Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 3
The Dominicans and the road to crusade
Domingo (Dominic) Guzmán (1170–1221, canonized as St Dominic in 1234), from Castile, travelled through Cathar country in 1207 with his accomplice Diego, the bishop of Osma. They were struck by the sight of the humble and committed Perfects, in stark contrast to most of the Cistercians who travelled around in large and luxurious entourages, obviously benefitting materially from the wealth of the Church. Inspired to counter-imitation of the Perfects, Dominic walked barefoot through the region begging for alms and preaching the true Church, eventually persuading the papal legates to follow his example. For around two years Dominic and his cronies publicly debated the Cathars in various towns and cities of the Languedoc. The invective was powerful on both sides, and Dominic was in many ways trying to out-Cathar the Cathars. Dominic Guzmán was certainly determined. He once argued all night against a Toulouse innkeeper who was a Cathar to win him back to the Catholic church.11 Depite the branding of the Languedoc as ‘Cathar Country’, today it is Dominic who is commemorated with a street name in modern Carcassonne, not a famous Cathar like Guilhabert de Castres.
But the campaign, although a noble effort in comparison with the corruption that had preceded it and the violence that would follow, was not generally very productive if measured in the quantity of souls that were saved for Catholicism. However, there were positives: 150 Believers were converted after a debate in Montréal, and it did result in the foundation of the Dominicans as an order. Defined by their founder’s tireless and terrier-like pursuit of heretics, the Dominicans would get their own back on the intractable Cathars when the Inquisition moved in.
The pope had three legates in the Languedoc, obnoxious and hated members of the Cistercian order: Peter of Castelnau, Ralph of Fontfroide and Arnold Amaury (who would play a major part in the oncoming crusade). Peter of Castelnau was especially unpopular with the crowds and with Raymond VI of Toulouse, on whom he served an impromptu excommunication when Raymond refused to cease fighting local conflicts in order to persecute the heretics. Everything changed when, on 13 January 1208, Peter of Castelnau was murdered as he waited for a ferry to cross the Rhône on his way back to Rome.12
Innocent III was convinced that Raymond VI of Toulouse was behind the killing because Peter of Castelnau had tried, unsuccessfully, to coerce Raymond into persecuting heretics. There was no apology forthcoming from Raymond. According to the story, Innocent III buried his head in his hands when he heard the news and went away to a private garden to pray. On 10 March 1208 Innocent III called for a crusade against the region. This really was a momentous decision because previous and subsequent crusades were directed towards the East and principally, or notionally, against Muslim enemies. This was to be a crusade against western European Christians, in the heart of Christendom.
Arnold Amaury and Fulk of Marseilles spent 1208 gaining support from kings and aristocrats.13 Any participating crusaders were to be offered a full range of spiritual and material benefits. Their past, present – and even future – sins14 would be officially forgiven, their debts suspended and those to Jewish moneylenders cancelled; they would be able to plunder and land-grab.
In comparison to the difficulties involved in travelling to the Holy Land, the Languedoc was a very convenient location for a crusade. Crusaders only had to serve a 40-day term. Most of the crusaders were from the northern kingdom of France and the German-speaking lands. The French king, Philip II Augustus (reigned 1180–1223), attempted to resist the call to crusade as he was busy with other concerns and conflicts. He reluctantly agreed to it after months of badgering, but refused to lead it in person. The Albigensian Crusade would go ahead because of the determination of a single man: Pope Innocent III. Although this was not a papal army, controlled by the pope, as is sometimes misconstrued in the popular mind, the crusade was conceived and launched by the pope and the army was initially led by the papal legate, Arnold Amaury.
Crush the Templars
In the same year as Pope Innocent III declared the start of the Albigensian Crusade he accused the Templars not only of pride and arrogance but also necromancy.
