As such the Albigensian crusade displayed familiar features to emphasize Innocent III’s conception of the universal embrace of holy war. The plenary indulgence and cross, absent in 1179, were prominent. Crusade temporal privileges were insisted upon and the crusade leaders attempted to impose sumptuary rules on their followers.37 A Burgundian benefactor to the Cluniac monks in 1209 was recorded as joining the Albigensian campaign for the traditional reason of ‘the remission of my and my parents’ sins’. In a charter in favour of the abbey of Cluny, Odo III duke of Burgundy, the grandest of the 1209 recruits, is described as ‘crucesignatus contra hereticos Albigenses’.38 Sympathetic contemporary chroniclers refer to the crusaders generically as peregrini, pilgrims, although the object of any penitential pilgrimage is hard, if not impossible, to identify. During the fighting at the sieges of Lavaur in 1211 and Moissac in 1212, the crusader army clergy sang the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, which became the crusaders’ anthem.39 The crusades’ opponents were ‘enemies of Christ’ to the recruited as well as the recruiters and war propagandists. To his enemies, Raymond was ‘the cruellest persecutor of Christ’. Innocent and preachers, such as James of Vitry and the Englishman Robert of Curzon (Courçon), succeeded in creating an atmosphere of spiritual crisis and crusading duty. Within a few years a crusade preaching manual in England was including uplifting stories of heroic deaths in Languedoc to set beside the deeds of Holy Land martyrs.40 According to James of Vitry, his pet holy woman, Mary of Oignies, was a great enthusiast for the cause, experiencing visions showing Christ’s care for the fate of Languedoc and, usefully for recruiters like James, angels lifting the souls of dead crusaders ‘to heavenly bliss without any purgatory’.41 This congruence with Holy Land wars of the cross was reinforced by the presence in the ranks of the Languedoc crucesignati of veterans from other crusades, including four prominent Fourth Crusade dissidents at Zara in 1202–3 – Abbot Guy of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, Enguerrand de Boves and Simon and Guy of Montfort – and the inveterate crucesignatus Leopold VI of Austria, who was recruited in 1210, as were the brothers Philip bishop of Beauvais (who went again in 1215) and Count Peter of Dreux, who had seen service in Palestine on the Third Crusade. Other recruits later joined the Spanish crusade against the Almohads in 1212, led by the Languedoc legate Arnaud Aimery. Such international experience of crusading lent flesh to Innocent’s ideology of almost eternal armed struggle against the spiritual and material forces of evil.
The regularity and persistence of this preaching sustained an atmosphere of immediate spiritual crisis. One unexpected and not entirely welcome response later became known as the Children’s Crusade (discussed in the next chapter). Stirred by the claims of the dangers besetting Christendom, a series of revivalist penitential processions in northern France converged on St Denis in the summer of 1212, calling for general moral reform, a clear echo of the papal programme of reform. The heretic scare and the annual round of preaching and cross-giving contributed to the sense of alarm. A Norman chronicler suggested that many of those who marched were later recruited to the Albigensian crusade.42 The war against heresy formed an important religious as well as political context for the Fourth Lateran Council announced by Innocent in 1213 to be held in Rome in 1215, the council’s third decree expressly dealing with the Albigensian crusades, which were equated with aiding the Holy Land.43
However, not all the language or practice of the Albigensian crusades replicated Holy Land models. The euphemism of ‘the business of faith and peace’ represented a more temporal legalistic slogan than ‘the business of God’ or other tags attached to the eastern campaigns. Fighting within Christendom, for most within their own kingdom, with authorized territorial profit held particular repercussions. To cement local support in Toulouse, Bishop Fulk instituted the White Confraternity, a militia aimed at combating heresy and usury (a very Innocentian combination). Members received the cross and remission of sins so they would ‘not be deprived of the indulgences which were being granted to outsiders’. Although reflecting civic identity as much as piety, and challenged by a rival Toulouse association called the Black Confraternity, Bishop Fulk’s association possessed sufficient cohesion and commitment to supply troops at the siege of Lavaur in May 1211.44
