who created the category lingua d’oc. Observing the different words for “yes” in Occitan, in various Italian and Iberian languages, and in French, he wrote: “Some say oc, others say si, others say oil.” Hoc illud (“this is it”) is the derivation of oil, and the langue d’oil refers to the language of medieval northern France that is the basis of modern-day standard French. Oc is derived from the Latin hoc (“this”), and Occitan’s linguistic features demonstrate both the depth of Rome’s cultural influence in the regions of Provence and Aquitaine as well as its persistence after the end of empire. The words “Occitan” and “Occitania”—a probable conflation of Oc and Aquitanus (Aquitanian)—were first used in the 13th century and they are based on an archaic allusion to the Roman province of Gallia Aquitania which included large areas of southern France. Occitan was used by the mass of the population in the regions where it predominated during the Middle Ages, but it was also the language of courtiers and of aristocratic society. Through the poetry of the troubadours who adopted both Occitan’s standard form and its different dialects, the language became the vehicle of a high culture. During the 15th century Occitania’s cultural and political assimilation into the French kingdom was fast evolving, and by that stage the region’s nobility were increasingly speaking French while the lower orders tended to use Occitan. French bureaucracy’s enduring obsession with uniformity and regulation explains the persistence of its hostility toward Occitan from the time of the Cathars to the present day. The language was hard hit by Francois I’s Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets (1539), which proscribed the use of any language other than standard French in official legislation. And the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution waged a continuous campaign against the southern culture and language, seeing in both the expression of a dissent that undermined Republican unity and solidarity.
THE GLORY OF ISLAMIC SPAIN
711–1002
Spain’s Islamic civilization reached its apogee during the tenth century and was centered on the city of Córdoba. This was home to the caliphate, the institution that exercised predominance over most of the Iberian Peninsula. With a population of about half a million, Córdoba was Western Europe’s largest conurbation, and the caliphate’s levels of economic prosperity, intellectual vitality and artistic originality made it an advanced civilization whose only possible European rival was Byzantium. Spain had by then experienced over two centuries of intense Islamic influence, and the caliph’s government must have imagined it was set to endure on Spanish soil. But the invading army that had arrived from North Af
rica in 711 and set in motion a huge cultural transformation was only the latest in a wave of influences to affect the peninsula.
By the end of the 11th century Spain’s pre-existing Christian civilization was once again on the march, and determined to regain the lands it had lost. Spain had been Roman long before it became Christian, and Córdoba, conquered by the Roman army in 152 BC and seized from the Carthaginians, became capital of the imperial province of Baetica. The transformation of the Roman world during the fifth-century imperial retreat inevitably affected Spain, and during 415–18 the Germanic people known as the Visigoths (or Goths of the West) made an initial foray into the country following their leader Alaric’s celebrated sacking of Rome in 410. Another Germanic grouping called the Vandals had, however, already established themselves in southern Spain by 409. It was from there that in 429 their leader Gaiseric transported his people en masse to North Africa, where the Vandals were initially Rome’s federated allies—although they were to become the waning empire’s implacable foes.
A CLASH OF CHRISTIAN FAITHS
The Visigoths became imperial allies in 418 and were settled for this purpose in Roman Aquitania, the region between the Garonne and the Loire valleys. In the fifth century an increasingly independent Visigothic kingdom expanded from this base in Gaul, spread across the Pyrenees to most of Spain and moved its capital from Toulouse to Toledo. The Visigoths, like the Vandals, had converted to Christianity by the mid- to late fourth century, and both peoples had adopted the faith’s Arian form, which denied that Christ was part of the Godhead. For Catholic Christians this exclusive emphasis on the Savior’s human status was a heresy, and one which also had a major political and military consequence. The Franks were another Germanic people, and Clovis, who became their king in c.481, had subsequently converted to Catholic Christianity. He found the Visigoths’ Arianism a useful pretext to declare war and succeeded in dislodging the Visigoths from Gaul following the Frankish army’s victory of 507 at the Battle of Vouillé, near Poitiers.
RIGHT The Great Mosque of Córdoba, now a Christian cathedral, was built over a period of 200 years and completed by 987.
Attachment to Arianism gave a group identity to Spain’s Visigothic rulers and set them apart from their Catholic subjects. But the conversion of King Reccared to Catholicism in 587, followed swiftly by that of Spain’s Visigothic nobility, gave rise to an intense brand of religious nationalism in the peninsula. Reccared’s father, Leovigild, had already united most of the peninsula under his rule between 567 and 586, and his approval of mixed marriages was leading to the Romanization of the Visigoths. By c.600, therefore, Spain’s national identity had acquired some distinctive roots and was strongly allied to the cause of the Church. One of the casualties of this Hispano-Gothic fusion was the country’s large Jewish population, and the intolerance to which they were subjected led many Jews to welcome the arrival of an army of Muslim invaders in 711. Some 7000 soldiers had left Tangier under the command of the city’s Arab governor, Taiq ibn Ziyad, consisting mostly of non-Arab Berber tribesmen along with a number of Syrians and Yemenis. The Visigothic nobility had only recently elected Roderick—in all probability Baetica’s military governor—to the throne, and dissidents who supported the claims of the previous king’s two sons joined the ranks of defectors. Toledo and Córdoba fell to Islam, and the arrival in the following year of another invasion force, again mostly Berber, meant that by 714 Islam was in effective control over most of Spain, a country that became collectively known as al-Andalus.
ABOVE Chintila was the Visigothic king of Galicia, Hispania and Septimania from 636 until his death in c.640. His statue, sculpted by François de Vôge in 1753, stands in Retiro Park in Madrid.
