by Sean Martin
William Bélibaste was from the Corbières. Sometime before Easter 1305, he killed a fellow shepherd. Later that year, shortly before James Autier and Prades Tavernier were arrested in Limoux, he had met the Perfect Philip d’Aylarac while the latter was travelling by night and wanted to take refuge in William’s sheepfold. The meeting was to change William’s life. He joined the Autier network, and was consoled. In 1307, he and Philip d’Aylarac were imprisoned in Carcassonne on suspicion of being heretics, but managed to escape in September of that year; they evaded their gaolers by hiding all day in a stream. Bélibaste seems to have then crossed over the border into Catalonia. After the Autier movement was effectively destroyed in the arrests and burnings of 1309–10, he remained in exile, where he tended to a group of Believers who had fled from the Languedoc.
Bélibaste’s ministry was an unusual one. He kept a mistress in the shape of Raymonde Piquier, but outwardly kept up the pretence of the celibacy required by the consolamentum. In 1319, he arranged for Raymonde to marry Peter Maury, a shepherd and Cathar Believer, in an attempt to fool people into thinking that Peter was the father of the child that Raymonde was carrying. Several days after the marriage, Raymonde and Peter were divorced and she moved back in with Bélibaste. Despite his shortcomings, however, Bélibaste was an inspired preacher who conscientiously guided his diminished flock as best he could. He urged his followers never to give in to despair, stressed the need to love one another and praised the good God who waited for them all in the true world, the immaterial world of light. As Stephen O’Shea notes, ‘Bélibaste’s sermons were remembered for years’92 by his followers.
The group was troubled by the arrival of a newcomer, Arnold Sicre, in 1317. His credentials seemed respectable enough. He had come from Ax-les-Thermes, where his mother Sybille and his brother – Pons of Ax, one of the Autier Perfect – had been burnt by the Inquisition. He asked for instruction in the faith, but not all of Bélibaste’s group were convinced he was genuine; his father was not a Cathar and had helped organise the raid on Montaillou. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, Sicre became part of the group and found work locally as a cobbler. After a year with the group, Arnold informed Bélibaste that he wanted to search for his rich aunt and younger sister, who lived, so he said, somewhere in the Pallars valley, a part of Aragon that bordered on the county of Foix. He made two trips north in search of his family, each time returning with money that he said his aunt wanted Bélibaste to have to fund his teaching. Finally, he announced that his sister, Raymonde, wanted to marry. Bélibaste decided that she would make a fine wife for one of the group, Arnold, Peter Maury’s brother; the prospect of having a rich benefactress also appealed.
Bélibaste set off with Sicre to meet the aunt and the sister sometime around the middle of March 1321. It was a sting. Once they reached Tírvia, which was within Fuxian jurisdiction, Bélibaste was arrested. Arnold Sicre explained that he had done it because he wanted to reclaim his mother’s house, which had been forfeited when she had been burnt. The aunt and nubile sister had never existed: during his absences, Sicre had instead been visiting James Fournier, who was spearheading a fresh wave of Inquisitorial proceedings. Sicre’s treachery did not stop there. Once Bélibaste had been put into custody, he immediately put himself into the endura, hoping to starve himself to death before he could be burnt. Sicre convinced the Perfect that he was sorry for his actions, and told Bélibaste that he had devised an escape plan, which could only be carried out if Bélibaste were fit. He abandoned his fast. Sicre had been lying again – there was no plan, no escape. Had Dante been a Cathar,93 one could easily imagine Sicre being placed in one of the lower circles of hell for his treachery. Sicre had his mother’s house restored to him, and continued to betray other Cathars to the Inquisition. No record of Bélibaste’s trial survives, and he was burnt in the small town of Villerouge-Termenès.
