The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  130 under the direction of Bishop Fulk of Toulouse: The number of Fulk’s contingent of singers and soldiers swells according to the sources consulted, from a few hundred to 5,000. What is certain is that these men were firebrands of orthodoxy. In a nettlesome question of usage, I have opted to follow Joseph Strayer’s example and have referred to the bishop throughout as Fulk. He appears in some histories as Foulquet when a troubadour and Foulque or Foulques in his later incarnation as bishop.

  130 Montgey: The mass murder at Montgey deeply shocked chroniclers and churchmen throughout Europe. For one, it was the only slaughter en masse of pilgrims during the entire twenty years of the crusade. Also, the job of mutilating and finishing off the wounded was left to peasants and villeins—which was an almost intolerable transgression of the social order. This might, if one were disposed to make excuses, account for Simon de Montfort’s savagery toward Lady Geralda and the eighty knights at Lavaur, which violated all customary practices toward captives of noble birth. Near Montgey today, there is a plaque at a roadside calvary in the village of Auvezines, memorializing the lost column of armored pilgrims. To embrace anachronism for a moment: The plaque must be unique in France for deploring the demise of an invading German army.

  130 The leader of the defeated defenders was Aimery of Montréal: The village of Montréal bears no relation to the great city on the St. Lawrence River. First garrisoned by the Romans, the gentle height became a village in the ninth century and owes its name to a corruption of the Latin Mons Regalis (royal mount) or Mons Revelatus (bare mount). Its sister in Catharism, Fanjeaux, is said to derive its name from Fanum Jovis (temple of Jove). The tale of Aimery’s hulking corpse bringing down the gallows originates in the Hystoria of Vaux de Cernay. The average height of the warriors of thirteenth-century France was five-foot-two or five-foot-three. As for Geralda, a later Catholic chronicler claimed that she and Aimery had several children borne of their incestuous couplings, a fairly standard libel leveled at heretics.

  10. A Time of Surprises

  132 led by four Christian kings: Kings Alfonso VIII of Castile, Sancho VII of Navarra, Alfonso II of Portugal, and Pedro II of Aragon.

  141 his historic flip-flop: Innocent threatened Pedro at the end of his letter dated May 21, 1213: “Such are the orders which your Serene Highness is invited to obey, in every last detail; failing which … We should be obliged to threaten you with Divine Wrath, and to take steps against you such as would result in your suffering grave and irreparable harm” (source: Zoé Oldenbourg, Massacre at Montségur, p. 163). It is amazing that Pedro should have gone from being Christendom’s hero—the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa took place in July 1212—to the pope’s nemesis, all in the space of ten months.

  141 Simon … had made his last will and testament that morning: Peter of Vaux de Cernay recounts this telltale act on the part of a nervous Simon. Much of our information about the actions of Simon comes from his chronicle. It should be noted that from January 1213 to May 1214 Vaux de Cernay was in France; thus he was not present for the fateful battle. However, he would have spoken to Simon and his men about the events once he had returned to Languedoc and rejoined the crusade.

  142 Pedro … relaxed with his mistress: There are two dubious historico-erotic tales told of Pedro’s actions before the battle. The first has Pedro writing a letter to a married lady of Toulouse in which he proclaims that his sole reason for fighting is to impress her enough to get into her bed. Vaux de Cernay tells of Pedro’s letter being intercepted by a prior in Pamiers and shown to Simon de Montfort as he marched to Muret. There is much tut-tutting by Simon about the indecency of the king’s motives. Historians, while not doubting the existence of the intercepted letter, believe Pedro’s missive was a standard, poetic greeting couched in the courtly language of the day, and addressed to one of Pedro’s sisters in Toulouse—it will be remembered that Raymond the elder and Raymond the younger had both married into the Aragonese royal house. Vaux de Cernay, significantly, does not give the identity of the addressee. The other rumor has Pedro so tired after his amorous activities on the eve of the battle that he can barely stand up in the morning. This originated in the Llibre dels feyts, a chronicle that Pedro’s son commissioned when he had reached manhood and become King Jaume (or James) the Conqueror. Although delightful (and unlikely), the story is thought to be the invention of a Catalan chronicler who wanted to explain how the otherwise unbeatable Pedro could have been slain on the field of battle. The poor fellow was exhausted, so it wasn’t a fair fight.

