The Perfect Heresy (22 page)

The siege of Toulouse was a long, ugly engagement, truly medieval in its cruelty. Both sides knew that this time they were locked in a fight to the death. Any unlucky besieger captured by the defenders, according to a chronicler, had his eyes gouged out and tongue cut off before being dragged half-dead through the streets tied to a horse’s tail. Dogs and crows finished him off, after which his severed hands and feet would be placed in the spoon of a trebuchet and sent whistling back to his comrades.

Simon de Montfort, no stranger to such tactics, had plans to obliterate the city. The tents and workshops of his army were deployed in a settlement dubbed “New Toulouse,” the area where the wrathful northerner promised to build a new capital once he had killed all of his subjects and burned their houses to the ground.

How Simon’s triumph in Rome in 1215 became a test before Toulouse in 1218 had nothing of the inevitable about it. Count Raymond’s son, the youth who had so impressed the pope with his Christian piety and noble bearing, turned out to be startlingly unlike his father. Raymond the younger was a born warrior, and it was in his birthplace that he first showed his belligerent talent. On returning from the Lateran Council to Avignon in the winter of 1216, he rallied hitherto apathetic Provençal nobles to his cause and boldly captured the crusader-held city of Beaucaire, the Rhône river citadel where his mother, Joan of England, had been delivered of him nineteen years earlier. In storming the town, the young Raymond announced that the Church had no business depriving him of his birthright.

When Simon arrived at Beaucaire to punish the upstart, he was repulsed, repeatedly, by a foe who did not flinch at riding out to clash with the fearsome northerner in open country. The south had lost a hero at Muret but found a new one at Beaucaire.
Throughout the summer of 1216, Raymond the younger held Simon at bay, humiliating the man who had just been made lord of all of Languedoc. On the heels of crusader frustration came calamity. On July 16, 1216—the fourth anniversary of King Pedro’s decisive victory at Las Navas de Tolosa—Innocent III died, carried off by a sudden fever in Perugia.

The news of victory in Beaucaire and death in Perugia caused stirrings of revolt, which Simon only exacerbated by reverting to his tactics of quick strike and sudden atrocity. Whereas the task of managing his enormous Lateran windfall cried out for shrewd diplomacy, Simon blithely trod on the toes of potential allies. Even Arnold Amaury, the legate turned archbishop, came out against his onetime crusader partner, excommunicating Simon for pressing his prerogatives too hard in the see of Narbonne. Arnold had wrested the wealthy bishopric from a corrupt prelate, the man once denounced by Innocent as a “dumb dog,” only to watch in alarm as Simon, the new count, demanded a share of the power and revenue never claimed by his predecessor. Arnold Amaury, of all people, gradually became a partisan of Raymond the younger.

Yet Toulouse, not Narbonne, was the key to Simon’s legitimacy, and it was there that his failings as a statesman became most evident. In August 1216, Simon reluctantly raised the siege of Beaucaire, then raced cross-country—200 miles in three days—to stifle Toulouse’s growing restiveness. The Toulousains had not forgiven the crazed manhunt and needless butchery of their citizen militia at Muret, yet they were unwilling to risk defying Simon openly. If anything, their hardheaded merchants were amenable to suggestion as to how their tolerant, prosperous burg might fit into his dominion. Simon had other plans. He approached the town in battle array and sent word that only
money and hostages could deter him from attacking. Within hours, barricades sprang up throughout an indignant Toulouse, and furious street fights began. Following a night of violence, Bishop Fulk persuaded an assembly of notables to negotiate with their new count in a meadow far beyond the turmoil of the city. Such an act, the bishop suavely argued, would dramatically demonstrate their trust in Simon’s sense of equity.