The Templars were strong in the Languedoc. The Templars revered John the Baptist while the Cathars rejected Catholicism’s water baptism and believed that John was sent by the devil to lead people away from Jesus. Despite this divide, the Templars accepted Cathars and in some parts of the Languedoc Cathars outnumbered Catholics in the Templar preceptories. The sixth grandmaster of the Templars, from 1156 to 1169, Bertrand de Blancfort was actually from a Cathar family.15
The Templars had always accepted excommunicates into their organization in the East, which was explained as being due to a lack of manpower. A western European Christian who had been excommunicated for some political reason was still, in the East, on the same side. However, just as it was for the Cathars, the kingdom of France would prove to be the undoing of the Templars. It is quite possible that the ‘success’ of the Albigensian Crusade, which indeed it was when viewed from the perspective of the French monarchy, inspired Philip II Augustus to move against the Templars, who represented a powerful independent interest in his kingdom. The same slander that was hurled at the Cathars, and possibly gave them their name (of delivering an obscene kiss to the anus of a cat), was applied to the Templars.
The Templars, the ultimate crusaders, didn’t fight during the Albigensian Crusade, rather they sheltered Cathars and even allowed Cathars to be buried on Templar grounds. The Inquisition later dug up Cathar corpses so they could be burnt for heresy.16
Given the difference in attitudes to John the Baptist, the overall picture that emerges means we should expect the Templars to be unsympathetic to the Cathars. Bernard of Clairvaux was a mentor to and promoter of the early Templars and an enemy of the Cathars. And yet, within a century, we find these hardened warriors and wealthy bankers sheltering Cathars, rather than fighting against them, and accused of heresy, they were vanquished by the forces from northern France that destroyed the Cathars.
The butchering of Béziers
On 18 June 1209, Raymond VI was whipped naked outside a church in front of the papal legate. Twenty-four bishops and a crowd of Raymond’s fellow Toulousians then swore allegiance to the Catholic Church. He would have to crusade for 40 days; seven of his castles were to be forfeit; he was to employ no mercenaries; and all Jews were to be dismissed from his service. Raymond Roger Trencavel, son of Roger II, also offered to submit to the Church but Amaury refused to accept his offer, preferring to target Trencavel and his dominions as supporters of heresy.
The crusading army assembled at Lyon and staggered towards the Languedoc. It consisted not only of mounted knights, archers and foot soldiers, but of all sorts of professions necessary to feed and maintain an army: cooks, servants, carpenters, metalworkers, priests and, straggling at the back, a beggar army of the underclasses; known in French as ribauds, these hangers-on were caught up by the rhetoric of crusade and had more chance of food and adventure than they would have had by remaining in the cities. The first location in the army’s sights was to be Trencavel’s city of Béziers, which was reached after a month-long march down the Rhône valley from Lyon.
William of Tudela, a supporter of the crusade, would write the first part of The Song of the Cathar Wars. He was a steadfast Catholic, hated the Cathars and approved of many of the atrocities performed; he was also skilled in divination. ‘He had long studied geomancy and was skilled in this art, so that he knew that fire and devastation would lay the whole region waste, that the rich citizens would lose all the wealth they had stored up, and the knights would flee, sad and defeated, into exile in other lands, all because of the insane belief held in that country.’17 There is no better illustration of the bizarre nature of the late Middle Ages than this. A rigid Catholic who wrote a celebratory saga of a vicious war against heretics can nevertheless, immediately after invoking the Trinity, boast that he already knew it was going to happen because of his excellence at divination.
It was on 22 July, the feast day of St Mary Magdalene, popularly associated with the Cathars, in 1209 that the crusaders invaded Béziers. There were said to be 222 Cathars in Béziers, which had a population of over 10,000.18 Trencavel had already left Béziers for heavily fortified Carcassonne, taking the city’s Jews with him. In 1205 the elderly Catholic bishop of Béziers had declined to turn over its Cathars, but faced with the huge force of crusaders and the papal legate he now advised the townspeople to hand them over. The town elders refused to do it, but the bishop left with a list of names. The Cathars were from a wide range of employment and class, including ‘a baron, four doctors, and a medley of craftsmen: hosiers, blacksmiths, cobblers, a carpenter, weaver, saddler, corn-merchant, cutler, tailor, taverner, baker, money-lender.’19
The ribauds usually served as cannon-fodder but at Béziers they had an unexpected influence. The beggars, armed only with daggers and clubs, had come to the forefront of the army and were loitering beneath the walls. When a band of young men from Béziers came out from the gate, carrying improvised flags of white cloth, the beggars took their chance and rushed the young men, forcing their way into the city and slaughtering any of the surprised inhabitants who stood in their way. The crusaders had no way of distinguishing the small percentage of Cathars from the Catholic inhabitants. It was then that Arnold Amaury was reputed to have said, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’20 It was all over within three hours.
