The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  16.

  Backlash

  ONE DAY IN 1233, a working man named John Textor, according to the chronicle of William Pelhisson, yelled out into a street of Toulouse as he was being questioned by the Inquisition: “Gentlemen, listen to me! I am not a heretic, for I have a wife and sleep with her. I have sons, I eat meat, I lie and swear, and I am a faithful Christian. So don’t let them say these things about me, for I truly believe in God. They can accuse you as well as me. Look out for yourselves, for these wicked men want to ruin the town and honest men and take the town away from its lord.”

  People stopped to listen, laughed, then applauded. The foolhardy laborer was braying aloud what most of the city was whispering privately. Brothers Peter Seila and William Arnald failed to see the humor. They called their men-at-arms, and soon John Textor lay in chains in their prison.

  Not that anyone expected the chief inquisitors of Toulouse to show mercy to a critic, no matter how humble. Seila, before becoming one of the first companions of Dominic, had been a rich burgher and a supporter of the detested Fulk. In 1215, the Seila family had given the very first bequest to the dirt-poor Dominicans: a large townhouse in the heart of Toulouse. Seila’s younger colleague, William Arnald, was a zealous brother from the city of Montpellier. When the Inquisition eventually got around to that stronghold of Catholic orthodoxy in 1234, one of its first acts concerned neither Cathars nor other heretics. At the behest of the city’s conservative Jews, the Dominicans threw the works of the great Sevillan thinker Moses Maimonides onto a large bonfire of proscribed books.

  Seila and Arnald wasted no time in making enemies. On receiving their papal commission in 1233, they had immediately targeted one of the most prominent Perfect in Toulouse, Vigoros of Bacone. Before his many allies and friends could rally to his defense, Vigoros was tried, convicted, and burned. There followed an unseemly two-year binge of body exhuming, coupled with sweeping imprisonments. To do the actual physical work of arresting, jailing, and executing, the two friars had to force the secular authority of Toulouse to do their bidding, by threatening prosecution of all who dared defy them. Refusing to obey the Inquisition was, according to Rome, as much a spiritual crime as heresy. Therefore it fell within the jurisdiction of Church, not secular, courts. The successful inquisitor used the full panoply of clerical intimidation—threat of excommunication, interdict, dispossession—to obtain the armed men necessary to do his job.

  Count Raymond VII and his consuls, wary of bringing war back down on their heads, reluctantly went along with the Dominicans, until their dragnet grew too large to be tolerated. Raymond wrote to Pope Gregory IX that the inquisitors were so noxious that they seemed “to be toiling to lead men into error rather than towards the truth.” He complained as well to Paris, so convincingly that Blanche of Castile, the regent who had vanquished the south, sent off her own letter to Rome. The inquisitors of Languedoc, Raymond and Blanche told the pope, had gone beyond the bounds of Christian decency.

  Although supportive of his Dominican firebrands, Gregory found himself in a precarious position to impose his will. Politics intervened, in the form of a struggle with the German emperor over the papacy’s temporal possessions. Ironically, Gregory’s troubles were caused by the man who, as a toddler, had become a ward of Innocent after Emperor Henry VI had been felled by a mosquito in 1197. In a disastrous reversal for the Church, Frederick II, now emperor and in the prime of life, stood as a towering threat to Rome. Known as Stupor Mundi (the marvel of the world), Frederick was a polyglot, eccentric, and energetic monarch, who, from his multicultural court in Sicily, sought to expand his influence throughout Europe. He locked horns with the papacy repeatedly over control of cities around the Mediterranean. Faced with this charismatic foe, Gregory sought help wherever he could find it—including heretical Languedoc. Seeing his chance, Count Raymond declared himself willing to thwart Frederick’s designs in Provence, if the pope called off his inquisitorial dogs.