Even given past crusader actions, the depth of Fulk’s treachery impresses. Several hundred emissaries, the richest and most influential men of Toulouse, duly marched out of the protective embrace of their city—and were immediately clapped in irons by the gleeful French. Simon and Fulk had effortlessly made a rich harvest of hostages. To regain its leading citizens, Toulouse was ordered to tear down its remaining defensive walls, demolish its fortified mansions, and scrape together enormous ransom payments. When rebellion broke out anew at these terms, Simon ordered his troops to sack the city. Everything—money, arms, goods, food—was taken in a monthlong rape of Toulouse. Scores of great houses were picked clean, then smashed to their foundations. And the hostages were not handed back to their families; they were loosed in the countryside and instructed never to return.

There was, significantly, no wholesale slaughter. By late October of 1216, Simon’s designs had become clear: The capital was to be allowed to survive as a milch-cow, financing his campaigns of pacification and bowing to his absolute authority. He abolished the institution of the capitouls, the city’s hallowed system of self-governance, and imposed crippling taxes on an already beggared populace. When he departed in November, leaving behind a garrison, the city was prostrate, in need of time to heal. There were no longer any Black and White Brotherhoods—Bishop
Fulk and Count Simon were now universally, infinitely loathed.

Simon’s tyranny might have taken root had he not elected to spend most of the following year bringing war to far-off Provence. He tried to expand his holdings, to go beyond the already generous terms of Innocent’s decree. As Simon battled in the shadow of the Alps, Toulouse recovered. Grain-bearing barges on the Garonne smuggled weapons into the city, deposed consuls crept secretly into welcoming cellars, tradesmen hoarded supplies in back rooms, and servants and whores spied on the French garrison. Throughout Languedoc the network of Cathar believers, a grapevine untainted by orthodoxy, spread the word about the gathering storm.

On September 13, 1217, a small party of horsemen took advantage of a murky dawn fog to splash across the Garonne at a ford downstream from the sleeping city. They had ridden stealthily northward from the Pyrenees, past Foix and Muret, successfully avoiding detection by the occupying French. Before the mists had lifted, they were in the streets of Toulouse, and the pages of the foremost rider had unfurled scarlet pennons emblazoned with a twelve-point gold cross, the symbol of Count Raymond VI. An eyewitness wrote:

When the count entered through the arched gateway all the people flocked to him. Great and small, lords and ladies, wives and husbands, they knelt before him and kissed his clothing, his feet and legs, his arms and fingers. With tears of delight and in joy they welcomed him, for joy regained bears both flower and fruit.
“Now we have Jesus Christ,” they said to each other, “now we have the morning star risen and shining upon us! This is our lord who was lost!”

A few unfortunate French soldiers caught out in the streets by surprise were summarily cut down. Others managed to fight their way back through the clamor to the castle on the outskirts of the city, where Alice of Montmorency lived with Simon’s younger children. The fortress, once the residence of the Saint Gilles, was a high-security enclave, safe from the passions and politics of the town. The Toulousains did not give chase, for almost immediately Raymond and the consuls issued orders. The townspeople were to drop their peacetime occupations at once and rebuild the walls and dig the moats of the defenseless city. When Simon got wind of the uprising, everyone knew, he and his barons would come roaring back through the valleys of Languedoc, intent on mass murder.

September of the year 1217 was the city’s finest, most terrified hour. A chronicler told of the frenzy of united action:

Never in any town have I seen such magnificent laborers, for the counts were hard at work there, with all the knights, the citizens and their wives and valiant merchants, men, women and courteous money-changers, small children, boys and girls, servants, running messengers, every one had a pick, a shovel or a garden fork, every one of them joined eagerly in the work. And at night they all kept watch together, lights and candlesticks were placed along the streets, drums and tabors sounded and bugles played. In heartfelt joy, women and girls sang and danced to merry tunes.

On October 8, the banner with the dreaded red lion fluttered in the fields to the north of the city. Simon de Montfort decided
to attack immediately, before moats deepened and walls thickened. The senior churchman in Simon’s company, remembering Beziers, exhorted the northerners to “let neither man nor woman escape alive.”

