The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  Raymond VII realized that there was no point in bleeding his people white in a conflict they could not possibly win. With Foix opposing him, he was well and truly beaten, and his cause now and in the years to come utterly without hope. He would be the last in his line. In January 1243, Raymond and Louis signed a treaty reestablishing the status quo ante. The relative leniency of its terms—the treaty amounted to a slap on the wrist—made clear that all parties knew this defeat was final and that the once powerful Saint Gilles family had been neutered by Church and Crown. This time, there was no need for a scourging at Notre Dame or any other allegory of abjectness.

  The revolt had been a comprehensive failure. The hot gale of revenge that had howled across Languedoc after the murders at Avignonet ended up a mere summer squall. The rebels returned to their previous occupations, heads down and ears cocked for the footfalls of the friars in their villages and towns. The alarums of 1242 were all but forgotten.

  The Church, however, remembered its dead. Even if it could never find all of the outlaws responsible for the crime at Avignonet, it had to make sure that such a crime could not be repeated, that its inquisitors could conduct their task without fearing for their lives. There was only one place left in all of Languedoc that openly defied the Church. The clergy habitually referred to it as “the synagogue of Satan.” At a conclave held in Beziers in the spring of 1243, it was decided that Montségur had to be destroyed.

  Ever since 1204, when Raymond of Pereille had rebuilt the castle atop the height of Montségur, the isolated eyrie had served time and again as a refuge for the Perfect. Raymond, a local lord with several Cathar ascetics in his family, had witnessed the population of his village swell and contract with every vicissitude of war in the lowlands. From its 3,000-foot height, he watched the Perfect scurrying through the wooded valleys to his haven of safety, then leaving again several months or years later, to head north and spread their quiet message of peace. South of Montségur, there stood the great stone wall of the Pyrenees, where the shadows of clouds raced over the tortured slopes of Mount St. Bartholomew.

  The coming of the Inquisition brought Montségur scores of new inhabitants. Sometime in the early 1230s, Guilhabert of Castres, the respected Cathar bishop of Toulouse, formally asked Raymond of Pereille if his fortified village could become the center of the dualist faith. By the end of the decade, when Guilhabert died of old age and was succeeded as spiritual leader by Bertrand Marty, there were more than 200 Perfect living in huts and caves around the castle. They were the heart, head, and soul of Catharism in Languedoc. Winter and summer, the days passed in a tireless round of prayer, fasting, and hard work, for the male and female Perfect were not only contemplative ascetics but also artisans turning out such wares as blankets, saddles, horseshoes, and candles to support their settlement. Some were herbalists and doctors, tending to the sick in the surrounding area. Fittingly, the commerce with the farms and villages in the valleys below went beyond the mere material: Montségur also became a site for retreats, the credentes of distant towns making secretive pilgrimages to a community lodged midway between heaven and Earth.

  The 200 Perfect were not alone on their mountaintop. Alongside them, in slightly fewer numbers, lived an extended clan of men-at-arms and knights, in the company of their wives, mistresses, and children. Many had relatives among the Perfect; others had been dispossessed by the peace of 1229; still others were mercenaries. The aging Raymond of Pereille had called on a kinsman, Peter Roger of Mirepoix, to be the co-lord of Montségur, mainly because the younger man, from a prominent family of credentes, enthusiastically shared the violent mores of the day. Witnesses would later tell the Inquisition that in lean times Peter Roger was not above such pointedly un-Cathar activities as brigandage, extortion, and theft. He had organized, if not suggested, the murderous evening at Avignonet.

  In the spring of 1243, the talents of Peter Roger of Mirepoix became of greater moment than those of Bertrand Marty and his fellow Perfect. In the alpine pastures below the eastern flank of Montségur, warriors from Gascony, Aquitaine, and all parts of a newly subdued Languedoc began arriving and setting up an encampment. These knights and men-at-arms had been summoned to Montségur by Hugh of Arcis, King Louis’s seneschal in Carcassonne. The men of Languedoc owed the Crown feudal military service, and the French and their clerical allies had decided that it was time to call up their reserves if ever they were to force the remote stronghold into submission. The siege was fully in place by the Feast of the Ascension, one year after its memorable celebration in Avignonet. The coincidence could not have escaped Peter Amiel, the archbishop of Narbonne, who pitched his richly appointed tent below Montségur and waited for the sanctuary to disgorge its diabolical congregation.

