The Cathars

by Sean Martin

  Most of Simon’s campaigns concentrated on Trencavel lands or around Toulouse, and the odds of any given town being attacked were between three or four to one against. The Perfect therefore had plenty of places to hide, and hide they seem to have done, as there were no mass burnings of Cathars after Lavaur and Les Cassès. De Montfort was partially successful at breaking up the infrastructure on which the Cathars depended: there were no Cathar bishops of Albi, Carcassonne and Agen during his tenure, and only one deacon (in Carcassonne).68 Cathar bishops seemed to have held office in Toulouse throughout Simon’s years,69 but they only survived by hiding at the Cathar stronghold of Montségur in the Pyrenees.

  One partially successful policy had been the encouragement of crusading settlers in the south. The property of Cathars and their supporters, once abandoned, proved to be virtually impossible to get back, as they had been bequeathed to Crusaders such as Alan of Roucy, who took over Termes, Montréal and Bram, and Bouchard of Marly, who got Saissac and Cabaret.70 Once installed, they were encouraged to marry local women, and thereby eliminate heresy through marriage. (Landed southern widows and heiresses required a licence to marry; Crusaders did not.) However, few of the settlers founded long-term dynasties in the south: they were either killed during subsequent southern uprisings, or went back north while they still had the opportunity to do so.

  During the de Montfort years, diplomacy and preaching were still being used as weapons against the Cathars: Innocent never tired of trying to check the violence, and was constantly in talks with various ambassadors, legates and lobbyists. That he had to censure Simon in January 1213 shows how much he had come to distrust the military solution, and de Montfort’s execution of it. It was not his military genius that was in question, but the sheer number of extracurricular sieges that he was undertaking, all in the name of increasing his own power base (indeed, after the Fourth Lateran Council, Simon held more land than the king of France, Philip Augustus).

  However, the nine years of violence, brutality and terror did have a profound impact on Catharism. Before 1209, the Cathars had been able to pursue their faith quite openly. After that date, they became cautious and secretive, knowing they were hunted and might meet the same fate as the Perfect of Minerve, Lavaur and Les Cassès. De Montfort’s other main achievement was to leave a legacy of hatred. The anonymous second author of the Song of the Cathar Wars spoke for many in the Languedoc when he wrote:

  The epitaph says, for those who can read it, that he is a saint and martyr who shall breathe again and shall in wondrous joy inherit and flourish, shall wear a crown and be seated in the kingdom. And I have heard it said that this must be so – if by killing men and shedding blood, by damning souls and causing deaths, by trusting evil counsels, by setting fires, destroying men… seizing lands and encouraging pride, by kindling evil and quenching good, by killing women and slaughtering children, a man can in this world win Jesus Christ, certainly Count Simon wears a crown and shines in heaven above.71

  The Changing of the Guard

  Simon de Montfort’s death heralded not only the end of one of the darkest eras in the west since the Viking raids, but also a period of change that saw the old figures die off: Dominic Guzman died in 1221 (in 1234 he would be canonised as St Dominic); Raymond VI died in 1222; King Philip Augustus of France died in 1223, the same year as Raymond Roger of Foix, who remained unrepentant and went to his grave wishing he’d killed more Crusaders; Arnold Amaury died in 1225. In their place rose sons and heirs such as Raymond the Younger, who would become Raymond VII upon his father’s death, and Roger Bernard, son of Raymond Roger of Foix. Both men were able warriors, and played key roles in repelling the siege of Toulouse in 1218 and in subsequent southern resistance.

  Simon de Montfort’s son, Amaury, however, was not a chip off the old block when it came to military matters. After his father’s death, he faced six years of constant conflict with Raymond the Younger and Roger Bernard. The de Montfort lands began to shrink on an annual basis. Amaury tried in 1221 to found a military religious order dedicated to fighting heresy modelled on the Templars,72 but without success. His incompetence was to undo virtually everything his father had built up.

