by Tuvia Fogel
Yehezkel ben Yoseph, a rabbi and a medicus, had arrived in Provence from Egypt five years earlier at the age of twenty-one. He had not just abandoned Fustat and its Nile sunsets but had also given up the shining future that awaited the favorite disciple of Moshe ben Maimon, Salah ad-Din’s personal physician and the greatest Jewish scholar of his time, known to Latins as Maimonides. And what was more, given it up for the dubious revelations of a bunch of mystics in the French Midi.
The esoteric schools of the so-called kabbalists had fascinated him for some time, but the truth was he’d chosen exile, and knew it, to escape the gloom that had enveloped him ever since his Naomi drowned herself in the Nile. Naomi—a sweeter name never existed—hadn’t given him children, and her smile faded year after year. Jewish law ruled that after ten years of sterile marriage, Yehezkel would have the right—nay, the duty—to repudiate his wife. An unshakable conviction that she somehow deserved that fate caused Naomi’s mind to drift into a no-woman’s-land where at times he could reach her, while other times she was alone with pure despair.
Yehezkel tried to reassure her. He told her he would never divorce her. He’d explained about the Matriarchs, all three initially barren—Sarah to the age of ninety!—but Naomi was inconsolable. Then one night, in the sixth year of their marriage, she left the house and walked into the Nile. The river that gives life to Egypt took the life of his wife. Custom demanded that he remarry, but Yehezkel escaped to Provence instead, in search of a light in the teachings strong enough to pierce the darkness that had swallowed him.
On his arrival in Posquiére, he’d been accepted on the power of the name of his Egyptian mentor. It would have opened any door in the Jewish world, this time into the school of Rav Yitzhak the Blind, one of the first kabbalists to have received new revelations on the meaning of Scripture directly from the prophet Elijah. The long nights of study with his new teacher had been full of the ways in which the Sephirot, the ten Divine Emanations, manifest themselves in this world. Sometimes, waking up suddenly, his nostrils full of the dry fragrance of veal-skin parchment, Yehezkel would wonder for an instant if he’d fallen asleep in his bed with a book on his face, or if he was still sitting at his teacher’s wax-encrusted table, head slowly collapsed onto some holy text.
Yehezkel lived those five years to the hilt, but still they seemed like five months: sea passages, rich cities, markets, sophisticated courts, rabbinical circles. He became the personal medicus of several nobles and learned their langue d’Occitanie, a hard, yet musical tongue. As he did with every new language, he had inadvertently learned its singsong before its words or grammar, the result being the total absence of a foreign accent that never failed to amaze the locals. Over five years, Yehezkel turned into one of a growing band of itinerant, rebellious, mostly young thinkers of all three faiths: wandering, polyglot mixtures of hope and disenchantment, mysticism and irony, humility and ambition, who prospered in much of the West to the dismay of the church, even seducing many Christian youths.
In his roaming, Yehezkel witnessed the flowering of a new, voluptuous love for God’s creation. The courts of heretical nobles hosted rowdy bands of troubadors—melancholy minstrels—usually afflicted with unreciprocated love and invariably intoxicated by the thick wines of the region. In those courts Cathars, Moors, and Jews competed in poetical, musical, and philosophical contests, courting the attentions of witty, beautiful ladies. And all this while in the Holy Roman Empire the worth of a man was still only determined by birth or by arms, and the virtues of women something yet to be discovered.
The column moved on. Dribbles of refugees left on paths familiar to them until, as the sun melted into the hills, some twenty people climbed the last crest, their legs trembling with fatigue as they sighted the fortress of Montréal. After a little while, they entered the deserted village, its pink Roman roof tiles set alight by the last shafts of sun shining through the tops of the pines. Many dispersed to their homes. The villagers had fled to the mountains, but as in all wars, a strange mixture of cynical old men, young fanatics, and lonely women hadn’t left. It didn’t take them long to find that these had taken refuge in the kitchen of the Hots, the very family to whom Yehezkel was to entrust the child.
