The Perfect Heresy (2 page)

Bouchard de Marly
(d. 1226): First cousin of Alice of Montmorency and comrade-in-arms of her husband, Simon de Montfort. Held hostage for a time by Cathars in Cabaret, Bouchard subsequently led the second corps of cavalry at the battle of Muret.

Louis VIII
(1187–1226): King of France after the death of his father, Philip Augustus, in 1223. Louis ordered the massacre of Marmande and launched the decisive royal crusade of 1226.

Pedro II
(1174–1213): Monarch of the unified kingdom of Aragon and county of Barcelona, victor over the Moors at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. King Pedro the Catholic allied himself to the cause of Languedoc and led the greatest army ever assembled to fight the crusaders.

Philip Augustus
(1165–1223): King of France. He successfully whittled down the Plantagenet continental presence of Kings Richard (Lionheart) and John (Lackland) of England to a small corner of Aquitaine. Philip’s barons were the principal leaders of the Albigensian Crusade.

Raymond VI
(1156–1222): Count of Toulouse. Three times excommunicated and five times married, the leader of Languedoc was formally dispossessed at the Lateran Council of 1215.

Raymond VII
(1197–1249): The last count of Toulouse of the Saint-Gilles clan. Despite having driven the French from his lands, Raymond was eventually forced to agree to a harsh peace that obliged him to subsidize the Inquisition.

Raymond Roger of Foix
(d. 1223): The most belligerent of the southern nobles opposed to the French invasion. Brother and husband of Cathar holy women, he distinguished himself for ferocity on the battlefield and bluntness before the pope.

Simon de Montfort
(1165–1218): Champion of the Catholic cause in the south. After showing conspicuous bravery in battle, he was made viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne in 1209. Years of
brilliant, brutal generalship led to his becoming lord of all of Languedoc.

Raymond Roger Trencavel
(1188–1209): Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, suspected of strong Cathar sympathies. He stood alone during the summer of 1209 against the might of the north.

The Perfect Heresy

A
LBI, AS IN
A
LBIGENSIAN
, the most notorious heresy of all time. On a bright summer afternoon several years ago, I found myself walking the silent streets of Albi in the company of my brother, surprised at having stumbled across a town whose name was familiar. We had come to Albi by chance, having rented a car in Paris a week earlier for an aimless drive southward through the French countryside. It was our version of what the English call “a mystery tour,” a trip with an unknown destination. Once the slate roofs and off-white walls north of the Loire had given way to the warm terra-cotta of the Midi, we began feeling pleasantly disoriented. In Clermont-Ferrand, we had our first confirmed beret sighting; in Aurillac, we backed into an accident; in Rodez, we watched as our waitress fell out of her dress. We had reached Languedoc, France’s Mediterranean southwest.

After a long lunch at a truck stop, we cruised into Albi, the
town with a whiff of infamy to its name. The Albigensian Crusade, we knew, was a cataclysm of the Middle Ages, a ferocious campaign of siege, battle, and bonfire during which supporters of the Catholic Church sought to eliminate the heretics known as the Albigenses, or the Cathars. That thirteenth-century crusade, directed not against Muslims in distant Palestine but against dissident Christians in the heart of Europe, was followed by the founding of the Inquisition, an implacable machine expressly created to destroy the Cathar survivors of the war. As a result of the upheaval, Languedoc, once a proudly independent territory, was annexed to the kingdom of France. Crusade, Inquisition, conquest—Albi’s place in history, if not in fond memory, was assured.

To our eyes on that summer day, the town looked as if it had opted for drowsy amnesia about its past. We strolled through a deserted old quarter, past siesta-shuttered shops and homes, the wine-red bricks of walls and windowsills bathing us in a rosy glow. A white cat slept on a doorstep, undisturbed by any ghosts. It was hard to square Albi’s blush of forgetful well-being with its singular legacy. I needed only think back a decade or so to remember a college instructor describing the Albigensian Crusade as nascent colonialism and, in a more obsessive vein, a potheaded roommate rambling on and on about how the heretics had been hunted down by the original thought police. Now that I was actually in Albi, such recollections seemed inappropriate, a rude intrusion into the town’s pink dream.

On a height above the River Tarn, the narrow streets opened up into a wide plaza. My brother and I glanced at each other. This was more like it.

There, looming over a terraced tumble of riverside dwellings, stood a red fortress, monolithic and menacing, a stupendous mountain of bricks piled 100 feet high and 300 feet wide. Sullenly rectangular, its windows little more than elongated slits, the building looked indestructible, like a glowering anvil hurled from the heavens. Its thirty-two buttresses, shaped like smokestacks cut in half lengthwise, ringed cyclopean walls on all four sides and rose as far as the flat line of an impossibly distant roof. In silhouette, it resembled an appallingly large change dispenser, of the type once worn by bus conductors and waitresses—one buttress holding pennies, another nickels, and so on. Yet that homely comparison was spoiled by an even taller structure, a tower, a red-brick rocket shooting 100 feet higher than the roof alongside the west wall.

The Cathedral of Ste-Cécile, Albi

The tower held bells that toll on Sunday. The building was a church.

