The Perfect Heresy (25 page)

Seal of Raymond VII of Toulouse

(Archives Nationales, paris)

While fending off peace initiatives in Languedoc during these years, Romano had been engaged in talks in Paris, with the aim of bringing the full might of France to bear on Languedoc. The new king, Louis VIII, had twice been to Languedoc as crown prince; he would have realized that the upheaval of crusade had created a power vacuum that might sooner or later
arouse the cupidity of France’s two rivals in the southwest, England and Aragon. At the moment, fortunately for the French, neither power threatened to interfere with any belligerent initiative in the south.

The English realm, recovering from the disastrous reign of King John, was in the throes of baronial revolt. (Indeed, in 1216, Louis had briefly accepted the crown of England at the invitation of the barons, until the pope stepped in and excommunicated him.) England’s fief holders in Aquitaine were enjoined to remain neutral in the event of a new war in Languedoc. South of the Pyrenees, the merchants of Barcelona had used the disappearance of Pedro at Muret to turn their nation’s attention seaward. Throughout the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Aragon would direct its energies to conquering the Muslim-held Balearic Islands, as part of a larger and eventually successful effort to establish a maritime empire to rival that of Genoa and Venice. Languedoc was receding from the horizon of Spain just as Amaury de Montfort was handing it over to France.

These political and dynastic considerations would have weighed heavily at the royal residence at the Louvre in favor of a decision to march south. Yet the first family of France wanted not only land but also money. The document record gives an impression of undignified horse trading, as both Romano and Louis jockeyed for advantage in their proposed joint enterprise. In the end, Romano promised to give the Capets a tenth of all French Church incomes for five years to pay for the cost of crushing Languedoc. And the cardinal delivered—by prying open the coffers of such wealthy sees as Chartres, Rheims, Rouen, Sens, and Amiens. It was a risky stratagem, with enormous consequences—later French monarchs would view the Church, and treat it, as a cash cow.

The royal crusade got under way in the spring of 1226, the mailed chivalry of medieval France once again jangling down the Rhône Valley, this time under the fleur-de-lis banner of King Louis VIII. The army dwarfed its predecessors in numbers and outmatched them in organization and unity of command. For all that, the great force conquered more by intimidation than by battle—and sometimes its powers of intimidation backfired. At the walled town of Avignon, King Louis’s crusade came to an unscheduled halt when the frightened city fathers slammed shut their drawbridges on seeing the gargantuan size of the French army. They had originally promised the French free passage through the city and the use of their stone bridge to cross the Rhône—the same bridge of the nursery rhyme “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse”—but once the huge host appeared outside their town, they wanted nothing to do with it. Well protected by their fortifications and well supplied by their river fleet, the Avignonnais held off the infuriated French king for three long months. Stuck out in the marshy flats to the north of the city as the heat and the flies grew unbearable, the army suffered terrible casualties from dysentery. His men, Louis realized, were dying in their own excrement. By the time Avignon finally capitulated, more than 3,000 had perished and tens of thousands more had been weakened by the ordeal. One lord to die from this outbreak of dysentery was an elderly Bouchard de Marly, the faithful friend of Simon de Montfort

Still, the city had surrendered. The fall of supposedly impregnable Avignon impressed the coalition of Languedoc nobles under the command of Raymond VII. So too had a band of
preachers sent out ahead of the army by Cardinal Romano, Bishop Fulk, and Arnold Amaury’s successor as archbishop of Narbonne, Peter Amiel. The preachers’ task was to hammer home the lessons of the recent past by evoking such appalling memories as Béziers and Marmande. For the inhabitants of a weakened, wounded land like Languedoc, the thought of renewed tribulations could have only inspired terror. The propagandists of fear would also have emphasized that this crusade was unlike any other to have descended on the south. Its resources were as limitless as the wealth of the Church; its leader was no mere baron or monk, but the king of France himself. Historian Michel Roquebert has argued convincingly that the French monarchy, although it had been only a formal overlord of much of Languedoc during the twelfth century, held a place of primacy in the collective imagination of the Occitans. The king of France, alone among monarchs, represented the sacred legitimacy of the feudal order—even the independent burghers of Toulouse dated their documents according to the years of a French reign. The Cathars, of course, would have been immune to such thinking, but their compatriots must have quailed at the thought of the king of France coming to punish them. Louis had previously been to Languedoc only as a crown prince; now he was the person of the king, the repository of almost sacramental power. To defy him and his powerful army was to be both doomed and damned.

