By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  Béziers, 1209

  When the excesses of medieval warfare are considered, the most common association is with the crusades. Their zealous religious motivations certainly provided a dominant element used in propaganda to dehumanize, and hence brutalize, the enemy; but the fact that crusades were fought out on the borders of Christian Europe in unfamiliar territory against peoples of an entirely different culture and society made conditions even riper for atrocity. The savage wars with Muslims in the Middle East and the Iberian Peninsula (the Reconquista) and against pagans on the fringes of eastern and northern Europe bear this out. The Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth century was every bit as vicious as the others, yet, being fought in southeastern France, it had none of their frontier antagonisms, and any societal differences were relatively minor in comparison, being merely regional rather than ethnic. It is therefore tempting to emphasize religious differences on the Albigensian Crusade when attempting to explain the quantity of blood it spilt, but this can offer only a partial answer. To understand fully, we must once again examine the part played by the military imperative.

  The Albigensian Crusade began in the summer of 1209. It had been declared against Count Raymond VI of Toulouse in the previous year by Pope Innocent III, following the murder of his papal legate, allegedly by a vassal of the Count. The legate had been in southern France to pressurize secular rulers like Raymond to extirpate the Cathar heresy. The Cathars had developed Bogomil influences from Greece and the Balkans into their dualist religion in which the good God of the spiritual world existed co-eternally in contest with the malign God of the material world. To free their souls from imprisonment in the material, human realm, Cathars aspired to a form of purity indicated by their name and achieved by their perfecti elite. This entailed prayers at fixed hours fifteen times through the day and night, and abstention from worldly things such as milk, eggs, meat and sex. It was surprisingly popular. Suppressing the heresy was proving a real headache for the Church, as many noble families and even senior churchmen had relatives who followed Catharism. With its belief in two gods, its denial of the Holy Trinity, and, most damning of all, its renunciation of the Latin Church, it was easy to consider the wayward Christianity of Catharism less as a heretical movement and more as a different religion altogether.

  The heretics’ power base lay in the city of Albi, situated north-east of Toulouse. With the Spanish engaged in their own campaigns against the Moors, the predominantly, but far from exclusively, French crusading army set out from Lyons at the end of June 1209 and marched south under the leadership of the papal legates Milo and Arnald Amalric, archbishop of Cîteaux. In a little over two weeks it had reached Montpellier, one of a handful of southern cities that remained resolutely orthodox. By this stage, Count Raymond had already submitted to the Church, forcing a change of crusading objective. The new chief enemy was now the young Raymond-Roger Trancavel, Viscount of Béziers, in whose lands the heretics had flourished unchallenged. His two greatest strongholds were the formidable cities of Béziers and his capital at Carcassonne. When Raymond-Roger’s negotiations with the crusaders failed – his penitential approach was rejected by the legates – he returned to Carcassonne to hurriedly prepare his defences there. Between his capital and the crusaders lay Béziers. Here he stopped briefly en route to stiffen the resolve of the burghers for the inevitable and imminent siege; this would buy him time to organize a military response, which would include reinforcements for Béziers.

  Béziers was a well-fortified and elevated city of some eight to ten thousand people and had a strong garrison. In the few days it had to make itself ready for the investment, it stocked up on plentiful provisions and deepened the ditches around its walls. Its confidence in withstanding a lengthy blockade until either disease and hunger or reinforcements dispersed the besiegers was based on solid, high grounds. So when the crusaders arrived outside its gates on 21 July it rejected the terms offered by its bishop addressing its citizens in the cathedral: the people of Béziers refused to hand over 222 leading heretics named on a list that still exists today in exchange for the city being spared. Nor did the majority Catholics there – not even priests – take up his warning wrapped up in advice to ‘quit the city and leave the heretics behind, so as to avoid perishing with them’.31 William of Tudela reports this in more explicit terms: ‘rather than be defeated and killed or imprisoned, their goods and clothing taken from them,’ the citizens ‘should surrender the town…. If they refused, they would be stripped of all they had and put to the sword.’32 Despite the redundant accumulation of threats – what goods were possessions to the dead anyway? – the people of Béziers acknowledged the danger of their situation but then rejected the assurances given for their safety.

