Holy Warriors (35 page)

The Fourth Crusade remains one of the most controversial of all crusading expeditions. While conspiracy theories have accused the pope, the Venetians, and various of the crusade leaders of plotting the diversion to Constantinople, none of these can be sustained. Originally, the campaign planned to attack Egypt but it was the disastrous terms of the Treaty of Venice that drew the crusaders to Zara and then laid them open to the offer of Prince Alexius. Ironically, therefore, it was a Greek who steered the campaign toward Constantinople; otherwise, there is no hint that this was a realistic desire on the part of anyone. The chronic instability of the Byzantine Empire during the early thirteenth century, combined with the desperation and the determination of the crusaders—men whose military expertise had become so honed and reinforced in the course of their experiences—gave them the opportunity to pull off an improbable and tragic victory, and an event still remembered in the Orthodox world today.

FROM “LITTLE FOXES IN THE VINES”AND THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE TO THE GREATEST CHURCH COUNCIL OF THE AGE

T
he closing decades of the twelfth century saw the emergence of several powerful new forms of spirituality across western Europe.
¹
A thriving economy brought widespread urban expansion and considerable personal gain, but this financial boom clashed with a growing interest in a pure and simple existence, modeled on a life of apostolic poverty. In tandem with this, increasing numbers of lay people openly questioned both the wealth of the Church and the moral qualities of some of its clerics. Men such as Waldes of Lyons gave up a comfortable lifestyle to follow a more spiritual approach and his calls for austerity attracted numerous followers. Notwithstanding his overt criticism of the Church, Waldes was, at heart, still fairly close to orthodox Catholicism, although his demands to be allowed to preach in public were rejected by the papacy, jealous to preserve proprietorship of what it regarded as the true interpretation of the Gospels.
²
Around the middle of the century, however, another strand of religious belief began to surface: Catharism (from the Greek
kathare
meaning “pure”), a radical set of ideas that posed a profound challenge to the power of the Catholic Church. To fight this threat Pope Innocent launched the Albigensian Crusade, a conflict that brought the horrors of holy war to the heart of Christendom and engendered levels of atrocity unseen in Europe since the barbarian invasions. As one contemporary lamented, the launch of the crusade was “the decision that led to so much sorrow, that left so many men dead with their guts spilled out and so many great ladies and pretty girls
naked and cold, stripped of gown and cloak. From beyond Montpellier as far as Bordeaux, any that rebelled were to be utterly destroyed.”
³

Two of the prime reasons why Catharism posed such a danger to the Church lay in the broad appeal of its beliefs and the fact that it did not rely on a single charismatic leader but had a well-established hierarchy. At the heart of the faith was dualism, the belief that a Good God had created all spiritual matter, including men’s souls, and an Evil God (Satan) had created all material and corporeal things.
⁴
Christ had come to earth, but only took on a human appearance to avoid entering a physical body. He told the Cathars how to achieve salvation through the baptism of the spirit, an act known as the consolamentum, a process that could be administered only by a spiritual elite, the perfecti. These men and—crucially—women renounced all property, vowed never to kill any human or warm-blooded beast, to consume no products of sexual intercourse such as meat, cheese, eggs, or milk, to tell no lies, and abstain completely from sex, which was the means of physical procreation and intrinsically evil. Most Cathars found these rules an impractical way to exist and followed as modest a life as possible. They rejected the Old Testament, the Eucharist, baptism, and only took the consolamentum—thus obtaining salvation—as they neared death. The concept of a female priest was unheard of in the Catholic Church, but given the restricted outlets for women’s spirituality anyway it represented another powerful attraction of this new faith. The simple tenets of Catharism were easy to understand; the perfecti seemed to lead genuinely pure lives—especially compared to the venality of the existing hierarchy. Local lords did little to shift the newcomers and some welcomed the spiritual rigor they seemed to bring.

