The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  A triumphant Te Deum resounded in the stone vault of the cathedral as the canons of Notre Dame were directed to give voice to their joy. It had been almost twenty years since one of their number, William of Paris, weighted trebuchets and adjusted mangonels for the greater glory of God and his servant Simon de Montfort.

  From her place of honor, Blanche of Castile surveyed the instructive tableau of count and cardinal standing before her. She had done not man’s work but Christ’s. Beside her on this memorable Holy Thursday stood her eldest son, Louis. Once grown to manhood, the boy, as King Louis IX, would become the most devout monarch of Europe, eventually earning sainthood for his death on crusade near Tunis. A persecutor of heathen and heretic, Muslim and Jew, St. Louis inherited his mother’s extravagant Iberian faith. Across the island from Notre Dame, he would erect the Gothic masterpiece of the Sainte Chapelle, an exquisite stone reliquary for the treasures he had bought from wily traders: a vial of the Virgin’s milk, the crown of thorns, and dozens of other costly frauds peddled to the credulous crusader king. In watching the spectacle of Raymond VII’s humiliation, the twelve-year-old future saint may have acquired his taste for devotional brio.

  To receive the blessing of the cardinal, Raymond sank to his knees. The pose was apt, for the count had acceded to crippling demands in order to wring peace from the Church and the Crown. Not only were his lands cut in half, but his treasury was to be badly bled for the rest of his life. His sole child, a daughter aged nine, was forced into a marriage with one of Louis’s many siblings; when they died childless forty-two years later, the county of Toulouse automatically became a part of France. Romano and Blanche also made sure that Raymond subsidized the hunt for heresy. A university was to be established later in the year in Toulouse, its four doctors of theology paid by the count to train future generations of Occitan clerics in the intricacies of orthodox belief. A posse of scholars would henceforth seek out and destroy the remnants of Catharism.

  When Raymond, tall and handsome at thirty-one, emerged from the portals of Notre Dame, he was once again a legitimate Christian lord in good standing with both Paris and Rome. His enemies thought him lucky to have been granted even a pittance. Thanks to the usual tangle of noble bloodlines, Raymond of Toulouse and Blanche of Castile had a grandmother in common, the great twelfth-century queen of both France and England, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Were it not for that sentimental connection, Blanche might not have yielded an acre of land to the count.

  The bonds of cousinhood stretched only so far. Immediately after the crowds had dispersed on the Ile de la Cité, Raymond and his entourage were carted across the river to the Right Bank and led into the brooding stone fortress of the medieval Louvre. They were held hostage there for six weeks, while the armies of the north tore down the fortifications of Toulouse, reduced dozens of castles to rubble, installed a royal seneschal in Carcassonne, and brought about all the other changes spelled out in the draconian treaty. The ceremony at Notre Dame may have had a touch of déjà vu, but in Languedoc nothing would be as it was before.

  15.

  Inquisition

  ON AUGUST 5, 1234, a wealthy old lady of Toulouse said on her deathbed that she wanted to make a good end.

  Her servants scuttled down the stairs and out into the street. They had to find a Perfect, hidden somewhere in the attics and cellars of the city. If they were lucky, perhaps the revered Guilhabert of Castres, the Cathar bishop of Toulouse, had come down from the safety of Montségur on a discreet visit to a believer in town. The servants made cautious inquiries at the houses of those who quietly shared the old lady’s faith. In time, they returned with what they were seeking—a Perfect, who administered the consolamentum to the ailing woman, then left as stealthily as he had come.

  One member of the household had not returned. He had dashed across town to the Dominican monastery, then ducked into its chapel. He made his way round the darkened ambulatory and knocked on the sacristy door.

  William Pelhisson, a Dominican inquisitor whose memoir of Languedoc immediately after the end of the Albigensian Crusade gives a vivid glimpse of the altered circumstances of life in Toulouse, was most probably in the sacristy that day. With Pelhisson and his fellow friars was Raymond du Fauga, the bishop of Toulouse, also a Dominican. The bishop was changing out of the vestments in which he had just said mass in honor of the newly canonized Dominic. August 5, 1234, marked the very first time that St. Dominic had his feast day celebrated.

