The Friar of Carcassonne (4 page)

This last twist in his story contains an irony, for against all of Bernard's high-risk activities looms the ghostly presence of the Cathars, heretics par excellence. A pacific but heterodox Christian credo, Catharism had been mercilessly crushed by the forces of codifying orthodoxy in the thirteenth century, although courageous sympathizers of the creed still trod the byways of Languedoc in Bernard's day. Indeed, as the flamboyant Franciscan had driven the Dominican inquisitors literally to distraction, the Cathars were able to regroup stealthily in Languedoc for one final flowering of their faith.

A personal itinerary this perilous usually ends badly. The story of Bernard Délicieux is, sadly, no exception. Arrested in Avignon on the pope's order in 1317, he was tried in Carcassonne two years later. With so many enemies made, it is hardly surprising that there were more than one hundred counts listed in the docket of charges brought against him. These can be grouped together in four specific areas: obstructing the inquisition, high treason, adherence to heretical notions of poverty, and the murder of a pope through black magic. Délicieux was interrogated, cross-examined, tortured, broken; dozens of witnesses testified against him; and he was sentenced to a harsh solitary confinement that he did not long survive. The inquisition ground on, untrammeled henceforth by any man of his caliber.

To chronicle the life of Bernard Délicieux poses something of a challenge. The years before and after the period of his anti-inquisitorial activity at the turn of the century remain shrouded in darkness. The brief biographical sketch of his early life given above contains just about all that we know of him from the 1260s through the 1290s. The last part of his life, 1305–1320, is not as meager in detail as the first, yet it pales into near-nothingness in comparison to the six-year period at his midlife, from 1299 to 1304. Those years streak across the historical record like a Roman candle, incandescent in detail.

The reason for this spotlight is the trial held in 1319, the subject of Laurens'
Agitateur.
Scores of witnesses were called and much of their invaluable testimony has come down to us in transcripts of the proceedings. His judges, by no means priestly hacks intent on revenge, labored to make sense of what had happened in Languedoc fifteen years earlier. The trial was a torment for him, a gift for us. In 1996, an American historian undertook the task of collating, transcribing, and publishing the charges, depositions, interrogations, cross-examinations, and judgments of the trial. Five years after that, Cathar specialist Jean Duvernoy rendered the Latin of the original into a modern vernacular, French, allowing for wider scrutiny of this astonishing collection of documents. They open wide a window onto a campaign for freedom that occurred seven hundred years ago. In them, the voices of the historical actors, the conflicting memories, the evasions and confessions of the accused, and the tenacity of the investigating judges mingle with such a wealth of everyday detail that the usual inferences necessary for the writing of narrative history can be kept to a minimum.

However rich this source, it cannot do justice to the dangerous complexity of the era in which Bernard lived—and which must first be understood to make sense of his story. A time riven by dispute between a ruthless king and an imperious pope, enlivened by plots of mass arrest and murder, and rich in discontent, rivalry, and riot, the opening of the fourteenth century presents a vivid, almost frightening tapestry against which the revolt led by the Franciscan must be set. Bernard's world was profligate in incident, interconnected and consequential. The actions of the great on the larger stage of western Europe buffeted his Languedoc, as did, just as importantly, the steady growth of the repressive apparatus in Carcassonne and Toulouse and the resistance to it. When, at last, the storms had abated by the second decade of the century and repression resumed unchallenged, Bernard paid the price. He, along with Catharism and Spiritual Franciscanism, met a violent end, the gentler Christianities represented by both the friars and the heretics crushed by a vengeful orthodoxy. Only the memory of Brother Bernard Délicieux—and his example—remained.

Part I

The World of Bernard Délicieux

CHAPTER ONE

THE BRIDGE AT ROME

I
N THE
Inferno,
Dante Alighieri has the pimps and whores in Hell troop past each other on a bridge. Miserable but meek, they are whipped into order by a diabolical traffic cop, each single file of people keeping to its side of the passage. The image is odd, for the thought of a medieval mob does not usually suggest pedestrian discipline. Such behavior seems more modern, more conformist, more housebroken: T. S. Eliot, a student of Dante, has the drudges of his
Wasteland
trudging across London Bridge, as forlorn in their twentieth-century funk as the Florentine's damned of the fourteenth.

Yet the original models for these dark rivers of humanity were of this world, and fully medieval, for they lived in the year 1300. Their bridge spanned the Tiber and was unimaginably old even then, having been built by the emperor Hadrian to give access to the hulking mausoleum he constructed for himself on the right bank of the river. By Bernard Délicieux's time, eleven and a half centuries later, that mausoleum had become the Castel St. Angelo, and its bridge the Ponte St. Angelo. The reason for its heavy foot and equestrian traffic in the year 1300 was a great celebration. Dante commanded his underworld denizens to do as the Romans do:

As when the Romans, because of the multitude

Gathered for the Jubilee, had pilgrims cross

The bridge with one side kept for all those bound

Toward St. Peter's, facing the Castle, while those

Headed toward the Mount were all assigned

The other side.

Not only Romans were on the bridge. Pilgrims came from all over Europe, having heard that their sins would be forgiven in exchange for going through a few devotional motions and loosing liberally the strings of their purses. The year 1300 had been declared a Jubilee, the first in Christendom, and all believers were summoned to Rome to celebrate. To gain remission of all their sins, pilgrims were enjoined to visit the four papal basilicas of the city several times during their stay. Hordes descended on St. John Lateran, St. Peter's, Santa Maria Maggiore, and St. Paul's Outside the Walls. Of the last a traveler wrote: “Day and night two priests stood at the altar of St. Paul's holding rakes in their hands, raking in infinite money.”