  Despite religious differences and the concomitant tensions these produced, the heretics (who included some adherents of the less radical Waldensian sect) posed no real dangers to the city. But it was not just a spirit of enlightened liberalism and religious toleration that prompted this, at first hand, admirable defiance; there was more at stake than religious practice. Many of the leading heretics on the list were also leading citizens, which meant they had influence, followers, sympathizers and interests that affected many throughout the city. Secondly, and even more importantly, submitting to the crusading forces would have meant the imposition on the city of a new regime and a feared loss of their hard-earned civic liberties; the city, like a growing number in France during this period, had gained considerable independence and did not wish to relinquish it to outside forces. For all the usual religious justifications propounded by the crusading propagandists, and for all the spiritual indulgences promoted, the Albigensian Crusade was for many little more than a glorified land-grabbing opportunity. Just as the goods of heretics could be expropriated, so could their land. With completely logical and practical reasoning, the Church and the nobles participating in the crusade argued that for heresy to be eradicated, the territory it existed in needed to be under the control of orthodox and actively anti-heretical rulers. That so many heretics were related to the ruling class increased the reluctance of local lords to move against them; even when these lords submitted to the Church, it did not guarantee their enthusiastic repression of Cathars. The people of Béziers were well aware of the importance of this political dimension and it informed their position of resistance.

  The scene was therefore set for an epic siege between up to twenty thousand crusaders and an impressively strong city made ready for the oncoming trial of strength. The siege formally began on 22 July – and ended the same day.

  All the advantages possessed by the city – the strength of its fortifications, its position, its garrison, its stockpile of provisions, the resolve of its citizens – were totally negated by one act of folly. While the besiegers were having breakfast and setting up camp, a sortie burst out from the city. A French historian has called it a reconnaissance party, but given the war cries and flag-waving reported by one chronicle it was more likely to have been a daring raid, a taking of the initiative while the besiegers’ camp was unprepared and still disorganized. It may also have been an act of bravado to raise the morale and fighting spirit of the citizens. A crusader guarding the bridge was cut down and flung into the river below. The cry of ‘To arms! To arms!’ went up as the crusaders scrambled to meet this unexpected danger.

  The contemporary account provided in The Song of the Cathar Wars is unconvincing and possibly confused as to what occurred next. According to its author, the sergeants (camp followers, common soldiers and, almost certainly, mercenaries) reacted with an animated fury. Some counter-attacked in force, wielding little but clubs; others jumped down into the ditches and set to work with picks, taking the walls apart stone by stone; while still others began battering and smashing the gates. The assault was so spontaneous the attackers wore nothing but their shirts and trousers, ‘with not a pair of shoes between them’. When they forced the defenders off the ramparts, the men, women and children of Bézie
rs fled into the churches for sanctuary. ‘It was their only refuge.’33

  The narrative is somewhat problematic: it is inconceivable that soldiers would make any assault on a city’s walls, no matter how extempore, without some minimum form of protection, never mind barefoot; if the ramparts were taken, there would have been some form of escalade, not mentioned here; and picks would not have brought down the walls of Béziers in a day (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay says that the city was taken within an hour). Wiliam of Tudela also writes of the gates opening, so it is much more probable that the size and ferocity of the counter-attack in turn surprised the sortie party, which fled back to the castle hotly pursued by the crusaders, who then forced their way in before the gates had been fully closed. As we have seen, Richard I had taken Taillebourg in a similar fashion thirty years earlier. The crusaders poured into the city and sacked it utterly. As Joseph Strayer noted, ‘There followed one of the most pitiless massacres of the Middle Ages.’34

