The Perfect Heresy (12 page)

Viscount Raymond Roger did not stay. Given the Trencavels’ bloody legacy in Béziers, he and the townspeople must have harbored ambivalent feelings toward each other. In the face of a common enemy, the young lord and the Biterrois came to an understanding. Instead of manning the battlements, Raymond Roger rushed back to Carcassonne, to the heart of his territory, to raise an army from his vassals in the Corbières and the Montagne Noire. He planned to return to Béziers as soon as was
practicable and attack the crusaders. Raymond Roger was escorted to Carcassonne by all of Béziers’s Jews. Crusades spelled doom for Jews, even if they were not directly concerned with either the cause or the outcome.

The next day was July 22, 1209, the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene.

The date was not without poignancy. From the eleventh century to the present day, the gypsies living near Béziers and farther up the coast toward the Rhone have had a predilection for Mary Magdalene. They believe that Mary was forced to flee Palestine by boat shortly after the disappearance of her beloved Jesus and that she, Martha, and the raised-from-the-dead Lazarus made landfall near Marseilles, from which they spread the good news about the Nazarene into the pagan countryside of Rome’s provincia Narbonnensis. It is this Mary, the flawed penitent, the once fallen woman, the one to whom proof of Jesus’ resurrection was first given, who has stoked the fires of popular piety among the common people along the Mediterranean coast.

Mary Magdalene had an even better reputation among the gnostics, the classical ancestors of the Cathars. According to many of these thinkers, Mary was actually the foremost among the apostles, outranking Peter and all his successors in Rome. The gnostic gospels were suppressed in the editing of the collective work that came to be known as the New Testament, but those that survived elsewhere often gave her an exalted, pastoral position. Even the gospel of John—admittedly, the oddity when compared with the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—assigns Mary a staggeringly important role, in which she
is singled out to pass the first message from the resurrected Christ to the apostles. Orthodoxy subsequently played down her status and threw its weight behind Peter; many heretics were not so sure. Certainly, the implications of her apostolic primacy—women could be leaders, not just breeders—found an echo in the tentative parity between the sexes allowed in some dualist faiths. The Cathars, who prized the Gospel of John for its gnostic elements, would not have found Mary as antipathetical as other figures in orthodoxy’s communion of saints.

It was fitting, then, that the most important date in the history of Béziers, an acropolis of Catharism defended by its Catholic majority, should coincide with the feast day of a saint so rich in ambiguity and gnostic significance. Fitting, perhaps, but not particularly auspicious; for all her many attributes, Mary Magdalene was never equated with Lady Luck.

By July 22, the crusade had swarmed all over the flats to the south of Béziers. As the Biterrois on the walls watched, tens of thousands of men pitched tents, watered their horses, and lit campfires. Stretching to the distant horizon was an ocean of changing shape and constant movement, ceaselessly shifting in the summer sunshine. Trees were felled, enclosures built, flagstaffs erected. Hundreds of banners, garishly dyed for the gray monotony of the north, fluttered near the pavilions of the lords. The singing of monks could be heard, as could the braying of beasts of burden. The army prepared for a long stay before Béziers.

Just how long was the question. Arnold Amaury had already summoned the crusading lords to a meeting. During his days
alongside Peter of Castelnau and Raoul of Fontfroide, Arnold had stayed in Béziers frequently. On the monthlong march down the Rhône, the leader of the crusade would have told the French barons that the city looked impregnable. Now they could judge for themselves; their siege experts rode out to a respectful distance from the city walls and trotted around the entire circumvallation of the ramparts to look for flaws. In the view of the clergy, these French men of war, feared from Palestine to England for their warrior prowess, would surely find the way to defeat this stubborn, satanic city.

As the meeting convened to discuss what was to be done, the great mass of the army was finishing its tasks. From three chroniclers, William of Tudela, Peter of Vaux de Cernay, and William of Puylaurens, it is possible to piece together what happened on that fateful afternoon.

A handful of the camp followers—kitchen boys, muleteers, varlets, thieves—drifted down to the River Orb, shirts and hats in hand, to find a cool respite from the day. The Orb passed close to the southern fortifications of the city, within shouting distance. Inevitably, insults were exchanged between the men by the riverside and those atop the walls. One of the crusaders rashly walked onto the bridge spanning the Orb, a clear shot for any deadly defensive crossbowman, and loudly taunted the burghers of Béziers. The sight of this half-naked riffraff rankled the proud men behind the walls. A few dozen youths of Beziers decided to teach the scum of the crusade a lesson. They gathered spears, sticks, banners, and a few drums, then swung open a gate and went charging noisily down the slope to the river. The foolhardy loner on the bridge barely had time to choke down his last jeering taunt before they were on him, pummeling and beating him senseless. As his friends scrambled up the bank to help him, he was thrown off the bridge and splashed with finality into the muddy Orb. By then the donnybrook was on.

