The Age of Chivalry (23 page)

L
EFT
A 15th-century painting by Pedro Berruguete
(c.
1450–1504) showing the miracle of Fanjeaux. The legend maintains that Cathar and Catholic books were burned, but Catholic books floated up, unharmed by the fire
.

The long papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216) saw a vigorous assertion of the universal nature of papal authority in relation to secular princes and a renewed emphasis on crusading activity. In 1198 Innocent decreed the Fourth Crusade, which was designed to recapture Jerusalem. He was also particularly exercised by Catharism. The pope considered the Languedoc's bishops to be obstreperous, and they certainly resented the powers given to papal legates sent to combat heresy in the region's dioceses. In 1204,
therefore, the pope suspended a number of these bishops, and in the following year he appointed the dynamic Folquet de Marseille, a former troubadour poet, to be bishop of Toulouse.

Folquet worked closely with the Spanish priest Dominic de Guzman (St. Dominic), one of the great religious figures of the age, on an extensive conversion program, and a series of public debates were held between Cathars and Catholics. Few Cathars, however, were converted, and Dominic's experiences led him to establish in 1216 the Order named after him, the Dominicans. They exercised a preaching ministry specifically designed to combat heresy using well-honed arguments and exposition. But Dominic had also identified an important feature of the Cathars: many of those he had met in Languedoc were well-informed and cultured people rather than ignorant fanatics. As he told the papal legates who returned to Rome in 1208, having failed yet again to convert the Cathars:

“It is not by the display of power and pomp, cavalcades of retainers … or by gorgeous apparel, that the heretics win proselytes; it is by zealous preaching, by apostolic humility, by austerity …”

The Church hierarchy needed to show the same qualities, but in defense of a stronger case:
“Zeal must be met by zeal … false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching falsehood by preaching truth.”
Confronted, though, by the reality of what had turned into a mass movement of opposition, the Church hierarchy and its political allies chose another way.

Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, was the region's most powerful noble and a significant Cathar defender. Toward the end of 1207 he was challenged by Pierre de Castelnau, the papal legate and former Cistercian monk who had been active for some years in the anti-Cathar mission. De Castelnau was the central figure in Pope Innocent's newly energized campaign, and several local nobles had already been excommunicated because of their support of the Cathars. Raymond is supposed to have threatened de Castelnau with violence after the legate accused him of being a heretic, and the count was subsequently excommunicated. On January 15, 1208 de Castelnau was attacked and murdered while traveling back to Rome, and the pope, along with many others, concluded that the knight responsible for the assassination was acting on Raymond's orders.

THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

1179
At the Third Council of the Lateran, Catharism is condemned as a heresy.

1205
Folquet de Marseille is appointed bishop of Toulouse by Pope Innocent III and is charged with combating Catharism.

1208
Murder of the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau, member of the anti-Cathar mission and adversary of Raymond VI, count of Toulouse.

1209
Simon de Montfort is appointed military commander of the Albigensian Crusade. Beziers is destroyed after a siege and Carcassonne surrenders.

1213
King Peter II of Aragon is killed at the Battle of Muret. The lands of the conquered county of Toulouse are granted to Simon de Montfort.

1217
Raymond VI retakes the city of Toulouse.

1218
Simon de Montfort is killed.

1229
Raymond VII signs a peace treaty. The House of Toulouse is dispossessed of most of its fiefdoms.

1243–44
The Cathar fortress of Montségur surrenders to the bishop of Narbonne's army.

Pope Innocent now had an excuse for war, and he wrote to King Philip II Augustus of France requesting his support for a crusade that would crush Catharism. Rather than take part himself, the king sent Simon de Montfort, an adventurous, militarily skillful and conventionally pious aristocrat, to the south instead. De
Montfort's reputation for extreme brutality in warfare was well justified, and in 1209 his fellow nobles on the Albigensian Crusade elected him to be their leader. The French Crown was experiencing great success in asserting its authority in the north, and strategic calculation on its part dictated de Montfort's nomination to lead the crusade, while also allowing him to commit multiple murders during the campaign. King Philip Augustus also saw the crusade as an opportunity to deflect the energies of some of his more ambitious nobles, and he allowed them to claim southern territories. Quite apart from its religious dimension, therefore, the Albigensian Crusade was an attempt by the monarchy and northern French nobility to subjugate the hitherto independent-minded Midi. The region's hilly terrain, along with its mass of fortified towns, nonetheless frustrated the military strategies pursued by both sides and made for a prolonged campaign in which as many as half a million people, and possibly even more, may have died.

Raymond-Roger Trencavel was the first Languedoc aristocrat to fall victim to the crusader force as de Montfort and his northern barons moved into the south. Although not himself a Cathar he had tolerated the faith's diffusion across his territories, and his own position showed how the crusade involved a pattern of feudal loyalties while also seeking to combat religious heresy. As viscount of Beziers and Albi, Raymond-Roger was a vassal of the county of Toulouse, and as viscount of Carcassonne he owed allegiance to his feudal overlord, Peter II, who was king of Aragon and a notably orthodox Catholic monarch. De Montfort was granted the Trencavel lands by the pope and paid homage for them to the king of France, thereby angering King Peter, who had previously been neutral. There was also conflict between the French Crown and the papacy following Innocent's official decree that Cathar lands could be confiscated. This angered not just the southern nobility but also King Philip II Augustus, since he remained the ultimate suzerain of lands that the papacy had declared to be open to seizure and spoliation.

