The History of the Renaissance World (44 page)

Meanwhile, Innocent III had died suddenly of an embolism, aged fifty-six, while visiting the central Italian town of Perugia. The cardinals of Rome went immediately into conclave to elect his successor, neglecting to bury the dead pope’s body; two days later, the theologian Jacques de Vitry found Innocent III’s body decomposing in the church of St. Lawrence, stripped of its gold-trimmed robes by thieves. His successor, the Roman priest Honorius III, immediately put most of his energies into the proposed Crusade, paying little attention to Languedoc except to authorize the creation of a new monastic order led by Dominic Guzman. This Order of Preachers, soon known simply as Dominicans, renewed Dominic’s efforts to conquer the Languedoc heresy by converting, rather than murdering, its inhabitants.
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Simon de Montfort laid siege to Toulouse, but his constant assaults on the city’s walls were always driven back by the citizens, who joined Raymond’s knights in building new defenses and operating the mangonels, catapults that hurled boulders over the city’s walls at the attackers: “Knights and citizens handled the stones,” says the contemporary
Song of the Cathar Wars
, “as did noble ladies and their daughters, young men, little girls and boys, everyone, great and small, and they sang songs and ballads as they worked.” Nine months into the siege, a stone pitched from a mangonel worked “by little girls and men’s wives” struck Simon de Montfort between the eyes and shattered his skull. A knight nearby hurriedly covered the body with a cape, but word of Montfort’s death spread at once, and his men immediately abandoned the siege.
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Toulouse rejoiced, but when Honorius III heard the news he announced a revival of the Crusade against Languedoc. Philip II of France sent a sizable force of archers and knights under the command of Prince Louis (newly returned from his unsuccessful bid to seize the English throne) to join Montfort’s son Amaury, aged twenty-three, in a renewed attack on the rebellious southern provinces.
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This campaign failed, disastrously. In one of the first engagements of the resurrected Albigensian war, Louis and Amaury besieged and captured the small town of Marmande. Probably hoping to terrify the rest of Languedoc into surrender, the two men authorized the massacre of Marmande’s inhabitants. “No one was left alive, man or woman, young or old,” says an eyewitness account. “Limbs and bodies, flesh and blood, broken fragments of human organs lay in every open place. The ground, the streets . . . were red with blood.”
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The strategy backfired. Resistance stiffened. Prince Louis took his army on to Toulouse and laid siege to it, but after six weeks Louis decided that the city was far too strong. He lifted the siege and went home. “He had achieved little,” writes William of Puylaurens, and Honorius agreed: “A miserable setback,” he wrote, of Louis’s defection.
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With Louis gone, Amaury de Montfort had no hope of retaking his father’s conquests. When Raymond of Toulouse died in 1222, after nearly seventy turbulent years of life, his son claimed his countship as Raymond VII.

The following year, Philip II Augustus of France also died. He had ruled France for over forty-two years, and in that remarkably long reign had doubled its territory, extended the power of the throne to unheard-of lengths, reduced the independence of its dukes, counts, and barons. Philip II had turned Western Francia into the nation-state of France.

Louis, inheriting the throne as Louis VIII, lived only three years before dying of dysentery, aged thirty-eight. His twelve-year-old son was crowned Louis IX; and Blanche of Castile became Louis’s regent, effective ruler of France. To bring peace to the south, Blanche offered the younger Raymond of Toulouse a treaty. If he tore down Toulouse’s newly constructed defenses, yielded several castles, and swore to fight Catharism, the French throne would recognize him as the rightful ruler of Toulouse. In addition Raymond would have to spend four thousand silver marks to establish a new university in Toulouse where right theology and proper doctrine would be taught.

Raymond VII agreed to the deal, which was signed in Paris in 1229. The Treaty of Paris brought Toulouse more firmly under the control of the French throne, but it also brought peace to the young count’s battered domains.

As further proof of his willingness to exterminate heresy, Raymond played host to a church council that met in Toulouse late in 1229. The council affirmed the establishment of the new University of Toulouse and laid out exactly how the extermination should proceed. “We appoint,” the council’s written canons explain, “that the archbishops and bishops shall swear in one priest, and two or three laymen of good report . . . in every parish . . . who shall diligently, faithfully, and frequently seek out heretics in those parishes.” When heretics were located, their houses were to be burned; if they repented “through fear of death,” they would merely be exiled and forced to wear crosses of colored cloth sewn onto their garments.
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This method of searching out heretics by appointed committee diffused the hunt out among both priests and laypeople: both were now authorized to inquire into the orthodoxy of their neighbors. Young Raymond had brought an end to the Albigensian Crusade; but in doing so, he had allowed the Council of Toulouse to establish the Inquisition.

