The Perfect Heresy (24 page)

Yet Languedoc was a pauper, its bustling cities reduced to penury by the exactions of constant warfare. Its merchants were not welcome at the great fairs on the Rhône and in Champagne, the legates of Rome threatening interdict and excommunication to all who traded with the outcasts of Christendom. And even as Raymond the younger vanquished Amaury’s loyalists in the field and many of the dispossessed nobles finally returned to their usurped castles, courtly life in Languedoc did not resume in the playful, spendthrift fashion that had once supported scores of performers and poets. The lovely successors of Loba went unsung
as their menfolk scrambled for survival in a blighted landscape. The newly delivered Languedoc of the early 1220s was a fragile creature, isolated and friendless, an all too easy victim should the armies of the north return in force.

During these years, the Cathars ventured out once again into the bright light of day. Inquisition interrogations conducted years later reveal that shortly after the death of Simon, the surviving Perfect climbed down from their eyrie at Montségur and sought out the credentes of the lowlands. Guilhabert of Castres, the Cathar “bishop” who had debated Dominic fifteen years earlier, reappeared in the Lauragais in the 1220s, preaching the gospel of darkness and light and administering the consolamentum to a new generation of novices. He and his fellow heresiarchs padded softly past the ruins of a decade of war. Guilhabert traveled to Fanjeaux, Laurac, Castelnaudary, Mirepoix, and Toulouse, meeting with the decimated families of the dualist faith and testing the waters of tolerance among the Catholic majority. Despite the hardships suffered—or perhaps because of them—Languedoc had not turned against its holy men and women.

In 1226, in the small town of Pieusse south of Carcassonne, more than 100 Perfect met in a council to create a new Cathar diocese. By then, scores of Cathar homes had reopened. At Fanjeaux, the hilltop village where Dominic and Simon had often met to break bread and discuss the progress of God’s work, the harvests of hemp and flax once again found their way to the spindles of Cathar women. An informal network of female dissent was woven anew, the daughters and widows of a wounded people drawing strength and status from a life of self-denial. The martyrs of Lavaur, Minerve, and dozens of other burning grounds went unmourned; the thousands who had perished were now in the embrace of the Good, angels forever, their pilgrimages
through the sordid world of matter concluded. Their fate inspired envy, not pity. As for the “unconsoled” among the maimed and murdered, the simple, sinful credentes fed to the flames of Rome or cut down by the steel of France, they had attained the status of Perfect in their next life. In the meantime, the church of the “good Christians” looked to resume its discreet place in Occitan life, as in the days before the devastation of the crusade.

The years around 1220 also marked the disappearance of the men who had shaped Languedoc’s destiny. Following the deaths of Innocent III, in 1216, and Simon de Montfort two years later, Domingo de Guzmán died in 1221, his passing in Bologna soon shrouded by tales of last-minute miracles. The redoubtable Spaniard was fifty-one at the time of his death, his years of punishing poverty on the road having taken their toll on what must have been an amazingly robust constitution. Dominic had converted few Cathars—the Church was understandably short on moral authority as the crusade raged—and even those he coaxed back into the fold were suspect. It was difficult to punish these champions of asceticism, for the usual regime of self-denial imposed on the repentant resembled in its particulars the way of life of a Perfect. There is a record of one of Dominic’s converts being ordered to consume red meat.

However much he failed to bring the dualists back into the fold of orthodoxy, Dominic nonetheless succeeded in firing the imaginations of some of the finest minds of his day. The Dominicans—the Order of Friars Preachers—mushroomed from 60 houses at the time of Dominic’s death to 600 just fifteen years
later. They, along with the Franciscans, would staff the nascent universities of Europe and crack the theological whip until the time of the Reformation. In Toulouse, the proving ground of the Dominicans, the first tentative bequests of lodgings grew into a citywide empire, until, at midcentury, the mendicant friars had enough muscle and means to break ground for a soaring redbrick Gothic sanctuary—later called the “church of the Jacobins.” In the center of its nave now stands the casket of the most influential of thirteenth-century Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas.

In the year after Dominic’s demise came the turn of Raymond VI, the admired but flawed old count of Toulouse. One day in early August of 1222, the sixty-six-year-old perpetual excommunicate spent the morning on the threshold of a church beside the Garonne, listening as sympathetic priests within raised their voices so that the aged nobleman could hear their celebration of the mass. At about noon, Raymond fainted from the heat. His escorts helped him to the courtyard of a merchant’s house and laid him out under the shade of a fig tree. A stroke soon followed, leaving him speechless. The clergy came running. The prior of St. Sernin, the grandest Romanesque church of Toulouse and the burial ground of the Saint Gilles family since the turn of the millennium, refused to lift Raymond’s excommunication but tried to take possession of the dying count anyway. The count’s companions, suspecting that the prior was in league with the exiled Fulk and would thus waste no time in throwing Raymond atop a bonfire, bundled up their master in a blanket and took him to safety. Raymond died later in the day, and in spite of repeated requests in the ensuing decades, his body was denied a public Christian burial. On his father’s death, Raymond the younger became Raymond VII. The elder man’s unforgivable sin had not been cowardice in battle or lechery in bed; he had
earned the hatred of the orthodox for his dogged refusal to persecute the Cathars.