Faced with such physical and imaginative intimidation, many in the south raised the white flag. As Louis laid siege to Avignon, the once-proud towns of Languedoc sent him embassies to swear their fidelity and to beg for kind treatment. Béziers, understandably, was first in line, followed by Nîmes, Albi, St. Gilles, Marseilles, Beaucaire, Narbonne, Termes, and Aries. At
Carcassonne, the citizenry chased Raymond Trencavel from the city and sent ambassadors to capitulate before the king. As the French poured over the borders of Languedoc, Louis received fawning letters of obeisance from many local nobles. “It has come to our knowledge that our lord cardinal has decreed that all the land of the count of Toulouse shall be annexed to your domain,” one letter stated. “We rejoice from the bottom of our hearts … and we are impatient to be in the shadow of your wings and under your wise dominion.” The author of this missive was Bernard-Otto of Niort, a noble who had been raised by his Perfect grandmother, Blanche of Laurac, and had an uncle, Aimery, and an aunt, Geralda, brutally murdered at Lavaur. If men like him were running like rabbits for cover, the cause of Languedoc was lost.

Raymond VII and the Toulousains resisted the wave of panic, as did Count Roger Bernard of Foix. In the autumn, as the French army marched from town to castle accepting capitulations, the men of Foix and Toulouse harassed and ambushed the northerners in small guerrillalike actions. Some of the more independent French barons headed home with their men. Although the royal crusaders had brought much of Languedoc to its knees through intimidation, the army had not recovered from its disastrous summer before Avignon. King Louis, unwell since the squalor of that siege, suddenly grew feverish and weak. His entourage, seeing his condition worsen, tried to rush him homeward to the comforts of France. At Montpensier, a village in the mountainous Auvergne region, the cavalcade came to a halt; the king was too ill to be moved any farther. Louis took to bed and, according to a pious chronicler, refused the ministrations of a virgin girl who had been slipped between his sheets to rouse his kingly vigor. It was too late, anyway; Louis VIII died in Montpensier on November 8, 1226. He was thirty-nine—and, more important, his eldest son was only twelve. France no longer had a king.

Blanche of Castile and Louis IX of France

(The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, New York)

The untimely demise might have turned the tide in favor of Languedoc had the powers in Paris not been steadfast. The hot Spanish heartland that had given the Cathars their holiest foe, Dominic, would now supply yet another devoutly orthodox enemy, Blanche of Castile. The widow of the king and the regent for their eldest son, Blanche brought to the cause of conquest a fiery piety that had been lacking among her Capet in-laws. To her, exterminating the heretics was as important as extending French domains.

As her principal adviser for affairs of state, she took Cardinal Romano, the papal legate. In Rome, the pope gave his blessing to this double duty; in Paris, tongues wagged about Romano
and Blanche sharing more than just prayers. Whatever their true relationship, the cardinal and the queen agreed that the royal crusade in Languedoc did not need a king. Over the protests of wealthy French bishops, Romano kept the money flowing while Blanche ordered her army to stay in the south until all resistance was crushed. When the great barons of the north became restive under the rule of a woman, Blanche raised another army to combat them even as she kept a force down in Languedoc. With the encouragement of a new pope, Gregory IX, a nephew of Innocent III, the formidable lady regent pursued the crusade.

It was, in fact, a crusade in name only. The French troops conducted an ugly war of attrition for two years against the forces of Toulouse and Foix. Inconclusive battles were fought, atrocities exchanged—in response to a savage French reprisal at one town, the Occitans cut the hands off the French defenders at another—and fortresses taken and lost. By 1228, the circle of destruction had contracted to the immediate hinterland of Toulouse. Although not big enough to lay siege to the exhausted city, the French army, under the intelligent generalship of Humbert de Beaujeau, could not be chased from Languedoc. Safe behind the walls of Carcassonne, the fortress city they had taken great care to garrison, the northerners eventually hit upon the tactic that would extinguish the last flame of resistance.

In 1228, the royal crusade systematically turned the fertile expanse of the Toulousain into a desert. The French did not seek out battle—indeed, they ran from it. Instead they waged war on the countryside itself. Simon de Montfort had just burned crops; the French army, bankrolled by the Church and blessed by the queen, chopped down orchards and olive groves, uprooted vineyards, poisoned wells, set fires, and razed villages. Applauded by a vengeful Fulk, the men of the north proceeded meadow by
meadow, manor by manor, valley by valley, in a medieval Sherman’s March of deliberate, thoroughgoing vandalism. The land and its people, extenuated after two decades of savage bloodletting, could stand no more. In the end, isolated and beleaguered, unbeaten yet unable to check the progress of this awful juggernaut, Count Raymond VII sued for peace.

A bundle of birch cuttings came whistling through the hush and landed with a crack on pale white flesh. The sharp twigs came down again and again. Twenty years earlier, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse had staggered up the steps of the church at St. Gilles, his public penance coinciding with the start of the Albigensian Crusade. Now, on April 12, 1229, it was the turn of his son, Raymond VII, to receive the same humiliating treatment, this time to mark the end of the crusade. Just as before, a papal legate handled the switch, bringing the twigs down on the mortified flesh of the nobleman. Just as before, throngs of thrill seekers jammed the stoops, windows, and rooftops of houses for a glimpse of the exalted brought low. And, just as before, the penitent promised to help in stamping out the Cathar faith. For the counts of Toulouse, public obloquy had become a family tradition.