God's Heretics: The Albigensian Crusade

by Aubrey Burl

Overview

This title provides a vivid account of the way the Crusade and its legacy turned and twisted for over a hundred years. It focuses on the personalities on sides, their motivations and objectives, creating for the modern reader an overwhelming impression of the powerful beliefs that drove persecutor and victim.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752494791
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	08/25/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	650 KB
Age Range:	12 Years

Read an Excerpt

God's Heretics

The Albigensian Crusade

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By Aubrey Burl

The History Press

Copyright © 2013 Aubrey Burl
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9479-1

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CHAPTER 1

To 1208: Catholics and Cathars

In the early twelfth century the Languedoc was a comfortable land of sunshine, civilisation and song. In any society there are discords but in Occitania there was also the distinctive pleasure of chords of lovely music.

'Surely the greatest glory of Occitanian civilisation – that which made it known throughout Europe – was the troubadours. They started writing their lyrics around the time of the First Crusade (1095) and continued even through the catastrophe and decadence until about 1295'.

Society was almost ideal for those poets and musicians. In the Languedoc townsman and countryman mingled, the bourgeoisie, knights, nobles, sharing a taste not only for luxury but also for decorum. There were manuals of courtesy for table manners, conversations and personal cleanliness. Females were not excluded from that way of life. On the contrary, moralists complained that women were laden under the weight of their stoles, capes and fur trimmings; they washed too frequently, took too long over their hair and put so much paint on their faces that none was left for the statues of saints. It was a society moulded by the delicacy and refinement of women. Music was their delight.

The verses and melodies of troubadours and their minstrels were welcome not only in cities like Toulouse, whose count was a regular patron, but in smaller places like Mirepoix, Cabaret and Minerve. The troubadour, Raymond of Miravel, advised a poor colleague to go to the castle of Cabaret, then on to the lord of Saissac 'who is certain to present you with a fine light robe'. At the finest and most generous centre of all, the town of Minerve, it was likely that he would be given a horse and a suit of clothes.

He was not over-optimistic. A late thirteenth century list of payments to minstrels in England supports him. Of players of the vieille, a medieval version of the cello, one received 20 shillings [a pound], another a gold clasp, a blind musician 12 pence and one mark [c. 67p]. A tambourinist got 4s 8d [c. 23p] 'for his shoes'. A group of Germans performing on the geige or gigue, a shrill form of violin to accompany dancing, were daily given a shilling and a pennyworth each of bread and wine. A harpist was awarded 6s 8d [c. 34p] for entertaining Queen Isabella. Another had the gift of a fine sorrel riding-horse with £10.00. Even though impossible to translate accurately into today's money these were handsome rewards.

Troubadours and minstrels went everywhere there was patronage: Toulouse, Castile, Barcelona, Normandy, even England. Many were of noble birth, explaining their easy manners in courts; but some of the minstrels or jongleurs had bad reputations, 'base, treacherous, debauched, drunken, lying bar-proppers of taverns'.

One of the earliest troubadours, perhaps the first professional, was a Gascon, Marcabru, or Macabrun, a waif discovered on a doorstep and educated by anothe troubadour. He was a moralist, 'one of the first troubadours ... and he spoke ill of women and love'. From about 1129 until 1250 he wandered in the Languedoc seeking support, raging at the deplorable manners and morals he saw, until he was finally killed by some lords of Guyenne that he had insulted. One of his last verses read:

Lo vers e.l son vueille envier The words and the tune I wish to send

A.n Jaufre Rudel outra mar.
To Jaufre Rudel across the sea.

Rudel, a minor nobleman of Blaye, who attended the court of Alphonse-Jourdain, Count of Toulouse, was a very different troubadour from Marcabru though not as accomplished. 'He made many poems with good tunes but poor words'. Many of those imperfect lyrics were dedicated to a beautiful woman whom he had never seen, the countess of Tripoli. A dubious history has it that he went to Acre on the Second Crusade of 1147–8 with the Count of Toulouse and others, fell ill there and died in the arms of the lady who had been informed of his adoration and misfortune.

