Lost Teachings of the Cathars, page 4
Next were Montréal, Termes and Puylaurens, all of which fell easily, and then Lavaur in the spring of 1211, scene of the next major war crime. The walls were breached on 3 May and the 80 knights who defended the town were hanged, contrary to the medieval rules of war. In addition, Aimery, lord of Montréal, was hanged and his sister Geralda was thrown down a well because she had sheltered Cathars who had fled from other cities; 400 Cathars were burnt at the stake, a number exceeding even the infamous burning at Montségur. Towards the end of May an additional 50–100 Cathars were burnt at Les Cassès.23
The end draws nigh
A quieter time followed, and on 17 January 1213 the crusade was suspended by Innocent III in response to the complaints of Peter II of Aragon, who had achieved a significant victory against Moorish forces in Andalucía in 1212 and thus commanded some respect in Christendom. The pope was persuaded by Arnold Amaury to relaunch it on 21 May of that year, having convinced Innocent that the Cathars were still a substantial threat.
On 12 September 1213 the crusaders fought the Battle of Muret, but this was not the usual one-sided action but warfare between Simon de Montfort’s army and that of Peter II, who finally took action to regain the lands that should have been under his jurisdiction. The army of the south was routed and Peter was killed.
In 1215 Simon de Montfort was made lord of the Languedoc in its entirety. In 1216 Innocent III died and in the subsequent shift of power the nobles of the Languedoc regained some confidence. Simon de Montfort responded by attacking Toulouse in August. Under siege, the city’s important men were persuaded to leave the safety of the city walls by Fulk of Marseille, now bishop of Toulouse, whereupon they were promptly clapped in irons and the city was invaded by rapacious crusaders who spent an entire month plundering the citadel. De Montfort was in no position to expel the entire populace of the third-largest city in the Christian West – exceeded in population, culture and wealth only by Paris and Venice – he imposed heavy taxes on the nobles, then took the bulk of his warband elsewhere.
The people of Toulouse prepared for resistance and on 13 September 1217 Raymond VI returned and started to repair the defences. Simon came back, intent on recapturing the city, but found his forces fruitlessly besieging Toulouse throughout the winter and spring. In June 1218 the crusaders finally started using their war machines again. Those who live by the catapult die by the catapult and on 25 June Simon de Montfort was killed outside Toulouse by a stone shot from a catapult inside, operated by women and girls.
As the unknown Catholic but southern-sympathetic chronicler of the second part of The Song of the Cathar Wars wrote: ‘If by killing men and shedding blood, by damning souls and causing deaths, by trusting evil counsels, by setting fires, destroying men, dishonouring paratge [the recognition of esteem in the Languedoc], seizing lands and encouraging pride, by kindling evil and quenching good, by killing women and slaughtering children, a man can in this world win Jesus Christ, certainly Count Simon wears a crown and shines in heaven above.’24
The campaign reached a peak of destruction in 1219, which saw the Massacre of Marmande when 7,000 inhabitants of that market town were killed by forces led by Prince Louis of France. From then on the crusade blundered on but had in reality been won. The 1220s saw the deaths of most of the major players: Dominic Guzmán (1221), Raymond VI of Toulouse (1222), Philip II Augustus of France (1223), Raymond Roger of Foix (1223) and Arnold Amaury (1225).
In 1224 the Languedoc was given to the French throne by Amaury and in 1226 Philip II Augustus’s son, the future Louis VIII, led his crusade against the south, which culminated in the 1228 siege of Toulouse and the scorched earth policy that accompanied it. The crusade ended in 1229 and Raymond VII allowed himself to be flogged in Paris. Its sequel, the Inquisition, began in 1231 and shifted to the Languedoc in 1233.
But the Cathars were not yet defeated (though they would be, within decades.) The Cathar council of Pieusse of 1226 assembled around 100 Perfects, and even in the final years of the crusade Cathars were occupied with such administrative details as bishopric boundaries and documentation.
The Albigensian Crusade had wreaked devastation across the Languedoc and changed its identity and the political climate forever. But the Cathars still existed and sympathy for them was still high among the ordinary people of southern France. It would take a couple of welltargeted, large-scale sieges in the following decades and some brilliantly manipulative religious engineering to stamp the Cathars out completely.
