The Perfect Heresy (18 page)

Innocent’s instructions had given the council the power to absolve Raymond but not to condemn him. If he could not speak, absolution was impossible. The tonsured heads at St. Gilles voted to extend indefinitely the excommunication decreed in September 1209. In so doing, they were not taking any initiative that could be construed as disobeying the pope; they were merely upholding the status quo. The perjury argument was an ingenious tactic, a great moment, one could say, in the annals of lawyering. Innocent went along with the decision, although he may not have been convinced of its justice. In a letter to King Philip Augustus of France shortly thereafter, he allowed, “We know that the Count has not justified his actions yet; but whether this omission is his fault or not we cannot tell.”

Raymond would spend the next six months trying to get the prelates to change their minds. An absurdist round of conferences and conclaves enlivened the major cities of Languedoc, as Raymond went knocking on doors that would not open because he was an excommunicate. His promises of greater concessions
to the Church were automatically invalid unless accompanied by a sworn oath; yet he could not swear to anything until his excommunication had been lifted. And the count could not request a hearing, since, as a perjurer, he could not speak.

Time pressed in the latter half of 1210, for Simon de Montfort’s unbroken string of victories brought him closer and closer to Saint Gilles territory. Victory at Minerve was followed by the taking of Termes, a hilltop castle in the Corbières that was thought unassailable by anything less than mountain goats. As Simon and his cadre of grizzled knights and crusaders from Germany and Flanders clung to the steep slope, a Paris priest and siege engineer named William directed the fire of the catapults and Simon’s ever-faithful Alice of Montmorency hustled reinforcements through the dangerous defiles to her husband’s exposed position. After four months, Termes surrendered and its lord was sent to a Carcassonne dungeon.

Termes and a succession of hangings and burnings called forth a new wave of capitulation. Even Peter Roger of Cabaret dropped his defiance, by announcing to his prisoner, Bouchard de Marly, that he would hand over to him all his lands, castles, and titles in exchange for lenient treatment from the new viscount of Carcassonne. Bouchard went free, and the rebel base on the Montagne Noire shut down. By the new year, the great majority of the old Trencavel possessions had been taken.

King Pedro of Aragon tried to prevent the war from engulfing the rest of Languedoc. In January of 1211, he made a generous overture to the Church: Pedro recognized Simon de Montfort as his vassal, thereby giving a sworn seal of approval
to the new viscount among the nobility on both sides of the Pyrenees. The bond of vassalage, a complex link of subservience for the vassal and obligation for the liege lord, was above all else a contract that established legitimacy. In recognizing Simon, Pedro was consigning the infant son of the late Raymond Roger Trencavel to feudal irrelevance and, in the process, acknowledging the Church’s right to depose his vassals without his permission. It was an important concession for which Pedro sought something in return: the restitution of his brother-in-law, Raymond VI, to his rightful place as the most important lord of Languedoc. Pedro might well have added that Raymond de Saint Gilles, count of Toulouse, Quercy, and Agen, duke of Narbonne, marquis of Provence, viscount of the Gévaudan, was no mere serf to be trampled underfoot.

Arnold Amaury promised to end the charade of Raymond’s ostracism the following month at a council in Montpellier. On February 4, 1211, Pedro and Raymond were told to wait in the cold outside a church while the Church’s proposal was dictated to a scribe by the legates. Given Arnold’s record as a merciless negotiator, the two men standing in the chill February wind must have braced themselves for a stern document.

Arnold did not disappoint. Raymond had the offer read to him by a literate member of his entourage. The legate enjoined the count to forsake the use of mercenaries, to pay the clergy their due, to levy no illegal tolls, to stop employing Jews, and to deliver all heretics in his lands to the crusaders within one year. It was the second part of the document that innovated: All of the castles and fortresses of Languedoc had to be demolished; Raymond and his subjects were forbidden to eat meat more than twice a week; henceforth all were required to wear only coarse brown robes; the nobles were forced to move out to the country-side
and live “like villeins,” and all of their property, goods, and earthly possessions were placed at the disposal of the crusaders. Furthermore, Raymond was required to go to Palestine and stay there until permitted to return by the Church.

This was not an olive branch; it was a club. Raymond seethed in silence, then, according to a chonicler, gestured to Pedro: “ ‘Come here, my lord king,’ he said with a smile. ‘Listen to this document and the strange orders the legates say I must obey.’ The king had it read out again and when he had heard it, he said in a quiet voice, ‘Almighty God in heaven, this must be changed!’ ”

The Church was asking nothing less than for the entire nobility of Languedoc to vanish and leave the way open for others to fill the vacuum. Raymond galloped off without even deigning to reply; he would never again even consider joining a crusade. For this and his previous acts of brazen impiety, he was solemnly excommunicated once again, and all of his territories were placed under interdict. Innocent chose to confirm the sentence.