  Innocent had long wanted the French crown to intervene in the south, but it was not until 1215 that Philip Augustus’s son, Louis, finally launched an expedition of his own. Nothing much came of it. In 1219, he tried again, this time getting as far as committing wholesale slaughter at the small market town of Marmande, where all 7,000 inhabitants were killed, before attempting to take Toulouse. He wasn’t able to, and went back to Paris.

  The Albigensian Crusade further suffered under Innocent’s successor, Honorius III (1216–27), who had another Crusade to deal with, the official Fifth, which began in the first year of his pontificate. While he saw the need to continue the fight against heresy, he did not put all his faith in crusading. He gave his blessing to Dominic Guzman’s Order of Preachers (better known as the Dominicans) and the Franciscans; both orders were to expand exponentially in the following years, with both Dominic and Francis being canonised between 1228 and 1234.

  The Perfect began to re-emerge during this period. Those who had survived Simon de Montfort had done so by hiding in caves, or in the Pyrenean fortresses of Montségur and Quéribus. In 1223, the Cathar bishop of Carcassonne, Peter Isarn, had copies made of the records of the meeting at St Félix so that he could determine and re-establish his diocesan boundaries after the havoc wrought by the Albigensian Crusade. In 1226, there was another major Cathar gathering at Pieusse. It was not as epochal as St Félix, but the fact that it happened at all showed that the Cathar church was far from beaten, and was confident enough to resume as normal a life as was possible: the council even established a new bishopric at Razès. But peace was not to last.

  It was Amaury de Montfort who inadvertently brought more grief on the Good Christians. After several years of losing ground to both Raymond VII and Roger Bernard of Foix, Amaury and Raymond agreed a truce in the summer of 1223. In January 1224, Raymond took control of Toulouse, and the following month Amaury admitted that he was beaten. He ceded all his claims to the possessions in the Languedoc to King Louis XIII. The southern nobles now had one overpowering enemy: the French crown.

  The Peace of Paris

  King Louis was not the only person who wanted to settle matters in the south once and for all. The new papal legate to France and the Languedoc, Romano di San Angelo, was a ruthless and duplicitous man; perfect Vatican material and perfect for harassing the beleaguered nobility of the south, Raymond VII in particular. Raymond was operating under the supervision of the aged Arnold Amaury, who, since excommunicating Simon de Montfort, had – in the greatest irony of the whole saga – become sympathetic to the southern cause. Raymond and Arnold proposed a series of reparation payments to the de Montforts, in addition to Raymond swearing allegiance to the French crown and promising to drive the Cathars out of his lands. Romano, however, wanted the reinstatement of the Crusade, and made sure that Raymond’s and Arnold’s peace plan never got off the drawing board by excommunicating Raymond in early 1226.

  Louis, for his part, was also keen on crusade rather than diplomacy, after getting the taste for mass murder at Marmande. He was also aware that he could use the Church to bankroll the whole enterprise; it was the start of an era in which French kings would simply appropriate Church wealth for their own ends, and it ultimately led to the waning of Church influence in France. He and Romano haggled and argued over funding, until Romano managed to extract money from wealthy sees such as Chartres, Rheims, Rouen and Amiens.

  In the summer of 1226, the Crusaders besieged Avignon. It was an uncomfortable stand-off lasting three months, during which Louis and his army succumbed to serious bouts of dysentery in the August heat. By the time the city finally surrendered, 3,000 Crusaders had died of the disease. But word spread: the great city of Avignon had capitulated. Even had they been able, the Crusaders would not have had to do much fighting; the size
of their army was such that southern nobles were offering their submission on first sight of it, or even hearing that it was nearby. In the light of potential instant annihilation, former Cathar sympathisers such as Bernard Otto of Niort, the nephew of Aimery of Montréal and Geralda of Lavaur, suddenly became staunch supporters of the Crusade. The only real military challenges the Crusade faced were guerrilla attacks from the forces of Raymond VII and Roger Bernard of Foix, which proved a nuisance more than a real danger. Dysentery, however, would do more damage than the forces of Toulouse and Foix: Louis himself was now seriously ill, and died on 8 November in Montpensier.