Such men were the precursors of a Golden Age of music in the later twelfth century. Troubadours, such as Peire Vidal, made many references to Raymond V, Count of Toulouse, Raymond of Miravel to Raymond VI. There is a paradox.

Many of their verses survive but of their music there are only whispers. Their instruments are known, the stringed harp, psaltery, lyre, harp; the blown trumpet, cornet, pipe, flute, the cornemuse or early bagpipe, the orgue (organ); the percussive tambourine, cymbal and drum. Modern renditions have been recorded but there are inescapable problems.

Of over two and a half thousand poems fewer than three hundred have known melodies. For over two thousand there is no music. And what does exist in manuscript is too simplified to know whether how or if it was orchestrated, how many instruments were involved, how many players, how many singers there were. It is a loss but it is not a vacuum. The troubadours lived and they brought art and loveliness to the Languedoc, a fact of that society that must constantly be remembered in the story of the religious tragedy of southern France in the Middle Ages.

The history of the Albigensian Crusade, which had little to do with Albi, started long before that crusade began in 1209 and continued for half a century after its end in the 1270s. Around AD 1000 the Languedoc was a land of peace with Cathars and Catholics living harmoniously together, often in the same village. Then, for three hundred years, there was internal dissension, external oppression and a disaster that concluded in the extermination of a faith. It is a tale of bigotry, brutality and bravery with, on one side, a sadistic certainty that Satan was the warlord of the enemy, and, on the other, an equal certainty that their opponents were servants of the Devil.

To explain how harmony became horror it is convenient to open with an episode just after AD1200. It involved a woman and a castle in decay.

Some two or three years after 1200 there was an unexpected request. A deacon of the Cathar church asked for the ruinous tower of Montségur to be repaired. All over the Languedoc there were defences. Some were huge, like the enormous ramparts of Carcassonne. There were great castles at Puivert, Puylaurens, Quéribus and elsewhere and minor ones such as that at Rennes-le-Château. There were garrisons like Les Cassès and walled villages like Bram. Of all these fortresses, the decaying tower of Montségur was one of the smallest.

It was also one of the most remote. Stranded on a steep-sided, here and there dangerous mountain, 963m high, with treacherous slopes, surrounded by forests and the jagged heights of the Roc de la Mousse, the Massif de Tabes, the Roc de la Gourgues; with only lonely farms and meagre hamlets around it, the nearest village was Bélesta on the Aragon-France border. No city was close and the larger, the farther. Foix was thirteen miles away, Limoux twenty-four, Carcassonne thirty-five and Toulouse, the capital, more than fifty.

Over forty years later in 1244 Raymond of Péreille, son of Dame Fornièra of Péreille and lord of Lavelanet and Montségur a few miles to the south, remembered the deacon's strange demand. Until that time he had been little concerned about his dilapidated, inhospitable and insignificant outpost, the second to have been built on the peak, that was now slowly decaying on its exposed mountaintop. No one lived there, but 'Because of the pressing demands and requests of Raymond Mercier of Mirepoix and of Raymond Belasco and other heretics, I rebuilt the castrum of Montségur which up to then was ruinous ... It was rather more than forty years ago'. At that time there was no foreknowledge of the persecution that was to follow.

Raymond Mercier was a deacon of the Cathar church with its very simple organisation of bishops in the dioceses of Toulouse, Carcassonne, Agen and Albi, one of the earliest. The immediate officers of the bishops were the filius major and filius minor, 'elder and younger brothers', the elder accepted as the successor to his bishop. Below them were deacons in each of the large towns and cities, administering the spacious 'houses' where Cathar believers could meet. The Cathars had no churches, only domestic meeting-places for believers and visiting Good Men. Such uncomplicated arrangements gave the Cathars easy contacts with their faithful. They were also economical, with no ecclesiastical buildings to administer and maintain.

