The Perfect Heresy (29 page)

The door burst open. Dozens of men streamed inward, their axes slicing through the blackness. Knives slashed, cudgels came down again and again, until the last dull groan had subsided. By torchlight, the murderers grabbed candlesticks, money, a box of ginger, then stripped the dead of their few belongings. Feverish hands rifled through a wooden chest, found an Inquisition register, and ripped it to pieces; a flaming brand was lowered to set the pile of names alight. By the time the ash from hundreds of fearful confessions had risen to the ceiling, then settled back down on the bloodred flagstones, the men with the axes had gone.

In Antioch Wood later that night, Peter Roger of Mirepoix gave a great bear hug to a returning friend. An eyewitness would tell the Inquisition years afterward that he then exclaimed, “Where is my cup?”

The man replied, “It is broken.”

The lord of Montségur laughed and said, “Traitor! I would have bound it together with a circlet of gold and drunk from it all my days!”

The cup the two men were talking about was William Arnald’s skull, which had been shattered at Avignonet.

N
EWS OF THE MASSACRE
spread quickly, its perpetrators cheered on their ride home to Montségur. Few in the south grieved for the murdered inquisitors; there is even a documentary record of a country curé ringing the bell of his church.

Within days, the allies of Raymond VII moved on bishops’ palaces, Dominican houses, and French-held castles, forcing their occupants to flee for their lives. The brutal crime had roused thousands from a torpor of fear and inaction. From Toulouse east through the Lauragais and the Minervois, all the way to Narbonne and Béziers, villages and towns rose in revolt against the custodians of the shameful treaty of 1229. Languedoc fought to restore its flouted dignity and traditions, and, for a time, it succeeded. By the late summer of 1242, Count Raymond could claim to have recovered his patrimony, and the insistent interrogations of the Inquisition had been silenced.

It was in the west that Raymond’s schemes went awry. Henry
III of England planned to land in Aquitaine, then march north to harass the French and recapture the territory of Poitou, to which his brother Richard of Cornwall had a legitimate claim. The French-speaking Plantagenets of England believed that what is now western France was rightfully theirs. (The Hundred Years’ War of 1337–1453 would finally decide the issue in favor of the kings of France.) Unfortunately for the cause of Languedoc’s independence, not only did King Henry’s campaign fail to defeat the French, it scarcely distracted their attention from Count Raymond’s revolt. Unable to convince his truculent barons of the soundness of the enterprise, Henry had made landfall in the southwest with a derisively small force of knights—and was promptly trounced by a large royal French army at Taillebourg, near Bordeaux. Further setbacks throughout the summer induced the other principal conspirator, Hugh de Lusignan, to switch his allegiance and turn against Toulouse. Count Raymond, isolated once again, prepared for yet another long war of attrition as a French army made its way from Aquitaine to the borders of Languedoc.

Not everyone was ready for another decade of ruin. Roger Bernard of Foix judged that the mad revolt was doomed. In a move that stunned his neighbors, the count of Foix negotiated a separate peace with the French in the fall of 1242. No one expected this from the most bellicose family of Languedoc; old Raymond Roger had fought the crusade all his life, and his son Roger Bernard had distinguished himself at the siege of Toulouse in 1217–18. Now that same Roger Bernard, whose mother and aunt had been Cathar Perfect, stabbed the rest of Languedoc in the back by allying himself with the despised Capets. The man who grew up eviscerating the French had become their comrade-in-arms. There could have been no more devastating betrayal to the city and friends of Toulouse than the defection of Foix.

Raymond VII realized that there was no point in bleeding his people white in a conflict they could not possibly win. With Foix opposing him, he was well and truly beaten, and his cause now and in the years to come utterly without hope. He would be the last in his line. In January 1243, Raymond and Louis signed a treaty reestablishing the status quo ante. The relative leniency of its terms—the treaty amounted to a slap on the wrist—made clear that all parties knew this defeat was final and that the once powerful Saint Gilles family had been neutered by Church and Crown. This time, there was no need for a scourging at Notre Dame or any other allegory of abjectness.

