Béziers was by no means entirely a Cathar city. There may have been as many as several thousand Cathar credentes living there, but Catholics are likely to have been in the majority. We know that there were 222 Cathar perfecti present on the day the siege began because a list of their names, prepared by Renaud de Montpeyroux, the Catholic bishop of Béziers, has survived.38 The bishop (whose predecessor had been assassinated in 1205) scuttled through the gates with the list soon after the crusaders began to arrive and returned from their camp a few hours later with an offer. If the townsfolk would hand over the 222 named Cathar notables for immediate burning then the city and everyone else living in it would be spared.39
It was in fact a pretty good offer but, to their lasting moral credit, the Catholic burghers of Béziers rejected it, stating that they ‘would rather be drowned in the salt sea's brine’ than betray their fellow citizens .40
What was to follow was a good deal worse than drowning.
It started on the early morning of the 22 July with a minor and wholly unnecessary skirmish. Separated by some distance from the main force of the crusader army, the ribauds – camp followers – had gathered by the banks of the River Orb which flowed a little to the south of the city walls. A bridge leading to one of the city gates spanned the Orb at this point and now one of the ribauds strolled onto it, shouting insults and challenges to the defenders. Angered by his temerity some inside rushed spontaneously out through the gate and down onto the bridge where they caught and killed him and threw his body into the water. Probably they expected to retreat to the safety of the city at once but before they could do so a gang of camp followers swarmed onto the bridge and locked them in combat. At the same moment, with what was obviously an experienced eye for the main chance, the elected ‘king’ of the ribauds ‘called all his lads together and shouted ‘Come on, let's attack’.41
Within minutes, driven on by an ugly cocktail of crowd-psychology, bloodlust and greed, a howling mob bore down on the scrum at the bridge. According to the chronicler of the Chanson de la Croisade albigeoise: There were more than 15,000 of them, all barefooted, dressed only in shirts and breeches, and unarmed save for a variety of hand weapons.42
Hatchets? Butchers’ knives? Cudgels? The mind boggles at the thought of what primitive bludgeons and rusty blades these dregs of the Crusade wielded as they forced the bridge and pursued the foolish skirmishers back up the slope towards the city walls. No one is quite sure exactly what happened next but by now the whole crusader camp was roused and bands of mercenaries and regular soldiers were charging into the fray. Most probably the ribauds succeeded in seizing control of the gate as the skirmishers tried to slip back inside, and were able to hold it open whilst crusader reinforcements poured through. But whatever the mechanism, the result was the same. With their defences hopelessly breached the proud citizens of Béziers were now doomed beyond any redemption: No cross or altar or crucifix could save them. And these raving beggarly lads, they killed the clergy too, and the women and the children. I doubt one person came out alive.43
The leaders of the Crusade made no attempt to stop or even limit the massacres. Quite the contrary, as the knights rushed to arm and mount, eager not to miss the action, a group of them reportedly asked Arnaud Amalric how they were to distinguish the many Catholics in the town from the heretics they had come to kill. The abbot is notorious for replying in Latin: ‘Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.’
Which means: ‘Kill them all; God will look after his own.’44
Though most of the killing was done by the lower orders, a particularly awful bloodbath was unleashed inside the Church of Mary Magdalene by the knights themselves. Here a multitude of Cathars and Catholics – old and young, men, women and children – were cowering in fear. Their numbers were estimated by chroniclers at the time as between 1,000 and 7,000. Just like the Gnostic and pagan refugees who had taken shelter inside the Serapeum in Alexandria nine centuries previously when it was attacked by Christian forces, they probably hoped that the hallowed ground would save them. And just as in Alexandria, it didn't. The knights burst in and slaughtered them all.45
By noon, a few hours after the fighting had started at the bridge, the entire population of the city had been murdered. Working with all the contemporary estimates, and allowing for exaggeration in some cases, modern scholars generally concur on a figure of between 15,000 and 20,000 for the total number of the dead of Béziers.46 Guiraraut Riquier of Narbonne, one of the last of the Occitanian troubadours, expressed the scale of the tragedy in a song: Béziers has fallen. They're dead. Clerks, women, children. No quarter. They killed Christians too.
I rode out. I couldn't see or hear, a living creature … They killed seven thousand people, Seven thousand souls who sought sanctuary in Saint Madeleine.
The steps of the altar, were wet with blood. The church echoed with the cries. Afterwards they slaughtered the monks who tolled the bells.
They used the silver cross, as a chopping block to behead them.47
Clearly Riquier's sympathies were not with the crusaders and he had no interest in making them look good. We might think that the whole scene was just something he'd invented as anti-Catholic propaganda were it not that all other accounts of the sack of the city, supported by archaeological evidence, also speak of a fearful massacre taking place inside the Church of Mary Magdalene.48 Indeed the Catholic forces felt they had nothing to hide or be ashamed of in the killing of so many heretics in so holy a place.