The ensuing savagery, like the half-dozen battles in the months to follow, failed to breach the defenses. As the French armored horsemen and infantry hurtled past an obstacle course of sharpened stakes and treacherous ditches in their headlong rush to the gates, the Toulousains—men, women, girls, and boys—let fly with everything they had. “Sharp fly the javelins, the lances and feathered quarrels,” an eyewitness wrote, “… fast the inlaid spears, the rocks, shafts, arrows, squared staves, spearhafts, and sling-stones, dense as fine rain, darkening the clear skies.” From out of a gate burst the Occitan defenders, led by Roger Bernard of Foix, as much a warrior as his father, the man who had told the pope to his face that he regretted not having mutilated more crusaders at Montgey. Thanks to the gruesome heroics of the besieged, Toulouse fought Simon’s experienced attackers to a standstill. The eyewitness described the scene with medieval relish:

How many armed knights you’d have seen there, how many good shields cleft, what ribs laid bare, legs smashed and arms cut off, chests torn apart, helmets cracked open, flesh hacked, heads cut in two, what blood spilled, what severed fists, how many men fighting and others struggling to carry away one they’d seen fall! Such wounds, such injuries they suffered, that they strewed the battlefield with white and red.

Throughout the winter and spring, the same terrible scenario was reenacted—the French charged through a blizzard of missiles until hand-to-hand carnage checked their progress in the
lists outside the city walls. Simon attacked from the east, the west, the river, the bridges. His horse drowned in the Garonne, almost taking him with it. He sent his wife and Fulk to France, to convince the warrior nobility that one final crusading quarantine should be undertaken. The call was heeded. From Picardy, Normandy, Ile de France, and England, thousands hurried south to take up their places outside the city. Yet even with superior numbers, Simon could make no headway. Toulouse was no Carcassonne or Minerve; the broad Garonne kept it supplied with water, and its size ruled out a suffocating encirclement. Fresh men and supplies easily slipped through the crusader lines. When Raymond the younger, the hero of Beaucaire, stole past the besiegers and entered Toulouse, the city went into raptures. “Not a girl stayed at home upstairs or downstairs,” a chronicler remarked, “but every soul in the town, great and small, ran to gaze at him as at a flowering rose.”

By June 1218, nine months into the siege, Simon’s prospects looked bleak. His massed crusaders, having completed their forty days of service, were getting ready to go home, as were his many mercenaries, weary of being told that the depleted Montfort treasury would honor its debts once the city was taken. A dangerous defeat stared Simon in the face, one that would dwarf the embarrassment of Beaucaire. In the north, he would be seen as a lord who could not even hold his own capital and who was thus undeserving of further help; in the south, he would seem diminished and deflated, easy prey for rebellion. Simon had to subdue Toulouse immediately, before his army deserted him, or else his nine years of fighting in Languedoc would come to nothing.

Simon, mindful of the success of Malvoisine at Minerve, opted for an all-or-nothing tactic. He had a huge siege engine constructed at great expense. An enormous cat, the likes of
which had never been seen in Languedoc, was rolled toward the northern walls of Toulouse in late June. Beneath its bleeding animal hides toiled scores of groaning laborers, inching the pharaonic structure ever closer to the city. On the cat’s uppermost platform—which towered over the tallest parapets of the defenses—stood dozens of archers, prepared to rain death down into the streets once they neared the walls. The Toulousains trained their catapults at the tower and, by late afternoon on June 24, had scored enough hits to halt its progress at a safe distance from the city.

Both sides knew that if the cat came any closer, the defense of Toulouse would be imperiled. The crusaders could have brought their superior firepower to bear and punched a fatal hole in the ranks of citizens atop the walls. The Toulousains decided that early the next morning they would charge across no-man’s-land and try to burn down the infernal machine. The ferocious Roger Bernard of Foix is reported to have said of the plan, “How we shall fight them! With swords and maces and cutting steel we’ll glove our hands in brains and blood!”