The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  Less poignant, but more emblematic of epochal change, was the death of Raymond Roger of Foix, in March of 1223. The old mountain man was engaged in one of his favorite pastimes—besieging a stronghold of the Montfort clan—when he passed away in his base camp. He had been the model of the obstreperous Occitan noble that would soon be extinct: He had patronized troubadours, wooed and won Loba of Cabaret, encouraged his sister Esclarmonde and wife Philippa to become Cathar Perfect, told Pope Innocent that he regretted not having killed more crusaders, and fought the invasive Montforts to his very last breath. Throughout, he had remained on uneasy terms with the Church, although he proved a generous benefactor to those clerics willing to condone his excesses. Ironically, it was the Cistercians, the order that had guided the crusade, who gave the deceased warrior a final resting place in their monastery near Foix.

  These years also saw the passing of Arnold Amaury, the monk with the stain of Béziers forever soiling his name. In the twilight of his life, as a mellowed—and much wealthier—archbishop of Narbonne, Arnold turned against the Montforts and sought to reconcile Raymond VII to the Church and the French nobility. Despite the youthful count’s convincing protestations of orthodoxy and obedience, consecutive Church councils in Montpellier and Bourges denied Raymond a voice in their deliberations. Arnold’s change of heart had come too late; he died in 1225, unable to persuade his clerical colleagues to drop the pious stonewalling that he himself had perfected.

  Yet the death with the most far-reaching consequences during this period occurred in Mantes, France. On July 14, 1223, fifty-eight-year-old King Philip Augustus succumbed to a fever. He had been the epitome of shrewd leadership, one of the supremely able monarchs that the Capet family of France would have the good fortune to produce every few generations, thereby ensuring the survival of their dynasty and the preeminence of their kingdom in Europe. At the beginning of Philip’s reign, the Capets of France had been hemmed in by the Plantagenets of England and the Hohenstaufens of Germany; through diplomacy, guile, and feats of arms, he had subdued his enemies and firmly set France on the pedestal of power that it would occupy, more or less continuously, for five centuries.

  Philip Augustus had been single-minded in making his kingdom secure. When Innocent pleaded with him to conquer Languedoc, the French king told the pope that he had, in effect, more important things to do. He had let some of his barons go to the aid of the Montforts, on strictly personal pilgrimages of violence, but in no way had he formally engaged the constellation of northern feudatories that made France the most feared nation of its time. Philip twice permitted his headstrong son, Louis, to swoop down on Languedoc, if only to show the colors: in 1219, notoriously, to order the Marmande massacre; and four years earlier, in the summer before the Fourth Lateran Council, to make a tour of Simon’s winnings after Muret. (On that occasion, Louis left early, his only prize the jawbone of St. Vincent, a relic extorted from a southern monastery.) Now Philip Augustus was gone, and with him the restraint that had governed the behemoth of the north.

  Six months after the king’s death, in January, 1224, Amaury de Montfort admitted that he was beaten. He dug up the oxhide pouch containing his father’s remains and led his diminished retinue back to the Montforts’ small woodland estate outside of Paris. The rebels of Languedoc had made a harmless fiction of the Lateran decree. Legally the lord from the Rhône to the Garonne, Amaury had, in fact, lost everything given to his family nine years earlier in Rome. Raymond Trencavel, the son of the man that Simon de Montfort had thrown into a dungeon, returned from Aragon, where he had been raised, and recovered his birthright as viscount of Carcassonne. In Toulouse, Raymond VII and his consuls tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered prosperity. And in the Ile de France, an embittered Amaury and his kinsmen played their last card.

  In February 1224, Amaury de Montfort renounced all claims to Languedoc in favor of the king of France. The south now belonged to the French royal family—all they had to do was go and claim it.

  14.

  The End of the Crusade

  SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH OF KING PHILIP AUGUSTUS, Cardinal Romano di San Angelo became the papal legate to France and to Languedoc. Romano, a scion of the patrician Frangipani family of Rome, was a master diplomat, determined to bring the Albigensian matter to a satisfactory conclusion. For the Church, that meant having a free hand to repress Catharism over generations, with the full cooperation of the secular lords of Languedoc. With the Montforts chased from the province, achieving that goal became ever more complex.