The massacre at Béziers (from the
Canso
, or
La Chanson de la Croisade
)

(Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

Farther downstream, the “king” of the camp followers—the ribauds—saw the lone heckler go hurtling down into the Orb. He also saw the open gate to the town. In the words of the chronicler: “He called all his lads together and shouted ‘Come on, let’s attack!’ ” By twos and threes, then by the hundreds, a throng came racing toward the mayhem, the scent of battle driving them forward. To return to William of Tudela’s account, mindful of medieval exaggeration: “Each one got himself a club—they had nothing else, I suppose—and there were more than fifteeen thousand of them, with not a pair of shoes between them.” The motley combatants surged toward the bridge.

At the open gate of Béziers, the men and women must have screamed to their brave young roustabouts down below. From
their vantage point atop the slope, those inside the city would have seen the thickening crowds converging on the bridge. The brawling Biterrois had made a ghastly mistake. The conventions of medieval warfare held that a besieging army should never be attacked when it is newly arrived and thus still fresh. Sieges were wearying ordeals of attrition for both sides, and risks were best taken when the opponent had grown tired. The crusaders, still well supplied with food and water, were not demoralized. If anything, they were itching for a fight.

The men of Beziers, outnumbered and exposed, fought their way back to the rampart, up the slope they had so playfully descended just a few moments earlier. As far as can be inferred from the chronicle record, the club-wielding crusaders were among them, shoving through the open gate and into the city itself. Proud Béziers was no longer inviolate; the attackers streamed into the town.

The Biterrois on the battlements saw the spreading stain below. They deserted their posts to descend to the streets to join the melee. Outside, crusaders propped long ladders against the walls of Béziers and scampered up to the unguarded heights. The town was wide-open.

The distant shouts reached the noblemen gathered around Arnold Amaury. A chronicle related, “Now the crusading knights were shouting, ‘To arms! To arms!’ ” The great barons and their armored infantry, the most effective killers of any feudal host, prepared to launch the assault.

In all probability, it was at this moment that the famous order was—or was not—given. Professional opinion is divided on whether Arnold Amaury actually said, in the vernacular, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” (Kill them all. God will know his own). That lapidary phrase was most likely
the invention of a pro-crusade chronicler writing thirty years after the fact. What is certain is that there is no record of anyone, certainly not Arnold Amaury, head of the Cistercian order and the loftiest representative of the vicar of Christ, trying to halt or even hinder the butchery that was about to begin. Not even Count Raymond, who is not thought to have taken part in the sack of the city, is mentioned by the chroniclers as attempting to discourage the crusader bloodlust.

Lord and pilgrim, monk and groom—all now rushed into Béziers. Catholic priests within the city put on vestments for a mass of the dead. Church bells tolled. At the cathedral in which the canons were holding a vigil for the Catholic faithful, the soldiery from the north charged the congregation, broad swords slashing and stabbing until no one within was left standing. The bishop’s auxiliaries were all slain.

The attack moved inexorably up the gentle slope of the hillside town, the Biterrois falling back through the narrow streets. The crusaders showed no mercy. Women and children crowded into the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in the upper town. They prayed to the patroness for protection, on her feast day. The chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay stated that there were 7,000 of them in all, an impossibility given the size of the sanctuary. They must have numbered about 1,000, an estimate based on the maximum capacity of the church. In any case, the church was full of terrified, weeping Catholics and Cathars when the crusaders broke down the doors and slaughtered everyone inside. A jumble of human bones, the victims of the massacre, was discovered under the floor of the church during renovations in 1840.

The townspeople now all dead, the lords of the crusade turned their attention to the material wealth of the city. The rabble who had stormed the bridge, according to William of
Tudela, had already begun looting: “The servant lads had settled into the houses they had taken, all of them full of riches and treasure, but when the French [the lords] discovered this they went nearly mad with rage and drove the lads out with clubs, like dogs.” The knights’ fury was understandable. The spoils of war were always apportioned by the leaders of an army, not by its followers. In the view of barons of the crusade, the ribauds and mercenaries were taking what rightly belonged to the conquering nobility.

The elected king of the ribauds, the man who had spotted the open gate beyond the skirmish on the bridge, called on his men to stop their plunder. They could not possibly defend themselves against the armored knights. But there would be a price to pay. “These filthy stinking wretches all shouted out ‘Burn it! Burn it!’ ” a chronicle noted. “[They] fetched huge flaming brands as if for a funeral pyre and set the town alight.”

The wooden dwellings in the cramped streets were tinder-boxes. The knights watched helplessly as flames engulfed first one, then another quarter of the town. The roof timbers of the great cathedral of St. Nazaire caught fire and collapsed. Soon the entire town was ablaze. The soldiery gradually backed out of the inferno of Béziers. They staggered past the bridge over the Orb and returned to where they had begun this strenuous afternoon of abattoir Christianity. As they watched, the city was consumed in flames, literally a funerary pyre for what scholarly consensus estimates at 15,000–20,000 victims.