God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Early in 1213, a combination of neat diplomacy by Peter II of Aragon with Innocent III’s desire to promulgate a new, general Holy Land crusade briefly threatened Montfort’s authority. Failing to overcome the settled refusal of the legates to accept reconciliation and an end to the war at a council at Lavaur in January, Peter succeeded in persuading the pope that Montfort and the legates had exceeded their brief. In a series of letters dated 15–17 January, Innocent cancelled the granting of crusade indulgences, effectively ending the crusade, and ordered Monfort to return the lands of Foix, Comminges and Béarn to their rightful rulers (all vassals of the king of Aragon) and insisted that Raymond’s lands and rights be restored. His previous doubts over the crusaders’ motives now crystallized into harsh words directed at Arnaud Aimery and Montfort: ‘you have extended greedy hands into lands which have no ill reputation for heresy… you have usurped the possessions of others indiscriminately, unjustly and without proper care’.79 This diplomatic coup encouraged Peter to break with Montfort and the legates, taking Toulouse, Foix and Comminges under his protection. However, in May, Innocent, now fully apprised of what had happened at Lavaur, after intense lobbying by Montfort and the legates revoked his letters of January. This did not revive the crusade on quite the same basis as before, as in April, Innocent’s great bull Quia Maior launching the new Holy Land crusade restricted indulgences for the Albigensian crusade only to those living in ‘Provence’, i.e. Languedoc.80 The general uncertainty was compounded when Louis of France took the cross in February 1213, presumably unaware of the papal cancellation.

  The diplomatic manoeuvres of the first half of 1213 ended with at least partial vindication for Montfort, witnessed at Amaury’s knighting in June. They left Peter of Aragon, if he wished to influence events and prevent Montfort’s annexation of south-west France, no option but war. His defeat and death at Muret on 12 September appeared to some providential.81 A much smaller force under Montfort had seized their chance and through bold, well-disciplined action had routed a larger, complacent enemy. God had spoken. Peter lay dead on the field, his infant son a hostage and his ally Raymond VI in flight, to Spain and then England. Yet the consequences were more equivocal. While Montfort, with new recruits from the north, tightened his grip towards the Dordogne valley in 1214, Innocent III tried once more to broker a settlement based on justice, not force. A new legate, Peter of Benevento, secured the release of the child King James of Aragon and the absolution of Raymond VI. However, the count’s lands were administered by Montfort, who ignored attempts at compromise. In January 1215, a large church assembly at Montpellier, presided over by Legate Peter, recommended that Montfort be chosen as ‘chief and sole ruler’ of all the count of Toulouse’s lands. However, Montfort remained unpopular: at Montpellier he narrowly avoided assassination by disaffected citizens.82

  The Montpellier decision required papal ratification. The dispossessed, led by Raymond VI and Raymond Roger of Foix, who had been deprived in 1214, took their case to Rome, where their fate would be decided at the general church council. Montfort’s position was recognized by Louis of France, who, free since Bouvines from the threat of John and Otto IV, visited Languedoc from April to June 1215 in fulfilment of his 1213 vow. His large and distinguished army conducted a triumphal tour, rather than a crusade, seeing no military action but demonstrating, for the first time, active Capetian overlordship of the region. With such powerful support, it came as a surprise that the Montfort cause had such a stiff challenge at the Lateran Council in November, a reflection of the unease felt by the curial lawyers at Montfort’s and successive legates’ pugilistic exercise of church authority. The count of Foix, a vituperative but effective debater, at least in one sympathetic poet’s imagination, challenged the legitimacy of the transfer of power as well as impugning the motives and methods of Montfort, the papal legates and the crusaders.83 He clearly had some effect as the pope ordered the return to Raymond Roger of lands occupied by the invaders. However, with the county of Toulouse, the logic of Innocent’s previous acquiescence produced a judgement in favour of Montfort, except the pope reserved the comital lands east of the Rhêne in Provence to be held by Montfort in trust for Raymond’s young son, the future Raymond VII.84