Less poignant, but more emblematic of epochal change, was the death of Raymond Roger of Foix, in March of 1223. The old mountain man was engaged in one of his favorite pastimes—besieging a stronghold of the Montfort clan—when he passed away in his base camp. He had been the model of the obstreperous Occitan noble that would soon be extinct: He had patronized troubadours, wooed and won Loba of Cabaret, encouraged his sister Esclarmonde and wife Philippa to become Cathar Perfect, told Pope Innocent that he regretted not having killed more crusaders, and fought the invasive Montforts to his very last breath. Throughout, he had remained on uneasy terms with the Church, although he proved a generous benefactor to those clerics willing to condone his excesses. Ironically, it was the Cistercians, the order that had guided the crusade, who gave the deceased warrior a final resting place in their monastery near Foix.

These years also saw the passing of Arnold Amaury, the monk with the stain of Béziers forever soiling his name. In the twilight of his life, as a mellowed—and much wealthier—archbishop of Narbonne, Arnold turned against the Montforts and sought to reconcile Raymond VII to the Church and the French nobility. Despite the youthful count’s convincing protestations of orthodoxy and obedience, consecutive Church councils in Montpellier and Bourges denied Raymond a voice in their deliberations. Arnold’s change of heart had come too late; he died in 1225, unable to persuade his clerical colleagues to drop the pious stonewalling that he himself had perfected.

Yet the death with the most far-reaching consequences during this period occurred in Mantes, France. On July 14, 1223,
fifty-eight-year-old King Philip Augustus succumbed to a fever. He had been the epitome of shrewd leadership, one of the supremely able monarchs that the Capet family of France would have the good fortune to produce every few generations, thereby ensuring the survival of their dynasty and the preeminence of their kingdom in Europe. At the beginning of Philip’s reign, the Capets of France had been hemmed in by the Plantagenets of England and the Hohenstaufens of Germany; through diplomacy, guile, and feats of arms, he had subdued his enemies and firmly set France on the pedestal of power that it would occupy, more or less continuously, for five centuries.

Philip Augustus had been single-minded in making his kingdom secure. When Innocent pleaded with him to conquer Languedoc, the French king told the pope that he had, in effect, more important things to do. He had let some of his barons go to the aid of the Montforts, on strictly personal pilgrimages of violence, but in no way had he formally engaged the constellation of northern feudatories that made France the most feared nation of its time. Philip twice permitted his headstrong son, Louis, to swoop down on Languedoc, if only to show the colors: in 1219, notoriously, to order the Marmande massacre; and four years earlier, in the summer before the Fourth Lateran Council, to make a tour of Simon’s winnings after Muret. (On that occasion, Louis left early, his only prize the jawbone of St. Vincent, a relic extorted from a southern monastery.) Now Philip Augustus was gone, and with him the restraint that had governed the behemoth of the north.

Six months after the king’s death, in January, 1224, Amaury de Montfort admitted that he was beaten. He dug up the oxhide pouch containing his father’s remains and led his diminished retinue back to the Montforts’ small woodland estate outside of
Paris. The rebels of Languedoc had made a harmless fiction of the Lateran decree. Legally the lord from the Rhône to the Garonne, Amaury had, in fact, lost everything given to his family nine years earlier in Rome. Raymond Trencavel, the son of the man that Simon de Montfort had thrown into a dungeon, returned from Aragon, where he had been raised, and recovered his birthright as viscount of Carcassonne. In Toulouse, Raymond VII and his consuls tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered prosperity. And in the Ile de France, an embittered Amaury and his kinsmen played their last card.

In February 1224, Amaury de Montfort renounced all claims to Languedoc in favor of the king of France. The south now belonged to the French royal family—all they had to do was go and claim it.

S
HORTLY AFTER THE DEATH OF KING PHILIP AUGUSTUS
, Cardinal Romano di San Angelo became the papal legate to France and to Languedoc. Romano, a scion of the patrician Frangipani family of Rome, was a master diplomat, determined to bring the Albigensian matter to a satisfactory conclusion. For the Church, that meant having a free hand to repress Catharism over generations, with the full cooperation of the secular lords of Languedoc. With the Montforts chased from the province, achieving that goal became ever more complex.

In Languedoc, Romano had to contend with Raymond VII, who wanted to keep the spoils of his conquests and be recognized by the Church and the French Crown as the legitimate ruler of his ancestral domains. Yet no matter how skillfully the young count maneuvered in his quest for a negotiated settlement, the cardinal-legate stalled the coming of peace until he could dictate its terms. In 1224 and 1225, Raymond VII, backed by an infirm
Arnold Amaury, repeated a set of proposals that both men believed would bring a much-needed reprieve to a war-weary Languedoc. Raymond promised to make a hefty payment of reparations to the Montforts, swear allegiance to the Capets of France, and hunt the Cathars from his lands. At a series of conclaves in these years that were reminiscent of the charade at St. Gilles where Raymond VI had been forbidden to speak, Romano smothered Raymond VII’s overtures in procedural delay. In 1226, the cardinal dropped all pretenses and excommunicated the young count, thereby setting the stage for a new crusade.