It has been assumed that the deacon had asked for Montségur to be restored because of the threat of attack from the Catholic church but at the time of his request there was no realisation that a crusade against the Cathar heretics was to be demanded by the Pope. The actual request may have been not the fear of war but the quite different request for the church to provide a secluded 'house' for Good Women, the female equivalents of Good Men.

Dame Fornièra of Péreille and Mirepoix, mother of Raymond, and her female companions already had a well-known Cathar dwelling in the village of Montségur. She wished for a less obvious shelter. When she had decided to became a Good Woman she left her husband, Guillaume de Sault, and retired to a Cathar house in Lavelanet taking her very young daughter, Azalaïs with her. Forty years later, the daughter told the Inquisition how she had been compelled to leave her father's house, and how her mother quickly persuaded her to give herself to God and the angels. But as a young woman, Azalaïs remained an ordained Good Woman for only four years before marrying a knight, Alzeu de Massabrac. Yet she remained a believer and became one of nineteen survivors of the subsequent massacre at Montségur, the 'mountain of safety'.

Fornièra had left all the lordly rights of Péreille, including the castle, to her son, Raymond. She knew that the place was ruinous and it is not impossible to think that the request for repair was to make the building habitable as a 'house' for faithful women.

There were many Good Women in the Languedoc. Witnesses at the severe investigations of the Inquisition between 1245 and 1246 testified to as many as 311 of them, almost the same as the number of Good Men, a ratio very different from that between nuns and monks in the Catholic church. The Cathar women, however, did not duplicate the rôle of the men. They seldom administered the consolamentum and very rarely preached. It was reported that, although Good Women had been observed nearly fifteen hundred times, on only twelve of those occasions did one of them preach.

This does not imply inadequacy or a minor importance. Good Women established 'houses' for believers and constantly talked with village women, converting them. Pierre d'Avrigny, a Catholic priest complained that, 'Men may invent heresies but it is women who spread them and make them immortal'. Foulques de Marseilles, a former troubadour who became Bishop of Toulouse in 1205 cursed Dame Esclarmonde of Foix, sister of the Count. 'Through her evil doctrines she succeeded in making a number of conversions'.

Esclarmonde is perhaps the most famous of the Good Women. Widowed, mother of six children, she was consoled and ordained in Fanjeaux by Guilhabert of Castres in 1204. It was a coruscating court scene of satins and jewellery with fifty-six nobles and other notables attending the ceremony, 'much as a great Parisienne of the seventeenth century might vie with her contemporaries for the most fashionable confessor of the day'.

Esclarmonde formed a house for women in Pamiers and, when a prestigious debate between Cathar and Catholic clergy took place there in 1207, being both educated and eloquent, she spoke. Aghast at such intrusion by a presumptuous female a Cistercian monk, Frère Étienne de Minsèricorde, rudely rebuked her. 'Go back to your distaff and spinning, Madame, it is not proper for you to speak in a debate of this nature'. It was boorish and, as Costen thought, 'Probably what she had to say made the Catholic clerics uncomfortable'. By 1215 the unperturbed woman was in charge of the 'house' instituted by Fornièra at Montségur.

She also became a legend. In his late nineteenth century, fanciful rewriting of Cathar history, Napoléon Peyrat, curé of St Germain-en-Laye in Paris, transformed her from a real woman into a blend of Joan of Arc, a prestigious priestess, a protectress of the Cathar treasure, both persuasive and beautiful and a martyr in the flames of the Montségur massacre, from which she emerged as a dove. In the twentieth century, deeming this too mundane, a German student and later SS officer, Otto Rahn, made her the Guardian of the Holy Grail.

Life was less romantic. Not every Good Man or Good Woman walked hand in hand with the angels. They could be cruel. To some, their loathing of the body was so rancid that they denounced Cathar wives who became pregnant, blaming them for bringing more corruption into the corrupt world. It was a dark side of Catharism, especially among the jealous and the ignorant. Some more biased Good Men could advise expectant mothers to liberate themselves of their unborn devil. Others were warned that if they died in pregnancy they could be offered no consolamentum.