Montaillou
James Fournier, meanwhile, was continuing to interrogate afresh people who had been questioned ten years earlier by Geoffrey d’Ablis (who had died in 1316). Fournier was a much more thorough inquisitor, and managed to extract a wealth of new information. In particular, he found that the situation in Montaillou was much graver than had originally been thought. Almost everyone there had been, or still was, a Cathar, which instigated a fresh wave of arrests. A number of factors had allowed Catharism almost to take over the entire village. There was no lord to keep an eye on things, as he had died in 1299, and his widow, Béatrice de Planisolles, seems to have been converted – at least for a time – to Catharism by Peter Clergue, the village’s rector. Although a Cathar, Clergue was still outwardly a Catholic priest, saying mass, hearing confessions, performing baptisms and funerals. He was also notoriously promiscuous, bedding many of the women in the village, including Béatrice, with whom he once had sex in the church. Peter’s brother Bernard was the village’s bayle – effectively an agent for the local count of Foix – and was also a Cathar. Together the two men effectively controlled the village, and had the power to keep unwelcome visitors out.
The early 1320s were a legalistic marathon, with Fournier sentencing hundreds of people. Béatrice de Planisolles was sent to prison, but her sentence was later commuted to the wearing of yellow crosses. Various members of Bélibaste’s group were jailed, including Peter Maury and his brother John, who were sentenced to ‘perpetual prison’ on 12 August 1324. Peter Clergue, the randy rector of Montaillou, died before he could be sentenced. On 16 January 1329, he was pronounced a heretic, and his remains were dug up and burnt.
It was the end of Catharism in the Languedoc. What Believers there were left had all been forced to confess and recant. There were to be no more consolings, or ‘holy baptisms’, as the ritual of the consolamentum phrased it, a tradition which, the Cathars believed, had come down to them ‘from the time of the apostles until this time and it has passed from Good Men to Good Men until the present moment, and it will continue to do so until the end of the world.’ Now that there were no more Good Men left, it seemed that the end of the world had truly come.
6
Italy and Bosnia
Thirteenth-Century Italian Catharism
Italian Catharism entered the thirteenth century as a fractured church, with Concorezzo and Desenzano being respectively the bastions of the moderate and absolute schools. The ordo of other churches, such as those at Florence and the Val del Spoleto, remains unknown. Like the Languedoc, the political situation helped nurture the growth of Catharism, but, unlike the south of France, opposition did not generally come from Crusaders but from reforming movements that originated both within and without the Church. From within, the way was led by St Francis of Assisi who, while not mentioning the Cathars – or Patarenes as they were frequently known in Italy – by name, stressed the importance of closely examining the beliefs of potential new recruits to the Franciscan order. He wrote of the importance of regular attendance at both church and confession, and of the need to respect priests. He also stressed the physical reality of Christ’s birth, which went against the Docetism of the Cathars.
There were also popular preachers such as John of Vicenza, who commanded the attention of huge crowds every time they gave a sermon. In John’s case, it led to the rise of the Alleluia movement, a popular, if short-lived, phenomenon in the tradition of the pro-reform Pataria of Gregory VII’s day, and John presided over the mass burning of 200 heretics – mainly Cathars and Waldensians – in Verona in August 1233. John’s success led to the founding of a number of lay confraternities, such as that of St Maria of Misericord in Bergamo, which were intended for people who wanted to further their spiritual practice without having to become a monk or nun. Its members swore to adhere to certain rules, such as the refusal to shed blood, to bear weapons and to refrain from an unethical way of life. They also actively worked towards the repression of heresy.
While the various movements acted as outlets for people who were dissatisfied with traditional forms of religiosity, conflict betw
een the papacy and the empire created space in which Catharism could flourish. The reign of Emperor Frederick II (1220–50) saw these confrontations reach their zenith, and Italian politics came to be dominated by two factions, the pro-papal Guelphs, and the pro-imperial Ghibellines. Frederick did little to encourage the persecution of heretics, and the papacy, keen to gain allies in the key cities of Lombardy, did not press the heresy issue. Also, many cities, wishing to maintain their independence, did not enforce anti-heresy legislation, not because they were especially sympathetic to groups such as the Cathars or the Waldensians, but because any attempt to persecute heretics would have necessarily led to a greater role for the Church, thereby decreasing the cities’ autonomy. Cathars were relatively free to go about their business under the protection of the Ghibelline nobility, and in Lombardy, a Languedocian Cathar church in exile flourished.
