The Cathars
Page 7
Raymond Roger Trencavel knew time was running out, but was confident that, as a Catholic, he would be able to parley with the Church. After all, most of Innocent’s efforts had been directed against Raymond, the Cathars and their supporters who lived on his lands, and he must have thought that he was in a strong position. He was wrong. The Trencavels had a long record of antagonising the Church. In one of their boldest coups, Raymond Roger had kicked out the bishop of Carcassonne and installed a puppet. The new bishop’s mother, sister and three of his brothers were all Perfect. Realising that Raymond VI had played a very canny hand by undergoing his scourging and submission, Raymond Roger also offered to submit to the Church, join the Crusade and take action against the Cathars. Arnold Amaury refused to allow this. The crusading army moved towards Béziers, while Raymond Roger retreated to Carcassonne.
Béziers – which had refused to hand over its Cathars to the Cistercians in 1205 – was annihilated on 22 July. Such was the scale of atrocity that even Crusade apologists such as Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay felt the need to distance themselves from it by blaming the bloodbath on the ribauds, the mercenaries. That such – even by mediaeval standards – appalling cruelty had been authorised by the papal legate, Arnold Amaury, was no doubt felt by some in the Church to have been justified. Arnold certainly thought so, and wrote to Innocent that ‘the workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.’62 This view is echoed by the English writer, Gervase of Tilbury,63 who described the situation in terms of a conversation between a priest and a ghost. The ghost told the priest that God had approved of the death of the Cathars, and that the citizens of Béziers had sinned because they had tolerated the presence of the Cathars in their town.64
The news of the atrocity at Béziers spread like wildfire. The Crusaders marched on Narbonne, which, fearing a similar fate, surrendered at the first sight of the Crusade. Carcassonne was next, and Raymond Roger Trencavel knew it. He implemented a scorched-earth policy around the city to make the land as inhospitable as possible for the Crusaders, who arrived on 1 August. The following day, the suburb of Bourg, which lay outside the city walls, fell. Further progress was halted by the arrival of King Peter II of Aragon, who asked to speak to Raymond Roger, who was his vassal. Peter informed Raymond Roger that he had brought the Crusade on himself by allowing Cathars – ‘a few fools and their folly’ as he described them65 – to live unmolested in his city. Peter urged negotiations, as the size of the crusading army vastly outnumbered Raymond Roger’s men. Talks began, and Arnold Amaury guaranteed Raymond Roger safe passage from the city once the surrender had been effected. The fate of the city’s inhabitants would be left to the discretion of the Crusaders. Peter left in disgust at such terms and went back to Aragon. The siege dragged on. In losing Bourg and its wells, Carcassonne had lost its supplies of fresh water, and the city was soon suffering under a miasma of typhoid and dysentery. Raymond Roger was coaxed out of the city by a relative to negotiate. The precise details of the deal are not known, but Raymond Roger managed to save the lives of all the people of Carcassonne – including all the Cathars – on the condition that they leave the city. On 15 August, they did just that. They were not allowed to take with them anything more than the clothes they were wearing; many emerged from the gates barefoot. Arnold reneged on the promise he had made to Peter of Aragon, and had Raymond Roger clapped in chains in the dungeon of his own castle. He died there on 10 November, allegedly of dysentery. At the end of August, Raymond Roger’s lands, and the leadership of the Crusade, passed to an obscure noble whose name was to become synonymous with ruthlessness and terror on a scale never before seen: Simon de Montfort.
Simon de Montfort
De Montfort was, until Carcassonne, only a minor feature of the Albigensian Crusade. He had distinguished himself during the attack on Carcassonne’s other suburb, Castellar, and also during the Fourth Crusade, when he had refused to take part in the sack of the port of Zara on the Adriatic. This was not due to cowardice on Simon’s part – he was a fearless warrior, almost suicidally so at times – but due to principle: the Crusade was meant to be attacking Muslims, not fellow Christians. He left the Crusade disillusioned. Simon’s family were middling wealthy, with lands in the north, near Paris, and also possessed the earldom of Leicester, with which Simon’s fourth son, another Simon, would become closely associated.
