The Perfect Heresy (21 page)

S
ILENCE
!” I
NNOCENT STOOD IN HIS SLIPPERS
in front of the high altar at the Lateran and yelled at an unruly crowd of priests, “Silence!!”

An eyewitness wrote that the hubbub only worsened, as members of the congregation gave up on insults for fists. Miters were dislodged, tonsures ruffled, crosiers swung. The second plenary session of the Lateran Council degenerated into an undignified tussle between bishops who supported different pretenders to the German throne. The pope vainly hollered for order, this time in the vernacular, but no one in the riotous conclave paid him any heed. Disgusted, the vicar of Christ stalked out of his cathedral, followed by the cardinals of the curia. The afternoon of November 20, 1215, would not be remembered for its episcopal decorum.

The council itself was another matter. A month-long conclave three years in the planning, the meeting brought together
the largest assembly of churchmen in a millennium—61 archbishops, 412 bishops, 800 abbots and priors—as well as representatives from every kingdom, duchy, and county in Christendom, 2,283 dignitaries in all. The Fourth Lateran Council (it had smaller predecessors in the twelfth century) was a lavish, polyglot, oversized spectacle stage-managed by Innocent III as the showcase of his pontificate. Marking the apogee of the medieval papacy as a power broker, the council filled the streets of Rome with haughty lords and proud prelates, bickering fanatics and barefoot friars, boyish princes and litigious dowagers. Not since antiquity were so many important doctrinal decisions made by the Church. The crush of ecclesiastical finery was so great that at the opening ceremony the bishop of Amalfi dropped dead from suffocation.

Given the pope’s theocratic bent, the assembly not only defined dogma but also legislated on the secular affairs of Europe. So many political and legal fiats flew out of the Lateran that the hundreds of lay ambassadors summoned by Innocent could only stand by and watch the awesome papal machinery in action. Trial by ordeal, the hoary Germanic custom of tying people to logs or making them walk through fire, was supplanted by Roman law, administered by the curia. The barons of Britain, who had rammed the Magna Carta down their king’s throat earlier in the year, were anathematized. The Jews of Europe were required to wear a distinctive yellow circle on their clothing, so that they would no longer be mistaken for first-class citizens of the medieval polity. No person great or small was exempt from the call to recapture Jerusalem, lost to the Muslims in 1187. The list of decrees and exhortations lengthened as the month progressed. The Fourth Lateran Council was the clearest expression of Innocent’s quest to be the shepherd of European destiny. Naturally, the continent’s most notorious black sheep—Languedoc—received special attention.

The Fourth Lateran Council (from the
Canso
, or
La Chanson de la Croisade
)

(Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

The protagonists in the Albigensian Crusade were all in Rome, with the notable exception of the Cathar Perfect and a confident Simon de Montfort. The southerners had come to argue over who would get what. Since Muret and a subsequent year of further brutality, Simon had exercised de facto sovereignty over all of Languedoc. It was up to the pope, however, to make the final settlement. The southern clergy, led by Fulk and Arnold, wanted to ensure that the partisans of the Saint Gilles did not chisel away at the gains won on the battlefield. Indeed, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, his fifth and last wife (a sister of the late Pedro), and his nineteen-year-old son had come to Rome for the momentous meeting. They would have formed a bathetic trio in the banqueting halls of the city, their plight as highborn homeless capable of wringing sympathy from their fellow nobles.

Accompanying the count of Toulouse was a large delegation
of lords from Languedoc, led by an indignant Raymond Roger of Foix, who had been forced the year before to place his castles in escrow to the Church. There was even a nobleman of dubious Cathar lineage with the southern embassy, Arnold of Villemur. It is impossible to conceive of a worse place for a suspected heretic to linger than in the biggest convention of churchmen of the Middle Ages.

The pope invited all the concerned parties in the Cathar wars, lay and religious, to a special audience, a caucus of sorts, away from the larger deliberative body of the Lateran. The men of Languedoc were given permission to speak their minds freely before the referee of Christendom. Given the strife and bloodshed of the past six years, Innocent’s hope for dispassionate discussion was, at best, pious. Too many deaths separated the two camps; too much horror had scarred the face of Languedoc. A chronicler told of how the session immediately turned nasty.

It was Fulk, the bishop of Toulouse, who opened the hostilities. The eloquent prelate launched an attack on Raymond Roger, claiming that the advocate for the southern cause should not be allowed to speak, much less to regain his castles. The count of Foix, Fulk pointed out, had long had heretics in his family and had permitted Montségur to be rebuilt as a citadel of sedition. Raymond Roger retorted, disingenuously, that he was not responsible for the actions of his Perfect sister Esclarmonde and that he was not the suzerain lord of the country over which Montségur stood guard. Undeterred, Fulk reminded everyone of the count’s role in the infamous massacre of the crusaders at Montgey. The bishop addressed the pope directly:

And your pilgrims, who were serving God by driving out the heretics, mercenaries and dispossessed men, he has killed so
many of them, slashed and broken and hacked them in two, that their bodies lie thick on the field of Montgey, the French still weep for them, and it is upon you that the dishonor falls! Out there at the gateway rise the moans and cries of blinded men, of the wounded, of men who have lost their limbs or cannot walk unless someone leads them! He who broke those men, maimed and tortured them, does not deserve ever to hold land again!