In July 1211 in Beaucaire the ghost of a recently deceased 11-yearold boy named Guilhem appeared to his female cousin. Over an extended sequence of spectral appearances, Guilhem became quite a local celebrity, sometimes accompanied by his guardian angel Michael and once with a horned demon. The local priest became involved in the seances with the girl and he asked Guilhem about purgatory and the conditions of existence after death, most of which fitted in neatly with Catholic doctrine. About God Guilhem was less specific, but he had one nugget to offer: ‘Nothing had pleased God so much as the death and extermination of the Albigensians.’25
So much for the history of crime. The crusade could only confirm the beliefs of the Cathars: surely this God, who was so pleased by their death and extermination, could only be Satan? Hildegard of Bingen was right that Satan had emerged from the bottomless pit, but wrong about which side he supported.
Chapter 2
Hammer of
the Heretics:
The Inquisition
The battle for bodies had been won; the next stage of religious warfare was the battle for souls. The Church could move from the conquest of a geographical region to the domination of the inner realm. Prior to the Albigensian Crusade, Bernard de Clairvaux, Dominic Guzmán and others had tried to use the power of argument to draw people away from Catharism. Leaving aside the basic question of why the Cathars shouldn’t have been left alone to pursue their own religious path, the use of theological argument and exemplary life practice isn’t in itself an unreasonable way of converting people to your own faith. After all, the Cathars themselves would preach or teach their own myth and proselytize to Catholics with more or less the same intention.
The Church’s strategy would combine sophisticated intellectual ability with physical coercion, imprisonment, social manipulation, public shaming and capital punishment. The name of the Catholic organization convened to stamp out the smouldering ashes of Catharism is familiar even to those who have never heard of the Cathars or who are religiously illiterate: the papal Inquisition.
The Inquisition was founded in 1229 to deal with heresy – specifically to eliminate the Cathars and to a lesser extent the Waldensians. It remained active in the Languedoc for a century and would be Christianity’s secret police for centuries more. In 1233 the Inquisition moved into the Languedoc, initially in three cities: Toulouse, Albi and Carcassonne. Inquisitors were usually friars of the Dominican order, initiated by Dominic Guzmán, supposedly in a spirit of poverty and reason. Their powers of arrest and trial powers were intended originally for the disciplining of Catholic clergy.
As G I Gurdjieff commented in illustration of his Law of Octaves, whereby a process deviates and changes direction unless it receives periodic shocks or forces from outside to keep it on track: ‘Think how many turns the line of development of forces must have taken to come from the Gospel preaching of love to the Inquisition; or to go from the ascetics of the early centuries studying esoteric Christianity to the scholastics who calculated how many angels could be placed on the point of a needle.’1
Brutal inquisitors
Conrad of Marburg was the first Inquisitor, mandated by Pope Gregory IX in 1227 to wreak havoc in the Rhineland. Accompanied by two vicious henchmen, Conrad of Marburg was responsible not only for the deaths of Cathars and other heretics but also for the hundreds or thousands of ignorant and innocent Catholic peasants who were caught up in his machinations.2 He finally overstepped his mark in claiming Count Henry II of Sayn in northern Rhineland as a heretic. In a scene straight out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch (who, a controversial scholar has claimed, was a Cathar – see Chapter 11, ‘Surviving the Apocalypse’), Count Henry had supposedly been seen travelling to an orgy on the back of a giant crab. Not unreasonably Henry II insisted on a trial, which was then rigged by Conrad to include witnesses who were known enemies of Henry. Two archbishops complained about Conrad’s tactics, and, never one to give ground, Conrad appealed to Gregory IX to convene a crusade against Count Henry II’s territory. It was a step too far, and on 30 July 1233 Conrad was murdered by a Franciscan. It is a recurrent theme in the Inquisition, and in its later secular counterparts, that in the frenzied desire to punish transgressors, the innocent become targets too, like machine gun fire sprayed at a crowd.