Arnold Amaury began to look for a successor to Raymond Roger after the fall of Carcassonne. He approached the nobles one by one, but all declined on political grounds, fearing a potentially jealous reaction from Philip Augustus, the French king. Simon, with his modest holdings in the north, was deemed a safer choice, especially as his military credentials and piety were beyond reproach. The Trencavel lands had a new viscount, and the Albigensian Crusade a new leader.
Simon’s immediate problems were twofold: with the winter drawing on, most of the northern nobles returned home, and a number of the castles that had submitted to the Crusaders in the wake of Béziers had been retaken by southern forces. Indeed, resistance to the northerners was to be a near permanent feature of the Albigensian Crusade, and at Lombers there was even an attempt on Simon’s life. No doubt such actions reinforced Simon’s belief that he was fighting a just war; the towns and cities of the Languedoc were viewed – unlike Zara – not as Christian, but heretical, and the only way to bring them to submission was through merciless brutality.
The campaigning season of 1210 got off to just such a start. In early April, Simon had taken the small town of Bram after a siege lasting only three days. He ordered 100 of Bram’s defenders on a forced march. Before setting off, the men were blinded, and had their noses and upper lips cut off. The man at the head of the procession was left with one eye intact, to guide his mutilated comrades to Cabaret, the nearest town 20 or so miles distant, which was known to be sheltering Cathars. It was the most hideous of warnings; Cabaret would fall to Simon within the year.
In June, the Crusaders besieged Minerve, a town perched on rocky cliffs 30 miles to the east of Cabaret. A huge trebuchet nicknamed The Bad Neighbour began bombarding the stone staircase that led to the town’s wells, which lay at the foot of the cliffs. Once the wells were inaccessible, all the Crusaders had to do was wait; it would be Carcassonne all over again. Despite an unsuccessful attempt by the town’s defenders to set The Bad Neighbour alight, the trebuchet continued to bombard the town into July. With their water supply cut off, Minerve’s lord, William, had no other option than to surrender. He offered Simon all of his lands and castles on the condition that everyone within the walls of Minerve be spared. Simon agreed, and was just about to let the exhausted defenders of Minerve leave when the papal legate, Arnold Amaury, arrived.
Arnold, superior in authority to Simon, told William that everyone could go free on the condition that they swore allegiance to the Church. All the townspeople did so, but the Cathars were another matter. Swearing oaths was anathema to the Cathars, swearing one of allegiance to Rome unthinkable. Three Believers went back to Catholicism, but the rest remained unrepentant. On 22 July 1210, exactly a year to the day since the atrocities at Béziers, all 140 Cathar Perfect in Minerve were burnt in the valley below the town. It was the first mass burning of the Crusade. It would not be the last.
After Minerve, the remaining Trencavel castra – fortified towns – of Montréal, Termes and Puylaurens all fell to Simon’s forces. It was while besieging Lavaur in the spring of 1211, that Simon’s tactics reached new extremes of cruelty. No doubt enraged by the fact that reinforcements from Germany had been wiped out by Raymond Roger of Foix at Montgey near St Félix the day before they were expected to arrive at Lavaur, Simon’s forces breached the walls of the town on 3 May. With flagrant disregard for the conventions of mediaeval warfare, all 80 knights defending Lavaur were hanged, as was its lord, Aimery of Montréal, who was suspected of being a Cathar Believer. His sister, Geralda, was famed for her generosity towards Cathars who had been displaced from towns that the Crusaders had taken. She was throw
n down a well and stoned to death. All the town’s Perfect – around 400 – were burnt at the stake. It was the largest mass execution of the Crusade. Later in the same month, between 50 and 100 Perfect were burnt outside the town of Les Cassès. If one were looking for proof that the world was, according to Cathar belief, evil, one would need to look no further than the events of May 1211.