They staggered in one at a time as darkness fell. The big kitchen was divided into three spans by two sturdy pairs of columns joined by arches. At the far end, a huge mantelpiece jutted out over the empty fireplace like a roof, welcoming what was left of the population into its smoky shade. Four men played dice on a low table. A woman sat on a stool suckling an infant. Another followed the game over the head of a man, and a third, old and shriveled, squatted on the floor shelling beans. Five or six more peasants sat on their haunches along the wall. There was a smell of breaths heavy with wine; and a wick sizzled in the bottom of an oil lamp, spreading a foul, sticky smoke.
In an instant the apparent calm shattered. The heretics all talked at once, shouting, embracing, weeping. A ruddy woman dished out broad-bean broth for everyone. Yehezkel declined, pulling out some dark bread and a piece of kosher cheese. Aillil was fed and put to sleep on some straw near the far wall. When he’d eaten, the rabbi went out in the yard to say Ma’ariv, the evening prayer. He used the stars to determine the direction of Jerusalem and then saw some chickens milling around and moved a little farther from the house. Finally, he closed his eyes and prayed, swinging back and forth in the sultry darkness filled with the smell of rotting hay.
Back in the kitchen, Yehezkel pulled the cook to one side. The woman’s red cheekbones, nose, and chin were so swollen and shiny they looked like blisters, yet far from making her look clownish, they gave her face a strangely menacing, thuggish expression.
“What is your name, good woman? Are you part of the Hot household?” he asked her.
“I am Germaine, and I have been in this kitchen since I have memory of myself,” said the woman.
“The child sleeping over there is Aillil Arifat, the only son of Arnald Arifat. Do you know his father?”
“I held Arnald on my knees. If the infant is with you, am I to understand that his mother . . .”
“Esmeralda didn’t survive the siege, may the Lord have mercy on her soul. She died of the fever three days ago, and with her last words begged me to entrust Aillil to the Hot family in Montréal.”
Germaine looked war weary but smiled at Yehezkel with all the assurance she could muster. “I’ll look after Arnald’s son like after my own, sir. I heard he left for Outremer about a month ago.”
“Yes, God only knows where he is.” Yehezkel fixed his eyes on hers. “Listen, Germaine. Aillil was born with some deficiencies. Sight, hearing, growth. . . . He looks like a babe, but he’s over three years old . . .” The rabbi paused, his eyes almost weighing the peasant’s heart. “I advise you to find a childless woman to ween him . . . he needs more attention than a normal child, he needs to be . . . stimulated all the time.”
Germaine was nodding slowly, a knowing smile on her lips.
“I’ll come and see him once a year,” said Yehezkel, “and I’ll try to let Arnald know where he is.”
There was a prolonged creak from the door. All heads turned as two perfecti*10 entered silently, their faces streaked with sweat and dust. They were barefoot, and their patched-up habits were black and hoodless. In the leather satchels across their shoulders was the only nourishment they had need for: a Gospel of John.
The white-haired bonhomme was the respected preacher Pierre de Gramazie, but most believers in the room were more devoted to Pons Roger, his young companion with the elephantine ears, whom Yehezkel knew quite well. Despite fasting often, Pons was a handsome youth, whose wide eyes and disarming smile gave him an air of sincerity somehow confirmed by the huge, flapping ears.
The believers stood up and bowed three times to the bonhommes. Some exchanged the Kiss of Salvation with them; others went down on their knees and asked for the melioramentum, a Cathar blessing.
There were loud requests for the perfecti to
give them the Cathar church’s interpretation of the war, but the perfecti knew that the most reliable source of information on events at Carcassone was the Jew, and soon everyone was standing around the table at which the rabbi related the siege to the perfecti. Yehezkel, reluctant to remember the last two weeks, wasn’t very talkative, something unusual for him.
Just five years earlier, a fleet of cross-wearing marauders lead by Enrico Dandolo, the blind Venetian Doge, sacked Constantinople in a fratricidal massacre for which its leaders had been excommunicated. And here now was the same pope—as if to prove how far the love of Christ can go—waging war on other Christians himself. And all this while the Holy Sepulchre had been in the hands of infidels for over twenty years! These were indeed dark times.
