The Perfect Heresy (14 page)

Chastened, Raymond Roger asked the king to intercede on his behalf with the besiegers. The monarch of Aragon and Catalonia rode back to the crusader encampment, confident that the sweet voice of custom would prevail. The negotiations, however, quickly went nowhere. In the end, Arnold Amaury reluctantly consented to allow Raymond Roger, along with eleven companions of his own choosing, to leave Carcassonne with whatever they could carry; what happened to the city and the thousands within it would be left to the discretion of the crusaders. Pedro, disgusted with the demeaning offer, remarked that “donkeys will fly” before the viscount accepted such a deal. When Pedro presented
the terms to Raymond Roger the next day, the younger man all but chased his superior from his sight. He declared that it would be better to be flayed alive than to acquiesce in such a base betrayal of his people. Pedro then left Carcassonne and returned to Aragon, grieving for his vassal and angry at the pope’s legate.

On August 7, the crusaders attempted to storm Castellar, the southern suburb of Carcassonne. At daybreak they charged across its dry moat in full cry, but this time the stream of rocks and arrows loosed by the defenders left scores of attackers writhing on the ground, crawling back to the safety of the trees. One knight, bleeding from the thigh, lay all alone at the bottom of the moat, helpless and exposed. A crusader dashed back out into the line of fire and slid down the slope to his rescue. He propped the man up and hustled him to shelter, the missiles kicking up the dirt all around them. Both sides witnessed this exceptional act of courage, but only the crusaders, for now, knew the hero’s name: Simon de Montfort.

Seeing that Castellar was better defended than Bourg, the northern lords ordered their siege engines brought into play. This was a very wealthy group of barons, so the number and size of these fearsome weapons had to be considerable. First there were the mangonels, small, torque-powered catapults that launched the medieval equivalent of shrapnel. These clouds of rock and pebble swarmed over the walls at great speed, maiming and killing those unfortunate enough to be caught out in the open. Then there were the trebuchets, the “spoon” at the end of their long shaft large enough to accommodate larger rocks and
burning brands, which crashed into the wooden galleries atop the walls. Finally, in smaller numbers, there were the compact howitzers of siege warfare since antiquity, the ballistas.

The shouts and grunts of the artillerymen alternated with the whoosh of their airborne missiles. As would become common in the Albigensian Crusade, monks and bishops sang hymns to remind the combatants of the supernatural purpose behind the fracas. A team of laborers started building a makeshift causeway across the moat, using logs and stones and anything else that came to hand. Carpenters away from the fray put the final touches on a chatte (or cat)—a mobile shelter, topped by a platform of planking, beneath which twenty to thirty men could stand. The cat would be wheeled over the rough causeway and up against the fortifications; the men inside the shelter, experienced sappers, would set to work tunneling under the foundations of the walls. To prevent the defenders from setting the cat ablaze as it crossed over no-man’s-land, unwanted horses and pack animals were slaughtered and skinned, and their wet, bloody hides draped over the planking. The besiegers might not have tried this tactic against the superior fortifications of Carcassonne itself, but the walls of Castellar were less imposing.

According to the chonicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay, the plan worked, but just barely. As the great, bloodied device got rolling, the crusader catapults lashed the defenders with an unrelenting storm of stone. From behind the narrow slits in the walls of Castellar, crossbowmen and archers took aim at the juddering cat as it came closer. Flaming arrows, quarrels, brands went flashing through space. Those that lodged in the superstructure of the shelter fizzled out in the puddles of fresh blood on the skins. The cat reached the wall. The men inside, who would have been soaked in the gore that had dripped from their animal
protection, grabbed pick and spade and set to work. Soon they were digging for their lives. A lucky shot had ignited the cat as it stood against the rampart.

As the cat went up in flames, the sappers furiously carved out a protective niche in the wall so that the men atop the battlements could not take aim at them. Before their wooden shelter collapsed, the siege experts had secured their position and were ready for a long night’s work. The defenders would now have to listen helplessly as the sappers dug a mine gallery beneath the fortifications. The classic sabotage scenario of medieval warfare would be played out at Castellar.

From underneath the rampart, in the darkness, the sappers scrabbled away at the loose gravel and packed earth until they reached the first row of heavy stone. This they propped up with beams and braces, until a large segment of the wall was precariously held up over a deep tunnel by a system of wooden stays, groaning under the weight. The makeshift supports were then drenched with olive oil, suet, pig fat, and other inflammable substances. They jammed the tunnel itself with straw, twigs, and branches brought across the moat under cover of darkness.

At dawn on August 8, the signal was given and the kindling lit. Great clouds of black smoke came pouring out of the hole. Within the mine, the flames from the branches and straw licked the wooden stays and braces, until they too caught fire. Burning, they weakened, cracked, and then collapsed. The heavy stone above came tumbling down with them. The wall was breached.

The crusaders were soon up and over the rubble and into Castellar. A vicious fight ensued, in which most of the defenders of the suburb were killed. The lords of the crusade, pleased with the outcome, repaired to their tents. Raymond Roger and his
men, seeing their opportunity, came charging out of Carcassonne to counterattack and clear the suburb of the crusaders. Most of the northerners left to garrison Castellar were hacked to pieces. This savage massacre, the revenge of Béziers, subsided only when hundreds of mounted knights came riding back from the crusader encampment, their vigilance reawakened by the screams of the dying. The Carcassonnais could not withstand the shock of superior numbers. They fought their way back to the safety of their city, and a gate was swung smartly shut behind them.