The Albigensian crusades were the first great political as well as anti-heresy crusades, aimed as much against Christians as against heretics. Participants understood that the Languedoc war, however equal in merit, was not the same as the Jerusalem war. There was almost no military involvement by the military orders, despite their strong presence in the area. Wars in Languedoc were easier to fight than in Palestine, more accessible, less physically demanding, less time-consuming. The 1208 offer of indulgences invited a rather casual approach, if not blatant abuse. Recruits showed little commitment or staying power, judging a brief appearance in the field adequate to gain spiritual reward, and perhaps hoping for a share of the clerical taxes being raised for the project. The latter was not forthcoming, many crusaders probably reckoning that the war in fact offered them no profit, only loss, and, until the 1220s, served the material interests solely of the Montforts. By the autumn of 1210, the legates had become seriously alarmed that indulgences were distorting the military viability of the operation. Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, nephew of Abbot Guy, wrote a detailed and well-informed contemporary account of the crusades, often as an eyewitness. He recorded the measures taken to mitigate the problem:
the papal legates, aware that most of the crusaders were somewhat lukewarm in their enthusiasm for the campaign and perpetually anxious to go home, had laid it down that the indulgence promised to the crusaders by the pope would not be granted to anyone who failed to complete at least one full period of forty days in the service of Jesus Christ.45
This contractual finesse to the indulgence became a unique central aspect of the Languedoc crusades. It did not always work. In the autumn of 1210 the bishop of Beauvais and count of Dreux’s army abandoned the siege of Termes to return north before their forty days were up.46 Paradoxically, the legates’ attempt to stabilize Montfort’s reinforcements merely had the effect of institutionalizing an inconveniently brief period of frontline duty, especially awkward in a war characterized by lengthy sieges rather than lightning chevauchées. The problem was exacerbated by Montfort’s chronic lack of funds preventing him hiring crusaders to remain. By 1226, the forty-day term was being claimed by the count of Champagne, eager to leave the siege of Avignon, as a right, ‘de consuetudine Gallicana’, according to Gallic/French custom.47 A later thirteenth-century preaching anecdote detailed how one knight struck a bargain that he would only extend his forty days’ service for another forty if Archdeacon William of Paris, who usefully doubled as crusade preacher and Montfort’s chief siege engineer and tactician, would grant the second plenary indulgence the crusader felt he was earning to his deceased father. A dream confirmed the ruse worked.48
Such spiritual bargaining, while of interest to schoolmen, had little place on the campaigns against the infidel. Nor did it feature in Innocent’s original scheme. Just as he could not have foreseen the diversion of his 1198 crusade, so the pope could not have prophesied in March 1208 how this new crusade would develop. It is likely Innocent anticipated a sharp policing operation that would remove the protectors of heresy and install a rigidly orthodox Catholic secular regime that, with the cooperation of a newly invigorated episcopacy, would proceed to extirpate the heresy and exterminate the heretics. The failure of the crusade to complete a quick conquest led to a laborious struggle almost for each valley and strongpoint. The crusade’s political dimensions competed with religious certainties. Before the battle of Muret in 1213, after four years of the crusade, when Simon of Montfort’s troops faced an army led by the Spanish crusading hero Peter II of Aragon, a recent ally of some of those now ranged against him, the bishop of Comminges was recorded as having to reassure the Montfortians that he would stand surety for the promise of martyrdom to those who, having confessed their sins, fell in bat
tle.49 Only a few months earlier Innocent III had temporarily ended the general offer of crusade indulgences to those who helped Montfort conquer the county of Toulouse.50 As a war against Christians, enemies could become allies and vice versa, without clear lines of conflict much beyond the ambitions of Simon of Montfort. The war was more or less continuous for over a decade, but its status as a crusade was not. After the initial euphoria of victory in 1209, while rhetoric gained recruits from the north, it failed to hold them for long or lift the operation in the south far above a regional power struggle. When his new-won political rights were at stake, Montfort fell out even with his former leader Arnold Aimery, over jurisdiction in Narbonne, to whose archbishopric the abbot had been elevated in 1212.51 In Languedoc, Innocent III’s perception of holy war as a constant necessity imposed compromise with the integrity of the ideal itself.