  One German chronicler alleged a few years after the event that the legate Arnald Amalric exhorted the crusaders on to wholesale slaughter with the infamous cry, ‘Kill them all; God will know his own!’ 35 It seems they tried to do just that. Afterwards, the legate matter-of-factly reported to Pope Innocent III that twenty thousand had been killed and neither age nor sex nor status saved anyone. William of Puylaurens states simply that the people ‘fled for refuge to their churches’, where the crusaders ‘massacred many thousands of them’.36 Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay says that the slaughter was not quite total, as ‘the crusaders killed almost all the inhabitants from the youngest to the oldest’, ‘seven thousand’ of the ‘shameless dogs’ meeting their just end in the church of Mary Magdalene.37 William of Tudela furnishes his readers with the most detail. The citizens

  hurriedly took refuge in the high church. The priests put on vestments for a mass of the dead and had the church bells rung as for a funeral…. [The crusaders] were in a frenzy, quite unafraid of death, killing everyone they could find and winning enormous wealth…. They massacred them at Béziers, killing them all. It was the worst they could do to them. And they killed everyone who fled into the church; no cross or altar or crucifix could save them…. They killed the clergy too, and the women and children. I doubt if one person came out alive. [The crusaders] burned the town, burned the women and children, old men and young, and the clerks vested and singing mass there inside the church.38

  Peter’s slightly qualified massacre is far more likely than the utter annihilation of the other accounts, for reasons given in the discussion on the sack of Jerusalem above. The rounded figure of twenty thousand is considered a gross exaggeration for a town perhaps less than half that size; however, it should be remembered that its numbers would have been inflated by the influx of refugees from the surrounding areas (one recent respected study puts the number who perished at fifteen thousand). The Church of Mary Magdalene simply did not have the capacity to hold anywhere near seven thousand people. But there can be no doubt not only that the slaughter was extensive even by the standards of the time, and also that the non-combatant victims numbered women, children and priests among their dead. Heretics – the cause of the crusade – were a minority of those killed.

  There are both parallels to and differences from the massacre at Jerusalem. The most obvious difference is that the crusaders at Béziers had experienced only the minutest fraction of the hardships of the crusaders in the Holy Land. They had marched through safe territory in France for most of the brief campaign, and the ‘siege’ had lasted barely twenty-four hours between their arrival at the city and its fall. No wonder the sources make no reference to the deprivations and dangers usually inseparable from besieging a stronghold. There was none of the years of pent-up emotion and vengeance fomented in the hostile deserts of the Middle East. Nor did Béziers have any magical hold on the crusaders’ hearts and souls. Religious fervour was still present, of course, but it can hardly compare with that generated by the ultimate pilgrimage.

  An obvious similarity, as with all sackings, is the matter of booty. Here we have one contributing explanation for the massacre, but neither the main nor the most interesting one. However, as a factor, it requires a little examination, mainly for the light it sheds on the larger question of population massacres. William of Tudela offers some very useful information in his account of Béziers. He blames the army’s rabble for the sack of the city: ‘raving, beggarly’, ‘filthy stinking wretches’ and ‘wretched’ soldiers in one translation; ‘ruffians’, ‘damnable foot soldiers’, ‘mercenaries’ and ‘brigands’ in others.39 The legates’ report to Rome confirms that it was the lower orders who were first to attack the city. William is making an effort to distance the knightly element of the crusade – the nobility, chivalry and true soldiers of Christ – from the riff-raff responsible for the massacre. This may be a further indication that women, children and priests were victims; had only the male population been killed, the language offers a hint that there would not have been the need for this dissociation to be highlighted. The infantry were certainly the first into the city. Their rapid response precipitated a more general assault, but given the indications of their unpreparedness, it would seem probable that the knights would take even longer to get kitted up for battle. By the time the cavalry entered the city, the killing and looting had gathered its full, horrific momentum.