Toulouse was next in Simon’s sights, and the siege started the month after the bonfires at Lavaur. Within its walls, Raymond VI had not been having an easy time. He had been excommunicated yet again in September 1209 for failing to show enough commitment to the Crusade. The count then journeyed to Rome to bargain with Innocent, who allowed him to remain within the Christian fold, but only just. He then began a frantic diplomatic campaign, making good on all the promises that he had committed to during his scourging the previous June. Toulouse, meanwhile, was being terrorised by its bishop, Fulk of Marseilles, who had organised a vigilante group called the White Brotherhood, whose main occupation was nightly attacks on the homes of Cathars and Jews. In response, the Toulousains formed the Black Brotherhood, who clashed with the Whites on the city’s streets on an almost daily basis. To cap it all, Raymond had been excommunicated for a fifth time at the Council of Montpellier in February 1211 after refusing to obey its directives, which would have restored him to the Church at the cost of abandoning all his possessions and giving up his titles. It was, therefore, a moment of respite when Simon called off the siege of Toulouse after only two weeks.
Peter II of Aragon was particularly sensitive to the threat posed to Toulouse and Raymond’s lands. He attempted to negotiate with Innocent. He knew he was in a strong position: as one of the commanders of the crusading army which had achieved a decisive victory over Moorish forces on 16 July 1212 at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in Andalusia, he was one of the heroes of Christendom. He argued that the Crusade had betrayed its original purpose – that of exterminating the Cathars – as it was now becoming evident that Simon de Montfort had killed as many Catholics as Cathars, if not more, and was also in the process of building up a nice little empire for himself. Peter proposed that he should oversee all of Raymond’s possessions, which would then pass to the count’s son, the future Raymond VII, when he came of age, leaving Peter to mop up the vestiges of Catharism that remained.
Innocent weighed up Peter’s proposition, and was prepared to find in the Aragonese king’s favour. On 17 January 1213, Innocent stunned Church forces in the Languedoc by announcing the end of the Albigensian Crusade, and instructed Simon de Montfort to return lands to the counts of Foix, Comminges and Béarn. Arnold Amaury protested loudly, arguing that the Crusade was still valid, as the Cathars remained very much at large. To make the situation even more tense, the remaining southern nobles – the counts of Toulouse, Foix and Comminges among them – agreed to Peter’s plan to let him rule over all of the Languedoc, at least as long as the Albigensian Crusade was in operation against them. On 21 May, Innocent was finally swayed by Arnold Amaury, and reinstated the Crusade.
Simon de Montfort swung back into action, but, on 12 September, found himself confronted by a huge army of southerners led by Peter outside the town of Muret. Although greatly outnumbered, the Crusaders routed the southern and Aragonese forces. Not only that, Peter himself was killed. It was a disaster for the south, with at least 7,000 men being killed. It was de Montfort’s greatest victory. He was now effectively the lord of all Languedoc.
The Fourth Lateran Council
November 1215 saw the biggest gathering of churchmen for centuries when the Fourth Lateran Council convened. Of its predecessors – the councils of 1123, 1139 and 1179 – only the latter had had any business with heresy, when it had been deemed acceptable to use force against heretics. By the time of the Fourth, that force had been a reality for six bloody and long years. Remarkably, the Fourth Lateran Council saw all of the major figures of the Albigensian Crusade in Rome, with the exception of Simon de Montfort and the Perfect. Even that veteran of excommunication, Raymond VI, was in town, as was the fearsome Raymond Roger of Foix. The southerners clearly had business with Innocent, and meant to be heard.
After a month of dealing with other issues – the preparations for the Fifth Crusade, the forcing of all Jews and Muslims to wear a yellow mark on their clothes to distinguish them from Christians – Innocent finally had time to address the situation in the Languedoc, which was, as ever, grave. Things got off to a bad start with Fulk of Marseilles, bishop of Toulouse, lambasting Raymond Roger of Foix for tolerating Cathars on his lands, and for his role in the massacre of Crusaders at Montgey. Raymond Roger retaliated, hurling abuse at Fulk and saying that he was only sorry he hadn’t killed more Crusaders. It was all too much for Innocent, who had to go out into the gardens of the Lateran Palace to get away from the poisonous atmosphere inside and try to regain a clear head. When he came back in, he had decided to allow Simon de Montfort to retain all his lands in the Languedoc. Raymond VI’s son, Raymond the Younger, would become heir to various smaller possessions, but Simon would now be officially the count of Toulouse. It seemed to be the final nail in the Languedoc’s coffin.