The focus of Arnaud Aimery’s recruitment in 1208 was northern France. From his own province of Burgundy among the first to be signed up were Duke Odo and Hervé count of Nevers. By contrast, Philip II was concerned at the pope’s attempt to confiscate the fiefs of his vassals and, in the process, reduce the pool of soldiers available for the king’s wars. Philip had not successfully resisted Innocent’s interference in his conflict with King John of England over the Angevin lands in northern France in 1202–4 only to allow the pope to parcel out lands in the south. Neither, until the Angevin struggle was resolved, would Philip dissipate his energies in Languedoc. However, he abandoned attempts to limit the recruitment of his major vassals. Philip’s response in 1208–9 fixed the subsequent Capetian position, one determined more or less openly by considerations of politics and self-interest. Even though his pious son, Louis, proved here, as in England in 1216–17, a willing military adventurer, his interventions in Languedoc, in 1215, 1219 and, as king, in 1226, were conditioned by royal security in the north and clear opportunities for dynastic advancement in the south.
Confident in the support of Odo of Burgundy and Hervé of Nevers and their promise of 500 knights, Arnold Aimery began the formal preaching campaign at Cîteaux on 14 September 1208, Holy Cross Day, six years to the day since another Cistercian general assembly had listened to Fulk of Neuilly preach the Fourth Crusade in the presence of Boniface of Montferrat. As then, the Cistercians dominated the evangelism for the Albigensian crusades, as they had for the Second and Third as well. In contrast with previous general Holy Land crusades, the area of preaching was restricted, chiefly to northern France. The count of Auvergne and the archbishop of Bordeaux also gathered an army in western France which launched a brief foray into the Agenais and Quercy in May 1209, terrorizing the Lot valley before tamely withdrawing. How far this incursion was motivated by frontier rivalry rather than enthusiasm to destroy heresy must remain obscure, although a number of heretics were tried and burnt. A similar raid into the Rouergue by the bishop of Le Puy seemed more concerned with profits from tribute than imposing religious orthodoxy.52
The main army raised in 1208–9 depended heavily on secular networks of lay and ecclesiastical lordship and financial inducement. The clerical tenth authorized by the pope was concentrated on the provinces where the crusaders came from, notably the archdiocese of Sens, while a voluntary lay subsidy was proposed for those living on the lands of the crusader nobles.53 Raising troops was left to the lay leaders. The future leader, Simon of Montfort, was recruited by Odo of Burgundy, with ‘substantial gifts’ with more to follow when Simon agreed.54 The lay commanders’ underwriting of the enterprise invited division, especially as it transpired during the 1209 campaign that the immensely grand duke of Burgundy and parvenu opportunist count of Nevers detested each other to such an extent that it was daily expected that either might resort to murder.55 Disunity on crusade was perhaps normative. However, the Albigensian campaigns proved especially vulnerable to squabbles among its short-stay generals.
The search for an acceptable lay leader foundered on Philip II’s repeated refusal to countenance his own or his son’s involvement, especially once he learnt of an anti-French alliance early in 1209 between John of England and his nephew Otto IV of Germany, both of whom held overlordship claims to different parts of Languedoc. However, Philip, still mired in marital problems that had aroused the censure of the pope, needed to maintain some association with the crusade to safeguard his interests. At an assembly at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on 1 May 1209, in the presence of Arnaud Aimery, Odo of Burgundy and the counts of Nevers and St Pol, Philip reiterated his inability to campaign in person, although he promised a royal contingent. By emphasizing that the French crusaders undertook the campaign with their king’s approval, Philip implicitly reserved the right to intervene. Any rearrangement of Languedoc’s tenurial structure would require royal approval, offering the French king further opportunities to assert his suzerainty throughout his kingdom.
