The Friar of Carcassonne (15 page)

While inflammatory, such words were not that unusual in Languedoc, even well into the twentieth century. Where Saisset departed from the norm was in openly hectoring the local lords of his region to ally with the Kingdom of Aragon and secede from France. This was treason. Many of the other customary medieval accusations of moral turpitude—heresy, simony, sorcery, fornication, and blasphemy—came to be leveled at Saisset, but there can be no doubt that his talk of secession was what first caused the king to sit up and take note.

In 1301, Philip ordered two of his loyal servants, Jean de Picquigny and Richard Leneveu, to go to the south and investigate the matter. They were appointed as
enquêteurs
-
réformateurs
, posts that gave them authority greater than the seneschal's. Leneveu was an important prelate of Normandy; Picquigny, a nobleman and experienced royal magistrate (
vidame
) from the great Picard center of Amiens. These men, viceroys in a sense, were precisely the type of grandee Bernard Délicieux had to meet in order to amplify his campaign against the inquisition. Bernard Saisset's troublemaking had given the mischief-maker of Carcassonne the opening he needed.

The post held by Picquigny and Leneveu was a Capetian innovation, having originated during the reign of the saintly and punctilious Louis IX. The first
enquêteurs
had been Franciscan friars. They had shaped the office and its duties—making sure the prerogatives of the king remained free from encroachment, seeking the cause of complaints from his subjects and working to redress them, and ensuring that the king's agents in the provinces were fulfilling their duties in an appropriate manner. Given such sweeping powers, the opportunity for all kinds of personal treasure hunting was boundless; fortunately for Philip, and for the people of the south, the pair he sent to Languedoc in 1301 seems to have been irreproachable.

By the middle of that year, Picquigny and Leneveu had found ample grounds to charge Saisset with high treason. They ordered him arrested and, in exercising secular authority over a man of the Church, set off the tremendous struggle between king and pope that culminated in the Outrage of Anagni. While adding further piquancy to the relation between Crown and Church that forms a backdrop to Délicieux's agitation, the fate of Saisset matters less than the acquaintances made by the men sent to investigate him. For Leneveu and Picquigny took up with dangerous company.

Leneveu, the Norman priest, hovered in the wings of the drama told two decades later at Délicieux's trial, whereas Picquigny played a role front and center. Multiple testimonies speak with one voice: the great magistrate from Amiens fell under the spell of the friar of Carcassonne. Starting in the summer of 1301, Picquigny sought Bernard's counsel on all of his major decisions. As he was a man of the world accustomed to wielding authority, his allegiance to the friar bespeaks the force of character Bernard Délicieux possessed. To have won over such a great man, the friar had to have been a formidable presence, and not just when he mounted the pulpit. His was a personality that impressed the great and the small alike and inspired affection and admiration, as is abundantly clear from the course of his career.

Picquigny's principal character trait seems to have been loyalty. He would stick with Délicieux throughout the turbulent years to come, but, above all else, he was a truly faithful courtier of King Philip's, keenly interested in keeping Languedoc equally faithful to their monarch. Men of the south, he had seen in the matter of Bernard Saisset, harbored no great love for the men of the north. To keep the kingdom united, prosperous, and loyal, the people of the Midi had to know that the king's justice was impartial and fair.

This was an echo of the argument Bernard Délicieux would advance repeatedly to Picquigny against the Dominican inquisitors: they were untrustworthy, they abused their power, they had to be replaced—but, most important, they were endangering the Kingdom of France. The people of the south, Bernard argued, were deeply unhappy, primed for revolt at any moment, because of the depredations of the inquisition and the king's acquiescence in its excesses. Whether Bernard cared a whit about the Kingdom of France is highly doubtful, given his subsequent actions, but he recognized in this argument a cogent and persuasive tool to shift the great power of the north to his side.

He first traveled to meet Picquigny and Leneveu in Toulouse some time in early 1301, accompanied by the wives of the men of Albi who had recently been condemned to the Wall. Bernard would have other occasions to bring these lonely women along with him, in an effort to soften hearts and appeal, perhaps, to the dying embers of chivalry. The women, for their part, shared the enthusiasm of their kinfolk on the arrival of this providential man. His success at knocking the inquisitors off stride in Carcassonne had been noticed by aggrieved parties throughout Languedoc. The people of Albi and such towns as Cordes and Castres raised money for Bernard to keep up the fight and to agitate on their behalf. Neither the riot at the convent nor his deft defusing of the Castel Fabre bombshell would have inspired distant burghers to open their purses for him. Rather, they took heart in hearing that the inquisitors at Carcassonne had been intimidated into making themselves scarce and, more important, that Bernard Délicieux had the ear of the most important royal officials in Languedoc.

After their initial meeting, Délicieux consulted frequently with Picquigny and Leneveu in Carcassonne, in a townhouse of the Bourg. The dwelling still belonged to Raimond Costa, the agitator of the 1280s who had escaped imprisonment and set himself up as the untouchable bishop of Elne, in the Kingdom of Majorca. Thus, from across the Corbières mountains, then the frontier of Capetian France, this rather peculiar bishop continued to lend a hand to the foes of the inquisition.

The persuasive Bernard laid out his case forcefully to his two powerful auditors from the north. The prisoners from Albi deserved justice from their king. They had been left to rot in the Wall, just as their deceased kinsmen had been left to rot in the trees of the lands that they had refused to hand over to an avaricious tormentor. Bishop Castanet was a wicked, amoral prelate, his lordship of Albi inimical to the interests of the king, his brazen conflict with the royal agents there a vivid reminder to the townsmen that their true lord lived impossibly far away, in Paris, unaware of their troubles. Bernard would not have complained, however, of Castanet's liberal recourse to torture, as the men seated in front of him had no qualms about its use. In the investigation of the Saisset matter, Picquigny and Leveneu had given free rein to the torturer—one of their recalcitrant witnesses emerged from the dungeon to testify with both arms irredeemably broken.