The Siege of Toulouse
When Toulouse heard the news, there was uproar; the Toulousains were determined to keep de Montfort out of the city. He was, after all, universally hated. Resistance was compounded by the unexpected military victory of the Younger Raymond, who took the Crusader-held town of Beaucaire. Then Innocent died unexpectedly on 16 July 1216. It seemed as though things might be turning in the favour of the south.
Simon de Montfort’s reaction was to hit Toulouse, and hit it hard. He was aided by that most charming of men, Fulk of Toulouse, who persuaded the city’s dignitaries to discuss terms outside the city walls. Either Fulk was remarkably convincing, or the city fathers remarkably forgetful of what had happened to Raymond Roger Trencavel at Carcassonne, but they took the bait. They left the safety of the city, and were put in chains as soon as they reached Simon’s camp. With no one left to coordinate its defences, Toulouse fell almost immediately to the Crusaders, who then spent a month sacking the city. To cap it all, Simon imposed exorbitant taxes on the beleaguered Toulousains.
At the moment of what was potentially his finest hour, Simon made a fatal mistake. Despite the fact that Arnold Amaury had recently excommunicated him for his bullying tactics in Narbonne, Simon blithely disregarded the excommunication and left Toulouse to harass the nobles of Provence, leaving a garrison to hold the city. The Toulousains immediately began to build up weapons secretly and devised plans to revolt against this most hated of men. On 13 September 1217, Raymond VI re-entered the city under the cover of dawn mist; the populace was ecstatic. Despite the fact that Raymond was an almost notoriously bad military commander – at the battle of Muret he had famously done nothing – the Toulousains felt that salvation was at hand. Raymond immediately ordered the rebuilding of the city’s defences. Simon’s garrison was terminated with extreme prejudice.
When he heard the news, Simon rushed back to Toulouse, intent on atrocity. Much to his surprise, he was thwarted time and time again. Despite the arrival of reinforcements from the north, Simon’s forces could not breach the city walls. The stalemate lasted nine months, until June 1218, when the Crusaders decided, somewhat belatedly, to employ siege engines against the walls of Toulouse. On 25 June, during a defence of his siege engineers, Simon de Montfort’s head was destroyed by a stone launched from a catapult on the walls of Toulouse. According to tradition, the catapult was operated by women and girls. The most hated man in the Languedoc was dead; no revenge was ever sweeter.
De Montfort’s Impact on Catharism
With de Montfort dead, a chapter had closed in the Albigensian Crusade, yet it remains debatable what he had actually achieved. As Malcolm Barber notes: ‘The relationship between Montfort’s unceasing military activity and the actual extirpation of the Cathars is much more complex than the pope’s rhetoric [of his call for a Crusade in 1208] sugges
ts.’66 Out of the 37 places de Montfort is known to have besieged, contemporary chroniclers record only three where Perfect were actually known to be (Minerve, Lavaur and Les Cassès). Although Cathars are not actually recorded as being anywhere else during the de Montfort years, ‘it is probable that the Crusaders took it for granted that the defenders of places which resisted them must by definition at least be sympathetic to the heretics and their teaching.’67 Furthermore, there were no fewer than 86 places on the eve of the Crusade where Cathars were known to have been living, of which de Montfort held 23 at one time or another between 1209 and 1218. This leaves 63 places that de Montfort did not attempt to take. It is possible that de Montfort was unaware of the presence of Cathars in some of these places, or besieging them may have been beyond his resources. Despite a crusading tax levied by Innocent, the Albigensian Crusade was not properly financed, and de Montfort had to rely on the support of private bankers and on obtaining booty to keep the Crusade afloat. The accusations that de Montfort, despite his piety, had a keen eye for booty and a desire for personal power are reinforced by the fact that he also managed to gain control of another 63 places that had no reputation for heresy whatsoever.