The Cistercian chronicler Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay proclaimed: It was right that these shameless dogs should be captured and destroyed on the feast day of the woman [i.e. Mary Magdalene] they had insulted and whose church they had defiled …49
Arnaud Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux and leader of the Crusade, was thrilled too – and not just with the slaughter in the church but with the overall tally of the day. In a breathless letter to his master Pope Innocent III, the man at the source of all this carnage, he wrote proudly: Nearly 20,000 of the citizens were put to the sword, regardless of age or sex. The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.50
Truth in extremes
Our purpose thus far has been to track the secret tradition that lay behind Catharism, that kept a complex system of Gnostic spirituality alive in the West through a thousand years of persecution, and that the Albigensian Crusades were designed to obliterate forever. We will not offer a detailed history of the Crusades themselves since several excellent books already exist that provide a thorough record of the main sieges and battles. Nevertheless, the best chance to study human behaviour always comes in the starkest, most dangerous and most extreme circumstances. For this reason, as we will see in the next chapter, the Crusades provide a unique opportunity to get closer to the truth about the two sides.
The truth is that upon the citizens of Béziers, who had threatened no one, aggressed no one, gone out to make war on no one, and merely followed their own harmless beliefs, the Catholic side unleashed an army from hell to inflict a hellish atrocity of rare and terrible evil. Zoé Oldenbourg suggests that we should reflect on what this tells us: Massacres such as that at Béziers are extremely rare; we are forced to accept the proposition that even human cruelty has its limits. Even amongst the worst atrocities which history has to show us through the centuries, massacres of this sort stand out as exceptions; and yet it is the head of one of the leading monastic orders in Catholic Christendom who has the honour of being responsible (while conducting a ‘Holy War’ to boot) for one such monstrous exception to the rules of war. We should be on our guard against underrating the significance of this fact.51
Nor did the atrocities stop with Béziers. They went on and on, seemingly endlessly, each with some mad demonic quality of its own. But soon after Béziers, having bathed in sufficient blood to satisfy his appetite, Arnaud Amalric opted for a less ‘front-line’ role. His successor, chosen to prosecute the Crusade with the utmost vigour, was Simon de Montfort, described as a man who ‘pray
ed, took Communion and killed as easily as drawing breath.’52
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE SWORD AND THE FIRE
It was not until the formation of the Holy Office [of the Inquisition] that the world was presented with the spectacle of an organisation prepared to kill, starve, and dispossess those who had deviated a hair's breadth from its own theological preoccupations. No other major religion has ever produced such an organisation. There are secular organisations which have acted with equal ferocity and efficiency, but, unlike the Inquisition, they did not last for seven centuries.
Arthur Guirdham, The Great Heresy
The crusading army rested three days in the meadows around the reeking corpse of Béziers, then marched off to besiege the great city of Carcassonne – which surrendered two weeks later without putting up a fight. A condition of the surrender was that this time the inhabitants would not be slaughtered; instead all their property was confiscated and they were expelled from Carcassonne, penniless and homeless, never to return.
In August 1209 Simon de Montfort officially took command of the army, and of a new title, Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne.1 But by mid-September the vast majority of the forces at his disposal had packed their bags and gone home. This was a routine and predictable desertion since the indulgences and remission of sins that the pope bestowed on crusaders required them to put in a minimum of 40 days on campaign. The surrender of Carcassonne was accomplished just within the 40 days but after that, in the minds of most of the volunteers, the campaign was over.
With a small band of dedicated knights de Montfort hung on in what was now the heart of very hostile territory over the winter. Then in 1210 – and yearly thereafter – the pope preached another crusade and the ranks of the army swelled once more.2
A macabre highlight of the 1210 campaign was the capture of the fortress of Bram after three days of stiff resistance. Because they had put up a fight the surviving members of the garrison, numbering over 100, suffered a terrible punishment. On de Montfort's orders their eyes were put out. Then their noses and upper lips were crudely hacked off. One man was left one eye, not out of charity but so that he could lead the stumbling, blinded, mutilated soldiers to Caberet, the crusaders’ next target, as a very particular message for the defenders there.3
At Béziers, because the city's entire population, heretic and Catholic alike, had been indiscriminately massacred, there could be no mass burning of heretics. Although de Montfort had personally supervised the immolation of a small group of Cathar perfecti at Castres in 1209,4 it was therefore not until the 1210 campaign that the opportunity came his way to burn a large number of heretics at once – a sight, according to the pro-Catholic chronicler Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, that all the crusaders experienced with feelings of ‘intense joy’.5
