The Perfect Heresy (15 page)

S
O SANG THE TROUBADOUR PEIRE VIDAL
, bound for the castle of Cabaret, of the most beautiful lady of his day, Etiennette de Pennautier, or Loba. Those who traveled to the highland hideaway to woo her included men from the uppermost ranks of society: Bertrand of Saissac, the guardian of the young Trencavel; Aimery of Montréal, a lord of the rural Cathar heartland;
Raymond Roger of Foix, the hotheaded Pyrenean count. In the first decade of the 1200s, Cabaret had become Languedoc’s foremost shrine on the pilgrimage of courtly love. In 1210, the crusade would make it synonymous with sorrow.

Cabaret was a rugged estate hugging the forward slope of the Montagne Noire, its wealth attributable to its gold and copper mines. At the time of the crusade, Cabaret had three tawny stone fortresses—Cabaret, Surdespine, Quertinheux—grouped on a height from which the plain around Carcassonne could be glimpsed, ten miles to the south. Loba was married to the brother of the seigneur, Peter Roger, the man who had been at Raymond Roger’s side throughout the defense of Carcassonne, and who had implored the impetuous young Trencavel to refrain from rushing out to attack the crusaders on the day of their arrival. It is not recorded whether Peter Roger advised similar caution before the viscount accepted the safe-conduct that was subsequently violated by the crusaders. A measure of satisfaction was won by the imprisoned viscount’s allies, when, a few weeks after the fall of Carcassonne, Simon de Montfort and his army were soundly repulsed before Cabaret. The wild terrain gave them no purchase for a long siege, and the attackers abandoned all hope of taking the place.

In the months following this defensive victory, Cabaret became the nerve center of minor rebellion. The occupying French lost control of about forty of the hundreds of castles that had originally submitted to the crusade in the wake of the Béziers massacre. From Cabaret, raiding parties stole through the scrubland by moonlight to lay traps for the new rulers of the Trencavel domains. In one such ambush, Bouchard de Marly, a member of Simon de Montfort’s inner coterie, was disarmed and dragged
back to captivity at Cabaret. Yet these were minor skirmishes, occurring in the dead of winter; the coming of warm weather would signal a return to more ambitious engagements.

In early April, a stumbling procession of about 100 men in single file arrived at the gates of Cabaret. They had walked across the inhospitable countryside from Bram, twenty-five miles away, a poorly fortified lowland town that had yielded to Simon de Montfort after only three days of siegework. The exhausted, whimpering men were Bram’s defeated defenders; each trudged through the dust of the courtyard with face downcast, an arm outstretched to touch the shoulder of the man ahead in line. The people of Cabaret soon saw the reason for their odd parade discipline. The men had been blinded, their eyes gouged out by the wrathful victors. So too had each man’s nose and upper lip been sliced off—they were walking skulls, their unnatural, immutable grins a hideous spectacle of mutilation. Their leader, who had been left with one eye so as to guide his companions from Bram to Cabaret, brought the grotesque march to a halt in front of Peter Roger, his knights, and their ladies.

Simon de Montfort, the new master of Carcassonne, had begun the campaign of 1210. The soldiers of Christ were once again on the move.

For the next two decades, the fate of the Cathars became intertwined with a political power struggle between feudal lords. There could be no backing down from the uncompromising precedents set in 1209. Pope Innocent had made it a crime not only to be a heretic but also to tolerate the presence of heretics in the community. Since the highest secular authorities in
Languedoc continued to scoff at such a notion, they could be deposed with the pope’s blessing.

What was needed to stake a claim in the resulting Languedoc land rush was ruthlessness, orthodox piety, and a predisposition to conquest stemming, usually, from one’s meager inheritance. Many of the settlers in armor were second or third sons from the north, hoping to reverse the bad luck of their tardy births. The southerners whom they dispossessed with the approval of the Church became nobles without land, castle, or income. They were known as
faidits
—fautors—a banditry of angry men looking for revenge. It was these faidits who ferociously defended their pacifist Cathar kin.

Simon de Montfort was the prime creator and crusher of faidits. A second son from an estate near the forest of Rambouillet, a woodland to the southwest of Paris, Simon came from an illustrious but not particularly affluent clan. His Anglo-Norman parents bequeathed to him the county of Leicester, in Britain. It was a bequest as beautiful and useless as the sky, since the Plantagenets on the English throne were loath to recognize the claims of nobles so uncomfortably close to their enemies in Paris. It would be up to Simon’s fourth son, another Simon de Montfort, to reclaim his English patrimony and, in the course of an illustrious career, champion the cause of baronial freedoms in the teeth of royal tyranny. The father defended papal bulls; the son, the Magna Carta.

