The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  By June 1218, nine months into the siege, Simon’s prospects looked bleak. His massed crusaders, having completed their forty days of service, were getting ready to go home, as were his many mercenaries, weary of being told that the depleted Montfort treasury would honor its debts once the city was taken. A dangerous defeat stared Simon in the face, one that would dwarf the embarrassment of Beaucaire. In the north, he would be seen as a lord who could not even hold his own capital and who was thus undeserving of further help; in the south, he would seem diminished and deflated, easy prey for rebellion. Simon had to subdue Toulouse immediately, before his army deserted him, or else his nine years of fighting in Languedoc would come to nothing.

  Simon, mindful of the success of Malvoisine at Minerve, opted for an all-or-nothing tactic. He had a huge siege engine constructed at great expense. An enormous cat, the likes of which had never been seen in Languedoc, was rolled toward the northern walls of Toulouse in late June. Beneath its bleeding animal hides toiled scores of groaning laborers, inching the pharaonic structure ever closer to the city. On the cat’s uppermost platform—which towered over the tallest parapets of the defenses—stood dozens of archers, prepared to rain death down into the streets once they neared the walls. The Toulousains trained their catapults at the tower and, by late afternoon on June 24, had scored enough hits to halt its progress at a safe distance from the city.

  Both sides knew that if the cat came any closer, the defense of Toulouse would be imperiled. The crusaders could have brought their superior firepower to bear and punched a fatal hole in the ranks of citizens atop the walls. The Toulousains decided that early the next morning they would charge across no-man’s-land and try to burn down the infernal machine. The ferocious Roger Bernard of Foix is reported to have said of the plan, “How we shall fight them! With swords and maces and cutting steel we’ll glove our hands in brains and blood!”

  Simon de Montfort was hearing dawn mass when the attack came. Messengers arrived three times during the service, imploring the count to ride to the rescue of the cat’s embattled defenders. The men of Toulouse were clambering down ladders, rushing across the moats, slashing their way ever closer to the tower. The last of the messengers cried out to his lord, exasperated, “This piety is disastrous!” Unflappable, Simon waited for the consecration, the moment of the mass when the host is elevated, then crossed himself, snapped on his helmet, and said, “Jesus Christ the righteous, now give me death on the field or victory!”

  Simon and his knights mounted their destriers and galloped directly into the melee at the foot of the cat, swords and axes swinging. Within minutes, the tide had turned, and the warriors of Toulouse were staggering backward, badly bloodied, scrambling for the safety of the town. On the walls, the dismayed defenders loaded catapults and drew bowstrings to cover the retreat. An arrow tore through the head of the horse of Guy de Montfort, Simon’s brother and comrade-in-arms since their campaign in Palestine. The animal reared up, dying, then a bolt from a crossbow caught Guy in the groin. Their screams of pain carried over the tumult. Simon saw his brother down. He scrambled to dismount when, as the chronicle relates, a mangonel atop the parapet let fly:

  This was worked by noblewomen, by little girls and men’s wives, and now a stone arrived just where it was needed and struck Count Simon on his steel helmet, shattering his eyes, brains, back teeth, forehead and jaw. Bleeding and black, the count dropped dead on the ground.

  Two crusaders rushed over and draped a blue cape over the body.

  Word of Simon’s death spread in all directions. Men stepped back, thunderstruck, lowering swords and shields. There was a stunned silence, which was soon broken by a great cheer, swelling louder and louder as the news swept through Toulouse. Lo lop es mòrt! (The wolf is dead!) Bells, drums, chimes, tabors, clarions sounded—the noise lasted all day and night.

  Simon’s eldest son, Amaury, gathered up the corpse and carted it out of sight of the revelers.

  For Toulouse, the memory of Muret had been avenged and the devil defeated. For the crusaders, the disaster was total. Within a month the siege was lifted. The giant cat had been burned by the defenders and one last desperate assault, on July 1, firmly repulsed. The man who had trounced Languedoc, befriended Dominic, burned the Cathars, bullied the greatest medieval pope, was dead at fifty-three.

  Drawing from thirteenth-century bas-relief in St. Nazaire church, Carcassonne, showing a scene from the siege of Toulouse and believed to depict the death of Simon de Montfort

  (Mansell Collection/Time, Inc.)

  As was the custom, his body was boiled until the flesh and organs fell off the bone, and his remains were placed in an oxhide pouch. This was interred at St. Nazaire Cathedral in Carcassonne, amid the requisite ecclesiastical pomp. It was his enemy, the anonymous chronicler of the Cathar wars, who penned a devastating obituary that, even today, some Toulousains can recite from memory:

  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, … 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.

  13.