The holy war finally approached the lands of Toulouse in April of 1211, when Simon de Montfort brought his crusaders to the town of Lavaur. Among their number were Enguerrand of Coucy, a wealthy noble from Picardy, and Peter of Nemours, the bishop of Paris. Peter had come to Languedoc to join his brother William, the priest of the Paris cathedral chapter whose expertise as a siege engineer had helped reduce Termes to submission. Many historians believe that Dominic, a good friend to Simon de Montfort, was also in attendance at Lavaur. To complete the crusader panoply, several hundred men of the White
Brotherhood took their places on the hillside opposite the town to chant out hymns under the direction of Bishop Fulk of Toulouse.

The siege of Lavaur lasted longer than expected because Simon lacked sufficient forces to smother the town, his reinforcements having been annihilated by Count Raymond Roger of Foix. In a surprise attack, Raymond Roger and his wild-eyed mountain knights fell upon a large column of crusaders who had made the long march from Germany to join up with Simon. Less than a day away from Lavaur, they were ambushed at Montgey, a hill near St. Felix en Lauragais, the village where the Cathars had met in 1167. The Pyrenean knights plowed into the thousands of hapless foot soldiers and killed as many as possible before the crusaders at Lavaur could ride to the rescue. When Simon arrived, Raymond Roger and his men had already taken flight. The leader of the crusade found only crowds of peasants from nearby villages, knives and clubs in hand, finishing off what the count of Foix had started.

The following month came Simon’s response. On May 3, 1211, the walls of Lavaur were breached by Father William and his sappers, and the crusaders successfully stormed the town. The eighty Occitan knights who had commanded the defense of Lavaur were all hanged, in an egregious flouting of the rules of warfare. Captured noblemen were usually imprisoned or ransomed off to their families; in killing all of the nobles, the crusaders were showing that the legitimate rulers of Languedoc were just as much the enemy as the heretics. The leader of the defeated defenders was Aimery of Montréal, the lord who had hosted Cathar-Catholic debates and, in 1210, sworn allegiance to Simon de Montfort. He paid a steep price for double-crossing
the northerner; the weight of Aimery’s large and lifeless body was said to have snapped the crossbeam of the gallows.

Aimery had broken his word to Simon in order to come to the aid of his sister, Geralda, the lady of Lavaur’s castle. Their mother was Catharism’s grande dame, Blanche of Laurac, whose three other children had become Perfect. Although neither Aimery nor Geralda had received the consolamentum, both were known to be credentes, and Geralda, a widow, gained a certain fame for her generosity to the indigent. She was, according to the sources of the time, the most beloved noblewoman of Languedoc. After hanging her brother, Simon de Montfort had Geralda thrown down a well, then stoned to death. Even by the standards of the day, the act was shocking.

Yet the fate of Geralda, Aimery, and his knights was just a prelude on that May day of 1211. The lady’s reputation for hospitality, especially after the terrible summer of Béziers, had spread throughout the south—Simon de Montfort and Arnold Amaury found 400 Perfect in Lavaur. As Fulk’s White Brotherhood sang a Te Deum, the Cathars were marched to the riverside and burned, in the largest bonfire of humanity of the Middle Ages.

I
N THE CENTER OF THE IBERIAN PENINSULA
, the blazing plain of La Mancha once stretched out as a no-man’s-land between Christian and Muslim. Beyond the abrupt mountains of the Sierra Morena, in the parched river valley of the Guadalquivir, rose the rich mosques and minarets of Al-Andalus, the most accomplished Islamic civilization ever to have gained a lasting bridgehead in western Europe. North of the Morena’s rocky divide stood the forlorn forward position of medieval Christendom, the brooding line of castle after castle that gave Castile its name.

In the year 1212, a host of 70,000 crusaders, led by four Christian kings, trudged across the dusty expanse of La Mancha to fight against the Almohad armies under the command of their new caliph, Muhammad al-Nasír. The Muslim forces fanned out over the jagged mountains until they thought all the passes through the Sierra Morena had been blocked or primed for sudden
ambush. A local shepherd knew otherwise and guided the Christian hordes safely through a defile hitherto unsuspected by either side. Thus it was in Andalusia, not Castile, that on July 16, 1212, the two great armies met on a plain to join battle. Nearby was the village of Las Navas de Tolosa. The elite defenders of the caliph chained themselves to the tent poles of their monarch’s red silk pavilion, so that flight would be impossible if the day went against them. The Christians won a crushing, total victory. There would henceforth be no stopping the inexorable spread of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain.

The tidings from Las Navas de Tolosa set bells pealing across a continent. For Innocent, here at last was a crusade that had scored an unambiguous, untainted triumph. No sack of Constantinople, no holocaust at Béziers—just a clear-cut massacre of the heathen Moor. Even more gratifying was the news that the hero of the hour was King Pedro II of Aragon, whose inspired leadership of the army’s left wing proved decisive in winning the day. Pedro had brought thousands of his vassals to the fight, including some from his turbulent possessions in Languedoc. Simon de Montfort, as viscount of Carcassonne, had sent fifty knights to join forces with their Aragonese suzerain. Arnold Amaury, recently named archbishop of Narbonne, had once again shouldered his armor and ridden out to combat. He had shown the king that he, too, was now a worthy vassal of Aragon.