  Raymond, William, and the other friars in the sacristy listened to their visitor’s tale: A Cathar believer, in the delirium of death throes, lay helpless in her bed just a few doors down from the cathedral. The bishop sent a servant out to fetch the prior of the Dominicans back from his midday meal. Bishop Raymond was always given to the grand gesture; his inaugural act on taking over from the deceased Fulk in 1232 had been to bully Raymond VII of Toulouse into hunting down and executing nineteen Perfects on the Montagne Noire. There was a chance to put on a similarly instructive show for the populace of Toulouse.

  According to Pelhisson, the traitorous servant led the bishop, the prior, and the other Dominicans into the woman’s house. They climbed the narrow stairs and entered her room. Her relatives shrank back into the shadows on seeing the friars arrive. The dying woman’s in-laws, the Borsier family, had long ago fallen under suspicion of heresy. One of them whispered a warning to the sickbed, telling the dying woman that the “Lord Bishop” had arrived.

  She apparently misunderstood, for she addressed Raymond du Fauga, the Catholic bishop, as if he were Guilhabert of Castres, the Cathar Perfect.

  Bishop Raymond did not correct her mistake. Instead, he pretended to be the Cathar holy man, so that the woman would damn herself all the more thoroughy. As the others in the room watched, Raymond questioned her at length, eliciting from her a full profession of her heretical faith. He stood over the bed and, according to Pelhisson, exhorted the woman to remain true to her beliefs. “The fear of death should not make you confess anything other than that which you hold firmly and with your whole heart,” the bishop advised with mock concern for her soul. When the woman agreed, he revealed his true identity and pronounced her an unrepentant heretic subject to immediate execution.

  Since she was too feeble to move on her own, the woman was lashed to her bed. It was carried downstairs and into the street. Raymond led the curious procession past his cathedral and into a field beyond the city gates. A bonfire had been lit in expectation of their arrival. News of the spectacle spread throughout Toulouse. A large crowd assembled, then watched, openmouthed, as a barely conscious woman, with just hours left in her natural life, was thrown into the flames.

  “This done,” the Dominican eyewitness noted, “the bishop, together with the monks and their attendants, returned to the refectory and, after giving thanks to God and St. Dominic, fell cheerfully upon the food set before them.”

  The papacy of Gregory IX, begun in 1227, marked a fevered new departure in the race to silence dissent. The notion of a permanent papal, as opposed to an episcopal, heresy tribunal began to gain ground. Prior to Gregory’s ascension to power in Rome, the task of ferreting out freethinkers had been left to the bishops. For the preceding fifty years, successive popes had repeatedly exhorted their spiritual viceroys to arrest and try heretics in specially constituted courts. After conviction, the condemned would then be, as clerical euphemism had it, “relaxed to the secular arm”—that is, they were turned over to the local nobility for speedy incineration. The only problem with these diocesan courts was that they were exceptional. Most bishops lacked the intellectual stamina, and perhaps the stomach, to launch a sustained slaughter of the strayed sheep of their flock. Despite the great doctrinal housekeeping at the Lateran in 1215, many bishops and priests were still unsure of what exactly constituted heresy; others were compromised or complaisant because of their ties of kinship to the leading families of their diocese; and others were simply corrupt. Innocent had spelled out his frustrations in his ope
ning sermon at the Fourth Lateran Council: “It often happens that bishops, by reason of their manifold preoccupations, fleshly pleasures and bellicose leanings, and from other causes, not least the poverty of their spiritual training and lack of pastoral zeal, are unfitted to proclaim the word of God and govern the people.” There could be no effective policing of souls as long as the bishops were left in charge.

