The Perfect Heresy (19 page)

In victory Pedro became a secular saint, an untouchable paladin of the Church. His faithful annual payment to Rome, his respect for ecclesiastical rights, his warrior valor placed in the service of a holy cause—no cleric could now even try to tarnish the glittering reputation of the thirty-eight-year-old monarch of Aragon. Troubadours sang of his gallantry, monks of his piety, and ladies bestowed their favors on this most Christian of heroes.
It came as a surprise, then, when the golden boy of orthodoxy demanded that another crusade, the one in Languedoc, be suspended immediately.

The king made the pope a proposition. He, Pedro, would act as a ward over all the lands of Toulouse for a few years. His brother-in-law, Count Raymond VI, would relinquish his territories in favor of his adolescent son, who would be educated in the court of Aragon in the ways of devout governance. When he attained manhood, Raymond VII could come into his inheritance, which would by then be cleansed of Catharism by the Aragonese king. The son should not pay for his father’s shortcomings.

Moreover, Pedro demanded that his vassals north of the Pyrenees—the counts of Foix and the neighboring mountain domains of Béarn, Comminges, and Couserans—be left in peace by the Church and its sanguinary servants. In Pedro’s view, Simon de Montfort had overstepped himself; having begun his career as an enemy of the Cathars and a spiritual athlete, he had become an outlaw. Simon had, in 1211 and 1212, attacked lands over which Pedro was suzerain, territories that had never been infected by heresy. Worse yet, according to the Aragonese’s reading of the recent past, Simon had taken advantage of Pedro’s absence in Andalusia on God’s business to launch his assault.

The crusader against the Moors was picking a fight with the crusader against the Cathars. At the Lateran Palace the 28 steps of the Scala Santa awaited Innocent’s troubled footfalls, for the pope now needed divine guidance.

Pedro’s support was manna to the Toulousains. Simon had outsmarted and outfought them for more than two years. Even with
the awkward nature of his army, which bloated, then shrank as forty-day crusader tours of duty were undertaken and completed, Simon had smashed and burned his way across all of Languedoc. As far north as Cahors, as far west as Agen, as far south as the Pyrenees, the tireless successor to the Trencavels had stretched his grasp over most of the lands of the Saint Gilles and the lower-lying fiefs of King Pedro’s mountain vassals.

Simon may have been a gifted strategist, but his opponents helped him by their bumbling. What had been a peacetime boon—truculent independence—turned into a wartime albatross. Occitan lords, faidits, and citizen armies seldom acted in concert, even when the weight of their numbers would normally have beaten the often depleted ranks of the crusaders. In the autumn of 1211 at Castelnaudary, a town midway between Toulouse and Carcassonne, a small garrison under Simon held out for days in the face of a massed army of Languedoc knights and foot soldiers. When Bouchard de Marly and Alice of Montmorency, Simon’s wife, rumbled into the plain from Carcassonne at the head of a column of reinforcements and wagon loads of supplies, the knights of Raymond Roger of Foix immediately charged down to attack. Thousands upon thousands of their fellows watched the ensuing combat from a hilltop, waiting for the order to join the battle. It never came. Count Raymond of Toulouse, as wretched a general as can be imagined, dithered ineffectually in the Occitan camp. Seizing the moment, Simon made a daring dash out to rescue his would-be saviors, thereby changing certain defeat into victorious stalemate.

Not all of the south courted debacle so assiduously. The family of Foix, the crusade’s most feared foe, consistently acted with the belligerence it had shown at Castelnaudary and Montgey. When Simon, in his sole mistake of these years, attempted
in June 1211 to besiege Toulouse with a force too small to encircle the city, Raymond Roger ignored Count Raymond’s pleas for caution and repeatedly rushed out of the ramparts to kill as many of the besiegers as possible. Simon, seeing his losses mount, lifted the siege within a fortnight. Roger Bernard of Foix, Raymond Roger’s son, then ventured into Simon’s territory on missions of mayhem. Near Béziers, well within the countryside pacified by the terror of 1209, Roger Bernard met up with a group of crusaders bound for Carcassonne, who naturally thought that any cavalcade of knights so deep in God’s country had to be supporters of orthodoxy. The subsequent attack came as an utter surprise, and the unfortunate northerners were dragged back to the castle at Foix, where they were tortured and torn to pieces.

Still, such reverses were the exception. In 1211 and 1212, Simon was free to cut a swath all around Toulouse. He gave the defiant, if disorganized, city a wide berth, but nonetheless penned off its access to the hinterland. He picked off one castle after the next, and his conquest soon came accompanied by further outrage. In the town of Pamiers, the new master of Languedoc drew up decrees in December of 1212 that effectively abolished southern law in favor of northern feudal practice. In many ways this was the unkindest cut of all, for time-honored systems of inheritance, justice, and civil procedure formed the touchstone of medieval identity. Simon’s statutes, among other things, forbade southern noblewomen from marrying suitors from Languedoc; henceforth, brides with fetching dowries would be compelled to wed only northerners. The desire to destroy, then colonize, became manifest.

