The Perfect Heresy (42 page)

188
“It was a great shame …”: The comment is from William of Puylaurens, who was once in the employ of Raymond VII. Of the three main chronicles about the Cathars, his is the only one that covers these years.

190
the county of Toulouse automatically became a part of France: Perhaps the most astounding clause of the treaty concerned the future of
Languedoc. Raymond’s daughter Jeanne was forced to marry Louis’s brother Alphonse of Poitiers. They were to inherit at Raymond’s death—even if Raymond had fathered other children. Succession would then pass through the Capets. Raymond died in 1249, after having spent the last twenty years of his life trying to find a way to beget a legitimate male heir—who, in any case, would have had to fight to regain his birthright. Toulouse was then governed in absentia by Count Alphonse. He and Jeanne died childless, within three days of each other, in 1271, and Languedoc was definitively annexed to the royal domain.

190
a university was to be established: The university, founded in 1229, is still going strong. The city of Toulouse counts a postsecondary student population of about 100,000.

190
Eleanor of Aquitaine: The justly celebrated Eleanor shaped the dynastic politics and culture of twelfth-century Europe. The granddaughter of the first troubadour, William of Poitiers (Guilhem de Poitou), and endowered with the immense duchy of Aquitaine, she first married King Louis VII of France. She bore him two daughters, accompanied him on the disastrous Second Crusade preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, then, on returning to France, had her marriage annulled on grounds of consanguinity. This ruse to get rid of an unwanted spouse was common practice among noblemen—Eleanor pioneered its practice among women. She then married Count Henry of Anjou, eleven years her junior, who became King Henry II of England. She bore him a brood of children, fiercely guarded her independence, and eventually left England to preside over a brilliant court for troubadours and scholars in Anjou. Her life has inspired a flood of scholarship and art. In Norman F. Cantor’s
Medieval Lives
, a series of imagined vignettes with emblematic figures of the Middle Ages, the chapter devoted to Eleanor (“The Glory of It All”) demonstrates her importance in an entertaining fashion. Her connection to the Cathar drama is fairly straightforward: Her daughter Joan of England married Raymond VI and produced Raymond VII; another daughter, Eleanor, married Alfonso VIII of Castile (who fought at Las Navas de Tolosa) and produced Blanche of Castile. Raymond and Blanche were thus first cousins.
Their
children, respectively Jeanne of Toulouse and Alphonse of Poitiers, were married under the terms of the treaty.

15. Inquisition

191
a wealthy old lady of Toulouse: This story is told by the Dominican William Pelhisson in his
Chronica
, translated into English by Walter L. Wakefield as
The Chronicle of William Pelhisson
in
Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250
, pp. 207–36.

195
“It often happens that bishops …”: Innocent’s stern sermon is quoted in Friedrich Heer’s
The Medieval World
(p. 220). Heer also finds a passage in Innocent’s
De contemptu mundi
, written before he became pope, in which he complains of bishops who “by night embrace Venus and next morning honor the Virgin Mary.”

195
Robert le Bougre … Conrad of Marburg: There seems to be a consensus among historians that Conrad was a dangerous sociopath who burned many innocents. Heer, a German-language historian writing in the 1950s, makes an implicit comparison between Conrad and Hitler. The evidence against Robert le Bougre, instigator of a massive bonfire at Mont Aime, in Champagne, is slightly more ambiguous. As Malcolm Lambert states in
The Cathars
, “Acquittal of Robert as an arbitrary, wilful inquisitor is not yet justified: a verdict of not proven best fits the existing evidence” (p. 125).

196
“We marvel …”: Pope Gregory’s disingenuous missive is quoted in Heer,
The Medieval World
(p. 217).

197
“The accused shall be asked …”: From Bernard Gui’s
Practica Inquisitionis
, cited in Zoé Oldenbourg’s
Massacre at Montségur
, pp. 307–8.

200
Qui aytal fara… : This lugubrious chant is related by William Pelhisson in his chronicle.

16. Backlash

201
John Textor lay in chains: The imprisonment quickly became a cause célèbre in Toulouse, inciting formerly quiescent citizens to denounce the actions of the inquisitors. Awkwardly, the average-Joe John Textor publicly converted to Catharism while in prison—receiving the
consolamentum from a captive Perfect—and thus made his erstwhile defenders appear foolish. William Pelhisson, who tells the story, fairly chortles at the embarrassment of Textor’s partisans. Many of them were subsequently jailed, or worse.

