The Friar of Carcassonne (30 page)

The judges uncovered events in Délicieux's life in the same seemingly unmethodical but entirely destabilizing manner of unexpected return to subjects already raised. Fournier also raised the question of the disputed inquisition registers. Welcoming the opportunity, Bernard demolished them. He told a lengthy and entirely credible story of a Dominican friar, no less, warning a prelate of Narbonne of their outright falsehoods. Bernard named the inquisition clerks he believed behind what was essentially a scheme to keep the inquisition active in Carcassonne so that the two clerks, both men of the south, could retain their feared positions and collect the fortunes confiscated. He enumerated once again his complaints about imaginary Good Men, then recited a devastating taxonomy of the type of people whom the inquisitors of the 1280s and 1290s convicted and despoiled: they were always dead, thus defenseless; they had always been hereticated on their deathbed; they were never accused of heresy while alive; many of those who supposedly attended such heretications never knew the deceased until that moment, and were only in turn accused after their own decease; and, most damningly, the living witnesses to the heretications, the informants, were never pursued. Bernard's arguments, given in a steady voice in the stone chamber, were not challenged by the court. Fournier must have known the friar was right, for he was aware of the workings of inquisition and the opportunities for abuse.

The bishop of Pamiers, however, had been sent to do a job, which he did on his own terms. Fournier was, above all, a man of principle—however much his prosecutorial ethic is unappealing to most modern eyes. Unlike many of his fellow churchmen, he was not venal or nepotistic. Alone among Avignon popes, Fournier, as Benedict XII, tried to rein in the circus of luxury by the Rhône. Yet in 1319, he had been clearly charged by Pope John to take down Bernard one way or the other. The challenge for Jacques Fournier lay in how to do this in a way that he thought just. It is bold but not unreasonable to conjecture that this brilliant, principled prosecutor did not really care about the other charges: he could have seen the murder charge as the usual farrago of fantastic rumor, the long-dead treason conspiracy as an exercise in the Church's guarding its jurisdictional turf, the Spiritual affiliation as a matter of mendicant madness. Efficient and workmanlike, he and his colleague had wrung out confessions on the last two charges and a ringing denial on the first. But only the matter of inquisition—for which, significantly, torture was not applied—could give Fournier satisfaction.

In late October, he threw the book at Bernard. In a written warning, the judges told Bernard that he had been an excommunicate for years. They spelled out the law of the inquisitors: anyone who caused to be released from the custody of the inquisition any duly convicted prisoner, without the permission of the competent church authority (inquisitor or bishop), was automatically, as a result of that action, excommunicated. And if the situation was not rectified within a year and the excommunication not lifted, that person was a heretic.

Faced with this sobering statute, Bernard confessed his role in undoing the work of the inquisitors and asked for absolution. Despite this admission, the judges knew it was insufficient. Public sentiment held that the conduct of inquisition in Languedoc in the two decades prior to the year 1300 had been scandalous. Bernard had merely confessed to opposing unjust inquisitors—which was what he had been arguing all along. The judges needed more than a confirmation of what everyone already knew and not a few still applauded.

If Fournier silently agreed with Bernard about the iniquitous registers and incompetent or corrupt inquisitors, he had to establish that the Franciscan's antipathy went far beyond that. Bernard maintained that he had gone only after particular inquisitors, not the inquisition. Both men knew the significance of the distinction. Arguing for the destruction of the inquisition, the sanctified tool for combating heresy, aided and abetted heresy. That was a capital crime. It was not, like freeing the prisoners, an action that triggered an automatic excommunication measure. It was not tantamount to heresy—it was heresy, not stumbled into through the expiration of a one-year grace period but held sincerely and criminally over time.