With hundreds of thousands streaming through the city, the sheer size of the event gave pause. A gentleman of Florence, Giovanni Villani, was so struck by the sight of so many people that he was moved to undertake his
Nuova Cronica
, a valuable chronicle of his native city and the Italian peninsula in the first half of the fourteenth century. And Dante, Villani's brilliant compatriot, chose to set his
Divina Commedia
amidst the crush and chaos of Holy Week in Rome in 1300.

The great gathering served up an ample sampler of medieval society, as matron, maiden, and wench jostled for elbow room on the bridge with graybeard, squire, and gallant. Noble mingled with peasant, bumpkin with bishop, merchant with purse-snatcher, sinners all, hoping to guarantee themselves a secure berth in the afterlife. Whether, under this heightened expectation, the bridge over the Tiber took on the jolly allure of a Breughel painting or the madness of a Bosch is something we shall never know, but eyewitnesses attested to a crazed enthusiasm in the air.

The impresario behind this lucrative giddiness was an old Roman nobleman, Benedetto Caetani, known to history as Pope Boniface VIII. A brilliant scholar of canon law and an equally accomplished actuary of church accounts, Boniface was the very model of a medieval papal monarch, curling a lip at the ludicrous pretensions of secular princelings when he alone, as pope, held dominion over all of humanity in this world and the next: “We declare, we proclaim, we define,” reads the famous foghorn of a sentence concluding his bull
Unam
Sanctam
, “that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”

Boniface may be said to be the medieval pope who most resembled his Renaissance successors in excessive self-regard. Taking his cue from Hadrian and his mausoleum, by the Jubilee he had had his workmen put the finishing touches on his massive marble tomb at the Vatican, complete with a fresco showing the keys of spiritual power in the grip of Boniface, and not St. Peter, who is depicted as some sort of apostolic deputy. The expansive pope had called the Jubilee to celebrate the commonwealth of Christendom, of which he believed himself to be the undisputed leader. The religion of Jesus had been out in the open in Rome for nearly a millennium, which was reason enough to celebrate.
^*

Pope Boniface looked out over the multitudes with satisfaction. He had taken care to have his likeness adorn several monuments of the city, as visible manifestation that Rome, and by extension all of Christendom, had its monarch. Despite the majesty surrounding his person, Benedetto Caetani's transformation into Boniface VIII had not passed without unseemly incident. His predecessor, Celestine V, an octagenarian hermit, had been pulled from his limestone cave and made pontiff in 1294 when squabbling clans of aristocrats could not come up with a compromise candidate from among their numbers. Far too holy to discharge the duties of the office, within months a despairing Pope Celestine, who wanted nothing so much as to return to his mountain fastness, repeatedly sought advice about abdication from experienced cardinals, who sagely counseled that he could, indeed, resign his office. One of those cardinals happened to have been Benedetto Caetani—who then acquired the papal tiara for himself, but not before adding a second tier, signifying temporal power, to the crown. After this bit of legerdemain, he then reneged on a promise to let Celestine return to his hermitage, ordering him kept under lock and key until the old man dutifully died.

Boniface demonstrated his legitimacy and his position at the pinnacle of Christendom through the great numbers of the faithful eager to acclaim their
papa
. At his apartments at the Lateran, a new loggia had been completed, from which he could greet his flock in person from a balcony, or failing that, have his image, as immortalized in a newly completed fresco, bless any of his eager children who turned their adoring gaze upward.
^*
This outpouring of affection was a testament to success, proof that the dream of the medieval papacy, from the great popes Gregory VII through Innocent III to himself, had finally been realized. The Vicar of Christ had at last been recognized as the unrivaled leader of Europe and, soon, the world.

On the strength of the adulatory acclaim in his city, Boniface may have fancied himself the unchallenged paladin of Christian civilization; more likely, as an intelligent politician, he may just have made noises to that effect to mask the weaknesses he had discerned in his position. For the hard truth of the matter was that the presumptions of the medieval papacy were dangerously close to unraveling definitively. The papacy in the Jubilee year brings to mind a heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, always at her loveliest, eyes aglimmer, complexion aglow—just prior to expiring. So too with the monarchical medieval pontificate in 1300, so stately, so mesmerizing and magnificent, but just as doomed to disappearance. The pilgrims crowding the bridge over the Tiber were devout, but not devoted; they would witness, indeed usher in, challenges to the old order during the first decades of the fourteenth century as resentments grew and circumstances changed. Through these roiling waters men such as Bernard Délicieux navigated, their acts of courage and defiance observed, perhaps applauded, by those watching from the bridge. The supreme pontiff, or
pontifex maximus
, a title borrowed from ancient Rome signifying he who builds the bridge and guides the souls across it, would in a very short time be nothing more than a toll collector on that bridge, and, as such, a sitting duck for his Reformation critics in the not-too-distant future. And within a few years following the Jubilee, to pay that collector one would cross not the Ponte St. Angelo but the Pont d'Avignon. Not only did the papacy's move to its seventy-year exile in Avignon shatter Boniface's dream and profoundly alter the Church, it also brought the great machinery of papal power uncomfortably close to Languedoc and its agitator, Bernard Délicieux.