  143 “It is a great pity that you who have lands to live on should have been such cowards as to lose them”: The insult is recorded in the Canso. Just prior to Muret, the chronicler known as Anonymous (see “Usage and Primary Sources” above) takes over from William of Tudela. The man who spoke so woundingly to Count Raymond was Michael of Luesia, who died fighting alongside Pedro later in the day.

  143 Simon de Montfort ordered his knights to … get ready for battle: The prelude and aftermath of the battle are rich in contemporary accounts. There is, however, a remarkable paucity of sources concerning the actual fighting at Muret. There is also a remarkable lack of agreement about where exactly the batde took place and how the forces were arrayed. The work of Michel Roquebert, in the second volume of his L’Epopée cathare, is exemplary for its exhaustiveness and its evenhanded consideration of different theories. His conclusions, including a set piece on the battle (pp. 167–236), guided my brief evocation of the fight. The route taken by the crusaders along the towpath, for example, is Roquebert’s hypothesis.

  143 “If we cannot draw them a very long way from their tents …”: Simon’s speech is set down by Anonymous in the Canso.

  143 Masses were said, confessions heard: Pious legend—backed up by a plaque in the main church of Muret—has Dominic inventing the Catholic prayer cycle known as the Rosary during the vigil before the battle. Church historians have long since proved, alas, that Dominic was not among the clergymen at Muret on that fateful September day.

  146 “Across the marshes …”: The descriptive passage is from the Canso (in Janet Shirley’s translation, p. 70).

  148 A mass grave would be unearthed in the nineteenth century: The riverside spot is called Le Petit Jofréry. Floods of 1875 and 1891 uncovered makeshift cemeteries and thirteenth-century armor (source: Dominique Paladilhe, Les Grandes Heures cathares, p. 154).

  11. The Verdict

  150 the vicar of Christ stalked out of his cathedral: For the events at the Lateran Council, I relied on the work of Brenda Bolton (“A Show with a Meaning: Innocent Ill’s Approach to the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Medieval History 1 (1991), pp. 53–67), which in turn led to S. Kuttner and A. Garcia y Garcia’s article “A New Eyewitness Account of the Fourth Lateran Council,” Traditio 20 (1964), pp. 115–78. There was another eyewitness, the chronicler Richard of San Germano.

  153 A chronicler told of how the session …: The chronicler is Anonymous of the Canso. It is possible that he attended the Lateran Council in the entourage of the Raymonds. At the very least, he talked to many of the principal participants. The speeches are all to be found in the Canso and are widely thought to give an accurate picture of the verbal sparring that must have occurred there. The version used is Janet Shirley’s translation.

  156 “you take away Montauban and Toulouse …”: Montauban, a city on the River Tarn to the northwest of Toulouse, was the only other major center to resist Simon de Montfort’s rule.

  12. Toulouse

  158 Any unlucky besieger captured … according to a chronicler: In his Hystoria albigensis, Peter of Vaux de Cernay lists an impressive number of atrocities committed by the Toulousains. There is no reason to disbelieve him.

  161 “When the count entered through the arched gateway …”: The eyewitness here is not Vaux de Cernay but Anonymous. In this chapter, the direct quotations relating to the siege are taken from the Canso, but much of the background material is found in the Hystoria and the Chronica.
All three sources are prolix about the great siege of Toulouse; only the Canso, however, has women operating the mangonel that killed Simon de Montfort. That twist of fate is too lovely not to be repeated.

  167 As was the custom: It is William of Puylaurens who states that the boiling of the corpse was a French funerary custom.

  168 “The epitaph says …”: The epitaph to which this remarkable passage refers has been lost. As for the funerary stone depicting Simon de Montfort, now affixed to a wall in the transept of Carcassonne’s St. Nazaire, it is now considered a hoax. Experts from Toulouse established in 1982 that the stone was carved between 1820 and 1829, at the behest of Alexandre Dumege, a local historian with an overheated romantic imagination (source: Michel Roquebert, L’Epopée cathare, vol. 3, p. 143).