Raymond Roger held a radically different opinion of the crusaders in question. He wasted no time in diplomatic circumlocution:

Those robbers, those traitors and oath-breakers adorned with the cross who have destroyed me, neither I nor mine have laid hold on one of them who has not lost his eyes, his feet, his fingers and his hands! And I rejoice to think of those I have killed and regret the escape of those who got away.

After making this terrible admission, he turned his ire on Fulk. Innocent listened as Raymond Roger thundered out his indictment of the bishop of Toulouse:

And I tell you that the bishop, who is so violent that in all he does he is a traitor to God and to ourselves, has gained by means of lying songs and beguiling phrases which kill the very soul of any who sing them, by means of those verbal quips he polishes and sharpens, by means too of our own gifts through which he first became an entertainer, and through his evil teaching, this bishop has gained such power, such riches, that no one dares breathe a word to challenge his lies… . once he was elected bishop of Toulouse, a fire has raged throughout the land that no water anywhere can quench, for he has destroyed the souls and bodies of more than five hundred people, great and small. In his
deeds, his words and his whole conduct, I promise you he is more like Antichrist than a messenger from Rome.

The venomous debate was adjourned by the pontiff. He had at last seen for himself what his zeal for crusade had wrought. The Christians of Languedoc hated each other and were unafraid to shout out their hatred in the holiest halls of Christendom. Upset and angry, the pope rushed out of the meeting room and headed toward his private quarters. “There now,” a chronicler has one of Raymond Roger’s nephews remarking, “haven’t we done well? We can all go home, for we have driven the pope indoors.”

In his search for quieter surroundings, Innocent retreated to the gardens of the Lateran. The calm was temporary—a number of southern clergy invested the cloistered quadrangle and demanded to hear the pope’s judgment. Innocent, in an effort to set an example of Christian mercy, suggested that only the lands and goods of proven heretics be ceded to Simon de Montfort and the rest of Languedoc be returned to the various highland counts and to the young Raymond of Toulouse. He spoke at length of the noble and Christian demeanor of the youthful Raymond, echoing the arguments made by the ill-fated Pedro three years earlier: The son should not suffer for the sins of the father.

The southern clergy howled in protest. Fulk, once again, stepped forward, his language of dissent veering toward disrespect:

My lord, true pope, dear Father Innocent, how can you covertly disinherit the count de Montfort, a truly obedient son of holy Church, one who supports yourself, who is enduring such wearisome strife and conflict and is driving out heresy, mercenaries and men of war? Yet you take from him the fief, its lands and
castles, which he has won by the cross and his own bright sword, you take away Montauban and Toulouse if you separate the lands of heretics from those of true believers … and that is not the smaller share. Never have such cruel sophisms or such obscure pronouncements been declared, nor such absolute nonsense!

Others followed Fulk’s lead. The pope was beseeched to give Simon the entire prize. Even if Catholics were dispossessed, the churchmen argued, the stain of heresy had splattered everyone in Languedoc. Innocent, although the pontiff, could not defy the wishes of an entire province of his clergy. A Cistercian from Southampton reminded the pope that the younger Raymond’s mother had been Joan of England, whose dowry had included several inalienable territories in Provence. Innocent seized on this information to deliver his verdict: Simon retained all the lands of the Trencavels and the Saint Gilles, save the scattered possessions in Provence which went to the young Raymond. His father received a handsome pension from Simon. Innocent demanded, as ever, that the hunt for the Cathars be intensified.

The victory of Muret was thus writ large, affixed with a leaden papal seal. Amid much solemnity, the decision was promulgated in mid-December 1215. Simon de Montfort was now, legally, the lord of Languedoc. He held more land than the king of France.

The defeated embassy of Occitan nobles left Rome just before Christmas. The merchant ships docking in the ports of Languedoc brought the news of Innocent’s decision. Everywhere in the south, from the Garonne to the Rhône, partisans of Raymond and protectors of the Cathars had to decide whether to shed tears or to sharpen swords.

I
N
J
UNE OF
1218, a full two and a half years after the Lateran had handed him Languedoc, Simon de Montfort was still in his armor. For the past nine months he had been waging a stationary war, thundering out orders, leading charges, fighting off counterattacks, laying siege to his perennial enemy: the city of Toulouse. The property transfer Innocent decreed in 1215 had made Toulouse the capital of Simon’s territory, the crown jewel of his conquest, the ruby metropolis that would make him rich. Such was the intent of the Lateran verdict; its consequence was wholly different, for Toulouse had rejected the lease granted by the pope. The staunch followers of the Saint Gilles, the outraged vassals of the Trencavels, the fierce warriors of Foix, the dispossessed nobles of the Corbières and the Montagne Noire, the friends of the Cathars—all had gathered in the proud city on the Garonne to thwart their new, papally approved, French overlord.