Cathar Writings
Very few Cathar tracts have come down to us. Most of the surviving works come from Italy, where literacy levels were generally higher than in the Languedoc, and where the controversy between various Cathar factions encouraged polemicism. Moreover, Italy’s geographical closeness to the Balkans meant that books arriving from the east, such as the Bogomil Secret Supper and The Vision of Isaiah, would generally first appear in the west on the Italian peninsula. These two works were known in the west by the end of the twelfth century. The Secret Supper elucidates the Bogomil/Cathar creation myth, in which Satan is cast out of heaven for wishing to be greater than God. Satan pretended to repent, at which God forgave him and let him do what he wanted. With his new-found freedom, Satan created the world of matter, and formed human beings from the primordial clay. Each soul was a trapped angel from heaven. Satan then convinced humanity that he was the one true god, an action which caused the real god to send Christ – a spirit who entered Mary through her ear – in order to alert humanity to the ways of the devil and to announce the existence of the true god. The Vision of Isaiah was accepted by both the moderate and absolute schools, as it ‘showed a material world and a firmament riven by the battle between Satanic and Godly forces.’94
The most important surviving Cathar tract is The Book of the Two Principles, which was written in the 1240s, probably by John of Lugio, a Cathar from the Albanensian95 school, which was part of the absolutist church of Desenzano. It is ‘the most decisive evidence that the Cathars were evolving their own ideas about the nature of Dualism’,96 and were not content simply to recycle Bogomil material. The Book of the Two Principles is a sustained polemic against the moderate school, whom the author regards as almost no better than Catholics (who also come in for attack during the course of the argument). The work makes a case for there being two coeternal principles of good and evil, each of which created their own spheres – heaven and the material world respectively. The true god cannot be the author of evil. The verse in the Gospel of John which states ‘All things were made by it [the Word of God], and without it, was made nothing’97 was interpreted as meaning that ‘nothing’ – i.e., the material world – was made by Satan. The true world was the domain of the real creator god, which was not a world of matter, but a higher world that obeyed its own laws.
Also extant is a very late tract – possibly from the third quarter of the fourteenth century – called The Vindication of the Church of God. It presents the Cathars ‘as a persecuted and martyred church, suffering before the appearance of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment.’98 It states that ‘this Church of God has received such power from our Lord Jesus Christ that sins are pardoned by its prayer’, that ‘this Church refrains from adultery’, that ‘this Church refrains from theft’, concluding that ‘this Church keeps and observes all the commandments of the law of life’, in sharp contrast to ‘the wicked Roman Church’.99
The Decline of Italian Catharism
The pro-imperial Ghibelline party received a major setback with the death of Emperor Frederick II on 13 December 1250. His son Conrad IV continued the struggle, but the papacy emerged victorious with the capture and execution of Frederick’s grandson Conradin in 1268, who was the last of the Hohenstaufen rulers. With the loss of their main ally, the Ghibellines went into decline, and the Cathars they were protecting found themselves vulnerable to the attentions of the Inquisition. After the murder of the Inquisitor and former Cathar Peter of Verona by Cathar-hired assassins in 1252, pope Innocent IV wasted no time using it to the Church’s advantage: Peter was canonised as St Peter Martyr, and Innocent authorised the use of torture during inquisitorial procedure.
The intensification of the Inquisition’s efforts drove many Cathars underground, or into living double lives. Perhaps the most extraordinary case of this is that of Armanno Pungilupo of Ferrara. He was thought of as a pious Catholic who was famed for his good works and, after his death on 10 January 1268, was buried in the cathedral. His saintly reputation persisted, and miracles were reported around his tomb. After much rooting around by the Inquisition, it emerged that Armanno had been not just a Cathar Believer, but had been a Perfect for the last 20 years of his life. He even survived a brush with the Inquisition in 1254, who tortured him, made him swear loyalty to the Catholic Church and threatened to impose a heavy fine on him if he was caught engaging in heretical practices in the future. Armanno agreed, and promptly carried on as before. Even one of the so-called miracles at his tomb, that of a mute who suddenly regained the power of speech, was found to have been faked by a Cathar intent on lampooning the Church’s cult of miracles. Eventually, the Inquisition prevailed, and Armanno’s remains were dug up and burnt in 1301, and his ashes thrown into the River Po.