  Thus the mid-1230s saw a strange three-way tug-of-war between Rome, Toulouse, and the Inquisition. The pope occasionally admonished his inquisitors in Toulouse to exercise more leniency, even to travel into the remoter parts of Languedoc to avoid creating friction in the cities. The count and his followers, encouraged by the citizenry, stiffened their resistance to the Dominicans. The luckier heretics—many in Raymond’s entourage had Cathar sympathies—were spirited out of town by the civic sergeants sent to arrest them. But such trickery only served to enrage and embolden the inquisitors. In the fall of 1235, the year after Bishop Raymond du Fauga’s incineration of the old woman on her deathbed, the Dominicans took aim at several consuls of the city. The riposte was quick in coming. In October, the inquisitors were thrown out of Toulouse; the following month, the rest of the Dominicans—including the bishop—had to flee the city under a pelting rain of stones hurled by a jeering mob. The shaken friars, once in the safety of royal Carcassonne, duly excommunicated their enemies and placed Toulouse under interdict.

  The pope, after sending a blistering letter to Raymond, lifted the interdict and ordered the inquisitors back to Toulouse. Whereas Raymond’s long-suffering father would have been pilloried for condoning such behavior, the count was spared papal thunderbolts because he was needed as an ally. As a sop to public feeling, a Franciscan, Stephen of St. Thibéry, was named inquisitor in Toulouse to work with Seila and Arnald. The Franciscans were reputed to be more humane than the Dominicans, but Brother Stephen soon dispelled this belief, for he proved himself the equal of his Dominican colleagues in prosecutorial ardor.

  Despite pressures from the count, the inquisitors persevered. At times they reaped a windfall from convenient conversions to Catholicism: Two ex-Perfect, Raymond Gros and William of Soler, gave the Inquisition reams of names and information about their coreligionists. These prized informers, who had to be protected from the wrath of their former flock, confirmed the friars’ suspicions about Catharism—that it was becoming resourceful in the face of persecution. To avoid detection, many of the Perfect had shed their simple robes and would, if necessary, eat meat in public. The strict separation of the sexes had even broken down. Some male and female Perfect now traveled in pairs, pretending to be married couples. The Cathar homes and workshops had closed, and many of the Perfect had moved to the safety of Montségur. Only the initiates knew when there was a holy Cathar on a pastoral visit.

  Inquisitors as depicted in The Men of the Holy Office by Jean-Paul Laurens

  (Musée des Beaux Arts, Moulins)

  The increased dissimulation proved to the inquisitors that Catharism was dishonest. In a neat chicken-or-the-egg pirouette of reasoning, deceit came to be seen as one of the principal hallmarks of heresy—despite the Inquisition’s having made such deceit necessary. In Albi and Carcassonne, after the initial outbreaks of hostility toward the Dominicans, the French royal authorities in place—the king’s seneschals—helped the work of the four inquisitors named to root out heresy in the old Trencavel domains. Often, they were supplied with men-at-arms to protect them. In the areas under the control of an independent Toulouse, Brothers William, Peter, and Stephen were on their own, traveling with a small retinue of scribes and clerks and relying on their powers of intimidation alone to bend the local nobility to their will. When not allowed in Toulouse, the friars combed the countryside, taking depositions and imposing hundreds of penances and prison sentences. They were methodical, merciless, and fearless, crisscrossing a hostile landscape as the resentment of the ordinary people of Languedoc grew.

  Raymond Trencavel tried to take advantage of the ground swell of ill will. The son of Raymond Roger, the viscount vanquished by Simon de Montfort, he had temporarily returned to Carcassonne in the 1220s, only to be chased out again by a citizenry terrified at the approach of the royal crusade. In 1240, he assembled an army of exiles in Aragon and marched across the Pyrenees to lay siege to his capital. It was 1209 all over again, except that the roles were reversed: Now the French were within Carcassonne and the O
ccitans without. As in 1209, the besiegers first concentrated on Bourg and Castellar, the suburbs outside the walls. Their inhabitants opened their doors without a fight—French overlordship and the Inquisition had few local supporters.

  This time, however, Carcassonne held. After a clamorous thirty-four-day siege during which Trencavel launched eight separate assaults from the suburbs, the Occitans withdrew as a French army from the north hurried into Languedoc to attack them. The dispossessed viscount then retreated to nearby Montreal, which was besieged in its turn by the French. The fighting was so ferocious that both sides agreed to a truce, and Trencavel eventually renounced his claim to Carcassonne. He ended up a minor landowner near Béziers and, oddly enough, a crusader in Egypt alongside the king of France.