  The Return to Tolerance

  WAR DID NOT CEASE IN LANGUEDOC, but victory changed camps. The Occitan nobles, inspired by the successful defense of Toulouse, at last united to press their advantage against the French. A large punitive expedition organized in 1219 could not check the rebellion. Preached by the new pope—Honorius III—and led by Philip Augustus’s son Louis, the crown prince of France, the crusade fell victim to its participants’ punctilious observance of the quarantine. Louis and his men returned to Paris after forty days of campaigning, their only accomplishment of note a cold-blooded massacre that mystified even their supporters. Every man, woman, and child in Marmande, an inoffensive market center of about 7,000 inhabitants in western Languedoc, was methodically put to the sword. Having thus doffed his cap to the precedent of Béziers, the future king then spent a few dilatory weeks outside the walls of Toulouse before torching his siege engines and riding home. Amaury de Montfort, Simon’s son, was left on his own to quell the rebellion as best he could.

  Thirteenth-century troubadour

  (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

  But Amaury was not the man his father had been. He did not inherit Simon’s steely decisiveness or any of his father’s talent for tactical atrocity. In the six years of battle, siege, and skirmish following Simon’s death, Amaury was consistently bested by Raymond the younger and Roger Bernard of Foix. The huge Lateran land grant to the Montforts steadily shrank with every castle lost and garrison evicted. The major towns refused to open their gates to the French—and to their allies in the upper ranks of the clergy. The displaced leaders of the Church in Languedoc, including Fulk of Toulouse, had to go into exile in Montpellier.

  The worst insult to the Catholic bishops came not from the battlefield, nor even from places that reverted to conspicuous Catharism, like the castles of Cabaret or the workshops of Fanjeaux. The bad news for the hierarchy came from Catholic believers. Many of them now viewed the leaders of the Church as a noxious, national enemy, to be denied the estates and benefices from which they had drawn their income. In the Occitan mind, Innocent’s reasoning about heretics had been stood on its head: It was the higher clergy, rather than the heretics, who should be charged with treason. The bishops were seen as accomplices of the hated French. The troubadours, already ill disposed toward killjoy prelates and papal legates, composed scathing sirventes about the warlords with the crosiers. The troubadour Guilhem Figueira began one song:

  Roma trichairitz—cobeitat vos

  Deceitful Rome, your greedr />
  engana

  leads you astray

  C’a vostras berbitz—tondetz trop

  You shear too much off your

  de la lana

  flock,

  Le Sainz Esperitz—que receup

  May the Holy Spirit who took

  carn humana

  on human form

  Entende mos precs

  Hear my prayer

  E franha tos becs

  And smash your beak!

  Roma, ses razon—avetz mainta

  Rome, you have killed many

  gen mòrta

  people without reason

  E jes non-m sab bon—car tenètz

  And I hate to see you take so

  via torta

  bad a path

  Qu’a salvacïon—Roma, serratz

  For in this way you are shutting

  la porta

  the door to salvation.

  Per qu’a mal govern

  Ill-advised the man,

  D’estiu a d’invern

  Summer and winter,

  Si sèc vòstre estern—car Diables

  Who walks in your steps—

  l’emporta

  The Devil carries him off to the

  Int el fuoc d’infern.

  fires of hell.

  A discouraged Fulk, who had not been allowed to return to his city since he had taken part in the siege of Lavaur in 1211, tried unsuccessfully to have the pope relieve him of his post as bishop of Toulouse.

  If such bad feelings had sparked a massive defection from the Church, the bishops could have thrown up their hands and, as is still the custom in some quarters, blamed the Antichrist. But there was no great defection. As if to compound the insult to episcopal dignity, Catholic piety in Languedoc remained strong. Throughout the 1220s, bequests to monasteries continued to be made by burgher and knight, secular priests celebrated mass for devout congregations, and the fledgling Dominican order found ready audiences for its preaching. Even during the darkest hours of crusader sieges, the local clergy within the towns of Languedoc had suffered no manhandling from the laity. Moreover, many in the lower orders of the Church had taken up the Occitan cause. On the death of Simon de Montfort, for example, it was the priests of Toulouse who rang the bells and lit the votive candles. Resentment was directed squarely at the bishops who had brought ruin to a formerly rich land. It was they, not the Perfect, who were shunned by the people.

  Yet Languedoc was a pauper, its bustling cities reduced to penury by the exactions of constant warfare. Its merchants were not welcome at the great fairs on the Rhône and in Champagne, the legates of Rome threatening interdict and excommunication to all who traded with the outcasts of Christendom. And even as Raymond the younger vanquished Amaury’s loyalists in the field and many of the dispossessed nobles finally returned to their usurped castles, courtly life in Languedoc did not resume in the playful, spendthrift fashion that had once supported scores of performers and poets. The lovely successors of Loba went unsung as their menfolk scrambled for survival in a blighted landscape. The newly delivered Languedoc of the early 1220s was a fragile creature, isolated and friendless, an all too easy victim should the armies of the north return in force.