The absence of an uncontested lay leader left the nominal command to Arnaud Aimery, who appeared wholly unabashed by the task. The main expedition mustered at Lyons on 24 June 1209 and set out down the Rhêne at the beginning of July. By this time the whole strategic context of the expedition had been thrown into confusion from which it never properly emerged. The expected target, Raymond of Toulouse, suddenly became an ally, no doubt to the relief of those of his vassals and close relatives who were marching with the crusaders. After trying desperately to shore up his diplomatic position and failing to persuade his nephew, young Raymond Roger Trencavel viscount of Albi, Béziers and Carcassonne to make common cause against the invaders, Raymond VI opened negotiations with the pope. Innocent was disinclined to cancel the crusade even if Raymond submitted and equally unwilling to compromise the work of his legate Arnaud Aimery. Nevertheless, he despatched two new legates to impose conditions for Raymond’s submission and readmittance into the church. At St Gilles on 18 June, Raymond accepted a long list of grievances against him, agreed to surrender certain lands, and was scourged by the legate Milo before being paraded half-naked before the coffin of the murdered Peter of Castelnau. On 22 June, Raymond took the cross, aligning himself with the invaders while securing the church’s protection from them. From St Gilles, Raymond hurried north to meet the advancing crusaders at Valence.56
Cheated of their expected victim, the crusaders turned their attention to the Trencavel lands, incontestably riddled with heretics, even though the young and engaging viscount himself was recognized as orthodox. This made little difference. The crusade needed an enemy; Raymond of Toulouse short-sightedly promoted an opportunity to destroy a troublesome vassal while escaping attack himself. Viscount Raymond Roger’s attempt to deflect his fate by submitting to Arnold Aimery was brushed aside; the legate’s Christian lexicon seemed to lack charitable forgiveness. Advancing from Montpellier, the crusaders entered Trencavel territory on 21 July. Raymond Roger fell back before them, leaving Béziers at their mercy. On 22 July, the crusaders began to dig in outside the walls of Béziers. The bishop of Béziers attempted to persuade the citizens to hand over or abandon the heretics in the city, of whose names he claimed to have a list. His overtures were rejected. The inhabitants believed their defences and food supplies would withstand assault. Reinforcements were expected. There were probably at most only 700 heretics in a population of 8–9,000. Béziers saw the besiegers in political and military, not Christian, terms; their city and their independence were being attacked. This, they reckoned, accurately as it turned out, the sacrifice of a few eccentric neighbours was unlikely to alter. However, the offer made by the bishop formed a crucial element in Catholic apologetics for what followed. The Christians of Béziers had placed themselves beyond the pale of humanity by consciously rejecting the bishop’s terms and choosing to harbour and sustain heretics. In the words of the legates’ subsequent report to the pope, their blood was on their own heads.57
Even so, Catholic reports on the sack of Béziers were keen to emphasize that the attack was not led by the nobles and knights but by the servientes, sergeants, and the unarmed mass of camp-follo
wers, a reversal of social norms suggesting literary uneasiness with events. Whoever began the attack, it seems most of the army joined in to make it quick, ruthless and devastating. The legates laconically recorded ‘our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age’.58 The citizens appear to have panicked and put up little resistance. In a later, possibly apocryphal, anecdote, when asked by priests how they could distinguish whom to kill, Abbot Arnaud Aimery, worried lest heretics escaped by pretending to be Catholics, ordered, ‘Kill them. The Lord knows who are his own.’59 Even the crowds who sheltered in the main churches were not spared. The legates estimated that 20,000 died in the carnage and called it a miracle.60 The true figure was almost certainly far less. The massacre may have been premeditated. Rumours suggested that discussions at the papal Curia in 1208 had authorized the destruction of any who resisted the crusade. The Navarrese cleric William of Tudela (d. c.1213), who composed a Provençal verse account of the early stages of the Albigensian crusades, noted that the crusade leaders decided to make examples of the inhabitants of any town taken by storm pour encourager les autres. ‘They would then find no one daring to resist them, so great would be the terror produced… that is why the inhabitants of Béziers were massacred; they were all killed, it was the worst they could do to them.’61
In that respect, the massacre at Béziers initially worked. Narbonne immediately sent in its unconditional submission and the army met no resistance as it advanced towards Carcassonne, as the countryside, towns, villages and castles were evacuated by terrified locals. In the longer term, however, the sack of Béziers hardened Languedoc opposition to the invasion across religious divisions. Thereafter adherence or opposition to the crusaders was determined largely by secular considerations. The chief religious element in the campaigns of the following two decades found expression in periodic military atrocities and regular mass execution, usually by burning, of captured heretics. However, despite the gaudy rhetoric of holy war and Simon of Montfort’s carefully constructed reputation as a warrior of Christ, between his appointment as crusade leader in 1209 and death in 1218, Cathars were hardly his main target. Most of the places where Cathars are known to have lived he left untouched, and at only a small minority of the castles and towns Montfort captured was the presence of heretics recorded.62 As Béziers demonstrated, strategy rested on realpolitik, not religion.
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