But the Church had reason to fear these Christians. All through the previous fifty years, something sweet had been fermenting in Christian souls. Love of knowledge, of music, of personal illumination, even love of love. Waves of mystics, new philosophical schools, traveling minstrels, cathedrals that soared as if to touch the heavens. Rome hadn’t liked one bit of it. An ignorant and corrupt clergy had pushed many Christians to the brink of spiritual rebellion against Mother Church. Of course, for the Church the rebels were all heretics: Cathars, Beguines, Waldenses, Humiliati—in the words of one theologian, “penitents and visionaries to whose mysticism nothing is repugnant.”
But there was no denying the spiritual spasm that seized Christendom in the name of a more apostolic life and of the definitive victory of love on earth. The Cathar heresy spread like a plague, from Bulgaria to Northern Italy to Provence. News of sacked abbeys and churches reached Rome with alarming frequency. Innocent III—placed on Saint Peter’s throne at the incredibly precocious age of thirty-seven—seemed not to know what he wanted. One minute the Midi was a wasp’s nest to be uprooted with fire, the next minute they were a wayward flock of sheep it was his mission to save. Romans joked that their pope was like a blind dog in a meat market.
Then, on a gray January dawn in 1208, hired assassins murdered Pierre de Castelnau, papal legate to Languedoc. The ineptly named Innocent launched a “just war” against the heretics, the cry rising from every pulpit: “Arm yourselves! Go and bring back Christ’s peace in Provence!”
It took him a year to rally Christians to war against heresy. Philip II Capetian, the first monarch ever to call himself King of France, dubbed himself “Augustus” to show his appreciation of the choice made by the Grace of God. Yet he declined to lead the ransack of his neighbors to the south, claiming that the constant scheming of the English against his throne left him no time to chase religious lunatics. But greed, much more than outrage at the heretics, sparked the enthusiasm of French nobility, or at least of the families who hadn’t been quick enough to grab a place in the sun in Greece or Syria.
The army gathered in Lyon on Saint John’s Day at the end of June in 1209. Soon the camp was a riotous city of thirty thousand souls, each one proclaimed a divine executioner by Innocent’s bull. By July the only wolf missing was the leader of the pack, the Duke of Burgundy, who kept them all waiting for two turbulent weeks. There were five thousand knights, and for each knight five ribauds—feverish peasant-zealots, many with their families in tow—who knew that the blood the Cathars would shed for their sins would bring about, as Innocent had said, the mysterious absolution of their own.
The way God chose to deliver Béziers to its executioners was indeed to put many a Cathar’s faith to the test. At first light on the 22nd of July, Saint Mary Magdalene’s Day, pyres and gallows were being erected outside the walls as monks vied for the privilege of shouting the sermons that would commit the perfecti to the fires of Hell. A mission bearing the offer to spare the city if it would give up the two hundred perfecti it harbored was leaving empty-handed from the Narbonne Gate, when some burghers came out to mock it. A handful of ribauds got in the gate and kept it open until some knights rushed over.
Thus did Béziers fall in one day, and without a siege. The ribauds joyfully drew and quartered men, women, and children They threw them from towers, and burned and boiled them. Not a soul survived, not even the Catholics who had fought the heresy. Arnaud Amaury, abbot of Citeaux and spiritual leader of the campaign, boasted in a letter to Innocent, no doubt inspired by God so later generations should make no mistake about the man, that “twenty thousand corrupted souls” had been exterminated.
Yehezkel’s tale began on the 3rd of August, when “Christ’s army” had been sighted from Carcassonne’s ramparts, singing the “Veni Creator Spiritus” and waving Agnus Dei banners as they marched toward the river.
“It lasted twelve days,” said the rabbi glumly.
“The peasants brought their cattle inside the walls out of compassion for the animals and as food in case of a long siege, but this August has been the hottest in living memory, and the water wasn’t enough for men and beasts. Not a drop fell from the sky, so they slaughtered the cattle. The carcasses attracted such a plague of flies that Catholic burghers started calling Carcassonne “the city of Beezelbub.”*11 And with the flies came the fevers, killing half the population within days.” He turned to Germaine. “Aillil’s mother among them. So they decided to accept Amaury’s offer to let the survivors leave—except, of course, the perfecti—on condition that they take nothing with them.” Yehezkel grimaced as he remembered the previous day’s executions.