  During these years, the Cathars ventured out once again into the bright light of day. Inquisition interrogations conducted years later reveal that shortly after the death of Simon, the surviving Perfect climbed down from their eyrie at Montségur and sought out the credentes of the lowlands. Guilhabert of Castres, the Cathar “bishop” who had debated Dominic fifteen years earlier, reappeared in the Lauragais in the 1220s, preaching the gospel of darkness and light and administering the consolamentum to a new generation of novices. He and his fellow heresiarchs padded softly past the ruins of a decade of war. Guilhabert traveled to Fanjeaux, Laurac, Castelnaudary, Mirepoix, and Toulouse, meeting with the decimated families of the dualist faith and testing the waters of tolerance among the Catholic majority. Despite the hardships suffered—or perhaps because of them—Languedoc had not turned against its holy men and women.

  In 1226, in the small town of Pieusse south of Carcassonne, more than 100 Perfect met in a council to create a new Cathar diocese. By then, scores of Cathar homes had reopened. At Fanjeaux, the hilltop village where Dominic and Simon had often met to break bread and discuss the progress of God’s work, the harvests of hemp and flax once again found their way to the spindles of Cathar women. An informal network of female dissent was woven anew, the daughters and widows of a wounded people drawing strength and status from a life of self-denial. The martyrs of Lavaur, Minerve, and dozens of other burning grounds went unmourned; the thousands who had perished were now in the embrace of the Good, angels forever, their pilgrimages through the sordid world of matter concluded. Their fate inspired envy, not pity. As for the “unconsoled” among the maimed and murdered, the simple, sinful credentes fed to the flames of Rome or cut down by the steel of France, they had attained the status of Perfect in their next life. In the meantime, the church of the “good Christians” looked to resume its discreet place in Occitan life, as in the days before the devastation of the crusade.

  The years around 1220 also marked the disappearance of the men who had shaped Languedoc’s destiny. Following the deaths of Innocent III, in 1216, and Simon de Montfort two years later, Domingo de Guzmán died in 1221, his passing in Bologna soon shrouded by tales of last-minute miracles. The redoubtable Spaniard was fifty-one at the time of his death, his years of punishing poverty on the road having taken their toll on what must have been an amazingly robust constitution. Dominic had converted few Cathars—the Church was understandably short on moral authority as the crusade raged—and even those he coaxed back into the fold were suspect. It was difficult to punish these champions of asceticism, for the usual regime of self-denial imposed on the repentant resembled in its particulars the way of life of a Perfect. There is a record of one of Dominic’s converts being ordered to consume red meat.

  However much he failed to bring the dualists back into the fold of orthodoxy, Dominic nonetheless succeeded in firing the imaginations of some of the finest minds of his day. The Dominicans—the Order of Friars Preachers—mushroomed from 60 houses at the time of Dominic’s death to 600 just fifteen years later. They, along with the Franciscans, would staff the nascent universities of Europe and crack the theological whip until the time of the Reformation. In Toulouse, the proving ground of the Dominicans, the first tentative bequests of lodgings grew into a citywide empire, until, at midcentury, the mendicant friars had enough muscle and means to break ground for a soaring redbrick Gothic sanctuary—later called the “church of the Jacobins.” In the center of its nave now stands the casket of the most influential of thirteenth-century Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas.

  In the year after Dominic’s demise came the turn of Raymond VI, the admired but flawed old count of Toulouse. One day in early August of 1222, the sixty-six-year-old perpetual excommunicate spent the morning on the threshold of a church beside the Garonne, listening as sympathetic priests within raised their voices so that the aged nobleman could hear their celebration of the mass. At about noon, Raymond fainted from the heat. His escorts helped him to the courtyard of a merchant’s house and laid him out under the shade of a fig tree. A stroke soon followed, leaving him speechless. The clergy came running. The prior of St. Sernin, the grandest Romanesque church of Toulouse and the burial ground of the Saint Gilles family since the turn of the millennium, refused to lift Raymond’s excommunication but tried to take possession of the dying count anyway. The count’s companions, suspecting that the prior was in league with the exiled Fulk and would thus waste no time in throwing Raymond atop a bonfire, bundled up their master in a blanket and took him to safety. Raymond died later in the day, and in spite of repeated requests in the ensuing decades, his body was denied a public Christian burial. On his father’s death, Raymond the younger became Raymond VII. The elder man’s unforgivable sin had not been cowardice in battle
or lechery in bed; he had earned the hatred of the orthodox for his dogged refusal to persecute the Cathars.