Robert the Bulgarian, Inquisitor in northern France and Flanders, achieved a similar reputation, burning 180 heretics in Mont Aimé in Champagne in 1239. He continued his killing spree until 1244. His epithet probably indicated that he had been a Bogomil or Cathar and was, in the words of the Church, a ‘returning heretic’, as were the two brutal companions of Conrad. Conrad’s title was Inquisitor haereticae Pravitatis (‘Inquisitor against heretical depravity’). Robert was known as the ‘Hammer of the heretics’ and the Inquisitors more generally became known as the ‘Hounds of God’, a pun on Dominican as domini canus.3 Perhaps the most notorious of these early Inquisitors was Bernard Gui, the author of a manual for Inquisitors, who set up his base of operations at a Dominican convent in Toulouse, which became nicknamed ‘L’Hôtel de l’Inquisition’.
People hated the Inquisitors. Alain of Lille, a Catholic theologian, thought that the term ‘Cathar’ was derived from ‘cat’ because Lucifer appeared to them as a cat and they kissed the cat’s anus during rituals (and then, according to Conrad of Marburg, went on to have incestuous orgies). In a reversal of the slander of witchcraft attributed to Cathars, people said that evil spirits in the form of two cats had accompanied the soul of the dying inquisitor Geoffrey d’Ablis.4
A totalitarian orthodoxy
It was in response to uncontainable individualistic Inquisitors such as Conrad and Robert that the efficient machinery of the official Inquisition was developed. The Inquisition began its investigations in the Languedoc in 1233, the same year that Conrad died.
The Inquisition did not consider itself a mere one-off expedient convened to deal with a temporary threat, rather it was as if it had always existed in potential form, ready to spring into life whenever Satan sent his heretical wolves into the sheepfold of Christendom. In a process of typical medieval mythmaking, the Inquisitors invoked biblical paradigms and precedents for their enterprise, from Jesus back through John the Baptist, King David, Moses down to the first interrogation that ever occurred: God’s questioning of Adam in the Garden of Eden after the first man had eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Seemingly, anyone in the Bible who had ever accused anyone else of anything at all was a proto-Inquisitor. With that kind of pedigree there was no reason at all for the medieval Inquisitors of the Languedoc to hold back.
The arrival of the Inquisition in the Languedoc turned a stable and sophisticated society upside down. Inquisitors travelled and worked in pairs, perhaps in response to the Cathars’ own practice of pairing up. But the Inquisitors themselves were merely the tip of the iceberg, the public face of a clandestine bureaucracy that was similar to the Soviet KGB or East German Stasi. Scribes and clerks recorded and filed the confessions. Legal apparatchiks, constables, bailiffs, attorneys, prison wardens, torturers and executioners enacted the institutional violence on which the Inquisition’s theological-dogmatic edifice was founded. A totalitarian orthodoxy was enforced at every level of society. Jonathan Kirsch has compared the bureaucracy to ‘the clerks who devised the railroad schedule for Auschwitz, showed up every day and simply did their jobs’.5 It was persecution on an industrial scale and the template of every secret police to come.
When Inquisitors arrived in a town or village the entire population was summoned to a public assembly. Anyone who held a heterodox belief was expected to confess there and then, and absence from the assembly was seen as an immediate admission of heretical guilt. All adults were expected to profess their Catholic faith, swear an oath against heresy and promise to attend confession three times a year. Those accused of being Cathars, or suspected of having connections or sympathies, were then questioned carefully, the interviews being recorded by scriveners so they could be cross-referenced. Much of our knowledge of the Cathars comes from these surviving Inquisition records, together with the more formal anti-heretical writings intended to educate other Inquisitors or to provide instruction on identifying heretics. Sometimes, as in the case of Montaillou, 6 an entire village could be questioned.
The Inquisition’s technique of cross-referencing and intelligencegathering meant that it was important for Inquisitors to get suspects to grass on their families, shop their friends, neighbours and spiritual mentors. Ratting on others might lead to a sentence being commuted and could be the difference between long-term imprisonment and merely having to wear the yellow cross. One ex-Cathar supergrass gave up the names of 169 other people during her interrogation.