  As in 1209, 1211 and 1213, no sooner won than victory slipped from Montfort’s grasp. Although he received Philip II’s investiture of the Languedoc counties at Melun in April 1216 and managed by the end of that year to have secured control over the troublesome Toulouse, rebellion, led by the younger Raymond, had already begun to sap his control. Montfort’s failure to relieve Raymond’s siege of Beaucaire in August 1216 encouraged further insurrection across the south. As well as the presence of a large pool of disinherited noblemen who knew the people and the country, later pro-crusade commentators pointed to the unpopularity of Montfort’s subordinates fuelling discontent. ‘They held the land for their own satisfaction, not for the purposes for which it had been acquired, or in Christ’s interests, but for their own ends, slaves to lusts and pleasures’.85 The Montfortians steadily lost ground as the dire cycle of violence and hard campaigning renewed itself. Despite increasing depression recorded by a writer close to his entourage, Montfort slogged on, notching significant successes without managing to prevent Raymond VI and his son re-establish a political presence across the county. The French monarchy gave no help to its new vassal, being distracted by its adventure in 1216–17 to place Prince Louis on the English throne. In September 1217, Raymond VI re-entered Toulouse, restricting the Montfortians to the citadel of the Narbonnais castle on its southern wall. Montfort began yet another siege of the city. Despite reinforcements arriving in January 1218, little progress was made. After nine months, the city, fearful of massacre, showed no signs of capitulation. The deadlock was resolved on 25 June. While inspecting forward siege engines, Montfort was struck on the head by a stone thrown from one of the city’s mangonels, operated, some said, by women, crushing his skull. He died instantly, one of the most revered and reviled men ever to have fought for the cross.86

  The removal of Montfort shifted the balance of power. Encouraged, young Raymond took the offensive, defeating the crusaders at Baziège late in the year. Pope Honorious III read the auguries and renewed the crusade indulgences in August 1218. A counter-offensive in 1219 led by Louis of France, who had again taken the cross in November 1218 and remained allied to the surviving Montfortians, captured Marmande on the Garonne in June with Montfort’s son and heir Amaury, before laying siege to Toulouse. However, on 1 August, Louis abandoned the struggle, returning to France, as one writer laconically and perhaps without irony remarked, ‘after continuing his crusade for the required period of service’.87 It is hard to see in this foray much more than Capetian flag waving to remind whichever side emerged triumphant of where the ultimate suzerainty lay.

  Louis’s withdrawal from Toulouse exposed the full weakness of the Montfortians, dependent on French royal indifference and a pope engaged in prosecuting the crusade in Egypt (1218–21). The main support came from the largely new southern episcopacy, who owed their places and revived finances to the crusade. Amaury of Montfort, lacking his father’s ability, could do little to prevent the unravelling of Simon’s achievement. The clerical tenth proposed in 1221 to assist him provoked fierce resistance.88 By 1222, the year he died, Raymond VI had recovered most of his lands, mainly though the efforts of his son, who succeeded as Raymond VII (1222–49). Foix retained its independence. Even the Trencavel lands reverted to the control of Raymond (1209–47), son of the dispossessed Viscount Raymond Roger. A truce was agreed between Amaury of Montfort and Raymond VII in 1223. The following year Raymond entered the Monfortian stronghold of Carcassonne while Amaury resigned his claims to Louis of France, now Louis VIII. The Albigensian crusade seemed over and lost.

  This did not suit Louis VIII, who saw Languedoc not only personally as unfinished business but as part of the wider problem of Capetian control of south-west France, the more urgent since the annexation of Po
itou from the king of England in 1224 and the French failure to hold on to Gascony in 1225. Louis managed to get a papal legate to reject Raymond VII’s attempts to get his titles recognized as legitimate at a council in Bourges in December 1225. Both sides prepared for war. Honorius III once more cranked up the machinery of the crusade at the French clergy.89 Unlike his father, Louis had no qualms in embracing the status of crucesignatus. As his son Louis IX was to do to even greater effect, Louis sought to identify his kingship and dynasty with a holy mission, to the advantage as he saw it of both church and state. A pall of legitimacy was lent the new crusade by the undeniable recrudescence of heresy in Languedoc in the wake of the Montfortians’ defeat. King Louis took the cross in January 1226 and marched south in June. Despite a long and costly siege of Avignon (10 June–9 September), which ended in a negotiated surrender, Louis’s passage through Languedoc was largely unopposed. Although Raymond persisted in refusing homage, most lords submitted. Louis died on his way back north on 8 November, probably of dysentery, but this time a fortuitous death did not reverse the trend of events.