  It is hard to envisage the scenes at Béziers as anything but apocalyptic chaos, a Breughel-style canvas of diabolical anarchy depicting death, fire and misery. Yet when the knights arrived, they immediately imposed some sort of order onto this hellish rampage. They feared they were losing out on the seizing of booty. William of Tudela says of the ordinary soldiers’ initial haul of plunder:

  Rich for life they’ll be, if they can keep it! But very soon they’ll be forced to let it go, for the French knights are going to claim it though it was the foot soldiers that won it…. The foot soldiers had settled into the houses they had taken, all of them full of riches and treasure, but when the French discovered this they went nearly mad with rage and drove the soldiers out with clubs, like dogs…. The captain and his men expected to enjoy the wealth they had taken and be rich for evermore.40

  When the barons took their booty from them, the soldiers sent up a cry of ‘Burn it! Burn it!’ and torched the city so extensively the cathedral collapsed in flames. The part played by the knights begs the question: if they were able to stop the looting, why had they not stopped the indiscriminate slaughter? They were moved to action not by horror at the pleading of the non-belligerents being struck down around them, but by horror at the prospect of not gaining their full and rightful share of the plunder. For the knights, saving the lives of the citizens of Béziers was at best secondary to saving the city’s wealth for themselves; at worst, it reflected either a policy of total indifference or even the successful implementation of planned massacre.

  The Song of the Cathar Wars informs us that a form of mass execution was part of crusader policy from before the start. The leaders of the crusade, including the clergy, had already taken the ‘tactical decision’ by which they ‘all agreed that at every castle the army approached, a garrison that refused to surrender would be slaughtered wholesale, once the castle had been taken by storm’. The purpose was an intentional strategy of inducing maximum fear: ‘They would then meet with no resistance anywhere, as men would be so terrified at what had already happened…. That is why they massacred them at Béziers, killing them all.’ Such ruthlessness proved to be most effective. William vindicates the good sense of the crusaders’ terror tactics when he adds that this was how Fanjeaux and Montréal and all the country were easily taken later in the crusade, ‘otherwise, I promise you, they could never have stormed them’.41 William claims that he learned from another source that as far back as the announcement of the crusade, a papal council had called for the utter destruction of all who resisted. The bishop of Béziers also warned the citizens of the fatal consequences of resista
nce just before the sack started. Certainly the road to Carcassonne was left open to the crusaders, as garrisons deserted their stations when they heard of what had befallen Béziers.

  If such a hard and callous plan speeded up the taking of towns, then it fulfilled its purpose. Less time spent on a siege meant less expenditure, less loss of crusading lives, less risk from disease and relief forces and less loss of manpower (many knights were serving on the basis of a forty-day obligation). There is absolutely no indication that William finds the policy anything other than to be expected and sensibly efficient, especially when dealing with heretics. However, his disgust at the common soldiers at Béziers suggests that the killing got out of hand here, claiming the lives not just of the garrison and heretics, but of non-combatant Catholics also. But given the knights’ preoccupation with booty over lives, and the later massacres that marked the crusade – five years later at Casseneuil, in 1214, Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay says that the crusaders ‘put to the sword anyone they came across’42 – the distinction between garrison soldiers and non-combatants was not one that much troubled anyone as they poured into the towns that fell to them, be they lowly common soldiers or the elite of chivalry.

  William of Tudela’s account claims that it was not the intention to burn Béziers. This has led to some recent suggestions that the crusade leaders, chafing at the booty that went up in flames in Béziers, wanted to take all the enemy strongholds intact, primarily as a way of preserving and maximizing the plunder within. However, the crusade’s campaign trail could be tracked by the smoking towns it left in its wake. It is more accurate to say that the crusaders wished to have the towns exhaustively ransacked before the incendiaries went to work. One contemporary source offers an insight into the thinking of the crusaders on what they should do with the places that fell into their hands. After taking the capital Carcassonne, the crusaders held a council which decided not to raze it, because ‘if the city were altogether destroyed, there would not be found a nobleman of the army who would undertake the government of the country’.43 The city became the base of the whole crusade.