The elder Simon was a deeply devout man, respected for being straightforward in his dealings and for leading men by example. The admiring Catholic chroniclers of the time speak of his winning manner and distinguished appearance. One text lingers lovingly in its description of a tall, handsome aristocrat with a great mane of hair and a muscular build. Simon was, by all
accounts, fearless. On several occasions, his comrades-in-arms had to restrain him from single-handedly taking on an opposing army. At the impregnable castle of Foix, a furious Simon rode with just one companion to the main gate and shouted up insults at those who defied his will to conquest. From the rain of missiles that formed the defenders’ response, only Simon emerged alive.

In many respects, he was the opposite of Count Raymond of Toulouse, whose religious liberality, sexual profligacy, and elastic word were all traits Simon considered poisonous and immoral. A hardened warrior with an overriding sense of honor, Simon first drew attention to himself during the Fourth Crusade. Encamped with the greatest lords of France outside the Dalmatian port of Zara, he refused on principle to take part in the siege of a Christian city. When the Venetians subsequently persuaded the crusaders to embark for further outrages in Byzantium, Simon led a rump of disgruntled knights out of the Balkans in search of other mariners willing to take them to Palestine. After an inconclusive campaign under a crusader king, he returned home in 1205, his honor safe but his purse depleted.

Another of Simon’s distinguishing characteristics was his conspicuous monogamy, which set him apart from most of his peers. His wife, Alice of Montmorency, remained Simon’s lifelong partner, and the couple had six children together. Alice shared in his battlefield successes and dizzying dash to prominence. She could usually be found at Simon’s side, even in the dreariest of army camps. Alice, the first cousin of the captured Bouchard de Marly, arrived in Languedoc in March 1210 at the head of a troop of reinforcements for her husband, the new viscount.

While no army of Simon’s would be as immense as the one assembled in 1209, each marching season swelled the number of
men under his command, for the pope renewed the call for a crusade every year. From a mere handful of adventurers nervously waiting out the winter, the forces at Simon’s disposal mushroomed in the fine weather, only to contract once again as each fresh supply of armed pilgrims completed its quarantine and returned to the north. Among the more vigorous knights beyond the Loire and the Rhine, a trip south to Languedoc during these years was irresistible, even without the crusading indulgence. An absence of two months was too brief for any serious trouble to develop at home, but long enough to hone one’s skills in the storming of castles and the shedding of blood. A shrewd strategist and accomplished fighter, Simon de Montfort ran, in effect, a permanent, practical tutorial in warfare for the belligerent nobility of the north. When not bogged down in a siege, Simon ceaselessly galloped the length and breadth of his new domains, stamping out dissent, demanding homage, battling dispossessed nobles intent on revolt. His fair-weather allies had to keep up with him in a zigzagging marathon of intimidation.

The Perfect ran from the contagion of violence. Such horrors as Béziers and Bram strengthened their belief that the Church of Rome was illegitimate. The institution violated its own laws. For simpler souls, a similar damning conclusion could be drawn from what they witnessed in these years: The harmless, holy people within the villages were being forced to flee the foreign warriors without. The crusaders destroyed vineyards, burned crops, took what was not theirs. One of Simon’s first measures was to institute an onerous annual poll tax, the proceeds of which
went to the pope. It was as if he were encouraging people to side with the Cathars.

Resistance to his authority was widespread. In the countryside around Albi, Simon de Montfort rode triumphantly into villages and towns that paid him elaborate civic homage—then defied his representatives once he had returned to distant Carcassonne. The town of Lombers, where the pioneers of Catharism had faced down an assembly of bishops in 1165, did not even wait for Simon to leave. Their submission came only after a botched assassination attempt.

Other settlements that Simon visited were mysteriously deserted. At Fanjeaux, the hilltop settlement that had witnessed both lively arguments and balls of fire, he found a ghost town. The homes of the female Perfect were empty, their spinning wheels and looms surrendered to the insistent intrusion of the winds. In the valley below, at Prouille, Dominic’s young women worked hard in their new convent, but their heretical kin had vanished.

Some of the Perfect went to Montségur, a castle in the Pyrenees. In 1204, the fortress had been rebuilt, at the behest of farsighted dualist leaders, by a wealthy Cathar believer linked to the ruling family of the region. The eagle’s nest served as the ultimate bastion of heresy, an unassailable fastness that all turned to in time of need. Mount St. Bartholomew, a green goliath looming over Montségur, could be seen on the southern horizon from almost any point in central Languedoc, a constant reminder of the haven of sanctity nearby. Much of the Cathar leadership, including Guilhabert of Castres and other debaters of Dominic, headed to Montségur to weather the storm of war.