The results could be unexpected and fatal. In 1222 when a young wife, Ermessinde Viguier of Cambiac, a small village east of Toulouse, attended a Cathar meeting she was jeered at by other wives because she was carrying a child. Mockingly they told her that she had a demon in her belly. She was bearing wickedness. The infant would have horns and a tail. She never forgot. She abandoned the church and refused to rejoin it even when thrashed with a stick by her husband, William, in an attempt to 're-convert' her.

She not only remembered the insults of the women but became active against all Cathars. She spied on Good Men and informed the priest, Martin d'Auriac, of their whereabouts. Carefully searching the surrounding woods she found a sack with fresh eels in it, permissible food for a Good Man. There was also a shirt, onions, a bowl of chickpeas, a loaf and flasks of wine hidden there for the man. In the same forest was a shed where two Good Women, mother and daughter of Raymond Rasaire, lived in secret. A friend of Ermessinde, Raymonde Olmier, sometimes went there to pray with them. Other Good Men worked openly in the fields of Cambiac like ordinary peasants. The priest learned everything.

By 1245 the Inquisition was everywhere. The alarmed inhabitants of Cambiac confronted Ermessinde as she walked through the village hand in hand with her son. In desperation, they imprisoned the woman in a wine vat to keep her silent, saying, 'Boy, do you want to help this hag who wants to destroy us all?'

The years were so fearful that everywhere silence and deception became the custom. Entire villages hoped to confuse inquisitors by assuming false names but the ruse was unrealistic. In an entire village it needed only one informant like Ermessinde for the entire village to be condemned. Cambiac was. Heretics were betrayed to Inquisition.

The 'shaming' of Ermessinde explains the contrast between the almost identical numbers of Good Women and Good Men, and the large difference between female to male credentes. Hardly a quarter of ordinary women were believers. Maternal instincts were too strong for many to accept the Cathar disgust of procreation.

Yet that horror of the physical world was the basis of the Cathar faith. The Catholic Eucharist, the doctrine of transubstantiation whereby the body of Christ could be passed to believers, was an illusion. Material was evil. The perfect spirit of Christ could never have been flesh and blood. Descending to the world he had merely metamorphosed into a human body. He could not have been physically crucified for our sins nor eaten the Last Supper. Lacking a genuine body he could not have been resurrected. Neither could there be redemption for sins. Sin was inevitable. Only theconsolamentum could save a person's soul. The Catholic Mass was a contradiction. So was Heaven, Earth and Hell. The Earth itself was Hell.

Such a belief in dualism, the conflict between Good and Evil, had an ancestry many centuries old. Zoroaster, an Iranian prophet in the sixth century bc, divided existence into Truth and Lie. Truth or the Holy Spirit and the People of Righteousness whose God was Ahura Mazdah, were opposed by the People of the Lie led by the Fiendish Spirit, Ahriman. For his unorthodox and destructive creed Zoroaster was supposedly murdered, aged 70, when at prayer.

The cult of dualism flourished but it also generated divisions. Mani, c. AD 216–76, a Persian born near Baghdad, was expelled by the Zoroastrians as a heretic because of his preaching that there was a Spirit or Light struggling against Matter or Dark. He taught that each individual body held an almost unconscious spark of divine light and by abstinence and prayer a person would gradually become aware of the light. The awareness might require several reincarnations but souls would be rescued by messengers like Jesus. Mani termed himself the 'Apostle of Jesus Christ'.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from God's Heretics by Aubrey Burl. Copyright © 2013 Aubrey Burl. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Preface,
Introduction,
Maps,
One To 1208. Catholics and Cathars,
Two 1209. Béziers and Carcassonne,
Three 1209–1210. Towns and Castles,
Four 1211. From Crusade to Conquest,
Five 1212–1213. Miravel, Moissac and Muret,
Six 1214–1218. Toulouse,
Seven 1219–1229. Calm, Crusade and Collapse,
Eight 1230–1244. Inquisitors and Castles,
Nine 1244–1328. Aftermath,
Appendix. Coins, Codes and Crucifixions,
Notes,
Bibliography,