  The wait would be long. For all their thousands, the besiegers did not have enough manpower to encircle completely the two-mile perimeter of the mountain’s base. In many places, Montségur’s steep rock face ended in treacherous, scrubby ravines, their hidden defiles impossible to seal off entirely. Although Hugh’s position was not nearly as bad as Simon de Montfort’s at the great siege of Toulouse—there were no Garonne barges replenishing the stores of Montségur—the terrain was such that siege engines were out of the question. Fearsome trebuchets and tall cats were of no use on the hardscrabble slopes of the Pyrenees.

  Summer and fall passed in stalemate. Within Montségur, Peter Roger of Mirepoix had dug in and built up his defenses well. As the Perfect could not fight, he had a mere ninety-eight able-bodied combatants on the mountaintop to marshal into an effective defensive garrison. The royal armies repeatedly swarmed up the goat paths leading to the summit, only to be repulsed by a well-directed rain of missiles loosed by crossbow and catapult. Urged on by the seneschal and the archbishop, the attackers tried to cling to the gorse-covered slope but always had to retreat to the safety of the camp far below.

  The men of Montségur, crushingly outnumbered, dared not risk a sortie for hand-to-hand combat or ambush; thus they had to keep a constant vigil and sight their fire carefully. Peter Roger could not afford to make a mistake. When any of his men sustained a mortal wound, that meant one fewer pair of eyes to peer down into the morning mists. The casualty was carried to the houses of the Perfect, to receive a deathbed consolamentum witnessed by his grieving family. Over eight months, the hard-pressed defenders lost nearly a dozen men to the deadly flights of enemy archers. As the weather turned colder and the supply of food dwindled, the work of Bertrand Marty gradually became just as important as Peter Roger’s, for Montségur desperately needed prayer.

  Just before Christmas 1243, Hugh of Arcis saw that the paradox of siege warfare was affecting his shivering army: In the absence of any progress, the besieger grew as demoralized as the besieged. It was time to take a risk, and for that he needed volunteers. A troop of Gascon mountain men heeded Hugh’s call, even though the task set before them verged on the suicidal. They were to take the bastion atop the Roc de la Tour, a vertiginous spike of stone rising up on the easternmost point of the summit ridge of Montségur. The bastion, separated from the main castle to the west by a gentle incline several hundred yards in length, could not be approached directly by the easier western route, since that would entail running the gauntlet of the defense. To reach the Roc, the attackers had to scale the cliff to the east.

  In the dead of night, the Gascons ascended the rock face, wary lest the sound of pebbles bouncing into the void alert the defenders. It was a long and perilous climb in the blackness, the task of the mountaineers made even more difficult by the weight of their heavy steel weapons. The daredevil tactic worked. The occupants of the bastion were caught off-guard and either killed instantly or wounded and then thrown to their deaths from the top of the cliff. A chronicler relates that at sunrise the victorious Gascons looked down in horror at the dizzying drop and swore that they would never have made the ascent by daylight. The route they had taken was too terrifying.

  Within the walls of Montségur, the fall of the b
astion was rightly seen as a disaster. Bertrand Marty assembled the treasury of the Cathar village—gold, silver, and coins—and had four Perfect smuggle it down into the valley under cover of night. Peter Roger watched as parts of catapults and mangonels were winched up to the Roc by royal engineers; heavy stone projectiles soon began crashing into the outer barbican of his fortress. As the snow swirled, the attackers drew ever nearer to Montségur, moving inexorably forward up the sloping incline from the Roc, entrenching, then creeping forward again. Each week brought the enemy closer, and the catapults within better range. The giant stones flew into and over the walls, causing death and injury. In February 1244, the final messenger to reach Montségur from the lowlands encouraged the exhausted defenders to hold fast, for Count Raymond might come to their aid. There was even a wild rumor about the Emperor Frederick sending a force to lift the siege. When, at last, the weary Cathars could no longer believe in the chimera of deliverance, Peter Roger walked out of the gate to negotiate. On March 2, 1244, ten months after the banners of the fleur-de-lis and the cross had first fluttered in the meadows below the mountain, Montségur surrendered.