  Louis’s son, the future Louis IX, was only 12 at the time of his father’s death, and his mother, Blanche of Castile, became Regent. She was determined that her husband’s death would not be in vain, and pressed on with the campaign to subdue the southern nobles and eradicate Catharism. With Cardinal Romano as her principal adviser – they were even reputed to be lovers – she ordered her armies to remain in the south and to finish what her late husband had started.

  The late 1220s saw not so much a Crusade as a series of intermittent battles between Crusaders and southern nobility. It could have carried on indefinitely, were it not for the fact that, in 1228, the Crusaders began to employ an extreme form of scorched-earth policy. This was much more thorough than the one Raymond Roger Trencavel had ordered at Carcassonne in 1209; it was nothing less than the complete destruction of the countryside around Toulouse. Crops were burnt, orchards felled, sources of water contaminated. The skies were black for a whole year with smoke. By the beginning of 1229, with his lands an endless blasted heath that would take years to recover, Raymond had no choice: he had to sue for peace.

  On 12 April 1229, history repeated itself. Raymond VII, like his father before him, was publicly flogged. It was to be known as the Peace of Paris, and the combined strength of Church and king had the count of Toulouse in a vice. Raymond’s lands were seized by the French crown, leaving him with little more than the city of Toulouse and a few minor towns, which he was generously allowed to keep for the rest of his life, after which they would be incorporated into the growing kingdom of France. He was also forced to marry off his only child, a nine-year-old daughter, to one of the young Louis’s siblings. In addition, Raymond was instructed to found – and fund – a new university in Toulouse, at which Church-approved doctors of theology would instruct new clerics in the ways of righteousness. It was the end of the Albigensian Crusade. Life would slowly return to normal in the Languedoc after 20 years of war, but St Bernard’s original exhortation to catch the ‘little foxes’ before they ‘ruined the vineyard’ was now profoundly ironic: the vineyard of the Languedoc was indeed ruined, but it had not been the work of the little foxes. Although they did not know it at the time, the war-weary people of the Languedoc – both Cathar and Catholic – had little time to adjust to peace before they had to face a new terror: the Inquisition.

  4

  The Inquisition

  While French troops reduced the Languedoc to the sort of barren wasteland we might more readily associate with Arthurian myth or the nightmares of Bosch and Bruegel, a nightmare of another sort was being planned in the Lateran Palace. Pope Honorius had died in 1227, and was succeeded by Gregory IX, who was as much an activist pope as his great forebears Gregory VII and Innocent III had been. Gregory – born Ugolino dei Conti di Segni – was one of Innocent’s nephews, and was as legally minded as his uncle had been. Gregory realised that if the Cathars were to be effectively destroyed, then the Church needed the tools to pursue individuals as much as, and perhaps even more than, the ability to intervene militarily, as it was apparent that the dualists were still active in the Languedoc and in other parts of Europe; the discovery of Cathars in Rome in 1231 can only have hardened Gregory’s resolve.

  The Inquisition was based on procedures drawn up under Innocent to tackle wayward priests which gave Inquisitors – usually Dominican friars – the powers of arrest and trial. What started as a method for keeping the clergy in line was to become ‘one of the most effective means of thought control that Europe has ever known.’73

  The First Inquisitors

  The Rhineland, the haunt of the earliest known Cathars in 1143, was to receive the attentions of the first Inquisitor, Conrad of Marburg. Conrad was an extreme ascetic who brought a campaign of terror to the Rhineland with his two henchmen, Conrad Tors, a Dominican, and a one-eyed, one-handed layman called John. Almost everywhere they went, they found heretics of all denominations. Due to a combination of his own blinkered zealotry, and ignorance of what actually constituted Cathar belief, Conrad thought he had unearthed a heresy that he dubbed ‘Luciferanism’. No doubt he remembered – or had it pointed out to him – that ‘Cathar’ meant someone who indulged in satanic rites which included obscene kisses on the rear ends of cats. On top of this fiction, Conrad constructed an elaborate demonology that possibly also contained elements of undigested Cathar doctrine, such as the belief that the devil had created the world. The heretics were thought to worship the devil and engage in sexual orgies. Such beliefs were not new: exactly the same accusations (minus the cats) had been levelled at the Orléans heretics in 1022. Conrad relayed his findings to Gregory, who promptly issued the bull Vox in Rama in June 1233 denouncing the Luciferans.