  In Languedoc, Romano had to contend with Raymond VII, who wanted to keep the spoils of his conquests and be recognized by the Church and the French Crown as the legitimate ruler of his ancestral domains. Yet no matter how skillfully the young count maneuvered in his quest for a negotiated settlement, the cardinal-legate stalled the coming of peace until he could dictate its terms. In 1224 and 1225, Raymond VII, backed by an infirm Arnold Amaury, repeated a set of proposals that both men believed would bring a much-needed reprieve to a war-weary Languedoc. Raymond promised to make a hefty payment of reparations to the Montforts, swear allegiance to the Capets of France, and hunt the Cathars from his lands. At a series of conclaves in these years that were reminiscent of the charade at St. Gilles where Raymond VI had been forbidden to speak, Romano smothered Raymond VII’s overtures in procedural delay. In 1226, the cardinal dropped all pretenses and excommunicated the young count, thereby setting the stage for a new crusade.

  Seal of Raymond VII of Toulouse

  (Archives Nationales, paris)

  While fending off peace initiatives in Languedoc during these years, Romano had been engaged in talks in Paris, with the aim of bringing the full might of France to bear on Languedoc. The new king, Louis VIII, had twice been to Languedoc as crown prince; he would have realized that the upheaval of crusade had created a power vacuum that might sooner or later arouse the cupidity of France’s two rivals in the southwest, England and Aragon. At the moment, fortunately for the French, neither power threatened to interfere with any belligerent initiative in the south.

  The English realm, recovering from the disastrous reign of King John, was in the throes of baronial revolt. (Indeed, in 1216, Louis had briefly accepted the crown of England at the invitation of the barons, until the pope stepped in and excommunicated him.) England’s fief holders in Aquitaine were enjoined to remain neutral in the event of a new war in Languedoc. South of the Pyrenees, the merchants of Barcelona had used the disappearance of Pedro at Muret to turn their nation’s attention seaward. Throughout the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Aragon would direct its energies to conquering the Muslim-held Balearic Islands, as part of a larger and eventually successful effort to establish a maritime empire to rival that of Genoa and Venice. Languedoc was receding from the horizon of Spain just as Amaury de Montfort was handing it over to France.

  These political and dynastic considerations would have weighed heavily at the royal residence at the Louvre in favor of a decision to march south. Yet the first family of France wanted not only land but also money. The document record gives an impression of undignified horse trading, as both Romano and Louis jockeyed for advantage in their proposed joint enterprise. In the end, Romano promised to give the Capets a tenth of all French Church incomes for five years to pay for the cost of crushing Languedoc. And the cardinal delivered—by prying open the coffers of such wealthy sees as Chartres, Rheims, Rouen, Sens, and Amiens. It was a risky stratagem, with enormous consequences—later French monarchs would view the Church, and treat it, as a cash cow.

  The royal crusade got under way in the spring of 1226, the mailed chivalry of medieval France once again jangling down the Rhône Valley, this time under the fleur-de-lis banner of King Louis VIII. The army dwarfed its predecessors in numbers and outmatched them in organization and unity of command. For all that, the great force conquered more by intimidation than by battle—and sometimes its powers of intimidation backfired. At the walled town of Avignon, King Lou
is’s crusade came to an unscheduled halt when the frightened city fathers slammed shut their drawbridges on seeing the gargantuan size of the French army. They had originally promised the French free passage through the city and the use of their stone bridge to cross the Rhône—the same bridge of the nursery rhyme “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse”—but once the huge host appeared outside their town, they wanted nothing to do with it. Well protected by their fortifications and well supplied by their river fleet, the Avignonnais held off the infuriated French king for three long months. Stuck out in the marshy flats to the north of the city as the heat and the flies grew unbearable, the army suffered terrible casualties from dysentery. His men, Louis realized, were dying in their own excrement. By the time Avignon finally capitulated, more than 3,000 had perished and tens of thousands more had been weakened by the ordeal. One lord to die from this outbreak of dysentery was an elderly Bouchard de Marly, the faithful friend of Simon de Montfort