B
ELOW
The fortified city of Carcassonne was a Cathar stronghold during the Albigensian Crusade
.

Up until 1215 it was the crusaders who won the more significant victories, and the siege of Beziers, with its subsequent loss to the Cathars, in July 1209 was particularly bloody. The mass of its population, both Cathar and Catholic, was killed and the city itself destroyed before the crusaders moved on to Carcassonne, which surrendered in mid-August. Raymond-Roger, having led the defense of his city, was taken prisoner at Carcassonne, with de Montfort possibly involved in his murder while he was under supposedly safe conduct. By 1213 Catholic forces were in control of most of the county of Toulouse, at which point Peter II, king of Aragon, intervened in defense of Raymond VI, who was his vassal as well as his brother-in-law. King Peter's defeat and death at the Battle of Muret (September 12, 1213) led to temporary exile for Raymond, and the lands of the county of Toulouse, having been seized by the French Crown, were granted to de Montfort along with the territories of the dukedom of Narbonne. Peter II's defeat at Muret had a major long-term strategic impact, since it spelled the end of any southern French ambitions for the Aragonese kingdom.

A
BOVE
A 14th-century illustration from the
Chronicle of Saint Denis
depicting the crusaders massacring Cathars
.

During the next two years the Cathars and their aristocratic protectors were subjected to systematic campaigns of subjugation. Raymond VI, accompanied by his son who shared his name, returned at the head of an army in 1216. The future Raymond VII seized Beaucaire in the lower Rhone valley and defended it successfully against de Montfort's forces. In the following year his father retook Toulouse and entered the city in triumph, following which de Montfort mounted a prolonged siege in the course of which he was killed (June 25, 1218) after a stone launched from a projectile within the city smashed his skull to pieces. In subsequent years the Albigensian Crusade faltered and the Cathars retook formerly besieged centers. From 1226 onward, however, the French monarchy regained the initiative, and the treaty that Raymond VII was forced to sign at Meaux in April 1229 both ended the war and extinguished regional autonomy. The House of Toulouse was now dispossessed of most of its fiefs, and the Trencavels, lords of Beziers and Carcassonne, lost all their fiefdoms.

But the official end of military operations did not mean that the Cathars had gone away. One key result of the Albigensian campaign was the establishment of Inquisitions—formal bodies answerable to the papacy and staffed with clerical professionals charged with discovering error through cross-examination. These mobile institutions were very active in southern France from the 1230s onward. The Cathars were now taking refuge in their few remaining strongholds, and for a whole year from the spring of 1243, the remote Cathar fortress of Montségur was besieged by the archbishop of Narbonne's army. Over 200 Cathar
perfecti
were burned by their captors after the castle fell on March 16, 1244. From then on the Cathars lacked aristocratic support, and their few
survivors lived as rural fugitives. There were sporadic attempted insurrections in southwest France but these were pathetic affairs. The Inquisitions had now become very powerful and the
perfecti
, when captured, were invariably burned. But the
credentes
could survive provided they recanted, and during the period following their official statement of repentance they were forced to wear yellow crosses sown onto their clothing as a sign of past error. A new chapter had opened in the history of persecution in Europe.

Occitan is a Romance language and, like its close linguistic cousins French, Italian and Catalan, it evolved out of vernacular forms of Latin during the early Middle Ages. Spoken today by over a million people in southern France, the Aran valley in the Spanish Pyrenees and along the Franco-Piedmontese border, Occitan is a remarkable linguistic survivor and offers a direct link with the culture of medieval Western Europe
.

Although Occitan also flourished in Navarre and Aragon during the central Middle Ages, it was displaced in these regions by Navarro-Aragonese, another Romance language, during the 14th century. The first texts written in standard Occitan date from the tenth century, by which time the language was already being used as a medium of literary and scientific communication as well as in works of jurisprudence. Written forms of Occitanian dialects, which include Provencal, Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin and Auvernhat, can be dated to at least the eighth century.

It was Dante, in his
De vulgari eloquentia
(1302–05), who created the category
lingua d'oc
. Observing the different words for “yes” in Occitan, in various Italian and Iberian languages, and in French, he wrote: “Some say
oc
, others say
si
, others say
oil
.”
Hoc illud
(“this is it”) is the derivation of
oil
, and the
langue d'oil
refers to the language of medieval northern France that is the basis of modern-day standard French.
Oc
is derived from the Latin
hoc
(“this”), and Occitan's linguistic features demonstrate both the depth of Rome's cultural influence in the regions of Provence and Aquitaine as well as its persistence after the end of empire. The words “Occitan” and “Occitania”—a probable conflation of
Oc
and
Aquitanus
(Aquitanian)—were first used in the 13th century and they are based on an archaic allusion to the Roman province of Gallia Aquitania which included large areas of southern France. Occitan was used by the mass of the population in the regions where it predominated during the Middle Ages, but it was also the language of courtiers and of aristocratic society. Through the poetry of the troubadours who adopted both Occitan's standard form and its different dialects, the language became the vehicle of a high culture. During the 15th century Occitania's cultural and political assimilation into the French kingdom was fast evolving, and by that stage the region's nobility were increasingly speaking French while the lower orders tended to use Occitan. French bureaucracy's enduring obsession with uniformity and regulation explains the persistence of its hostility toward Occitan from the time of the Cathars to the present day. The language was hard hit by Francois I's Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets (1539), which proscribed the use of any language other than standard French in official legislation. And the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution waged a continuous campaign against the southern culture and language, seeing in both the expression of a dissent that undermined Republican unity and solidarity.