Carcassonne was secure, but the siege had begun in earnest. Each side caught its breath. The crusaders had paid dearly for the prize of Castellar, but it was the defenders who would suffer more. The disaster of the previous week—the fall of Bourg with its irreplaceable sources of fresh water—could not be undone. The cisterns of Carcassonne were befouled, and as August wore on, the torrid heat did its awful work. Infants started dying, then the children, the old, and the infirm. Sickness spread; the animals lay down in misery. Soon there was rotting carrion in the streets. A blanket of flies settled over the city; the ground was alive with maggots. There was no water to be had, anywhere. “Never in all their days,” wrote the chronicler who supplied these details, “had they known such suffering.”

Toward the middle of August, a horseman approached the walls of Carcassonne and identified himself as a kinsman of Raymond Roger. He wanted a parley with the viscount. Although the chronicles do not give the identity of this crusader emissary, it seems that his claim to kinship was recognized. Raymond Roger, accompanied by dozens of men-at-arms, rode out of the city to hear what the man had to say.

The crusader’s tone was sympathetic. “I hope … that you
and your people will prosper!” William of Tudela reported him saying. “I certainly advise you to hold out if you are expecting relief to arrive soon. But you must be well aware that nothing of the kind will happen.” The anonymous noble, having underscored Trencavel’s isolation, then threatened Carcassonne with the same fate as Béziers. It was time to negotiate a surrender. The viscount was guaranteed safe-conduct to and from the crusader encampment if he agreed to meet with the barons of the north.

Reassured by the word of his kinsman, Raymond Roger Trencavel rode alone away from his city and, as his enemies watched, made his way to the tents of the great northern nobles. The viscount was brought to the pavilion of the count of Nevers, Hervé de Donzy. He would never be a free man again.

What precisely transpired inside the tent has been hidden by the discretion of the pro-crusade chroniclers who are the sources for this eventful summer of 1209. What can be conjectured is that the nobles of the crusade arrived to greet this young man with the respect due a valiant foe. No doubt Arnold Amaury was present, careful to prevent some hiccup of chivalrous feeling from interfering with his plan to get rid of the viscount. That, it turned out, was the whole point of this siege. Even if, as some historians conjecture, the entire leadership of the Cathars was sheltering within Carcassonne, the head of the crusade thought it more important to eliminate the viscount than to pursue the heretics, which was, in theory, the stated object of the crusade.

The people of Carcassonne were told that they were free to go. In fact, they had to go; their viscount could not help them now. Catholic, Cathar, and Jew, one at a time out a narrow postern, the Carcassonnais deserted their city, and their fortunes.
If they attempted to leave with anything more than the shirt on their back—jewelry, money, finery—it was confiscated. “Not even the value of a button were they allowed to take with them,” a chronicle states. Thousands of barefoot, scarcely clad unfortunates wandered out into the scorching stubble of the black fields, their livelihoods gone and their dignity shattered. They dispersed in all directions, randomly, over hills and along river courses, each to a destiny unknown and unrecorded. Carcassonne was to be resettled.

Raymond Roger was brought back to his empty city in chains and forced down the stone steps of what had been, until two days previously, his castle. The viscount was manacled to the wall of his own dungeon. Whatever deal he had struck in the crusader camp to save his people, it is exceedingly doubtful that he consented to this fate for himself. Three months later, the once healthy Trencavel was found dead in his cell. His successor spoke of dysentery and the mysterious workings of divine agency, but many in a sullen Languedoc suspected foul play.

That successor was Simon de Montfort. He had been given the lands of the Trencavels by a grateful Arnold. The greatest barons of the crusade had first been offered the huge holdings, but all turned down the tempting prize, out of feudal principle and, no doubt, fear of the reaction of their watchful monarch in Paris. But Simon possessed so little land in the north that his windfall threatened no one in the kingdom of France, and his skill as a warrior had been abundantly proved. His was a perfect match of ambition and ability. On August 15, 1209, he was made viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, and all the Trencavel possessions in between. It was the feast day of the other Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Simon de Montfort (from a stained-glass window in the cathedral at Chartres)

(Mansell Collection/Time, Inc.)

The great army packed up and got ready to go home, its crusading quarantine completed and its sordid place in history assured. Simon had wrung a promise from the northern barons that they would return if he needed them. Count Raymond summoned his twelve-year-old son from Toulouse and cordially presented him to Simon and the assembled nobility at Carcassonne. Since one of the greatest nobles of Languedoc had just been ignominiously dispossessed, it is not unreasonable to assume that Raymond was presenting his son to these northerners as a way of asserting his family’s legitimacy. A chronicle relates that the boy met with their approval.

The mass of crusaders left Languedoc for France. Simon settled with forty diehard knights, and their several hundred armed soldiers, in the citadel of Carcassonne. Most of his followers were minor nobles from Picardy and Ile de France; all were
in search of adventure and wealth. There was even an Irishman, Hugh de Lacy, a malcontent of Norman lineage expelled from County Meath. Simon promised these men fiefs if they stayed and subdued the lands he had usurped. He would need their help, for beyond the walls of Carcassonne the new viscount was surrounded by people who hated him.