  Raymond VII of Toulouse had not helped Trencavel in his revolt, primarily because he could not risk angering Blanche of Castile and Pope Gregory. Two years later, the situation was changed, and he had nothing left to lose. The pope had died, and with him went any chance of getting Raymond’s marriage annulled. The count was desperate for a male heir. The succession clause contained in his penance at Notre Dame in 1229 stipulated that the county of Toulouse would, at his death, be passed on to his daughter and her Capet husband, Alphonse of Poitiers, even if Raymond had produced male offspring. This unusual clause, designed to ensure French dominion over Toulouse, might come to seem unfair and, eventually, untenable if there actually were a boy to lay a claim to the Saint Gilles patrimony. Hence Raymond’s desire for a new, young wife who could bear him the sons that his current spouse, Sancha of Aragon, was past the age of producing.

  The passing of Pope Gregory set back indefinitely his attempts to change his mate. Emperor Frederick had thrown the papacy into such disarray that there was, temporarily, no one on the throne of Peter to grant any favors whatsoever, whether it was in curbing the Inquisition or releasing him from his marriage vows. The time for diplomacy had passed; his only chance to become master in his own house and the lord of a Languedoc free from the French and their clerical terror lay through resorting to force. By the spring of 1242, the count of Toulouse had assembled his conspirators. They included his first cousin, King Henry III of England, and Hugh de Lusignan, the most prominent baron of Aquitaine. They, along with scores of Languedoc nobles itching for a showdown with the French, planned to put an end to the occupation of the south. The signal for revolt came on the Feast of the Ascension.

  On May 28, 1242, Stephen of St. Thibéry and William Arnald stopped in Avignonet, a fortified town in the region between Toulouse and Carcassonne. In this, the heartland of Languedoc Catharism, the two inquisitors had picked their way through the villages of St. Félix en Lauragais, Laurac, Saissac, and Mas-Saintes-Puelles, compiling confessions that the eight scribes who traveled with them faithfully committed to Inquisition registers. The Franciscan and the Dominican moved through the countryside without the benefit of bodyguards. The many credentes of the area must have viewed this small troupe of Catholic clergymen with dread, since the inquisitors often exercised their power to send Cathar sympathizers to the so-called wall, the dungeon of Carcassonne where prisoners were held in a cramped, clammy space and kept barely alive on a diet of bread and water. In a land where the Perfect had preached for generations—the great Cathar meeting of 1167 had taken place in St. Félix—the guilty numbered in the thousands.

  The inquisitors’ host on this eve of the Feast of the Ascension was Raymond d’Alfaro, the bailiff of the count of Toulouse in Avignonet. D’Alfaro, wed to the bastard half sister of Raymond VII, was an important personage in Languedoc and a confidant of his brother-in-law. Although there is no document attesting to the collusion of Raymond in the events at Avignonet, it is highly improbable that his bailiff would have undertaken any action without the count’s foreknowledge and approval.

  D’Alfaro lodged his visitors in the central chamber of the castle keep, away from the houses of the townspeople. As night fell, one of his men, William-Raymond Golairan, paid a visit to the friars and saw that they were at their evening meal. A few hours later, Golairan returned to the keep and determined that the inquisitors and their aides had bedded down for the night.

  In between these two instances of seemingly solicitous hospitality, Golairan had ridden out of town to a spinney of trees known as Antioch Wood. There, as arranged, he met up with a war party from Montségur, several score of heavily armed men who normally guarded the refuge of the Perfect in the shadow of the Pyrenees. Their leader, Peter Roger of Mirepoix, walked among his warriors, choosing which ones would accompany Golairan back to Avignonet. He stayed behind in the shadows of Antioch Wood, lying in wait lest a party of French knights unexpectedly rode past on their way to town.

  A few dozen men set off in the dusk behind their guide. They could have been mistaken for laborers coming in late from the fields, were it not for the battle-axes hanging from their belts and the horsemen that brought up the rear. By the time they reached Avignonet, the blackness of night had swallowed them. The knights dismounted, and a groom led the horses to a meadow at a safe distance from the fortifications. The men of Montségur hid behind a slaughterhouse outside the city walls.

  Golairan, after making his second visit to the castle keep, returned to the ramparts and opened the gate to Avignonet. The armed men stole through it and into the streets of town. They trod quickly over the cobbles, leaving a man in each alleyway to cover their retreat. At the main entrance to the castle, waiting to join them, stood a group of thirty townsmen, armed with clubs and cleavers.