36.1 The World of the Inquisition

*
“Lateran councils” were those held in Rome itself, at the hall known as the Lateran Palace.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Moving Westward

Between 1215 and 1229,
the Mongols set their eyes
on lands west of the Oxus river

T
HE
J
IN CAPITAL
Z
HONGDU
had fallen to Mongol siege, and the north of the Jin empire was in Mongol hands.

Four years in China—during which a multitude of Jin soldiers, officials, and councillors had been enfolded into the ranks of his advisors—had taught Genghis Khan that there was more than one way to build an empire. He did not give up the conquest of the Jin, a long and involved campaign of sieges and skirmishes that would drag on another nineteen years and he also sent troops to fight their way westward towards the Oxus river. But in an innovative and strange move for a Mongol, he also made moves towards diplomacy.

Just on the other side of the Oxus lay the kingdom of Khwarezm, a Turkish possession that had broken away from Khorasan after the Great Seljuk’s death, half a century earlier. It was ruled by Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad ibn Tekish, who had set out in 1200 to turn himself from a minor sultan into a major power by conquering the old lands of the Great Seljuk himself. While Genghis Khan was fighting in northern China, Shah Ala ad-Din was battling towards Baghdad, hoping to seize control of the caliphate there.
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Hearing of the Mongol advance, the Shah left the battlefront to return home. When he arrived, he found three Mongol ambassadors waiting for him, sent by Genghis Khan with presents of precious metals and semiprecious stones, rhinoceros horns and white camel wool. The Shah’s secretary, Muhammad al-Nasawi, records the message that accompanied the gifts. “I am familiar with the magnificence of your empire,” Genghis Khan wrote, tactfully,

and I know that your authority is recognized in the majority of the countries of the world. Therefore, I consider it my duty to strike up friendly relations with you. . . . You know better than anyone else that my provinces are nurseries for soldiers, of mines of silver, and that may produce an abundance of things. If you would agree that we open up, each from our own side, an easy access for negotiations between our countries, this will be an advantage for us all.
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There is no reason to think that he was insincere. He already ruled a larger swath of the world than any Mongol had ever dreamed of, and a treaty with Khwarezm would have opened up brand-new trade routes and the opportunity to gain unheard-of wealth. But the Shah, perhaps soured by two decades of war, saw only a threat. He bribed one of the ambassadors to act as a spy; and then, when a second delegation came from the Khan, had them arrested and murdered. (“He seized the negotiators,” says al-Nasawi, “and so they disappeared forever”—not the last time this technique would be used on suspects.)
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So began the disruption of the west.

“This movement of anger,” al-Nasawi wrote, several decades later, “brought about the ruin and depopulation of the earth. . . . From all sides poured torrents of pure blood.” In person, Genghis Khan led a vast army—200,000 strong, a combined force of Mongols and soldiers drafted from the conquered lands—westward. They rode through the dry wastes of the Gobi Desert, across the Altai Mountains, over the rough rocky ground between the Altai and the Aral Sea, to the borders of Khwarezm. In 1219, the horde descended on the border city of Otrar.
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The Shah, believing that the nomadic Mongols would be difficult to defeat on open ground but unable to take fortified cities, had divided his troops up among his frontier fortresses. Genghis Khan left two of his sons to besiege Otrar and sent a second division under his oldest son, Jochi, to blockade the nearby river city of Khojend. He himself led a third army to Bukhara, the wealthiest and largest city east of the Oxus river.
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In short order, all three cities were crushed. In Otrar, the official responsible for the murder of the Mongol ambassadors was taken prisoner and executed by having molten gold poured into his eyes and throat. The garrison at Khojend tried to escape along the riverbank at night, but Jochi’s men chased the soldiers away from the river and through the desert until, one by one, they fell to Mongol arrows or exhaustion. In Bukhara, the townspeople surrendered almost immediately, but a small royal detachment held out in the city’s citadel. Genghis Khan ordered the citadel stormed, with Bukhara’s civilians driven in front of his own men as a shield. After twelve days of assault and slaughter, the citadel too was taken; the defenders were massacred.
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Hearing of this efficient shattering of his frontier, the Shah fled westward. Genghis Khan sent his two highest-ranking generals, Jebe and Subotai, to pursue him, but Ala ad-Din escaped by boat into the Caspian Sea and took refuge on an island, where he died less than a year later. His son and heir, Jalal ad-Din, slipped away to the east, leading five thousand men to a safe haven in the north of India.

Jebe and Subotai, with twenty-five thousand soldiers behind them, continued around the southern end of the Caspian Sea, up into the Kingdom of Georgia.

Georgia, crisscrossed with mountain ranges and deep valleys, had always been home to a disunited array of tribes and peoples. At the beginning of the twelfth century, a vigorous young Christian king known as David the Builder had managed to bring the patchwork of native mountain tribes, Turks, refugees from Cilician Armenia, and various Muslim settlers under his rule; by the end of the same century, his granddaughter Tamar governed a Christian Georgia that covered almost all of the land bridge between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.
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