Surviving townspeople had retreated into the cathedral and churches, hoping for sanctuary, but those in the cathedral of Saint Nazaire were cudgelled to death, and over a thousand sheltering in the church of Mary Magdelene were butchered by knife and club, including Catholic priests who were reputedly praying and saying mass. The death toll was possibly around 15,000 and the timber buildings were set alight.
Narbonne was next on the list, but surrendered instantly having heard the news of Béziers. So the crusaders set forth for Carcassonne, an ancient citadel, founded by Visigoths in the 6th century. The fortifications were considerable and had been strengthened extensively in the 12th century. Although the walls were able to withstand heavy siege, the citadel had no independent water source.
Raymond Roger Trencavel owed his allegiance to King Peter II of Aragon. Peter II arrived in response to the crusade and told Trencavel to give up the heretics of Carcassonne. But Amaury would only offer Trencavel safe passage once he had given up the city, leaving its fate to the discretion (or lack of) of the crusaders. Peter II returned to Aragon in protest against the unfairness of this offer – ‘When donkeys fly we shall see that happen,’21 he is reported to have commented, and in doing so left Trencavel at the mercy of a huge army. The crusaders arrived on 1 August and on 3 August they attacked, with the clerics leading the singing of ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’, which had become the theme tune of the Albigensian Crusade.22
The siege of Carcassonne
Having visited Carcassonne in August I can testify to the oppressive summer heat. The modern citadel is huge, magnificent and well maintained, much of it rebuilt after the Cathar wars and restored and altered extensively in the 19th century by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who had also masterminded the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris. The conical fairytale castle towers are roofed steeply with the grey slate of northern France rather than the native terracotta tiles of the south applied at a gentle angle: it unintentionally symbolizes the victory of northern France over the Languedoc.
I had heard that the citadel was very touristy, but I hadn’t quite expected the extent of it. As soon as we entered the massive front gate, negotiating the young women in medieval costume who handed out flyers for forthcoming events, we saw the steep, central, narrow medieval street, filled with gift shops and eateries. If airports can double as malls, why not medieval castles? The entire citadel was like this, packed full with retail chains and food outlets, with the exception of the outer walls, along which it is possible to walk in relative peace and take photographs of the surrounding countryside through the narrow views allowed by the arrow slits.
The tourist traffic was so heavy in the main street of the citadel that we were standing stationary, packed in with the other tourists like sardines in a tin. The gift shops have plastic swords and shields, dragons and princesses, and models of crusader knights and Cathar knights, which look just like the crusader models on neighbouring shelves but with yellow Cathar or Languedoc crosses instead of the red crusader cross. I confess to buying a Languedoc cross in reconstituted stone (one arm of which snapped during the return flight) and a small gargoyle. These shops also stock the older kind of tourist memorabilia I remember adorning family mantlepieces: china plates and cups decorated with painted or transferred landscapes and coats of arms.
The first eating places offer fast food, halal kebabs (in memory of the Saracens?) and unkosher cheeseburgers, but further in the restaurants are more typically French. Streets have names of local notables, including Tren-cavel. The costumed jongleurs, dames and knights are saved for the evening jousting tournaments and banquets. It’s easy to despise the commercialism – indeed, it’s the default option – but it gives some life to the medieval streets, brings employment to the town and the money to maintain the citadel’s structure, which is in fine nick. It’s not Disneyland, not quite yet.