  Still, the city had surrendered. The fall of supposedly impregnable Avignon impressed the coalition of Languedoc nobles under the command of Raymond VII. So too had a band of preachers sent out ahead of the army by Cardinal Romano, Bishop Fulk, and Arnold Amaury’s successor as archbishop of Narbonne, Peter Amiel. The preachers’ task was to hammer home the lessons of the recent past by evoking such appalling memories as Béziers and Marmande. For the inhabitants of a weakened, wounded land like Languedoc, the thought of renewed tribulations could have only inspired terror. The propagandists of fear would also have emphasized that this crusade was unlike any other to have descended on the south. Its resources were as limitless as the wealth of the Church; its leader was no mere baron or monk, but the king of France himself. Historian Michel Roquebert has argued convincingly that the French monarchy, although it had been only a formal overlord of much of Languedoc during the twelfth century, held a place of primacy in the collective imagination of the Occitans. The king of France, alone among monarchs, represented the sacred legitimacy of the feudal order—even the independent burghers of Toulouse dated their documents according to the years of a French reign. The Cathars, of course, would have been immune to such thinking, but their compatriots must have quailed at the thought of the king of France coming to punish them. Louis had previously been to Languedoc only as a crown prince; now he was the person of the king, the repository of almost sacramental power. To defy him and his powerful army was to be both doomed and damned.

  Faced with such physical and imaginative intimidation, many in the south raised the white flag. As Louis laid siege to Avignon, the once-proud towns of Languedoc sent him embassies to swear their fidelity and to beg for kind treatment. Béziers, understandably, was first in line, followed by Nîmes, Albi, St. Gilles, Marseilles, Beaucaire, Narbonne, Termes, and Aries. At Carcassonne, the citizenry chased Raymond Trencavel from the city and sent ambassadors to capitulate before the king. As the French poured over the borders of Languedoc, Louis received fawning letters of obeisance from many local nobles. “It has come to our knowledge that our lord cardinal has decreed that all the land of the count of Toulouse shall be annexed to your domain,” one letter stated. “We rejoice from the bottom of our hearts … and we are impatient to be in the shadow of your wings and under your wise dominion.” The author of this missive was Bernard-Otto of Niort, a noble who had been raised by his Perfect grandmother, Blanche of Laurac, and had an uncle, Aimery, and an aunt, Geralda, brutally murdered at Lavaur. If men like him were running like rabbits for cover, the cause of Languedoc was lost.

  Raymond VII and the Toulousains resisted the wave of panic, as did Count Roger Bernard of Foix. In the autumn, as the French army marched from town to castle accepting capitulations, the men of Foix and Toulouse harassed and ambushed the northerners in small guerrillalike actions. Some of the more independent French barons headed home with their men. Although the royal crusaders had brought much of Languedoc to its knees through intimidation, the army had not recovered from its disastrous summer before Avignon. King Louis, unwell since the squalor of that siege, suddenly grew feverish and weak. His entourage, seeing his condition worsen, tried to rush him homeward to the comforts of France. At Montpensier, a village in the mountainous Auvergne region, the cavalcade came to a halt; the king was too ill to be moved any farther. Louis took to bed and, according to a pious chronicler, refused the ministrations of a virgin girl who had been slipped between his sheets to rouse his kingly vigor. It was too late, anyway; Louis VIII died in Montpensier on November 8, 1226. He was thirty-nine—and, more important, his eldest son was only twelve. France no longer had a king.

  Blanche of Castile and Louis IX of France

  (The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, New York)

  The untimely demise might have turned the tide in favor of Languedoc had the powers in Paris not been steadfast. The hot Spanish heartland that had given the Cathars their holiest foe, Dominic, would now supply yet another devoutly orthodox enemy, Blanche of Castile. The widow of the king and the regent for their eldest son, Blanche brought to the cause of conquest a fiery piety that had been lacking among her Capet in-laws. To her, exterminating the heretics was as important as extending French domains.