Catharism originated in southeastern Europe and it first appeared in the West, probably carried by traders and returning crusaders, during the 1140s in Cologne and southern France. Another group surfaced in Oxford in 1166, but King Henry II swiftly ordered the detention of the thirty individuals involved. Punishment was swift and harsh: their brows were branded, they were stripped to the waist, flogged, and driven out of the city to perish
in the bitter winter cold: the sect was never again seen on English shores. Other Cathar communities, however, thrived and the papacy felt compelled to pass formal legislation to outlaw the heretics at the Third Lateran Council in 1179: “since the loathsome heresy of those who some call the Cathars . . . has grown so strong that they no longer practise their wickedness in secret, as others do, but proclaim their error publicly and draw the simple and the weak to join them, we declare that they and their defenders and those who receive them are under anathema . . . [therefore, they will not receive Mass] or burial amongst Christians. We also grant that to faithful Christians who take up arms against them . . . a remission of two years’ penance.”
⁵

Catharism flourished most strongly in southern France. Culturally and linguistically, the Languedoc was entirely distinct from northern France (the
langue d’oc—oc
means “yes”). It was the home of the troubadour poets, of remote rural villages; a rugged land of castles clinging to rocky spurs, of fertile valleys and the broad floodplain of the River Rhône easing out into the Mediterranean. Based far to the north, the Capetian kings had no worthwhile influence in the Languedoc and while the counts of Toulouse were figures of considerable standing, most local power structures were highly fragmented. The Catholic Church was poorly developed in comparison to the well-established hierarchies of northern France; many urban clerics were perceived as greedy and indolent, while the rural clergy were often ill-educated men who lived openly with their mistresses and children. Such conditions were ripe for Catharism to enter communities and, with the support of the local nobility, it put down the most tenacious roots. The Church sent special delegations of Cistercian monks to try and bring the heretics and their supporters back into the fold. Cathar perfecti and Catholic clergy held numerous debates, but unsurprisingly neither conceded their beliefs were wrong. When Innocent III became pope, these efforts intensified; given his determination to guard the Christian faith, he saw that Catharism needed to be utterly eradicated.

Even before Innocent’s pontificate, churchmen had described the region around Toulouse as “a great cesspit of evil, with all the scum of heresy flowing into it,” and “the mother of heresy and the fountainhead of error. . . . When heretics spoke, everyone applauded.” The city itself was “so diseased that, from the soles of its feet to the top of its head, there was not a healthy piece in it;” the solution offered was simple—to stun, sever, and raise up the
head on a sword.
⁶
This highly emotive language of pollution and contamination formed the basic register in the fight against the Cathars; the body of the Mother Church itself was said to be threatened from within, as if by a cancer, and only a sword could cut it out. In 1204 Innocent tried to persuade King Philip of France to eradicate the wild beasts who planned to destroy the Church. The pope offered him the same remission of all sins as a crusader to the Holy Land if he would go to Toulouse and crush the man seen as the Cathars’ principal protector, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. Philip declined the invitation, as he would repeatedly do in the future.
⁷
It was another four years before the confrontation with the Cathars escalated into outright conflict. The situation became tinder-dry with the repeated failure of preachers to convince the heretics to recant; indeed, according to the near-contemporary William of Tudela, their attempts met with derision: “People in this region think more of a rotten apple than sermons.”
⁸
The conflagration itself was largely precipitated by the murder of a papal legate, Peter of Castelnau, in January 1208. Peter had spent months trying to bring the heretics to heel and in the course of his travels, as he waited for a ferry to cross the River Rhône, he was fatally stabbed in the back by one of Count Raymond’s vassals. When the news reached Rome, Pope Innocent was furious; he lit a candle and, in the name of Saint Peter, he dashed it to the floor and cursed the murder.
⁹

Godfrey of Bouillon and Adhémar of Le Puy head the armies of the First Crusade. Taken from a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Old French
Histoire d’Outremer
of William of Tyre.
(Bibliothèque Municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer MS 142 fol. 264v)

Patriarch Aimery of Antioch tied to the citadel of Antioch, where Prince Reynald smeared his head with honey and released a hive of bees on him, an act of revenge for the aging churchman’s opposition to his marriage to Princess Constance. Taken from a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Old French
Histoire d’Outremer
of William of Tyre.
(Bibliothèque Municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer MS 142 fol. 199r)

Marriage of Guy of Lusigan and Queen Sibylla of Jerusalem. Taken from a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Old French
Histoire d’Outremer
of William of Tyre.
(Bibliothèque Municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer MS 142 fol. 264v)