By far the most serious loss the Italian Cathars sustained was the fall in 1276 of the castle at Sirmione, which stood on a peninsula extending into Lake Garda. Sirmione was the Italian Montségur, and had been home to various exiled Cathars, including the last active bishop of the Northern French Cathar church, and also the last Cathar bishop of Toulouse, Bernard Oliba. In February 1278, all 200 Sirmionese Perfect were burnt in the amphitheatre at Verona.
Brute force and mass murder, however, were not the sole reasons for Catharism’s decline in Italy. As Malcolm Lambert notes, ‘alternative paths to salvation had opened up’,100 and people were able to express their dissatisfaction with the Church in other ways, not just by becoming Cathars. Groups such as the lay confraternities certainly played a large part in this, as did the enormous success of the Franciscans. Unlike the Languedoc, where Catharism was extinguished in a Church-sponsored holocaust that ended with the Inquisition of James Fournier and the burning of William Bélibaste, Catharism in Italy faded away slowly. The last known Cathar bishop was arrested in 1321, and the last known Cathar in Florence was hauled up before the Inquisition in 1342. By this date, the only remaining Cathars existed in secretive mountain communities in the Alps, where, for several more decades, they managed to elude the long arm of the Inquisition.
The Last Cathars
The last Cathars haunted the remote valleys of the Piedmont. An almost invisible presence, they co-existed with groups of fugitive Waldensians, only occasionally breaking their cover to murder a priest who tipped off the Inquisition about their location in 1332, and two Inquisitors, who met the same fate in 1365 and 1374. Once enemies, the Waldensians and the Cathars were now forced together by circumstance, and ‘came to see persecution as a special mark of the true church.’101 The persecution continued in the form of sporadic military action: the French mounted an expedition against the Waldensians in the Dauphiné in 1375, but on the Lombard side of the Alps, the use of force remained a logistical and political impossibility. Slowly but surely, the Inquisition closed in on the last remaining communities. Cathar sentiments were discovered in 1373 in the Val di Lanzo, while Antonio di Settimo di Savigliano’s inquisition of 1387–9 uncovered the last two major Cathars: Antonio di Galosna and Jacob Bech.
Antonio di Galosna had been a Franciscan in Chieri, near Turin, but in 1362 had been introduced to the heresy in a house in Andezen
o, a small town to the north-east of Chieri. The ceremony he participated in seems to have been part Waldensian and part Cathar, which indicates that, by this very late date, the Piedmont Cathars were practising a hybrid form of the faith. Galosna related to the Inquisition that he had renounced his belief in the incarnation of Christ and the sacraments of the Catholic Church. That a syncretistic or degenerate form of Catharism was being preached at Andezeno is evident in that, after visiting his teacher several times, Antonio was ritually struck on the head with a sword in order to induct him into the heresy.102 He was then given dualist instruction, in which God was extolled as the creator of heaven, but not of earth; the latter was apparently created by a fearsome dragon, which exercised more power in the earthly realm than the true god.103 A further teacher, Martin de Presbitero, had appointed Antonio to hear confessions, and was apparently present at two degenerate consolamentums, in which the consoled, rather than being put into the endura, were suffocated with pillows. Under torture, Antonio related stories of orgies presided over by a woman called Bilia la Castagna, who made a magic potion out of toad droppings and pubic hair to ensure that the novice would never leave the sect. This was undoubtedly untrue, as belief in sexual deviation had been a standard part of heresy accusations ever since Orléans in 1022, and it is fairly certain that Antonio was merely telling the Inquisitors what they wanted to hear.