  13. The Return to Tolerance

  169 Every man, woman, and child in Marmande: The massacre provoked almost as much comment as Beziers and became a staple among northern chroniclers. Anonymous, in the Canso, lets out all the stops in his description: “But clamour and shouting arose, men ran into the town with sharpened steel; terror and massacre began. Lords, ladies and their little children, women and men stripped naked, all these men slashed and cut to pieces with keen-edged swords. Flesh, blood and brains, trunks, limbs and faces hacked in two, lungs, livers and guts torn out and tossed aside lay on the open ground as if they had rained down from the sky. Marshland and good ground, all was red with blood. Not a man or a woman was left alive, neither old nor young, no living creature, unless any had managed to hide. Marmande was razed and set alight” (Janet Shirley’s translation, pp. 188–89).

  170 “Roma trichairitz …”: The troubadour’s song appears, with a translation by Roger Depledge, in Yves Rouquette’s Cathars., pp. 162–63.

  176 his body was denied a public Christian burial: Discredited legend long had it that the remains of Raymond VI were left to rot outside a cemetery gate, picked over by rats, but the truth of his ultimate fate may yet turn out to be less unseemly. Just before Christmas 1997, some 775 years after the count’s death, workmen restoring a medieval building in old Toulouse discovered a hitherto unsuspected hollow in a wall containing the hidden sarcophagus of a thirteenth-century nobleman. At this writing, DNA tests are being done to determine whether its occupant is the long-vanished Raymond, and the ever loyal city of Toulouse has formally petitioned the current pope to lift the excommunication that still hangs over his soul. There is a slim hope that the bones found might turn out to be, plausibly, those of Raymond VI. In the side of the great church of St. Sernin in Toulouse is a portal known as the Counts’ Door, where tenth- and eleventh-century members of the Saint Gilles clan had been laid to rest. Some of these sarcophagi have been pried open, and the jumble of 900-year-old bones therein is being genetically mapped. If some of these bones produce a familial “match” to the jumble found in 1997 in the sarcophagus hidden in the niche of the former Toulouse headquarters of the Knights Hospitallers (later the Knights of Malta), then the metropolis on the Garonne will no doubt build a worthy mausoleum for its beloved count. Toulouse’s mayor, Dominique Baudis, is somewhat of a Cathar enthusiast. His novel, Raimond “le Cathare,” tells a first-person story of Raymond VI and, on its publication in 1996, was fairly well received in neo-Cathar circles. One such group based in Toulouse, La Flamme cathare, circulated a petition—Manifeste pour la Réconciliation—asking Pope John Paul II to come to the church of St. Sernin in the year 2000 and apologize to Languedoc for the actions of his predecessors. The first signatory of the petition was Mayor Baudis. The pope never came.

  177 through diplomacy, guile, and feats of arms, he had subdued his enemies: As his barons were helping out Simon de Montfort, King Philip Augustus had been thrashing his enemies in the field. In the year after Muret, he repelled an English force under King John, who had used the upheaval of the Cathar struggle to try and enlarge his holdings in northwestern France. In the decisive battle of Bouvines on July 27, 1214, the French routed the forces of Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Germans were neutralized; the English thrown into disarray.

  178 Amaury had, in fact, lost everything given to his family nine years earlier in Rome: In a bar at Montségur, I was assured by several patrons that un amaury or un maury is a local dialect word meaning “a loser.” Alas, I was unable to find a similar entry in any regional dictionaries of the Midi.

  14. The End of the Crusade

  181 in 1216, Louis had briefly accepted the crown of England at the invitation of the barons: On the death of King John of England in 1216, his successor, the future Henry III, was only nine years old. The ever-rebellious barons of Britain saw their chance to unseat the Plantagenets by inviting in Louis.

  183 Michel Roquebert has argued convincingly… : Roquebert makes his case for a collective panic in chapter 22 (“Le Printemps de la grande peur”) of volume 3 of his L’Epopée cathare.

  185–86 Romano and Blanche sharing more than just prayers: The long-lived rumor was apparently spread by the irreverent students of the Latin Quarter. Romano’s power at the Louvre and in the Cité was resented by the schoolmen of the Left Bank. The rumor was reported by the English chronicler Matthew Paris (source: Krystel Maurin, Les Esclarmonde, p. 88). In any event, Blanche, as a mother of eleven, might have grown leery of the consequences of close male company.