  In a series of brutal campaigns in 1227 and 1228 led by Humbert of Beaujeu, backed by a nascent network of local Capetian administrators and agents, the annexation of Languedoc was completed. Politically, Raymond VII had nowhere to turn. In January 1229 he agreed terms at Meaux, ratified at Paris on 12 April, when the count underwent public penance in return for reconciliation with the church and his new overlord. The Treaty of Paris ended the Albigensian crusades.90 Raymond retained some lands but crucially his inheritance was to pass on his death to his daughter Jeanne, who was to marry a Capetian prince. Languedoc’s independence was ended. Despite rebellions by Raymond Trencavel in 1240 and Raymond VII himself in 1242, the decision of Meaux/Paris was not reversed. On Raymond’s death in 1249, his lands passed to his son-in-law Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of Louis IX. When he and Raymond’s daughter Jeanne died in 1271, Toulouse was united with the French crown. The Treaty of Paris had summed up the paradox of the Albigensian crusades. Ultimately of radical political effectiveness, in their prime declared objective they failed. At Paris in 1229, Raymond VII promised to prosecute heretics, precisely what his father had been accused of failing to do twenty years before.

  AFTERMATH

  With the Treaty of Paris the religious and political future of Languedoc was freed from the association with crusading. The revival of Catharism in the 1220s that coincided with the decline of Montfortian power was checked and reversed through the concerted efforts of the new mechanisms of the Inquisition.91 Established from 1229, and spearheaded by the Dominicans, the Inquisition in Languedoc operated as a series of essentially ad hoc diocesan judicial inquiries. Although standard procedures of investigation, evidence, examination and sentencing were developed, the Inquisition did not become the sinister bureaucratic institution of repression of legend. Its lurid later reputation was largely a creation of the Spanish Inquisition of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century and disapproving Protestant polemicists. The object of each Inquisition was, as its name suggested, to discover who were heretics and to eradicate disbelief by persuasion and reconciliation. Although the accused were prevented from knowing the identities of witnesses, they were permitted to mount a defence. Torture was rare and unsophisticated. Reason, not terror, was the inquisitors’ weapon. A university was founded at Toulouse in 1229 to underpin the ideological basis of the Catholic mission. The combination of new pastoral methods; effective, professional preaching; the dissemination of the systematic moral theology of the schools; and the simplicity and directness of the friars who largely conducted the Inquisition combated Catharism at every level, intellectual, parochial and personal. The punishments reflected the purpose of evangelism. The vast majority of those found guilty of heresy received non-custodial penances. Contumacious or obstinate offenders could expect prison. Only a tiny minority of convicted heretics were handed to the secular authorities to be burnt at the stake. One calculation from hundreds of penalties imposed in mid-thirteenth century Languedoc estimated that death sentences made up 1 per cent, imprisonment 10–11 per cent; the rest lesser penances, including the compulsory wearing of a cross to denote a former heretic. Out of 930 sentences presided over by Bernard Gui, the Dominican inquisitor in Carcassonne from 1308 to 1323, author of a famous inquisitor’s manual, made notorious by Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, only forty-five carried the death penalty, less than 5 per cent.92 Given the prevalence of capital punishment in other areas of justice, this may not appear especially brutal.

  As between 1209 and 1229, the greatest violence was provoked by an alliance of religion and politics. The infamous burning of over 200 perfecti at the fall of Montségur to royal troops in March 1244, including Bertrand Marty, the Cathar bishop of Toulouse (1225–44), came in retaliation for the assassination of two chief inquisitors at Avignonet, twenty-five miles south-east of Toulouse, in May 1242. However, the context for the nine-month siege of Montségur was the rebellion of Raymond VII in 1242–3 in alliance with Henry III of England and dissident Poitevins. The protection afforded the Cathars by the lords of Montségur epitomized resistance to the new Capetian and Catholic order. The holocaust of March 1244 spoke not of the Inquisition but the methods inherited from Simon of Montfort.93 The difference lay in the increasing inability of Catharism to sustain such losses to its institutional leadership. Here, in undermining the patronal organization and public networks of heresy, the crusade had contributed directly to the weakening, if not to the eradication, of the Cathars. After the bonfires and dispossessions of 1209–11, Catharism was denied open civil expression, forcing it on to the defensive. With the coalition of church and Capetian state, Cathars were under constant attack, as were their lay sympathizers and protectors. However popular Catharism had been, the decapitation of an effective diocesan structure ensured a slow decline, especially marked after 1250. The Cathars possessed less and less political, social or even ideological protection against the inquisitors and their ecclesiastical and secular allies. Furtive, beleaguered and increasingly seeming parochial, obscurantist and unfashionable, the failure of the brief revival in the Pyrenean foothills in the early fourteenth century to capture the support of the social elites sealed its fate. A flurry of inquisitorial action snuffed it out.94 By the 1330s, Languedoc was free of organized Cathar heresy.

