The Friar of Carcassonne (21 page)

The door to the prison was shut tight, locked and bolted. Picquigny called up to a barred window on an upper story that no one would be harmed if the warden opened the door to him. The shouted negotiations stalled, the armed liberators grew restless. The townsmen of Carcassonne called for the Wall to be razed—not especially difficult, for the prison was built not as a fortress, to repel attack, but as a strongbox, to keep people from escaping. No deadly arrow slits hid archers, no wall walk swarmed with armed defenders.

The standoff could not continue. Picquigny ordered his pikemen to ready themselves for assault. As they were assembling, voluminous parchments wafted into the air from the windows above. They floated downward in the puzzled silence, eventually settling on the cobbles at the attackers' feet.

The documents lodged protests at the outrage about to take place. They contained formal appeals to the pope to reverse the injustice of this day. As with Brother Bernard's magisterial handling of the Castel Fabre matter three years earlier, the Dominicans of the Wall wanted to establish a conspicuous paper trail. These appeals would make Picquigny's action the object of a formal proceeding. The event, far from being a spontaneous calamity, was now duly noted and would one day, the robed jailkeepers hoped, be overturned and avenged in court.

The prison door swung open and Picquigny stepped across the threshold, accompanied by several of his men. The tenor of his conversation with the Dominicans is unknown, but he shortly afterward emerged back out into the yard accompanied by scores of prisoners, blinking in the sunlight. A great cheer went up; hugs were no doubt exchanged between husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins. The eyewitnesses disagree over whether Bernard Délicieux was present in the crowd, but acquaintance with the workings of the human heart dictates that he must have been there. The day was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign by the agitator of Languedoc, a campaign brilliantly carried out before king, court, magistrate, inquisitor, congregation, and mob. To have missed this moment would have been unthinkable.

Yet the prisoners were not freed. Picquigny showed uncharacteristic indifference to the friar's opinion and instead had them moved to royal custody in the Cité, where they were housed in humane and generous conditions in the towers of the fortifications. The burly ruffians hosted in the Franciscan convent now headed home, to be hastily replaced in Carcassonne by another contingent from Albi—the wives who had complained to the queen of their loneliness.

In keeping the prisoners, the king's man performed an odd act of diplomacy. He had not questioned the verdict of the inquisitors; if he had, he would have set everyone free. Rather, he was addressing the problems of the conditions of detention and possible abuses of legal procedure. That nicety may have amounted to shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted, but the administrative fiction was necessary. His action had effectively placed his king in opposition to the inquisition and the Dominican Order. Already another of the king's ministers, Guillaume de Nogaret, had accused the pope of heresy and was preparing to lead a squad of mercenaries to the papal residence in Anagni. Picquigny would not throw oil on the fire by declaring the whole enterprise of inquisition to be a sham and thereby set up the king for charges of abetting heresy.

From the larger perspective, what Délicieux made happen on that day, no matter what the status of the prisoners, stands as a landmark in the course of medieval history. He had bucked the tide. To a culture of increasing persecution, of a developing Christianity of fear, of a renewed intolerance of Jews, of a nascent fear of witchcraft and sorcery—ultimately, to a culture intent on demonizing dissent and difference—the man who pried open the Wall had said no. Brother Bernard saw violent persecution as incompatible with his religion. It was a stark and simple position. He refused to allow the arguments of expediency and institutional loyalty to construct a worldview fundamentally at odds with his point of departure, as some Dominicans had done in their elaboration of a system of sincere persecution, righteous torture, and judicial killing. A century after Bernard's time a German bishop, horrified by the schism afflicting the Church in the wake of the Avignon exile of the papacy, would write: “When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.”

Bernard Délicieux could never condone such sentiment. He and a few kindred spirits stood up and decried the direction their church was heading. It had joined hands with the torturer and the executioner, effectively seconding the argument that Cathars had put forth for nearly a century: Roma was the opposite of Amor. The Franciscan could not have known that inquisition, once in the control of men far less scrupulous than the medieval Dominicans, would plague Catholic Europe and Latin America for centuries, but he could already see with his own eyes the spiritual corruption it brought in its wake. Bernard was exceptional in that he actually took effective action against this sickness of spirit. Somewhat as the amoral German bishop had advised for the defense of his Church, Bernard had used guile, politicking, demagoguery, oratory, persuasion, perhaps bribery, and even the threat of force to achieve his objective, but he had nonetheless done the unthinkable: overturn the inquisition. And, in contradistinction to the bishop, he had accomplished this without the effusion of blood or the flash of swordplay. He was a man of peace, true to Francis of Assisi. As one simple woman of Carcassonne is said to have exclaimed on hearing him speak: “Behold, the Lord has sent down an angel to help us!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TORTURE EXPOSED

B
ERNARD NOW LABORED
to make his victory permanent. The Wall had disgorged a valuable group of informants. These people had been tortured, made to accuse their neighbors, their enemies, their friends. Bernard, combining the instincts of an investigative reporter and an activist lawyer, set out to construct his own version of an inquisition register. He went to the towers of the Cité and interviewed the prisoners, beseeching them to scour their memories and recall the treatment they had received and the words they had spoken. In one part of this “register,” Bernard recounted the tortures awaiting those who fell afoul of the inquisition, specifying what had been done to whom, and when. The full panoply of cruel Christianity was laid bare.

