The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  The pope’s men, reeling from such audacity, then received Innocent’s letter. The pope had written Arnold, “Foxes were destroying the vineyard of the Lord … they have been captured.” To Simon de Montfort, he was more explicit: “The illustrious king of Aragon complains that, not content with opposing heretics, you have led crusaders against Catholics, that you have shed the blood of innocent men and have wrongfully invaded the lands of his vassals, the counts of Foix and Comminges, Gaston of Béarn, while the king was making war on the Saracens.” Both letters ordered an end to the crusade.

  Arnold Amaury rebelled. A decade’s worth of preaching, scheming, prosecuting, burning, hanging, and warring was in danger of being undone. He rode across Languedoc, rallying the bishops of the south to mutiny and dictating their letters of dismay to Innocent. A frantic embassy left for Rome. Preachers who had gone north to whip up enthusiasm for the crusading season of 1213 were instructed to continue their work, regardless of what the pope had said. Simon de Montfort, the jigsaw of his conquests the missing piece in Pedro’s master plan, brusquely renounced his bond of vassalage to Aragon. By doing this unilaterally, he was once again breaking the feudal rules. Understandably, the man intent on establishing French dominion of the south would not be at home in some sort of Greater Occitania.

  Arnold assembled his arguments. Unlike his gagging of Raymond, a decision that dangled by the thread of technicality, an honest point could be made this time: that King Pedro had been disingenuous in his representations to the pope. His Pyrenean vassals, contrary to his claims, had tolerated heresy in their domains for more than fifty years. Thus, argued Arnold, it was a Christian’s duty to bludgeon them into obedience, which was precisely what Simon de Montfort had been doing. The crusade could not be finished, for the very simple reason that the Cathar enemy was still standing, not least of all in the largest city of the land. The abbot of the monastery at St. Gilles, never a friend of Count Raymond’s, wrote to the pope of “the most putrid city of Toulouse, its viper’s bloated belly stuffed with rotting and disgusting refuse.”

  Innocent spent the spring listening and reading. Pedro argued from feudal custom; Arnold, from canon law. Both men were right. Innocent III was many things—noble, lawyer, priest—but above all else he was the one and only supreme pontiff of Christendom. The choice before the vicar of Christ was clear: secular order or spiritual uniformity, the law of the land or the law of the Church, tolerance or bloodshed, peace or war, Pedro or Simon. The old house of the empress Fausta at the Lateran waited for its occupant to exercise his free will.

  On May 21, 1213, a papal letter informed the world at large that the crusade against the heretics of Languedoc had been reinstated. Innocent had made his historic flip-flop.

  In the early evening of September 11, 1213, Simon de Montfort and his men reached the bank of the Garonne opposite the town of Muret. The sky, chroniclers related, was clear, after a torrential rainstorm had nearly swamped the crusaders in a gulley the night before. Muret, its 200-foot-tall castle keep visible from Toulouse, twelve miles to the north, would be the site of the fateful encounter. Simon, who had made his last will and testament that morning, led his army across a bridge and into the eastern gate of the city. There was no resistance, for Muret, like so many other settlements on the periphery of Raymond’s capital, had been cowed into submission by the crusade. Its location was ideal because the small group of loyal northerners garrisoned there could easily disrupt communications between Toulouse and Foix.

  In Simon’s forced march from Carcassonne, he had summoned every knight available to him, stripping his other fortresses of all but a skeleton force. He was faced with a great menace, and, ever the warrior, he was riding out to give battle. The off-again, on-again nature of this crusading year had not supplied him with a steady stream of manpower from the north, but he had still managed to assemble a fighting host: 800 heavily armed horsemen and 1,200 foot soldiers and archers. From the castle where Simon was housed that night, there was an unobstructed view to the west. Immediately outside the city walls were the masses of common soldiers from Toulouse who had been laying siege to Muret since August 30. Two miles away, farther off to the northwest, began a waving expanse of gold and blue and red—the banners of the Catalan, Basque, Gascon, Occitan, and Aragonese nobility. All the lords on both sides of the Pyrenees had rallied to the call of King Pedro. The south had finally united against the north. The crusaders were outnumbered, it is estimated, twenty to one. Pedro, who had insisted that the soldiery of Toulouse desist from storming Muret earlier in the day, wanted Simon to fall into a trap.