The most crass of the available activities must be La Maison Hantée, Das Geisterhaus, or the Haunted House. Do visitors really want to be haunted by the ghosts of those who died in the 1209 siege of Carcassonne? Of parched, starved old women and men, or infants dead from dysentery? It is not haunted by the Cathar Perfects, for they, according to their beliefs, have moved on to the heavenly realm.
In the August heat of the 13th century it had taken only two weeks for the besieged city, swollen with sheltering local peasants and its water cut off, to surrender. While I was hot and thirsty myself, I thought of the Carcassonians besieged by French forces, the second city attacked in the campaign, surviving on rainwater from cisterns.
Trencavel had prepared for a siege by destroying as much of the farmland and dwellings around the city as he could – a scorched earth tactic designed to hinder the crusaders’ stay in the region. The attacking and defending forces settled into the typical routines of medieval siege warfare: the crusaders constructing huge catapults with which to batter the walls and terrify the population, while the townspeople cascaded them with arrows, stones, boiling water and oil.
If the defenders of Carcassonne had held out a little longer they might have beaten the siege because many of the crusaders were coming to the end of their 40-day term of service and could not be compelled to remain. But, on 14 August, suffering from thirst and illness, Trencavel and some of his men went out to parley with the crusaders. The townspeople would be allowed to leave with only the clothes on their backs. Trencavel himself was imprisoned in a dungeon in Carcassonne, and not given the safe conduct he had been promised during the parley, but the residents of Carcassone were allowed to leave as per the terms. No attempt was made to apprehend the Cathar residents, which had supposedly been the whole point of the siege.
This is something of a mystery: had the Cathars of Carcassonne somehow escaped, or the crusaders been told that there were no Cathars present? Raymond Roger Trencavel paid the full price, however, and on 10 November was found dead in his cell. The citadel was made into a base for the crusaders, now led by Simon de Montfort, who was made lord of Carcassonne.
De Montfort was to become a major figure in the campaign. He was a typical medieval mix of chivalry and cruelty, piety and corruption, sincerity and opportunism. When he was on the Fourth Crusade he had refused to plunder the Adriatic port of Zara as it was a Christian city and the crusaders had intended to fight against Muslims rather than people of their own religion. Yet he would show no comparable scruples during the Albigensian Crusade.
Here we have another disorienting feature of the Middle Ages. We are used to thinking of European countries in terms of their modern nation-state boundaries. But in those times allegiances were owed in criss-crossing directions. Peter II of Aragon was the king to whom the nobles of the Languedoc owed allegiance. Who claimed dominion over the neighbouring territory to the west of the Languedoc? The king of England. Even Richard the Lionheart makes an entry into the history of the Albigensian Crusade. Simon de Montfort was titular Earl of Leicester in England, though he never took up the claim in person. It was his fourth and youngest son, also called Simon, who became Earl of Leicester, and then led the challenge against King John that led to the unique incidence of the king’s power being diminished and rights given to the aristocracy by means of the Magna Carta (part of a series of events which many have seen as important links in the chain that resulted in the parliamentary democracies that we now have in the West – but at the time, as now, it was also a result of greedy robber barons seizing influence for themselves).
Many of the crusader knights now departed, having served the statutory 40 days. Having secured Carcassonne, the army went onwards to Bram in April 1210, besieging it for only three days before taking it. Simon, the ethical crusader, acted swiftly. He sent 100 of Bram’s defenders on a forced march to Cabaret – which de Montfort would attack the next year – 20 miles away. But first he cut off the noses and upper lips of all the men and blinded them, with the exception of one man who was to lead the sightless band.
After this atrocity, Minerve was next. In June it was bombarded with rocks from a trebuchet named the Bad Neighbour. The town was cut off from its water supply, so the crusaders simply waited for the townspeople’s surrender. This time de Montfort was willing to spare all the inhabitants in exchange for the town and all its lands. Unfortunately for the Cathars of Minerve, the papal legate Amaury arrived and insisted that all the people swore allegiance to the Catholic Church before they would be set free. The Cathars conditions of purity forbade them from swearing any oath whatsoever. Although three Believers converted to Catholicism, all 140 Perfects were burnt alive.