This torture section, given Bernard's persuasive proclivities, must have been riveting. Although the document itself has not survived, the nearly indignant references to it contained in the formal charges against him at his trial suggest that, at the very least, it was distressingly colorful. Doubtless the friar evoked the torture in common use in his day, the strappado, the “queen of torments,” which was used to elicit confession, the “queen of proofs.” In this operation, the victim's hands were tied behind his back and then, the loose end of the rope coil having been played across a ceiling beam, he was raised into the air, his outstretched, distended arms bearing his full weight. Heavy weights could be tied to his feet, to make the contortion even more unbearable. Depending on the whim of the torturer, the rope could be loosed for a split second, causing the victim to drop, then be reimmobilized in midair, the resultant jolt dislocating his arms or pulling them out of their sockets. The strappado might initially last only a few minutes—the time it took for the holy inquisitor to intone a prayer, it was suggested piously—before being renewed if the results proved unsatisfactory.

The inquisitor had many other refinements, which Bernard would have taken care to relate in detail. For women and children, binding of the wrists tightly by coarse wet cord, then unbinding them and starting up the process once again, with even more force, was considered humane. Other extremities could be useful as well. Savagely beating the soles of the feet was fairly common. This sent pain rioting up through the body. For obdurate people, an inflammable liquid could be splashed on the feet and then set alight. This attention to the body's extremities arose from the duty of the thoughtful jurist, then as now, to avoid causing major organ failure. Another common technique entailed sleep deprivation. Forty hours of enforced sleeplessness came to be considered the happy mean. Further treatments common in Carcassonne included the rack, other means of stretching and dislocating (which sometimes came accompanied by the judicious application of hot brands), and the shock of freezing cold water.

In his complementary section, Bernard pieced together the confessions and accusations. He compiled a long list of names, organized by town, of people who were still blithely going about their business, unaware that the inquisitor had plans for them. They had been denounced as supporters of heresy. Were it not for Bernard's and his allies' ability to stymie the inquisitors in both Albi and Carcassonne, the persons bearing these names would have been manacled in the filth of the Wall, awaiting their next beating and strappado. His collating done, he had copies of his work made and disseminated far and wide.

The Franciscan barnstormed the towns and villages between Carcassonne and Albi. He convened meetings at which he told the inhabitants of the brutality and deceit of the inquisitors; for the illiterate, he pointed to their names on his lists. He elicited the expected reaction: horror and anger. Donations flowed into his treasury—only Bernard Délicieux could permanently lift this plague from the land.

Jean de Picquigny had more immediate concerns. Unable to countenance the injury done to the inquisition, Geoffroy d'Ablis had excommunicated Picquigny in September. The king's man would burn in Hell for what he had done. In the same month, the beleaguered Pope Boniface VIII was shouting
“E le cole, e le cape!”
to the intruders in his residence at Anagni. The outrageous slap took place on September 7; the pope was dead on October 11. Guillaume de Nogaret then quickly joined Jean de Picquigny in the ranks of the excommunicated, an occupational hazard of working for King Philip the Fair.

Whereas, incredibly, Nogaret then labored for seven years to have the dead pontiff disgraced and posthumously excommunicated, Picquigny took another tack. He appealed the sentence of d'Ablis. In October, he and Brother Bernard made the long journey once more to Paris. The Franciscan had been badgering Picquigny to make the voyage to see the king ever since the emptying of the Wall; he had suggested bringing along the prisoners who had been freed from it so that the monarch could see the marks of torture and mistreatment on the bodies of his loyal and blameless subjects. The king's man, perhaps regretting how well he had been played by Délicieux, showed himself once again not to be entirely the friar's creature. He refused to take the men of Albi with him, wisely wishing not to enmesh his master further in Bernard's schemes. Picquigny had paid the price: now he was an excommunicate, with little chance of a speedy reprieve from Rome. He knew that the events at Carcassonne and at Anagni would hardly dispose the new pontiff to think fondly of the French. In any event, given the turmoil usually attendant on the conclave charged with electing a pope, several months, even years, could pass before the throne of St. Peter was once again occupied. The cardinals would not lift his excommunication in the interim.

The Dominicans, not surprisingly, decided to exacerbate Picquigny's difficulties. At a general chapter held in Paris in the fall of 1303, the leaders of the Friars Preachers in France proclaimed his appeal invalid and confirmed the sentence of excommunication. Brother Geoffroy d'Ablis, they declared, had done the right thing in throwing this godless hypocrite out of the sacred communion of the Church.

Picquigny viewed this intervention in his appeal process as gratuitous, malicious, and infuriating. In a letter he asked for support from the consuls and townspeople of Toulouse, Carcassonne, Albi, Cordes, Pamiers, Montauban, Béziers, Gaillac, and Rabastens. It is an extraordinary document, so vehement in its language that it was included in the transcripts of Bernard's trial. One can divine the reason for this odd inclusion, for the excerpt below, even given the shroud of translation, leaves no doubt as to the identity of Picquigny's ghostwriter:

There are no words, no expressions that We could use to convey just how spitefully, irreligiously, monstrously and deceitfully some lying, perfidious, iniquitous men, who are ravening wolves disguised as lambs, have falsely denounced Us before our lord the king, our lady the queen and all the great of their court. Namely, Fr. Geoffroy d'Ablis, inquisitor, along with other friars, who in reality do not preach, but rather breach divine law and infallible truth. Repaying us evil for good, hate for love, in their distress at seeing our lord the king, his advisors and other men of good faith refusing to believe, as they had hoped, their poisonous words, they struck out higher and higher, reaching at last the weapon of excommunication. Abusing power, forsaking truth and embracing error, like madmen and dullards, they declared in a public sermon at the Dominican house in Paris that We were de facto excommunicate, thus offending our lord the king, madame the queen and their privy council, and that We were a supporter of heretics and a notorious troubler of the office of the Inqusition—this, after and in spite of a canonical appeal that We have submitted to the Apostolic See . . . [Their action] constitutes a manifest attack on the truth and an offense to justice.