  By all accounts, the negotiations did not last long. The capitulation was like no other in the Cathar wars, for the victor showed a measure of mercy to the vanquished, an indication of the sense of finality surrounding the fall of Montségur. A two-week truce was declared, after which the laypeople on the mountaintop were free to go. Their past crimes—including the murders at Avignonet—were forgiven, and their sole obligation entailed a promise to submit to a full interrogation by the Inquisition. The record of the defenders’ confessions, compiled by a Catalan inquisitor named Ferrer, provides the basis of our knowledge of the events at both Avignonet and Montségur.

  Then there were the Perfect, for whom no clemency was possible. The Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition in Languedoc had established one dark, immutable axiom: To dedicate one’s life to a Christian creed outside the bounds of medieval orthodoxy was a capital crime. Only those who renounced the Cathar creed would be spared the flames of ecclesiastical justice. Bertrand Marty and his 200 companions had a fortnight to think over their stark choice: recant or burn. Not one of the Perfect came forward to beg mercy of Archbishop Amiel. They parceled out their meager belongings among their neighbors on the mountaintop and comforted their weeping relatives. As their time left on Earth dwindled with each passing day, the men and women of the dualist faith steeled themselves for an awful death. From atop the walls of Montségur, the archbishop’s men could be seen at work in a field far below, stacking a large enclosure with dry wood scavenged from the surrounding forests.

  On Sunday, March 13, ten days into the two-week wait, twenty-one credentes approached the Perfect and asked to be given the consolamentum. They too were willing to brave the fire. It was the most eloquent moment in the whole sad saga of Catharism, a testament to the devotion inspired by the holy men and women whose preaching had convulsed an era. Now, as they were on the threshold of death, twenty-one people stepped forward to join them. It was an act of defiance, solidarity, courage, and, in the end, faith. These companions of the last hour came from all stations of feudal society. Raymond of Pereille’s wife, Corba, and daughter, Esclarmonde, decided to leave their noble families for the timeless embrace of the Good. With them went four knights, six soldiers (two with their wives), two messengers, one squire, one crossbowman, one merchant, one peasant woman, and one lady. The Perfect of Montségur administered the consolamentum to all of them and welcomed them into their ranks. They had three days of life remaining.

  The lugubrious procession of March 16, 1244, began in the early morning. It wound down the sinuous track leading from the summit to a clearing at the base of the hill. The 220 or so condemned walked past the last patches of snow on the brown winter grass until they reached a palisade of logs. Friend and enemy looked on. The leaders of the Cathar faith, barefoot and clad only in coarse robes, climbed the ladders propped up against the wooden walls. Groups of them were lashed together, their backs to the tall stakes sticking up from the colossal bier. At a sign from the archbishop, his men threw burning brands into the enclosure. The low murmur of prayers was overtaken by the crackling sound of flame, spreading underfoot, curling the first of the fiery twigs and setting the hems of garments alight. Within minutes, the crackling had become one great oceanic roar.

  A thirteenth-century drawing of a Cathar’s fate

  (Archives Nationales, Paris)

  By midmorning, a choking black nimbus billowed through the ravines and valleys leading from Montségur. Shepherds on nearby hills would have seen it rise slowly, heavy with the stench of fear and pain and man’s inhumanity to God. The wind took the cloud and, as it had done so long ago at Béziers, lifted it high into the skies of Languedoc. The particles of smoke drifted and dispersed, then disappeared.

  18.