The opportunity was provided by the fortress city of Minerve where it was known that many Cathar perfecti – both men and women – had taken refuge. De Montfort laid siege to the stronghold in June 1210 and forced its surrender some weeks later after cutting off its water supply and deploying his war-catapults and stone-guns to bombard it mercilessly. As had been the case at the surrender of Carcassonne there was no massacre; but this time the Cathar perfecti sheltering in Minerve were identified and singled out. Their choice was either to recant or die. Initially none recanted, and one of the perfecti explained to a Catholic priest: ‘Neither death nor life can tear us from the faith to which we are joined.’6 On 22 July 1210, the exact anniversary of the sack of Béziers (and again, significantly, the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene )7 Vaux-de-Cernay reports that a huge fire was prepared. While it blazed and roared the prisoners were brought out before it and: … more than one hundred and forty of these heretical perfecti were flung thereon at one time. To tell the truth, there was no need for our men to drag them thither; for they remained obdurate in their wickedness, and with great gaiety of heart cast themselves into the fire. Three women, however, were spared; being brought down from the stake … and reconciled with the Holy Roman Church.8
What stands out from the next year's campaign – 1211 – is the fate of an even larger group of perfecti. On 3 May 1211, after a lengthy siege, the crusaders breached the walls of Lavaur and poured through, seizing the city. Amongst the captives were more than 400 perfecti, both men and women, who were burnt on a gigantic bonfire.9 Though not Cathars, the 80 knights who had commanded the garrison were hanged for protecting them. Guiraude, the Lady of Lavaur, was also brutalised then murdered. This high-ranking Occitan noblewoman was a Cathar credente, much loved in the city, of whom it was said: ‘Never did a living soul leave her roof without having eaten well first.’10 De Montfort handed her over to a band of mercenaries who dragged her through the streets heaping indignities upon her, before throwing her down a well and killing her with stones.11
A month later de Montfort burnt 60 more Cathar perfecti at Cassis.12
In 1213 King Peter II of Aragon, famous for having recently won a great victory against the Moors in Spain, intervened against the crusaders. Some of the hard-pressed Occitan noblemen who were protecting the Cathars were his relatives, and there was a large population of Cathars in Aragon itself. Peter brought hope, a splendid force of 2,000 battle-hardened knights and 50,000 infantry into the equation – more than enough to change the course of the war. But it was not to be. Though he was heavily outnumbered, de Montfort attacked Peter at Muret and, through brilliant, ruthless generalship, succeeded in killing him in battle.13 At the sight of this terrible and totally unexpected catastrophe the Aragonese and Occitan forces hesitated, then began to retreat. The retreat turned to panic and then to a rout with De Montfort's knights in hot pursuit. Thousands were cut down, drowned in a nearby river, or crushed as they fled. 14
It took the Occitan nobles three years to lick their wounds and gather their strength before they were ready to take on de Montfort again. Nonetheless by 1216 the Count of Toulouse had succeeded in raising an army and, for the first time, began to inflict serious reverses on the crusaders. Using his favoured strategy – if in doubt attack – de Montfort tried to take the initiative by besieging Toulouse. The city fought back ferociously and – refusing to be put on the psychological defensive – routinely sent out armed sorties to attack de Montfort in his own camp.
The siege dragged on for many months and the defenders’ sorties grew ever more daring. On the morning of 25 June 1218, while repelling one of these raids, de Montfort was killed outright by a projectile from a stone-gun mounted on the walls of Toulouse and said to have been fired by a crew of women and young girls .15 The Chanson de la Croisade albigeoise describes his death: A stone flew straight to its proper mark, and smote Count Simon upon his helm of steel, in such wise that his eyeballs, brains, teeth, skull and jawbone all flew into pieces, and he fell down upon the ground stark dead, blackened and bloody.16
The darkest hour before the falsest dawn
With de Montfort thus felled like a pole-axed ox his son Amaury took charge and abandoned the failed siege within a month. In 1219, however, he was back in action leading yet another crusade. This time he was joined by Prince Louis of France, out to do his crusading duty and bringing with him ‘20 bishops, 30 counts, 600 knights and 10,000 archers .’17 The two armies met in front of the unfortunate city of Marmande, which Amaury had already besieged, and launched a joint attack, overwhelming its defences.
Then another of those demonic interludes of the Crusades took place – when the Catholic troops, urged on by their bishops, fell upon the fleeing citizens in the narrow streets of the city. From the Chanson comes this harrowing description of what they did at Marmande: They hurried into the town, waving sharp swords, and it was now that the massacre and fearful butchery began. Men and women, barons, ladies, babes in arms, were all stripped and despoiled and put to the sword.
The ground was littered with blood, brains, fragments of flesh, limbless trunks, hacked-off arms and legs, bodies ripped up or stove in, livers and hearts that had been chopped
to pieces or ground into mash. It was as though they had rained down from the sky. The whole place ran with blood – streets, fields, river bank. Neither man, nor woman, young or old survived; not a single person escaped …18
Did the Catholic forces serve the God of Evil, as the Cathars claimed?
We cannot say whether a ‘God’ of any sort was behind the butchery at Béziers and Marmande, the mass burnings and martyrdom of the perfecti and the ruin of Occitania. But since the Albigensian Crusades were launched and maintained exclusively on the pope's initiative, we can say, without equivocation, that the Catholic Church was directly responsible for all these evil things, and that it was acting in the name of its God.
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