  186 Gregory IX, a nephew of Innocent III: It is almost certain that Ugolino dei Conti di Segni was Lotario’s nephew. More in dispute is his birthday. In the past, historians have relied on information provided by the chronicler Matthew Paris, who held that Gregory was nearing his hundredth year at his death in 1241. It is now thought more likely that the nephew of Innocent was ten years younger than his uncle, which would place his birth year at around 1170.

  188 “It was a great shame …”: The comment is from William of Puylaurens, who was once in the employ of Raymond VII. Of the three main chronicles about the Cathars, his is the only one that covers these years.

  190 the county of Toulouse automatically became a part of France: Perhaps the most astounding clause of the treaty concerned the future of Languedoc. Raymond’s daughter Jeanne was forced to marry Louis’s brother Alphonse of Poitiers. They were to inherit at Raymond’s death—even if Raymond had fathered other children. Succession would then pass through the Capets. Raymond died in 1249, after having spent the last twenty years of his life trying to find a way to beget a legitimate male heir—who, in any case, would have had to fight to regain his birthright. Toulouse was then governed in absentia by Count Alphonse. He and Jeanne died childless, within three days of each other, in 1271, and Languedoc was definitively annexed to the royal domain.

  190 a university was to be established: The university, founded in 1229, is still going strong. The city of Toulouse counts a postsecondary student population of about 100,000.

  190 Eleanor of Aquitaine: The justly celebrated Eleanor shaped the dynastic politics and culture of twelfth-century Europe. The granddaughter of the first troubadour, William of Poitiers (Guilhem de Poitou), and endowered with the immense duchy of Aquitaine, she first married King Louis VII of France. She bore him two daughters, accompanied him on the disastrous Second Crusade preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, then, on returning to France, had her marriage annulled on grounds of consanguinity. This ruse to get rid of an unwanted spouse was common practice among noblemen—Eleanor pioneered its practice among women. She then married Count Henry of Anjou, eleven years her junior, who became King Henry II of England. She bore him a brood of children, fiercely guarded her independence, and eventually left England to preside over a brilliant court for troubadours and scholars in Anjou. Her life has inspired a flood of scholarship and art. In Norman F. Cantor’s Medieval Lives, a series of imagined vignettes with emblematic figures of the Middle Ages, the chapter devoted to Eleanor (“The Glory of It All”) demonstrates her importance in an entertaining fashion. Her connection to the Cathar drama is fairly straightforward: Her daughter Joan of England married Raymond VI and produc
ed Raymond VII; another daughter, Eleanor, married Alfonso VIII of Castile (who fought at Las Navas de Tolosa) and produced Blanche of Castile. Raymond and Blanche were thus first cousins. Their children, respectively Jeanne of Toulouse and Alphonse of Poitiers, were married under the terms of the treaty.

  15. Inquisition

  191 a wealthy old lady of Toulouse: This story is told by the Dominican William Pelhisson in his Chronica, translated into English by Walter L. Wakefield as The Chronicle of William Pelhisson in Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250, pp. 207–36.

  195 “It often happens that bishops …”: Innocent’s stern sermon is quoted in Friedrich Heer’s The Medieval World (p. 220). Heer also finds a passage in Innocent’s De contemptu mundi, written before he became pope, in which he complains of bishops who “by night embrace Venus and next morning honor the Virgin Mary.”

  195 Robert le Bougre … Conrad of Marburg: There seems to be a consensus among historians that Conrad was a dangerous sociopath who burned many innocents. Heer, a German-language historian writing in the 1950s, makes an implicit comparison between Conrad and Hitler. The evidence against Robert le Bougre, instigator of a massive bonfire at Mont Aime, in Champagne, is slightly more ambiguous. As Malcolm Lambert states in The Cathars, “Acquittal of Robert as an arbitrary, wilful inquisitor is not yet justified: a verdict of not proven best fits the existing evidence” (p. 125).

  196 “We marvel …”: Pope Gregory’s disingenuous missive is quoted in Heer, The Medieval World (p. 217).

  197 “The accused shall be asked …”: From Bernard Gui’s Practica Inquisitionis, cited in Zoé Oldenbourg’s Massacre at Montségur, pp. 307–8.