  The political legacy of the Albigensian crusades was less equivocal than the religious, suitably for a series of military campaigns in which the secular repeatedly dominated the spiritual. This is not to decry the sincerity of those who saw themselves as soldiers of Christ, nor of those laymen and clerks who genuinely feared the cancerous growth of heresy. However, it remains inescapable that the Albigensian crusades failed to destroy heresy while succeeding in annexing Languedoc to the Capetian dynasty. This may not have been the intention of the crusaders of 1209, yet Innocent III had persistently tried to involve Philip II, recognizing the force of using a strong state to recreate a strong church. It is equally apparent that this new order established the necessary conditions in which heresy could be destroyed. To the committed, this may mitigate the religious failure of the Albigensian crusades.

  The crusades did not destroy a region. The economy of Languedoc proved very resilient.95 Once the fighting was ended, prosperity returned. What was lost was religious and political pluralism, always hard to sustain, not just in thirteenth-century Europe. The career of Oliver, heir to the Corbières lordship of Termes, famously charted the process.96 Termes had been a Cathar centre lost to the crusaders in 1210. By the early 1220s, Oliver had regained it after submitting to Capetian authority in 1219. However, throughout the 1220s, Oliver supported Languedoc resistance, first Raymond Trencavel, then, after 1226, Raymond VII of Toulouse, while retaining close links with Cathar perfecti. Despite losing Termes and being forced to renew fealty to the French king in 1228, Oliver continued to oppose the new regime and the Inquisition from his vertiginous stronghold of Queribus, north of Perpign
an, which became a refuge for Cathars and other political dissidents. After joining the revolts of 1240 and 1242, Oliver was excommunicated. Reconciliation with the Capetian authorities ironically only came with his agreement in 1247 to join Louis IX’s crusade to Egypt. Many Languedoc rebels, including Raymond VII, found the Holy Land crusade imposed as a penance. Oliver seems to have taken to it. He stayed east until 1255 and returned to Outremer in 1264, 1267–70 and, in 1273–4, as commander of the French garrison at Acre, where he died in 1274. The quid pro quo for his service was the return of lands in Languedoc and his and his family’s absolute loyalty and orthodoxy: no more independence in politics or religion. Oliver’s late devotion to holy war suggests a fluid but serious piety grounded in the reality of temporal opportunities. Not a pacifist, he serially supported two highly contrasting strands of thirteenth-century belief, Catharism and crusade, each determined by conflicting political allegiance but indicating that the contending ideologies reflected a shared cultural desire for active religious purity.

  Oliver was not alone among Cathar sympathizers or even credentes in taking the cross as a positive sign of reconciliation with the church. However, such a path was denied the hapless Raymond VI, one of the most excommunicated men of the middle ages. His fate was to find himself in an impossible position. Unable to mount effective diplomatic or military resistance to his enemies, neither could he achieve what they asked of him even if he had been disposed to do so. The contrast with his father Raymond V’s attempt to suppress the Cathars in 1179 probably lay not with Raymond VI’s personal religious tastes; he was an active patron of the Hospitallers. Rather, by his accession in 1194, the Cathars had become too entrenched socially as well as religiously. Short of a disruptive and devastating conquest of his own lands, for which he had neither the appetite nor the resources, it is hard to see what Raymond could have done to appease Innocent III’s implacable legates and their military enforcer Montfort, who, in any case, was after Raymond’s lands. The personal bitterness directed at Raymond is difficult to understand; his iconic significance less so. He was the epitome of the fautor, the heretic’s accomplice. As such, there appeared no forgiveness, even beyond the grave. In 1222, Raymond had died technically excommunicate, prevented by his final stroke from making oral confession to the abbot of St Sernin.97 His body, covered in a pall provided by the Hospitallers, was refused burial. Despite repeated appeals by his son and numerous ecclesiastical inquiries, his coffin remained unburied in the precincts of the Hospitaller house in Toulouse, where it was still to be seen over a century later, the shrouded body half-eaten by rats. By 1515, the worm-ridden coffin had collapsed in pieces and the bones had gone, except for the skull. This was kept by the Hospitallers, who, as late as the 1690s, used to show it off to the morbid and the curious.98 There was something appropriate in this exhibition of antiquarian bad taste. The gruesome relic represented both the eternal vengeance of a church so badly rattled that it could not forgive or forget and the only too obvious corruption of the flesh. A Cathar might have drawn a succinct moral.