  Pope Gregory IX appointing the Dominicans to lead the Inquisition

  (Biblioteca Marciana, Venice)

  Like his late kinsman Innocent, Gregory IX wanted results, and on a continent-wide scale. Special papal legates were granted wide prosecutorial power and sent out all over Europe to put down heresy. Some of the men chosen for these posts, unfortunately, soon proved themselves to be overzealous sociopaths. Robert le Bougre (the “bugger”—an epithet that suggests conversion from Catharism) sowed terror in hitherto peaceable northern France. In the Rhineland, the job was given to the sinister Conrad of Marburg. Everywhere Conrad turned, it seemed, hordes of unsuspected heretics lay hidden—in church and castle, commune and manor, convent and city. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were sent to the stake, often on the same day that they were first accused. As if consciously playing the role of malignant madman, Conrad rode his mule about the Rhineland with a retinue of two: a dour fanatic named Dorso, and a one-handed, one-eyed layman called John. The threesome’s appearance only added to their capacity to appall. On July 30, 1233, an exasperated Franciscan friar intercepted the grim trio and murdered Conrad. Instead of provoking a crusade, as was the case for Peter of Castelnau in 1208, this killing of a pope’s man merely elicited a disingenuous letter from Gregory to the archbishops of Trier and Cologne on the excesses of his special envoy: “We marvel that you allowed legal proceedings of this unprecedented nature to continue for so long among you without acquainting us of what was happening. It is our wish that such things should no longer be tolerated, and we declare these proceedings null and void. We cannot permit such misery as you have described.”

  In Languedoc, where there were, indeed, heretics by the hundreds, Gregory showed fewer scruples. He and Cardinal Romano had been careful to staff the episcopal palaces of the south with such heartless prelates as Bishop Raymond du Fauga. A cash bounty was offered to anyone who betrayed a heretic, to be paid from the already overtaxed treasury of Count Raymond. Confiscated property was divided among the informer, the Church, and the Crown. The lure of blood money might have induced the servant of the dying woman in Toulouse to turn his mistress over to her wretched end.

  Yet the Church could not count solely on the spontaneous baseness of human nature to finish the job the crusade had begun. An activist pope, Gregory did not wait for a trickle of betrayals to become a torrent. He envisioned a well-organized administration, answerable only to the pope and rigorous in the execution of its investigative tasks. For that, men of unreproachable probity and devotion were needed. A generation earlier, Innocent had looked at Languedoc and called on the Cistercians. His nephew, judging the monks of Cîteaux a spent force, turned to the Dominicans. Innocent’s men went to debate and to convert; Gregory’s, to prosecute and punish. In the spring of 1233, papal inquisitors were appointed in Toulouse, Albi, and Carcassonne. They would have successors in different parts of Europe and Latin America for more than 600 years.

  The accused shall be asked if he has anywhere seen or been acquainted with one or more heretics, knowing or believing them to be such by name or repute: where he has seen them, on how many occasions, with whom, and when … whether he has had any familiar intercourse with them, when and how, and by whom introduced … whether he has received in his own home one or more heretics; if so, who and what they were; who brought them; how many times they stayed with the accused; what visitors they had; who escorted them thence; and where they went … whether he did adoration before them, or saw other persons adore them or do them reverence after the heretical manner … whether he greeted them, or saw any other person greet them, after the heretical fashion … whether he was present at the initiation of any amongst them; if so, what was the manner of the initiation; what was the name of the heretic or heretics; who were present at the ceremony, and where was the house in which the sick person lay … whether the person initiated made any bequest to the heretics, and if so what and how much, and who drew up the deed; whether adoration was done before the heretic who performed the intitiation; whether the person succumbed to his illness, and if so where he was buried; who brought the heretic or heretics thither, and conducted them thence.

  The excerpt above, from a much lengthier interrogation checklist, attests to the numbing thoroughness of the Inquisition established expressly to destroy the Cathars. Scores, then hundreds of people were summoned to testify before inquisitors and their clerks. The questions were repetitive, designed to plant doubt in the mind of the person being interrogated as to what exactly the inquisitor knew, and who had told him. A person suspected of Cathar sympathies was not always informed of the charges hanging over his head; if apprised of the danger, he had no right to know who his accusers were; and if he dared seek outside legal help, his unfortunate lawyer was then charged with abetting heresy. Whatever the verdict of the inquisitor—who combined the functions of prosecutor, judge, and jury—no appeal was allowed. Even before judgment was handed down, anyone could be held indefinitely in prison for further questioning, without explanation. It was not so much a court system as a machine to create anxiety.