The shifting nature of the conflict made the crusade stray from its original purpose. As Simon used his talents to carve out
a kingdom for himself, fewer bonfires were lit. He had no time to winkle out the heretic hidden in the sheepfold when there were nobles in a nearby castle refusing to pay him homage. In any event, the devastating flames of Lavaur, Minerve, and other towns had shown that there was no safety in numbers. The surviving Perfect heard the word from Montségur: It was wiser to wait out the storm in the house of one’s family, or in a cave in the Corbières, than to gather in a castle or city that the invincible Simon de Montfort would eventually get around to storming. For those imperiled few still living in the midst of orthodox spies, a trek over the Pyrenees to the discretion of Aragon and Catalonia was always an option. For all his talk, Pedro the Catholic ignored the Cathars in his domains. No more than the counts of Toulouse and Foix, the king of Aragon was loath to persecute his own people.

As the year 1213 dawned, Innocent grappled with the contradictions of the holy war he had launched four years earlier. Simon’s forays into the lands held by Pedro’s vassals smacked more of temporal ambition than of spiritual devotion. A genie had been unbottled at Carcassonne when Simon was allowed to usurp Trencavel. Innocent sympathized with King Pedro, his vassal and his champion, qualifying his ambassador to Rome as an “extremely cultivated” man. Moreover, now that the Moors were on the run and the Cathars weakened, Innocent wanted to turn the attention of Christendom eastward, to the reconquest of Jerusalem. In a letter to Arnold Amaury, the pope claimed that a new crusade to Palestine must take precedence over any further action in Languedoc. Accordingly, Innocent prepared a surprise of his own: In stern letters sent out in January of 1213, the pope announced that the Albigensian Crusade was over, effective immediately.

Before this stupefying news arrived from Rome, the situation in Languedoc had worsened. In a tense meeting at Lavaur, Pedro and Arnold Amaury brought their irreconcilable views out into the open. One wanted the preservation of the southern nobility; the other, its destruction. Since Pedro’s failed intercession at Carcassonne to save the young Trencavel, Arnold had never once backed down in the face of pressure from the Aragonese king. If anything, Arnold had always upped the ante, changing unacceptable offers into insulting ones. The novelty this time came from Pedro, who no longer meekly walked away from Arnold’s provocations. The victory at Las Navas de Tolosa had made of him an equal, if not a superior, to the legates in the construction of Christendom’s future. He could now show his hand, and, like Arnold, Pedro did not disappoint.

In February 1213, he convoked the quarrelsome lords of the south and had them swear to let him govern their possessions during these times of emergency. Languedoc was now his protectorate. With his brother, Sancho, who was the count of Provence, Pedro created in one fell swoop a vast new entity, the makings of a protostate that, had it survived, would have dramatically changed the course of European history. From Saragossa in Aragon and Barcelona in Catalonia, their holdings now stretched in a great unbroken arc around the Mediterranean almost as far east as Nice, encompassing Toulouse, Montpellier, and Marseilles. Pedro aimed for nothing less than the unification of the Occitan- and Catalan-speaking peoples under one monarch.

The pope’s men, reeling from such audacity, then received Innocent’s letter. The pope had written Arnold, “Foxes were destroying the vineyard of the Lord … they have been captured.” To Simon de Montfort, he was more explicit: “The illustrious
king of Aragon complains that, not content with opposing heretics, you have led crusaders against Catholics, that you have shed the blood of innocent men and have wrongfully invaded the lands of his vassals, the counts of Foix and Comminges, Gaston of Béarn, while the king was making war on the Saracens.” Both letters ordered an end to the crusade.

Arnold Amaury rebelled. A decade’s worth of preaching, scheming, prosecuting, burning, hanging, and warring was in danger of being undone. He rode across Languedoc, rallying the
bishops of the south to mutiny and dictating their letters of dismay to Innocent. A frantic embassy left for Rome. Preachers who had gone north to whip up enthusiasm for the crusading season of 1213 were instructed to continue their work, regardless of what the pope had said. Simon de Montfort, the jigsaw of his conquests the missing piece in Pedro’s master plan, brusquely renounced his bond of vassalage to Aragon. By doing this unilaterally, he was once again breaking the feudal rules. Understandably, the man intent on establishing French dominion of the south would not be at home in some sort of Greater Occitania.

Arnold assembled his arguments. Unlike his gagging of Raymond, a decision that dangled by the thread of technicality, an honest point could be made this time: that King Pedro had been disingenuous in his representations to the pope. His Pyrenean vassals, contrary to his claims, had tolerated heresy in their domains for more than fifty years. Thus, argued Arnold, it was a Christian’s duty to bludgeon them into obedience, which was precisely what Simon de Montfort had been doing. The crusade could not be finished, for the very simple reason that the Cathar enemy was still standing, not least of all in the largest city of the land. The abbot of the monastery at St. Gilles, never a friend of Count Raymond’s, wrote to the pope of “the most putrid city of Toulouse, its viper’s bloated belly stuffed with rotting and disgusting refuse.”

Innocent spent the spring listening and reading. Pedro argued from feudal custom; Arnold, from canon law. Both men were right. Innocent III was many things—noble, lawyer, priest—but above all else he was the one and only supreme pontiff of Christendom. The choice before the vicar of Christ was clear: secular order or spiritual uniformity, the law of the
land or the law of the Church, tolerance or bloodshed, peace or war, Pedro or Simon. The old house of the empress Fausta at the Lateran waited for its occupant to exercise his free will.

On May 21, 1213, a papal letter informed the world at large that the crusade against the heretics of Languedoc had been reinstated. Innocent had made his historic flip-flop.