In Carcassonne, Bernard argued, matters were no better than at Albi. Thanks to years of merciless persecution, a sullen cloud of suspicion lowered over the town like a thunderhead ready to unleash its fury. People feared each other; factions thrived; the townsmen were at each other's throats. All knew that, guilty or not, they could one day be taken from their families and immured in the prison. Though no one had seen the infamous registers, many knew some of their contents, having heard family, friends, and neighbors tell of their testimony before the inquisitors. Then, at the well and the washhouse, in the fields and taverns, there was gossip, always gossip, all the more urgent and contagious since life and livelihood might depend on it.

Bernard would have detailed the objections he had nailed to the inquisitors' door. Their registers overflowed with falsehoods, for heretics did not betray each other—they betrayed the innocent. On leaving the Wall, destitute and penniless, they were repaid for their false testimony by the heretical people they had shielded. Unscrupulous people got even with their enemies. Merchants named competitors. As for Registers X and XI, they were works of the imagination dreamed up by two inquisition clerks in the interest of enriching themselves through extortion. They had come up with two make-believe Good Men to bolster their shameful lies. No one had seen Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès; no one could say anything substantial about them. Their names were so common in the Languedoc as to be meaningless. Indeed, Délicieux, Picquigny, and Leneveu were meeting in the house of one Raimond Costa.

By early autumn, Picquigny was convinced. If not a co-conspirator, he was an active fellow traveler in the camp of the Carcassonnais and the Albigeois. To his mind, taking on the inquisitors and Bishop Castanet was not an act of rebellion against the established order—it was an action necessary to remedy a deplorable state of affairs, the sworn responsibility of a royal plenipotentiary charged with redressing the grievances of Philip's subjects.

Although powerful, he did not have enough power to set things aright on his own. For that he needed the approval of the highest authority in the land. Picquigny thus planned to go north to meet with the king, haul Bishop Bernard Saisset in front of him, and relate in detail the investigation that he and Richard Leneveu had conducted. The moment would be propitious for broaching the question of inquisitorial abuse in Languedoc, when Philip's attention was turned toward the south of his kingdom and its Church. Hearing of his intention to meet with the king, the consuls of Albi and Carcassonne selected delegations, laid out the necessary funds—and approved Bernard Délicieux as their leader.

In late September 1301 the men of the south made the journey north. On arrival, Picquigny immediately petitioned the king to accord them the privilege of a private audience. The request was granted. Some time in October—we are not sure of the precise day—Brother Bernard Délicieux of the Order of Friars Minor stood before King Philip IV of France. The momentous meeting occurred not in Paris but in a small town called Senlis.

CHAPTER NINE

THE KING AT SENLIS

T
HE TOWN OF SENLIS NESTLES IN THE PAST
, alive with birdsong, its old houses and stone steeples a lovely medieval surprise just past the northernmost edge of the grimy suburban sprawl of modern Paris. Nowhere in the town is the pink of Toulouse and Albi or the russet brown of Carcassonne, just the gentle gray of northern France. Senlis has somehow retained its verdant character—all around stretch leafy forests harking back to the time when a sea of green covered the Île de France. The woods around Senlis were part of the royal domain, a place for huntsmen in the service of their great lord to maintain with plentiful supplies of game and to protect from the desperate poachers who straggled through the trees in times of famine. For Philip the Fair, the place was a respite from the intrigues of the Louvre, but, as in his other residences scattered throughout his lands, he could never really escape the turmoil of his kingdom. Many of his courtiers came with him when he removed to his hunting quarters, always ready to petition favor for their various clients.

In the heart of the old quarter stands a quiet park with gravel drives that lead to several buildings standing in evocative Gothic ruin. They are called the Palais Royal. One building houses the king's quarters; the other, the queen's. The most impressive ensemble, however, is an empty shell, the stained glass long gone from its graceful embrasures and the sky alone supported by its ogive arches. This was the grand hall in which the king granted his audiences, and where Bernard Délicieux and Jean de Picquigny stood in October 1301.

They had been accompanied to Senlis by several consuls of Albi and Carcassonne, who flanked Bernard as he spoke to the king. Just out-chapter side the hall a gaggle of worried Dominicans paced and prayed. This delegation included the inquisitor Foulques de Saint-Georges, smarting that the pestiferous Délicieux had been granted the privilege of a private audience. With Foulques outside the door was a fellow Dominican, Nicolas de Fréauville, the king's confessor and, as such, enormously influential at court. That even he had not been admitted to the audience augured well for the men of Languedoc.

The king already had an inkling of many of the complaints of his subjects. Comprehensive dossiers had been assembled by the disgruntled citizens of Carcassonne and Albi. The latter's damning litany of grievance toward Bernard de Castanet verged on the encyclopedic. The Albigeois sought a royal ordinance to put an end to his extortion, his unlawful and inhumane incarceration practices, his abuse of inquisitorial procedure, and his arrogation of the king's rightful authority. In later complaints about Castanet, which may also have spiced up the presentation at Senlis, the bishop's enemies added a series of accusations concerning his sexual proclivities, eye-popping even by medieval standards. His residence, the Palais de la Berbie, was nightly the scene of shameless debauch, the loose ladies and unclad lads invited there to pleasure him appearing brazenly at the windows for all to see.
^*
Darker still, the burghers alleged, his depravity ran so deep as to include molesting young girls; one had vanished into the Berbie, later to be found headless, floating in the river Tarn below the bishop's palace of sin.