  Conrad’s procedure, if it can be called that, was swift and brutal. If the unfortunates whom the trio apprehended were adjudged guilty, they were burnt the same day without any further enquiries taking place. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people – most of them simple, unlettered churchgoers – met their deaths. In amongst them were a small percentage of Cathars. The level of hatred Conrad generated was astonishing. He achieved a notoriety of de Montfortesque proportions within months. He went a step too far, however, when he accused Count Henry II of Seyn of heresy. Count Henry demanded the right to a fair trial, and Conrad’s case against the count collapsed when it became apparent that the witnesses Conrad had called were amongst Henry’s enemies, and the Archbishops of Trier and Mainz wrote to Gregory to complain about Conrad’s behaviour. Conrad reacted by promptly calling for a Crusade against Henry and his supporters. On 30 July 1233, while Conrad was organising his Crusade, a local Franciscan decided to take matters into his own hands. He caught up with the Inquisitor as he was on his way back to Marburg from Mainz, and stabbed him to death.

  Northern France and Flanders were subject to the attentions of Robert the Bulgarian, whose name suggests he was a Cathar who had renounced his former faith. Like Conrad, he was a fanatic of the most zealous kind, whose methods were ‘ferocious and arbitrary’.74 Chronicles report that Robert could detect heretics by foibles of speech and gesture; another spoke of a document, which, when placed on a suspect’s head, made them say whatever Robert wanted.75 Robert’s crowning achievement was his participation in the burning of 180 heretics at Mont Aimé in Champagne in the spring of 1239. The area had been known for Catharism since the twelfth century, and the mass incineration was no doubt intended to spread further terror, and also to show bishops from around a dozen local sees what had happened to the heretics who had been uncovered in their areas. Robert was still conducting his idiosyncratic campaign against the devil and all his works as late as 1244, but was eventually disgraced and imprisoned for his excesses.

  The Inquisition in the Languedoc

  Gregory seems to have taken the complaints of the Archbishops of Trier and Mainz about Conrad seriously. While he castigated them for failing to keep the Inquisitor in check, he realised that if the Inquisition was to do its job properly, it needed to be much more methodical and thorough-going in its approach. With that in mind, Inquisitors were appointed in Toulouse, Albi and Carcassonne in the spring of 1233. It was with their arrival in the south that the Inquisition proper came into existence, and was to remain a grim fixture of life in the Languedoc for the next hundred years.

  When the Inquisition came to a town or a village, the first thing its agents would do was
to talk to the clergy, in order to brief them on their procedure. The Inquisitors were then allowed to give a sermon in the church, in which they demanded a profession of faith from all males over the age of 14 and all females over 12. Those who did not or could not profess were automatically suspect and would be the first to be questioned. The congregation was obliged to swear an oath against heresy and ordered to go to confession three times a year. The Inquisitors then asked them to think about their past actions and make confidential statements the following week, either confessing to their own sins, or denouncing their neighbour. Cathars who voluntarily confessed were resettled in areas where no heresy was known, and had to wear two yellow crosses sewn onto their clothes, which identified them as former heretics. Known or suspected heretics who hadn’t confessed voluntarily within this first week were issued a summons to appear before the Inquisitors immediately. Heresy, in the eyes of the Inquisition, included being a Perfect, sheltering them, ‘adoring’ them (i.e., performing the melioramentum), witnessing a ‘heretication’ (i.e., a consolamentum), and failing to report others. The Inquisitors needed at least two witnesses to convict someone; witnesses’ names were always withheld, making it all the easier to accuse an enemy – who may have been a perfectly upstanding citizen – of heresy. In a gruesome and deliberately shocking ploy, the Inquisitors did not just restrict the search for heretics among the living. If people named dead relatives as heretics, their bodies were dug up and burnt. If the denounced deceased had any living relatives, their homes and possessions were taken, and they were forced to wear the yellow crosses to acknowledge their relatives’ heresy.