  As night fell, the churchmen with the crusaders engaged in last-minute diplomacy between the two camps. Bishop Fulk and the legates had long lobbied for a definitive confrontation; now that it seemed inevitable, they did not like the odds. The mounted clerics galloped back and forth in the gathering gloom, before finally admitting to themselves that the time for talking was over. Simon spent the night with his confessor; Pedro, according to a memoir written years later by his son, relaxed with his mistress. Pedro had let Simon enter Muret unmolested so that the crusader would be faced with a stark choice: venture out to attack against overwhelming odds, or remain behind the ramparts and face inevitable defeat in a long and painful siege. Simon, whose skill as a general had been proved in Languedoc, had accepted Pedro’s terms.

  In the morning of September 12, Pedro summoned a war council. He exhorted his fellow Aragonese to show the same courage that had earned them glory at Las Navas de Tolosa a year earlier. Each knight was invited to distinguish himself for his valor on the field of battle. Count Raymond, the oldest man present, begged to differ, suggesting that it would be more prudent to fortify their camp and wait for Simon to attack. The quarrels of the crossbowmen, Raymond argued, would soften the crusader charge, and then the southerners could use their superior numbers in a counterattack.

  For voicing this proposal, the count of Toulouse was ridiculed. Victory had to be won with panache or not at all. The chronicler who recorded the conference had a Catalan grandee remark woundingly, “It is a great pity that you who have lands to live on should have been such cowards as to lose them.” Raymond left the meeting to confer with his closest vassals. He and his men would form the reserve, or third corps of cavalry, whose job it was to stay in camp until an emergency arose.

  In Muret at the same time, Simon de Montfort ordered his knights to burnish their armor and get ready for battle. At a meeting with his lieutenants, Simon’s assessment of the situation agreed with Raymond’s in the other camp. The crusaders had to risk a pitched battle in the open countryside, or they were lost. A chronicler reported Simon saying, “If we cannot draw them a very long way from their tents, then there’s nothing we can do but run.” The northern nobles prepared themselves for almost certain death. Masses were said, confessions heard. According to Peter of Vaux de Cernay, who was an intimate of the crusader leader, Simon headed to the terrace of the castle to arm himself, in view of the thousands of Toulousain militiamen encamped outside the town in expectation of plunder. Had his piety been tinged with superstition, he might not have ridden out to battle, for bad omens came in quick succession. First, he genuflected at a chapel door and broke the belt holding up the chain-mail chausses on his legs. A new belt was found. When his squires helped him atop his massive destrier, the girth securing the armored saddle snapped and he was forced to dismount. As a new one was being cinched into place, the horse reared up in alarm, delivering a blow directly to Simon’s head. He staggered backward, stunned. A wave of laughter wafted up from the watching soldiery of Toulouse.

  Simon ignored the worried looks from his entourage and rode with recovered dignity to the hundreds of knights waiting in the lower town. Bishop Fulk appeared with a relic, a chunk of wood from the True Cross, and implored the soldiers of Christ to kneel and kiss it. As each man took his turn awkwardly dismounting and clanking over in full armor to the prelate, it became obvious that the ceremony would take too
much time. Horses and men grew impatient. A bishop from the Pyrenees grabbed the relic from Fulk’s hands and gave a collective blessing to the assembly, assuring that those who died in battle would go directly to heaven.

  Simon’s cavalry filed out a gate and picked its way along a towpath between the bank of the Garonne and the walls of Muret. The militia and the southern nobles were on the other side of town, to the west. Once beyond the fortifications, the crusaders headed northward, hugging the riverside’s west bank, as if slinking off to safety. They formed their three corps as they rode: the first, under William of Contres; the second, under Bouchard de Marly; the third, under Simon.