  The inquisitor hereticae pravitatis (inquisitor of heretical depravity) tore apart the bonds of trust that hold civil society together. Informing on one’s neighbor became not only a duty but also a survival strategy. For 100 years beginning in 1233, the inquisitor was a dreadful fact of Languedoc life, his arrival in the villages and towns the occasion for demeaning displays of moral collapse. In theory, no one could be punished if no one talked—the inquisitor was powerless to act without denunciations. In practice, no community, especially not a rivalry-ridden medieval town, possessed the seamless cohesion needed to combat the power of a secretive tribunal.

  The inquisitor arrived in town and consulted with the local clergy. All males over the age of fourteen and females over twelve were required to give a profession of orthodox faith; those who didn’t would be the first to be questioned. In his keynote sermon, the inquisitor invited the people of the area to think hard about their activities past and present and to come forward in the following week to give confidential depositions. After this seven-day period of grace, those sinners who hadn’t denounced themselves would be issued summons. The reticent ran the risk of grave punishment, from the loss of property to the loss of life. Aside from the immediate capital crime of being one of the Perfect, offenses included sheltering the Perfect, “adoring” them (performing the melioramentum greeting), witnessing a “heretication” (the consolamentum), and simply failing to report instances of heresy to the Church. Proof of genuine abjuration of error lay in the number of people the repentant sinner was willing to betray. The Inquisition was interested in names—in compiling an inventory of the network of Catharism that had survived the crusade.

  Naturally, the unscrupulous immediately came forward to inform against their personal enemies, whether they were credentes or not. This initial list, if nothing else, served the inquisitor with a basis for installing a climate of fear. The denounced were called, sometimes imprisoned, always bullied into giving more names. The inquiry widened, pulling in Cathar and Catholic alike—and only the inquisitor knew which charges had any corroboration. To convict an individual who denied any affiliation with heresy, the inquisitor needed the testimony of at least two witnesses.

  Often, people threw themselves on the mercy of the court, admitting to minor transgressions—for example, giving a Perfect a loaf of bread—in a distant past, in the hope that more recent heretical acts would somehow be obscured. When pressed, as ever, to name names, the craftier credentes gave a long list of the deceased, thereby fulfilling their obligation to fing
er as many people as possible while sparing the living the perils of punishment.

  The inquisitors had an answer to this tactic. They dug up and burned the dead. To the stupefaction of friends and family, cemeteries were turned upside down and decomposing corpses carted through the streets to the burning ground as priests cried, “Qui aytal fara, aytal pendra” (Whoso does the like, will suffer a like fate). These macabre bonfires were just the beginning. If the flaming cadaver had been notorious for lodging a Perfect, his house was razed, regardless of who happened to be occupying it. Depending on the gravity of the postmortem sentence, some descendants of the condemned were disinherited, their property and chattels confiscated by the inquisitor to fund his investigations. Others were imprisoned, or made to sew large yellow crosses on their clothing, as a sign of their familial infamy, or forced to undertake grueling penances. And some talked, although still grieving over the indignities visited on the bodies and souls of their late relatives. The names of the living began filling the Inquisition registers.

  The Dominicans were hated. In Albi, the inquisitor Arnold Cathala was beaten to within an inch of his life when he began disinterring bodies. The bishop’s armed men had to step in to prevent the burghers from tossing him unconscious into the River Tarn. In nearby Cordes, a fortified settlement founded by Raymond VII in 1222, legend holds that the enraged villagers threw two agents of the inquisitor to their deaths down a well. At Moissac, a pilgrimage center on the Garonne, where the inquisitors Peter Seila and William Arnald nonetheless managed to burn 210 of the living, heretics were hidden by compassionate Cistercian monks. Even though there papal courts adhered to the merciless legal practices of their day, they were viewed as something new and malevolent, something that aimed at transforming a weary Languedoc into a land of turncoats and quislings. No one was safe unless he did harm to his neighbors.