  Twilight in the Garden of Evil

  FAITH GAVE WAY TO FAITHLESSNESS. After the fall of Montségur, the valedictory of the Cathars in Languedoc began in earnest, the sea of words collected by the inquisitors over the next three generations spilling out from one repetitive, destructive source: betrayal. The believers in dualism no longer caused armies to march or monarchs to fall; public acts of battlefield heroism and communal resistance were replaced by sordid deeds of private cowardice and delation, as people turned on their neighbors and families to save themselves from impoverishment, imprisonment, or death. No longer protected by the great and the powerful, the humble Cathar adherent now stood alone before a judge who tolerated neither temporizing nor evasiveness. Not everyone had a taste for martyrdom.

  The contagion of treachery spread faster and farther than the teaching of the Perfect ever had. In Toulouse, a Cathar believer named Peter Garcias, a consul and successful money changer, began meeting in 1247 with his kinsman William, a Franciscan friar, to discuss the tenets of their respective faiths. Their conversations took place discreetly in a common room of the Franciscan house—the open debates of Dominic’s time forty years earlier were now impossible. Confident in the company of a kinsman, Garcias gave vent to his disdain for the medieval Church and the stern god that it worshiped: “If I got my hands on this God who created so many souls to save but a few and damn all the rest,” the Cathar exclaimed, “I’d rip him apart with my fingernails and my teeth.” As for the Church’s pretensions to equity, Garcias looked back at the bloody recent past, then enunciated a view that is still ahead of its time: “Justice cannot condemn a man to death. An official who judges someone a heretic and has him put to death is a murderer. God did not want a justice of death sentences. It is not right to go on a crusade … against the Saracens, or against a village like Montségur that opposed the Church… . The preachers of crusades are criminals.”

  Unfortunately, we know of Peter Garcias’s dangerous opinions because he was denounced. His Franciscan kinsman, also ahead of his time, hit upon the medieval equivalent of wearing a wire. Whenever he and Garcias met, four other friars lay hidden in a gallery of the common room, silently scratching notes as the Cathar spoke. The ties of family and friendship counted for nothing in this new, perfidious Languedoc. Betrayal became virtue, as Garcias and others learned to their grief. The Perfect who had not been trapped at Montségur now had to live on the run, their sole refuge gone and their flock scattered, frightened, and pressed into becoming informers.

  In the end, Count Raymond VII joined the hunt. Having failed to ride to the rescue of Montségur, the epigone of the once-tolerant Saint Gilles family helped persecute his own people. In June 1249, he shocked his friends among the surviving Cathar gentry by ordering eighty people burned in Agen, a city on the Garonne to the northwest of Toulouse. By September of that same year, he was dead at fifty-two, shortly after having contracted a fever in the back-country town of Millau. His body was taken to Fontevrault, the abbey in the Loire Valley founded by Robert of Arbrissel, the charismatic preacher of the early twelfth century. In death Raymond deserted Toulou
se, to lie in Fontevrault alongside his mother, Joan of England, his uncle, Richard Lionheart, and his grandparents, King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  The count who had once vanquished both Simon and Amaury left his homeland defenseless. His daughter Jeanne would die childless in 1271, thereby ending the Saint Gilles line and allowing her husband’s family, the Capets of France, to annex Languedoc permanently. After Raymond VII’s passing, there was no one to resist the northerners or curb the agents of doctrinal cleansing. In this closing half century of humiliation, even those who had thrown in their lot with the French, notably Roger Bernard of Foix, were as unprotected as those who had remained loyal. In 1269, as a posthumous indignity to the family of Foix, the body of Roger Bernard’s wife, Ermessinde, was dug up and thrown out of a Catholic cemetery on suspicion of heresy.

  In less than ten years, the Inquisition had gone from being an artisanal undertaking of a fanatical few to a proficient bureaucracy employing hundreds and interrogating thousands. In Catalonia, a conclave of churchmen had assembled in 1242 to compile a glossary of repression:

  Heretics are those who remain obstinate in error.

  Believers are those who put faith in the errors of heretics and are assimilated to them.