  A long way off to the left, a mile or so distant in the west, the knights of the Occitan coalition cantered out into the plain. In the first corps of the southern cavalry were Raymond Roger of Foix and his fellow highland counts, as well as a large contingent of Catalans and Basques determined to show their individual prowess. We do not know if there was a leader to this large group. Behind them was a smaller corps, made up of the Aragonese under the command of their king. Pedro had switched armor with another knight so that he would not be singled out and taken hostage during any fighting. And back at camp, in reserve, were the forces of Count Raymond. The 30,000 auxiliaries—the militia in front of Muret, the archers, the crossbowmen, the infantry—were not involved. Out in the field, then, the numerical superiority of the southern cavalry was slightly less than two to one.

  The crusaders wheeled left and charged. If siege warfare in this era was a science, pitched battle had all the finesse of a freight train. William’s heavy cavalry rumbled across the wet grass, slowly picking up speed, followed by the squadrons of Bouchard and Simon. Soon the French knights were in full cry, bellowing out the name of their patrons. “Montfort!” “Auxerre!” “Saint Denis!” A chronicler relates: “Across the marshes and straight for the tents they rode, banners displayed and pennons flying. Beaten gold glittered on shields and helmets, on swords and hauberks, so that the whole place shone.”

  Seeing the flashing phalanx coming closer in the sunlight, the southern knights in the first corps spurred their mounts forward, heads bowed in anticipation of the nearing collision. William’s wall of men and metal grew ever larger, their massive warhorses covering ground at full tilt. The shock of impact was tremendous. Count Raymond’s son, then sixteen years old and safe in the Occitan camp, would later liken the sound of the crash to “a whole forest going down under the axe.” The compact core of William’s crusaders hurtled through the southerners like a cannonball. Men and horses went down, screaming. Swords swung, maces flailed, as the warriors from the north pressed the advantage gained by their punishing charge. The melee was well under way when Bouchard de Marly’s hundreds of knights smashed into the pack, dealing a second, decisive hammer blow to the disorganized southerners.

  The battle of Muret

  A: Camp of Pedro II and his allies; B: probable location of the cavalry combat;

  C: crusaders’ cavalry; D: allied cavalry; E: militia of Toulouse; F: graveyard.

  The crusaders left Muret (1) and rode along the river, out of sight of the besiegers

  (10). Once on the plain, they wheeled left (3) and drove straight toward the allied

  tents (4). The first two crusader corps crashed into the allied corps (6).

  While the allies fled toward a small river (7), the third crusader corps

  charged the allied reserve (8,9).

  After the cavalry combat (1), the crusaders fell on the allied camp (2) and doubled back on the militia besieging Muret (3), which fled in disorder (4).

  The crusaders were trampling and dispersing the foe when the banners of the king of Aragon were seen fluttering over a second corps of southern cavalry. Bouchard and William must have hollered over the tumult, for soon the disciplined crusaders regrouped for another charge. They galloped over a meadow toward the approaching Aragonese. Another sickening concussion ensued, and a clanging, clamorous fight began. The crusaders, according to the chronicles, hacked their way to the man wearing Pedro’s armor; somewhere in the confusion, unheard by the northerners, the real monarch had revealed himself and shouted, “I am the king!” Whether it was a cry of defiance or an admission of defeat has never been known. A sword cut through the air, and King Pedro of Aragon fell to the ground, dead.

  At the camp, Raymond’s reserve had not budged, and the disaster was total. Bloodied survivors of the battlefield fell back, spreading the incredible news of Pedro’s death. The army started to disintegrate, as men packed up hurriedly for a dash to safety.

  Then Simon de Montfort and his knights, the third corps of the crusading cavalry, barreled into view and pounded headlong toward the demoralized southerners. The panic was general: Those who could, rode or ran away; those who couldn’t, died.

  The citizen soldiery from Toulouse before the walls of Muret heard a fatally false rumor: Simon’s men had been routed by the brave king Pedro. Heartened, the thousands of lightly armed besiegers continued to harass the defenders on Muret’s ramparts, believing that the town would soon fall. From the west came the thunder of hooves. The Toulousains turned and looked. It was the crusaders, bearing down on them in the full feral majesty of warriors who had fought their way out of the shadow of the valley of death. The Toulousain militia scattered in abject terror, the majority racing northeast toward the Garonne, where their barges were moored.