  As her principal adviser for affairs of state, she took Cardinal Romano, the papal legate. In Rome, the pope gave his blessing to this double duty; in Paris, tongues wagged about Romano and Blanche sharing more than just prayers. Whatever their true relationship, the cardinal and the queen agreed that the royal crusade in Languedoc did not need a king. Over the protests of wealthy French bishops, Romano kept the money flowing while Blanche ordered her army to stay in the south until all resistance was crushed. When the great barons of the north became restive under the rule of a woman, Blanche raised another army to combat them even as she kept a force down in Languedoc. With the encouragement of a new pope, Gregory IX, a nephew of Innocent III, the formidable lady regent pursued the crusade.

  It was, in fact, a crusade in name only. The French troops conducted an ugly war of attrition for two years against the forces of Toulouse and Foix. Inconclusive battles were fought, atrocities exchanged—in response to a savage French reprisal at one town, the Occitans cut the hands off the French defenders at another—and fortresses taken and lost. By 1228, the circle of destruction had contracted to the immediate hinterland of Toulouse. Although not big enough to lay siege to the exhausted city, the French army, under the intelligent generalship of Humbert de Beaujeau, could not be chased from Languedoc. Safe behind the walls of Carcassonne, the fortress city they had taken great care to garrison, the northerners eventually hit upon the tactic that would extinguish the last flame of resistance.

  In 1228, the royal crusade systematically turned the fertile expanse of the Toulousain into a desert. The French did not seek out battle—indeed, they ran from it. Instead they waged war on the countryside itself. Simon de Montfort had just burned crops; the French army, bankrolled by the Church and blessed by the queen, chopped down orchards and olive groves, uprooted vineyards, poisoned wells, set fires, and razed villages. Applauded by a vengeful Fulk, the men of the north proceeded meadow by meadow, manor by manor, valley by valley, in a medieval Sherman’s March of deliberate, thoroughgoing vandalism. The land and its people, extenuated after two decades of savage bloodletting, could stand no more. In the end, isolated and beleaguered, unbeaten yet unable to check the progress of this awful juggernaut, Count Raymond VII sued for peace.

  A bundle of birch cuttings came whistling through the hush and landed with a crack on pale white flesh. The sharp twigs came down again and again. Twenty years earlier, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse had staggered up the steps of the church at St. Gilles, his public penance coinciding with the start of the Albigensian Crusade. Now, on April 12, 1229, it was the turn of his son, Raymond VII, to receive the same humiliating treatment, this time to mark the end of the crusade. Just as before, a papal legate handled the switch, bringing the twigs down on the mortified flesh of the nobleman. Just as before, throngs of
thrill seekers jammed the stoops, windows, and rooftops of houses for a glimpse of the exalted brought low. And, just as before, the penitent promised to help in stamping out the Cathar faith. For the counts of Toulouse, public obloquy had become a family tradition.

  Yet the ceremony was not an exact duplicate of the scourging at St. Gilles. This time the onlookers whispered to each other in French, not Occitan, for the solemnities took place in the heart of Paris, on the Ile de la Cité. On this Thursday before Easter, Raymond and Romano performed their dark duet before the facade of the city’s new cathedral, Notre Dame. Rising high over the warren of half-timbered dwellings reflected in the gray waters of the Seine, the elegant stone structure, its statuary and vaulting painted every color of the rainbow, stood as a spectacular symbol of cultural exuberance. Unlike the land of the Cathars, France was entering its springtime.

  The scourging of Raymond VII of Toulouse in Paris

  (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

  The two men went into the crowded church, past the nobility of the north, and walked down the nave to the high altar. “It was a great shame,” wrote a chronicler, “to see so noble a prince, who had long held his own against powers both mighty and many, thus haled to the altar bare-footed, clad only in shirt and breeches.” Raymond had agreed to undergo this degrading day for the sake of a lasting peace. His once huge domains were reduced to a truncated, landlocked principality encompassing Toulouse and a few minor cities to the north and west. The French Crown took what had belonged to the Trencavel family, as well as all of Raymond’s possessions on the west bank of the Rhône.