The dance between the two men on this fundamental matter continued throughout the month of November. Fournier stated that witnesses had spoken of a system of anti-inquisitorial opposition that Bernard had wanted to make permanent. A witness deposed in Avignon on June 7, 1319, had stated in a matter-of-fact manner that Bernard's goal in going to Senlis for his momentous audience was “to ensure the inquisition was completely paralyzed and persuade the king of France to abolish it altogether.” There were damning letters to consuls of Languedoc towns, demanding money for organizing. Bernard allowed that he might have overstepped his bounds as a simple Franciscan friar, but it was all in the service of fighting the unjust among the inquisitors. Around 1300, Bernard had claimed that there were no heretics left in Languedoc, yet that had been demonstrably proven untrue in subsequent years. In an exchange of November 8, Fournier asked a seemingly innocent question: who, at time of the disputation of Toulouse in 1304, were the inquisitors at Carcassonne and Toulouse? Bernard gave the names: Geoffroy d'Ablis and Guillaume de Morières. Yet they were not the ones Bernard had earlier identified to the court as objectionable, namely, Jean Galand, Guillaume de Saint-Seine, Foulques de Saint-Georges, and Nicolas d'Abbeville. They no longer held office at the time of the disputation, when Délicieux had lectured the king on diagnosing and extirpating an illness. The implication of this point of fact was clear: the friar would never approve of an inquisitor, any inquisitor.

November drew to a close. Bernard was failing, the constant interrogations and traps having taken their toll. So too had torture and captivity. Fournier, sensing the kill, opted then to take out his heaviest cudgel. Bernard was informed he had a choice. He could stop all his cavils and evasions on the charges, confess to obstructing not just inquisitors but the inquisition as a whole, thereby aiding heresy, and then ask for forgiveness, or he could persist in his denials and excuses. If he chose the latter, he should be under no illusion: he would then be convicted on the charge of heresy, which would incur excommunication, execution, and an eternity in Hell.

The Franciscan was given a few days to think it over. Now that his body was broken, he had to think of his soul.

On December 3, he was brought before Fournier and Mostuéjouls. He had decided to end the exhausting game of cat-and-mouse. The germane passage of the transcript reads: “[The judges], seeking and attempting to effect the conversion of Brother Bernard and the salvation of his soul, warned him once, twice, thrice and demanded he confess without any further diversions and frivolous excuses to having favored the heretics and obstructed the inquisition.” Bernard, in the first part of his surrender, at last uttered the words Fournier had long sought: “Despite the justifications and excuses put forth by me in my statements and responses on favoring and obstructing, I now admit my guilt.”

The “queen of proofs” had been delivered. If Bernard had indeed wanted to topple the inquisition, no matter who staffed it, then by the logic of the day this was a moment of justice long delayed. If, on the other hand, he had done only what he had originally claimed—attack corrupt inquisitors—then on this day in Carcassonne there must have been darkness at noon. He had condemned himself to spare the Church embarrassment.

On Saturday, December 8, 1319, crowds jammed the market square of the Bourg of Carcassonne. The great and the mean had gathered together. Of the former, there were prelates and noblemen and notables in their splendid finery, among them the bishops of Carcassonne, Mirepoix, and Elne, the abbots of Lagrasse and Montolieu, the count of Forez, the seneschal of Carcassonne, the knights François de Lévis, Guillaume de Voisins, Dalmas de Marciac, and Raimond Accurat-Comte, the judges of Verdun and Rivière, the eminent law professor Frisco Ricomanni, the lawyers Peire Vital and Peire Guille, and the consuls of Carcassonne. The humbler of the multitude—merchant and maiden, tradesman and alewife, friar and widow—had come from the streets leading to the marketplace, a variegated stream of medieval humanity. All had come to see Bernard, their enemy, their friend, their former nemesis, their erstwhile champion, the man they had heard vilified or praised, the holy or unholy priest their parents had told them so much about.

There was no
sermo generalis
. This was not an inquisitorial proceeding. There was no stake, no chanting Dominicans, no talk of dogs returning to their vomit.

Bernard stood in full view of the assembly, failing, sickly, undone. The judgments against him were to be read aloud. No mention of the friar's adherence to the Spirituals was made. The original pretext for prosecution had been abandoned. Judgment was rendered.

On the charge of killing the pope: not guilty.

On the charge of treason: guilty.

On the charge of obstructing the Holy Office: guilty.

The reading began, a long, detailed, and sententious monument of stately prose and stern outrage. As his offenses were recounted Bernard stood silent, as thousands looked at him for the last time.