  There was great sport for the crusader cavalry as the men of Toulouse sprinted across the open countryside. They were ridden down like wild animals, pursued and skewered during one long afternoon spent in the madness of a manhunt. The town of Muret emptied as Simon’s soldiers charged out to kill the wounded. Hundreds of the desperate threw themselves into the river, drowning their floundering comrades in the struggle to stay afloat. It was an epic butchery, unseen since Beziers. The low estimate is 7,000 killed outright—a mass grave would be unearthed in the nineteenth century—in this postscript to the main encounter. Toulouse, the great city on the Garonne, went into mourning.

  The horror of the battle’s closing stages did not overshadow Simon de Montfort’s achievement. He had won a miraculous victory yet again. The surprise was total. Count Raymond and his son fled to London, to the protection of their kinsman, King John. Pedro of Aragon, the one man who could resist the ambitions of Simon and the legates, of France and the French, was gone. The death knell of Muret sounded on both sides of the Pyrenees.

  11.

  The Verdict

  SILENCE!” INNOCENT STOOD IN HIS SLIPPERS in front of the high altar at the Lateran and yelled at an unruly crowd of priests, “Silence!!”

  An eyewitness wrote that the hubbub only worsened, as members of the congregation gave up on insults for fists. Miters were dislodged, tonsures ruffled, crosiers swung. The second plenary session of the Lateran Council degenerated into an undignified tussle between bishops who supported different pretenders to the German throne. The pope vainly hollered for order, this time in the vernacular, but no one in the riotous conclave paid him any heed. Disgusted, the vicar of Christ stalked out of his cathedral, followed by the cardinals of the curia. The afternoon of November 20, 1215, would not be remembered for its episcopal decorum.

  The council itself was another matter. A month-long conclave three years in the planning, the meeting brought together the largest assembly of churchmen in a millennium—61 archbishops, 412 bishops, 800 abbots and priors—as well as representatives from every kingdom, duchy, and county in Christendom, 2,283 dignitaries in all. The Fourth Lateran Council (it had smaller predecessors in the twelfth century) was a lavish, polyglot, oversized spectacle stage-managed by Innocent III as the showcase of his pontificate. Marking the apogee of the medieval papacy as a power broker, the council filled the streets of Rome with haughty lords and proud prelates, bickering fanatics and barefoot friars, boyish princes and litigious dowagers. Not since antiquity were so many important doctrinal decisions made by the Church. The crush of ecclesia
stical finery was so great that at the opening ceremony the bishop of Amalfi dropped dead from suffocation.

  Given the pope’s theocratic bent, the assembly not only defined dogma but also legislated on the secular affairs of Europe. So many political and legal fiats flew out of the Lateran that the hundreds of lay ambassadors summoned by Innocent could only stand by and watch the awesome papal machinery in action. Trial by ordeal, the hoary Germanic custom of tying people to logs or making them walk through fire, was supplanted by Roman law, administered by the curia. The barons of Britain, who had rammed the Magna Carta down their king’s throat earlier in the year, were anathematized. The Jews of Europe were required to wear a distinctive yellow circle on their clothing, so that they would no longer be mistaken for first-class citizens of the medieval polity. No person great or small was exempt from the call to recapture Jerusalem, lost to the Muslims in 1187. The list of decrees and exhortations lengthened as the month progressed. The Fourth Lateran Council was the clearest expression of Innocent’s quest to be the shepherd of European destiny. Naturally, the continent’s most notorious black sheep—Languedoc—received special attention.

  The Fourth Lateran Council (from the Canso, or La Chanson de la Croisade)

  (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

  The protagonists in the Albigensian Crusade were all in Rome, with the notable exception of the Cathar Perfect and a confident Simon de Montfort. The southerners had come to argue over who would get what. Since Muret and a subsequent year of further brutality, Simon had exercised de facto sovereignty over all of Languedoc. It was up to the pope, however, to make the final settlement. The southern clergy, led by Fulk and Arnold, wanted to ensure that the partisans of the Saint Gilles did not chisel away at the gains won on the battlefield. Indeed, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, his fifth and last wife (a sister of the late Pedro), and his nineteen-year-old son had come to Rome for the momentous meeting. They would have formed a bathetic trio in the banqueting halls of the city, their plight as highborn homeless capable of wringing sympathy from their fellow nobles.