202
At the behest of the city’s conservative Jews: The bonfire of 1234 in Montpellier may have been the only instance of the Inquisition doing anything for the Jews. By 1240, the wind had definitively turned; the Talmud was tried, found guilty, and burned in Paris. This was a mere prelude for several centuries of anti-Jewish activities by inquisitors (sources: R. I. Moore,
The Formation of a Persecuting Society
, p. 10 and L. Poliakov,
The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 1, From Roman Times to the Court Jews
, London: Elek Books, 1966, pp. 68–70).

204
Stephen of St. Thibéry: The appointment may also have been an attempt to wrest the institution of inquisitor away from the Dominicans. In later years, the Dominicans and the Franciscans would engage in unseemly turf wars that would stall the cause of doctrinal purity. In the Balkans in the thirteenth century, the competing friars quarreled bitterly over precedence for nearly a decade before an inquisition was set up.

208
On May 28, 1242, Stephen of St. Thibery and William Arnald stopped in Avignonet: The story of Avignonet, like most events to follow in the narrative, was culled from Inquisition interrogations, in this instance those of Brother Ferrer, the inquisitor who questioned the survivors of the siege of Montségur some two years afterward. The story of Brother William’s skull comes from the same source.

17. The Synagogue of Satan

212
Henry had made landfall in the southwest with a derisively small force of knights: Still, some did make the journey. One of the barons who sailed to fight the French, and thereby indirectly help Raymond VII, was the English king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort. His father, the Simon de Montfort of the Albigensian Crusade, and his oldest brother, Amaury, who had died in 1241 after a decade’s service as High Constable of France, were no doubt spinning in their graves at this switch in allegiance.

213
Raymond and Louis signed a treaty: The Treaty of Lorris.

215
In the spring of 1243… : The most scrupulous examination of the siege of Montségur, without recourse to the mythmaking that usually shrouds the citadel of “Cathar country,” is, once again, the work of Michel Roquebert:
Montségur, les cendres de la liberté
.

217
A chronicler relates that at sunrise… : The Gascons’ retrospective fright is reported by William of Puylaurens.

219
These companions of the last hour came from all stations of feudal society: Not all of the credentes to join the Perfect of Montesegur on the bonfire were saintly. William of Lahille had been one of the three faidits to lead the murderous posse into the inquisitors’ quarters at Avignonet. Lahille was the son of a Perfect noblewoman whom Guilhabert of Castres had consoled, along with Esclarmonde of Foix and two other high-ranking ladies, in the well-attended ceremony at Fanjeaux in 1204. Lahille was grievously wounded at Montségur just before the surrender and decided to accompany his Perfect aunt, India, into the afterlife. One of his accomplices, Bernard de St. Martin, also elected to receive the consolamentum and thereby doom himself. The third leader of the Avignonet raid, William de Balaguier, had been captured in the lowlands well before the siege of Montségur. For his complicity in the murders, he had been dragged behind a horse, then hanged. See Jean Duvernoy’s annotations to his translation,
Guillaume Pelhisson Chronique (1229–1244)
, pp. 103–04.

18. Twilight in the Garden of Evil

222
a Cathar believer named Peter Garcias: Extended quotations from the hidden friars’ testimony—a well-documented event in these years of treachery—may be found in Carol Lansing’s epilogue to Joseph Strayer’s
The Albigensian Crusades
, pp. 225–28.

225
“Heretics
are those who remain obstinate in error… : The litany of crime was compiled at the Council of Tarragona. Translated and cited by Edward Peters in his
Inquisition
, p. 63. Peters argues that the actual Inquisition was not nearly as fearsome as the myth of the Inquisition created by Enlightenment and romantic imaginations. He lowercases
inquisition
when describing the historical institution and capitalizes the word when discussing the myth. I have elected to follow accepted usage and capitalize the word throughout.

228
“the bread of pain …”: The felicitous expression, adapted from Kings 22:27, by inquisitor Bernard Gui, cited in Laurent Albaret’s
L’Inquisition: Rempart de la foi?
p. 53.

230
the murder of a respected inquisitor: A cult quickly grew around the victim, Peter of Verona, a Cathar-turned-preacher-turned-inquisitor. A speaker of great charisma and a miracle-worker, Peter was assassinated by credentes near Milan. Legend has it that as he lay dying, he wrote out the word
credo
in his own blood. One of the most popular medieval saints, he was venerated as St. Peter the Martyr. This book, I should add, was written while I was living in a very old Occitan farmhouse called Mas D’En Pere Martre. To my enduring embarrassment, it took me at least a year to realize that my address contained the name of the most famous figure in Italian Cathar history.