Immense religious and ethnic variety emerged as the new Arab ruling élite established its rule over a population consisting of Hispano-Romans and Visigoths. Cultural and political control was promoted by a policy allowing the peninsula’s large numbers of serfs to become freemen provided they converted to Islam. Spanish Christians who kept their religion but adopted the Arabs’ language and social customs were termed Mozarabs. Descendants of the pre-invasion population who converted to Islam were called Muwallads, and the Berbers who arrived in successive waves of migration had a major impact on population patterns. In 741 there was a major uprising of Berber troops garrisoned in Spain after their fellow tribesmen in North Africa rebelled against Arab rule. The subsequent arrival in the peninsula of a large army of Syrians sent to reassert Arab control ensured an even greater ethnic mix. Berber settlement had been especially strong in the northwest, and the 741 rebellion gave the Christian kingdom of Asturias, a northern outpost established in 718 by fleeing Visigothic nobles and officials, a chance to incorporate Galicia.
THE STRUGGLE TO RESIST ISLAMIC EXPANSION
During this earlier period of Islamic rule al-Andalus remained part of the empire presided over by the Umayyad dynasty of rulers based in Damascus. Arab tribal rivalry within Spain was intense, but this did not diminish the desire for northern expansion, and that thrust was maintained until 732 when the Franks, under their leader Charles Martel, defeated an invading force near Tours. Defeat by Byzantium in Anatolia during 740 suggested that Islam might be reaching its territorial limits in the East as well as the West, and the caliphate of Syrian rulers was about to pay the price. Muslims who desired a continuous and consistently Islamic expansion had always considered the Umayyads too secular in style and were apt to dismiss the Damascus regime as merely “the Arab state.” Nonetheless, it was the Umayyads who had broken with the ancestral Arab custom of allowing tribal leaders to elect their leader or caliph, and they established the new principle of hereditary rule within a dynasty. Following major revolts in Iran, Iraq and Khorasan, the Umayyad army was defeated in 750 at the Battle of the Great Zab river in Mesopotamia. The victors were the new ’Abbasid dynasty, whose forces set about the bloody business of exterminating the preceding regime’s leading members and supporters.
’Abd al-Rahman, the former caliph’s grandson, was 16 in the year of his family’s deposition and managed to escape the slaughter. Accompanied by a few loyalists, the young prince at first led the life of a fugitive in North Africa, but in 755 he succeeded in making the journey across the straits of Gibraltar from Ceuta to al-Andalus. ’Abd al-Rahman was now leading an army composed mostly of mercenaries, but he also benefited from pro-Umayyad sentiment among the local population. The governor of al-Andalus owed a nominal obedience to the now ’Abbasid-controlled caliphate, but he was still the region’s effectively independent ruler. Following a military defeat, his capital city of Córdoba was seized. The Umayyad prince proclaimed himself to be emir of Córdoba and as such the rightful ruler of al-Andalus, the peninsula conquered by his ancestors. The further arrival from Syria of Umayyad partisans and officials ensured the dynasty’s survival in its new base.
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THE GLORY OF ISLAMIC SPAIN
711 An Islamic army consisting mostly of Berber tribesmen leaves North Africa and arrives in Spain. Toledo and Córdoba, centers of the Christian Visigothic kingdom, fall to the invaders.
714 Most of Spain is Muslim-controlled and becomes known collectively as al-Andalus.
750 The Umayyad dynasty, rulers of the Islamic caliphate in the Middle East, are expelled from power by the ’Abbasids. Islamic Spain becomes politically independent of the ’Abbasids.
929 ’Abd al-Rahman III adopts the title of caliph and thereby establishes his religious independence of the ’Abbasid caliphate. He restores his dynasty’s authority over Islamic rebels in Spain.
933 Fall of Toledo, last center of Muslim resistance, to the Córdoban caliphate.
976 Completion of Córdoba’s Great Mosque.
978–1002 Period in office of Abu ’Amir al-Mansur as chief minister of the Cordoban caliphate and effective ruler of Islamic Spain. The caliphate establishes its authority in northwest Africa, which is administered as the viceroyalty of Cordoba.
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br /> ABOVE The Battle of Roncesvalles in 778, as depicted in the Song of Roland, is the subject of this illustration (c.1335/40) from a manuscript which forms part of the Grandes Chroniques de France (1274–1461). Roland lies dead on the ground, while a Christian knight prays over his body.
Al-Andalus had therefore ceased to be a territorial province of the caliphate centered on Baghdad, and the institution termed the emirate of Córdoba ruled the peninsula as an independent territory. As emirs instead of caliphs, al-Rahman and his immediate successors were nonetheless claiming political rather than religious independence from the ’Abbasids, and they still had to confront major internal challenges. ’Abbasid partisans, followers of the former governor—especially in Toledo—as well as Berbers in the grip of messianic movements and who controlled most of central Spain, were all able to resist the expansion of the Córdoban emirate for some 20 years. By the late 770s ’Abd al-Rahman had defeated these particular opponents and was extending his authority to northeastern Spain, where a variety of local Arab leaders were contesting the right to local predominance. Regional overlords in Barcelona and Zaragoza invited the Franks to intervene with military assistance, but the arrival of an army led by Charlemagne prompted a change of heart. Realizing, in all probability, that so mighty an ally could turn into a threat, garrisons in the two cities refused admittance to their putative supporter, and Charlemagne’s army had to retreat through the Pyrenees.
The Age of Chivalry Page 15