His sentence arrived at the end of the reading. He was to be defrocked—he would no longer be member of the clergy, no longer be Brother Bernard. Although he had confessed and been given absolution, a just punishment, a penance, had to be inflicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Wall of Carcassonne—to the
murus strictus
, shackled solitary confinement and a diet of bread and water.

Whether the sentence was too harsh or too lenient came to be answered conclusively later in the day at the episcopal palace, where Bernard was taken one last time for a formal ceremony to exclude him from the clergy. Following that moment of further degradation, a letter was addressed by Jacques Fournier and Raimond de Mostuéjouls to his new jailer, Jean de Beaune, the inquisitor of Carcassonne. Once beyond the customary flowery formalities, a surprising passage leaps out:

Having finally assigned him to strict confinement in the Wall, situated between the Cité of Carcassonne and the Aude, subjecting him to perpetual imprisonment in irons and a diet of bread and water, We, out of consideration for his age and weakness, and particularly at this moment for the weakness that can be discerned in his hands, believe that he should be dispensed from performing this penance . . . and [thus] give you by this document the permission to exempt him from irons and fasting.

This was a final twist, and, for his enemies, the last straw. The legal representatives of the French king, Philip V, demanded that Bernard be turned over to them for execution. He no longer could claim the immunity of the cloth—he was no longer a clergyman. Their appeal was lodged the next day. Although a formal gesture, a type of jurisidictional chest-puffing between state and Church, the document stands out for the vehemence of its language. The last-minute clemency clearly had grated—and produced last-minute prose:

He [Bernard] committed or encouraged others to commit many great and shameful crimes, shameful acts that were both criminal and harmful and that cannot be detailed without a long speech, that should stir up a tempest of the elements, and for which he should suffer death not once, but many times, if human nature would only allow it.

Fournier and his colleague were having none of it. They flatly rejected the appeal. They had punished Bernard enough by putting him the friar of carcassonne | 201 in the Wall he so detested and which he would never leave. For his contemporaries, the softened sentence seemed lenient. If, indeed, he was guilty of heresy through systematically trying to bring down the inquisition, then by the cruel standards of the day he deserved not imprisonment but death.

Yet behind Fournier's final act of compassion, there might be another consideration. Fournier, for all his rectitude, was not a softhearted man: to be an inquisitor of his stature, one had to have no compunction about ruining lives for matters that could very well have been ignored—and were, by other churchmen of his own day. The mercy Fournier accorded Délicieux may have proceeded from scruple. He had been dispatched by the pope to do a job, and he had done it. Yet if the final confession made by Bernard had been false, extracted under threat and given to save ecclesiastical face, Fournier would have known that only too well. It would have nagged at his conscience. If, as the Franciscan had maintained until the very last moment, he had acted only against inquisitorial abuse and not the inquisition itself, then he had done no wrong. In showing mercy to Bernard, Jacques Fournier may have been asking God for mercy for himself.

The pope had no such scruples. Inserted in an inquisition register of Bernard Gui conserved in the British Museum, a papal letter of February 27, 1320, informs Jacques Fournier and Raimond de Mostuéjouls that they had been mistaken to reduce the severity of the punishment. A marginal notation appears, written by an unknown but deferential clerk:

My Lord the Most Holy Pope John XXII, after the sentence delivered against Brother Bernard Délicieux had been read before him and the lord cardinals in a private consistory, and after learning the retention of the right to mitigate the punishment, revoked this stipulation entirely and ordered that Bernard Délicieux be subject to the full rigor of the sentence and that the conditions of his punishment be completely observed.

By the time this icy blast of malice was received, Bernard Délicieux was, in all probability, already dead. If not, its implementation finished him off. We do not know the date of his demise or where he was buried, only that it occurred in early 1320. The pope, in his final letter on the subject, clearly wanted Bernard to suffer and die quickly.

The trial at Carcassonne had been staged to make that happen. Had he been burned, he might have entered legend. Pope John, through the grinding machinery of a trial, wanted Bernard to confess and disappear into the Wall, where he would be forgotten. And he was.