We had been dead wrong about Albi’s amnesia. The fearsome oddity that is the Cathedral of Ste-Cécile will never let the townspeople forget their Albigensian connection. Erected from 1282 to 1392, the building is a massive bully that dwarfs and dominates its neighbors. There is no transept; thus the church does not even have the redemptive shape of the cross. For centuries, it had just one small door. Unlike the other great French cathedrals in Paris, Chartres, Rheims, Bourges, Rouen, and Amiens, there were no messy markets under Ste-Cécile’s soaring vault, no snoring wayfarers on its floor, no livestock droppings to slop out in the mornings, no grand portals to let in the air breathed by ordinary men. The church’s exterior was—and still is—a monument to power.

Bernard de Castanet was the medieval bishop who approved the plans, raised the money, and started the construction. As he was doing this in the 1280s, Castanet was also accusing many prominent townspeople of heresy, even though the Albigensian Crusade had ended two generations earlier and the inquisitors had been assiduously intimidating the populace ever since. The bishop’s opponents, particularly one outspoken Franciscan friar named Bernard Délicieux, claimed that Castanet was using the threat of Inquisition prisons to silence free men and to extort funds. Whatever the truth, the fortress church rose, brick by unforgiving brick, until its larger message became clear: Submit or be crushed.

There was nothing subtle about the appearance of Ste-Cécile, nothing that demanded a specialized monograph detailing gargoyles, grace notes, and the like. We walked around the hulking giant, marveling that the midafternoon silence of Albi had been so deceptive. The red cathedral was, in the end, an enraged bellow from Bishop Castanet and his successors. They had seen their world—their power, privileges, beliefs—imperiled by the subversive creed of the Cathars, and they had roared out their anger in this monstrous mountain of brick. It filled our eyes and our ears. Only a disagreement over something as fathomless as the soul of a civilization could elicit a shout so loud that it was still audible across a chasm of 700 years.

Not surprisingly, that afternoon echoed for a long time in my memory. In the years to follow, the Cathars and Albi came to mind again and again, appearing unbidden in books and magazines and the conversations of the Parisians in whose midst I lived. A lot of people had heard the shout. I began haunting the booksellers’ stalls by the Seine. Friends reached into their bookshelves, invariably producing yet another French-language study of the Cathars for me to discover. Specialized libraries contained hard-to-obtain translations of chronicles, correspondence, and Inquisition registers. In 1997, years after my first glimpse of Ste-Cécile, I moved to southwestern France to look—and listen—more closely in the places where the Cathars had lived and died.
The Perfect Heresy
, it turned out, was the destination of my mystery tour.

“Kill them all, God will know his own.” The sole catchphrase of the Cathar conflict to be handed down to posterity is attributed
to Arnold Amaury, the monk who led the Albigensian Crusade. A chronicler reported that Arnold voiced this command outside the Mediterranean trading town of Béziers on July 22, 1209, when his crusading warriors, on the verge of storming the city after having breached its defenses, had turned to him for advice on distinguishing Catholic believer from Cathar heretic. The monk’s simple instructions were followed and the entire population—20,000 or so—indiscriminately murdered. The sack of Beziers was the Guernica of the Middle Ages.

Whether Arnold Amaury actually uttered that pitiless order is still a matter for debate. What no one doubts, however, is that the phrase neatly illustrates the homicidal passions at work during the Albigensian Crusade. Even in an era commonly considered barbarous—“a thousand years without a bath,” runs a benign putdown of the Middle Ages—the campaign against the Cathars and their supporters stands out for its stark cruelty. The stories of Béziers and other Church-sponsored atrocities shock at first, then play into the belief that the millennium lying between antiquity and Renaissance was an unrelieved nightmare. Popular culture, drawing on the Gothic imagination of the nineteenth century, has exploited that notion; in Quentin Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
, to take a well-known example, an enraged mobster hisses at an enemy, “I’m gonna get
medieval
on yo’ ass!” Just the word makes us wince.

In this sense, the story of the Cathars is surpassingly medieval. The Albigensian Crusade, which lasted from 1209 to 1229, was launched by the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages, Innocent III, and initially prosecuted by a gifted warrior, Simon de Montfort, under the approving eye of Arnold Amaury. A mail-fisted response to the questions posed by a popular heresy, the crusade set baleful precedents for Christendom’s approach to
dissidence by laying waste to Languedoc, the great arc of land stretching from the Pyrenees to Provence and including such cities as Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Béziers, and Montpellier.

The crusade’s two decades of salutary slaughter then gave way to fifteen years of fitful revolt and repression, which culminated in the siege of Montségur in 1244. A lonely fortress atop a needle of rock, Montségur eventually surrendered, and more than 200 of its defenders, the leaders of the embattled Cathar faith, were herded into a snowy clearing to be burned alive. By then the Inquisition, guided since its founding in 1233 by the steely intellects of the Dominican order, had developed the techniques that would torment Catholic Europe and Latin America for centuries to come and, in the process, provide the model for latter-day totalitarian control of the individual conscience. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Inquisition had razed any residual trace of the Albigensian heresy from the landscape of Christendom, and the Cathars of Languedoc had vanished. The stations of their calvary—the mass burnings, blindings, and hangings, the catapulting of body parts over castle walls, the rapine, the looting, the chanting of monks behind battering rams, the secret trials, the exhuming of corpses, the creakings of the rack—match our phantasmagoria of the medieval only too well.