“Your brothers, the perfecti and perfectae of Carcassonne, did not try to mingle with the spared believers. Instead they affirmed their faith, mouths wide open on the stakes, with the joy of true martyrs . . .”
“The northern barons want our lands for themselves and will kill us all for it, that’s what’s happening!” shouted one believer. Pons struggled to achieve a measure of silence and then said, “Yes, the Babylonian prostitute is powerful today; in fact, our Church of Love seems doomed.” He hesitated. “This is why I decided to reveal a secret prophecy to you, brothers, one normally reserved to perfecti. I only do this . . . so that you may not lose your faith.”
Pierre shot him a glance of undisguised alarm. The pair reminded Yehezkel of kabbalists he’d seen, constantly reproaching each other for excessive revelations made to disciples.
“Have you ever heard of the Parchment of Circles?” asked Pons. “No? It’s the most precious relic of the Bulgarian church founded by Bogomil! Twenty years ago it almost fell into the hands of the barbarous Serbs, but Nazario of Concorezzo, an Italian perfectus who was in Bulgaria to be made bishop, took it to Italy and from there it made its way to Albi, thirty leagues from here. I saw it there six months ago . . .”
Pons lowered his voice, as if Catholics might be hiding somewhere in the kitchen. Heretics and Jew leaned forward, not to lose a word. “It is an ancient, secret prophecy, drawn by Saint John the Evangelist in his own hand, in the shape of a circle within a circle with Greek phrases that explain all of man’s history.”
A reverent murmur rose at the mention of Saint John, whose Gospel was the source of most Cathar liturgy. Yehezkel briefly wondered if Pons wasn’t making it all up for the sake of the believers’ morale but then told himself that Pierre could not have faked his outrage at this young man’s revelations.
“The Parchment of Circles foretells the persecution we’re suffering today.” Pons took a deep breath. “But it says that after it comes the ‘Judgment of the Sons of Darkness!’ This generation, by its position on the circles, is the last! Saint John’s drawing confirms Gioacchino’s prediction: the overthrow of the prostitute and the advent of an era of universal love. The same era we have been preaching! This, my brothers, is the Final Tribulation. The Tremendous Expiation is upon us!!”
Many believers fell on their knees and thanked the Lord. Some wept with joy, one or two even danced a few steps across the kitchen. Yehezkel sat motionless, deep in thought.
After Salah ad-Din retook Jerusalem, Jewish expectations of the arrival of the Messiah of David, who would gather Israel again in their promised l
and, became as thick in the air as the smoke from a town on fire. Excited mystics traveled from one community to the next, spreading tales of miracles performed by the latest pretender to the throne of Judah. Respectable city Jews, as if seized by the Spirit, began prophesizing and explaining mysteries in Scriptures. “And now,” thought Yehezkel, “here are these strange Christian prophecies about the overthrow of Rome . . . what a remarkable coincidence!”
“Pons, enlighten me, I beg you,” he said finally, “on this Gioacchino’s prophecy.”
“Oh, it’s very simple,” said Pons. “Gioacchino divides history into three epochs: of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The Father is fear, the Son is wisdom, and the Spirit is love. When the Father prevailed, we only knew the rigors of the Law. Then the Truth, which had long lain hidden under a veil, was revealed, and the reign of the Son came. Now man ‘fears’ and ‘knows’ but doesn’t yet ‘love’—the flame of the Spirit doesn’t yet warm his heart—which is why the reign of the Spirit must arrive. And just as we were freed from the slavery of mosaic Law when the Son came, so shall we be freed of all dogmas of the New Covenant when the Spirit comes.”
Yehezkel listened, all the while calculating if the third era was imminent and the present one dated to the Christian heresy where this Gioacchino placed the starting point of the whole cycle.
“When?” he suddenly asked with unintended intensity. “When will this third epoch begin?”
All the believers also stared at Pons, silently awaiting a deadline for the end of their sufferings. “Gioacchino’s epochs last forty-two generations of thirty years each, as those in the Apocalypse,” said Pons. “The Age of the Spirit will therefore begin in the year of the Lord twelve hundred and sixty!”