  Commanded by William of Lahille, William de Balaguier, and Bernard de St. Martin, the Cathar credentes from Montségur and Avignonet spilled into the courtyard of the castle and headed for the keep. Softly up the stairs and down the winding stone corridors, their guide led them to the massive oak door of the inquisitors’ quarters. Bernard de St. Martin, who had been condemned to the stake in absentia, hefted a two-headed battle-ax and swung it mightily.

  A deafening boom echoed within. Pious legend holds that Brother Stephen fell to his knees and began chanting in a trembling voice, “Salve Regina …”

  The door burst open. Dozens of men streamed inward, their axes slicing through the blackness. Knives slashed, cudgels came down again and again, until the last dull groan had subsided. By torchlight, the murderers grabbed candlesticks, money, a box of ginger, then stripped the dead of their few belongings. Feverish hands rifled through a wooden chest, found an Inquisition register, and ripped it to pieces; a flaming brand was lowered to set the pile of names alight. By the time the ash from hundreds of fearful confessions had risen to the ceiling, then settled back down on the bloodred flagstones, the men with the axes had gone.

  In Antioch Wood later that night, Peter Roger of Mirepoix gave a great bear hug to a returning friend. An eyewitness would tell the Inquisition years afterward that he then exclaimed, “Where is my cup?”

  The man replied, “It is broken.”

  The lord of Montségur laughed and said, “Traitor! I would have bound it together with a circlet of gold and drunk from it all my days!”

  The cup the two men were talking about was William Arnald’s skull, which had been shattered at Avignonet.

  17.

  The Synagogue of Satan

  NEWS OF THE MASSACRE spread quickly, its perpetrators cheered on their ride home to Montségur. Few in the south grieved for the murdered inquisitors; there is even a documentary record of a country curé ringing the bell of his church.

  Within days, the allies of Raymond VII moved on bishops’ palaces, Dominican houses, and French-held castles, forcing their occupants to flee for their lives. The brutal crime had roused thousands from a torpor of fear and inaction. From Toulouse east through the Lauragais and the Minervois, all the way to Narbonne and Béziers, villages and towns rose in revolt against the custodians of the shameful treaty of 1229. Languedoc fought to restore its flouted dignity and traditions, and, for a time, it succeeded. By the late summer of 1242, Co
unt Raymond could claim to have recovered his patrimony, and the insistent interrogations of the Inquisition had been silenced.

  It was in the west that Raymond’s schemes went awry. Henry III of England planned to land in Aquitaine, then march north to harass the French and recapture the territory of Poitou, to which his brother Richard of Cornwall had a legitimate claim. The French-speaking Plantagenets of England believed that what is now western France was rightfully theirs. (The Hundred Years’ War of 1337–1453 would finally decide the issue in favor of the kings of France.) Unfortunately for the cause of Languedoc’s independence, not only did King Henry’s campaign fail to defeat the French, it scarcely distracted their attention from Count Raymond’s revolt. Unable to convince his truculent barons of the soundness of the enterprise, Henry had made landfall in the southwest with a derisively small force of knights—and was promptly trounced by a large royal French army at Taillebourg, near Bordeaux. Further setbacks throughout the summer induced the other principal conspirator, Hugh de Lusignan, to switch his allegiance and turn against Toulouse. Count Raymond, isolated once again, prepared for yet another long war of attrition as a French army made its way from Aquitaine to the borders of Languedoc.

  Not everyone was ready for another decade of ruin. Roger Bernard of Foix judged that the mad revolt was doomed. In a move that stunned his neighbors, the count of Foix negotiated a separate peace with the French in the fall of 1242. No one expected this from the most bellicose family of Languedoc; old Raymond Roger had fought the crusade all his life, and his son Roger Bernard had distinguished himself at the siege of Toulouse in 1217–18. Now that same Roger Bernard, whose mother and aunt had been Cathar Perfect, stabbed the rest of Languedoc in the back by allying himself with the despised Capets. The man who grew up eviscerating the French had become their comrade-in-arms. There could have been no more devastating betrayal to the city and friends of Toulouse than the defection of Foix.