Homes, including cellars and roofspaces and outbuildings, all prime hiding places, could be systematically invaded by the Inquisition. Houses found to harbour heretics could be destroyed.
Cathars who confessed their allegiances or who were released after interrogation were made to wear two yellow crosses sewn onto their clothes and often forcibly relocated to areas in which there was no heresy. Usually such survivors were Believers; the Perfects were burnt. Cathars who were not imprisoned were unable to hold any kind of public office and had to attend mass and confession every Sunday for the rest of their lives. The yellow cross became the sign of a social pariah, its stigma affecting the social standing of an individual, which was so important in the Languedoc. Some convicted Cathars would leave their yellow-crossed garments hanging on a tree while they changed into plain garb. Although it has become popular in modern imagery as an icon of sympathy with the Cathars, it was never reclaimed by the Cathars as their own symbol. It was nicknamed las dabanadaros, which means ‘reel’ or ‘winding machine’ in Occitan. Its sense is unknown, but it may be that it alluded to the idea of the Church reeling them in or winding or retracting them. Peter Maury, the priest of Montaillou, accepted bribes to ignore Cathars who were not wearing their crosses.
Convicted heretics were forbidden to act as doctors so that the sick and the dying would not be able to receive the consolamentum or endura from a physician who might be a Perfect. As far as the Inquisition was concerned, heresy was an infection – to be isolated and eradicated.
Perversely, to possess an Old or New Testament was a sign of heresy, particularly if the books were in the vernacular Occitan language.7 Psalters and breviaries were acceptable as long as they were in Latin. Although in general the Cathars believed the Old Testament was largely the work of Satan, some of them possessed Bibles, but most Cathar holy books, which were used for the consolamentum, consist of either all four gospels of the New Testament or just the Gospel of John.
The Perfects were the Inquisitors’ principal targets but it was important to identify Believers too, who provided the support network. The Inquisition records are full of accounts of an individual seen adoring a Perfect: that is, performing the melioramentum, which was often just a Cathar way of saying hello. Inquisitors also particularly wanted to know if their subjects believed in the resurrection of the body. Denial of this, or even uncertainty of the doctrine, was a sure sign that person was a heretic.
Some Inquisitors were turncoats, often motivated by personal gain, a desire for power or out of self-preservation. Others had genuine grudges against the Cathars who, like the rest of humanity, were not universally fair and compassionate. Peter of Verona in Italy was one such turncoat. The son of Cathar parents, he became a leading Inquisitor and recruited Rainer Sacconi, another ex-Cathar and the author of an influential summa, which preserves many details of Catharism. Peter was an energetic persecutor, hounding Cathars and Waldensians in northern Italy. He was murdered in 1252 on the way to Milan. Curiously, his life story was included in The Golden Legend, an anthology of saints’ lives, in which he is depicted, having been canonized a year after his death, as a great Christian saint, his life replete with miracles.
The ordeal by water later developed by the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century has survived to this day in the West as the form of torture known as waterboarding. But the classic and most notorious form of medieval Inquisition violence was not by water but by fire. It was only heretics who were burnt at the stake: the mania for burning witches came later to the area.
Thousands of Cathars were executed this way over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries. It was an extremely painful and slow death that was often borne with great dignity. Cathar women who were about to go to the stake washed their faces and removed their makeup, so as not to go painted before God.8 A conversation between two Montaillou women, who were being deloused by their daughters, was recorded as follows:
‘How can people manage to bear the pain when they are burning at the stake?’
‘Ignorant creature! God takes the pain upon himself of course.’9
Cathar Perfects went underground if possible, disguising their status by living in unCatharlike ways if they were in towns or cities, or hiding in huts in the forest. Meetings were held in woodlands with Believers keeping a lookout. Cathars with medical vocations still practised itinerantly, although it was illegal for them in case they should get the chance to give the consolamentum or endura to a patient.10 When William of Ayros, a Cathar, and a Waldensian known only by his surname, de Vaux, travelled together they healed more than they preached. Many Perfects would travel to Lombardy in Italy for respite from the pressures of avoiding the Inquisition.11