The revolt had been a comprehensive failure. The hot gale of revenge that had howled across Languedoc after the murders at Avignonet ended up a mere summer squall. The rebels returned to their previous occupations, heads down and ears cocked for the footfalls of the friars in their villages and towns. The alarums of 1242 were all but forgotten.

The Church, however, remembered its dead. Even if it could never find all of the outlaws responsible for the crime at Avignonet, it had to make sure that such a crime could not be repeated, that its inquisitors could conduct their task without fearing for their lives. There was only one place left in all of Languedoc that openly defied the Church. The clergy habitually referred to it as “the synagogue of Satan.” At a conclave held in Beziers in the spring of 1243, it was decided that Montségur had to be destroyed.

Ever since 1204, when Raymond of Pereille had rebuilt the castle atop the height of Montségur, the isolated eyrie had served time
and again as a refuge for the Perfect. Raymond, a local lord with several Cathar ascetics in his family, had witnessed the population of his village swell and contract with every vicissitude of war in the lowlands. From its 3,000-foot height, he watched the Perfect scurrying through the wooded valleys to his haven of safety, then leaving again several months or years later, to head north and spread their quiet message of peace. South of Montségur, there stood the great stone wall of the Pyrenees, where the shadows of clouds raced over the tortured slopes of Mount St. Bartholomew.

The coming of the Inquisition brought Montségur scores of new inhabitants. Sometime in the early 1230s, Guilhabert of Castres, the respected Cathar bishop of Toulouse, formally asked Raymond of Pereille if his fortified village could become the center of the dualist faith. By the end of the decade, when Guilhabert died of old age and was succeeded as spiritual leader by Bertrand Marty, there were more than 200 Perfect living in huts and caves around the castle. They were the heart, head, and soul of Catharism in Languedoc. Winter and summer, the days passed in a tireless round of prayer, fasting, and hard work, for the male and female Perfect were not only contemplative ascetics but also artisans turning out such wares as blankets, saddles, horseshoes, and candles to support their settlement. Some were herbalists and doctors, tending to the sick in the surrounding area. Fittingly, the commerce with the farms and villages in the valleys below went beyond the mere material: Montségur also became a site for retreats, the credentes of distant towns making secretive pilgrimages to a community lodged midway between heaven and Earth.

The 200 Perfect were not alone on their mountaintop. Alongside them, in slightly fewer numbers, lived an extended
clan of men-at-arms and knights, in the company of their wives, mistresses, and children. Many had relatives among the Perfect; others had been dispossessed by the peace of 1229; still others were mercenaries. The aging Raymond of Pereille had called on a kinsman, Peter Roger of Mirepoix, to be the co-lord of Montségur, mainly because the younger man, from a prominent family of credentes, enthusiastically shared the violent mores of the day. Witnesses would later tell the Inquisition that in lean times Peter Roger was not above such pointedly un-Cathar activities as brigandage, extortion, and theft. He had organized, if not suggested, the murderous evening at Avignonet.

In the spring of 1243, the talents of Peter Roger of Mirepoix became of greater moment than those of Bertrand Marty and his fellow Perfect. In the alpine pastures below the eastern flank of Montségur, warriors from Gascony, Aquitaine, and all parts of a newly subdued Languedoc began arriving and setting up an encampment. These knights and men-at-arms had been summoned to Montségur by Hugh of Arcis, King Louis’s seneschal in Carcassonne. The men of Languedoc owed the Crown feudal military service, and the French and their clerical allies had decided that it was time to call up their reserves if ever they were to force the remote stronghold into submission. The siege was fully in place by the Feast of the Ascension, one year after its memorable celebration in Avignonet. The coincidence could not have escaped Peter Amiel, the archbishop of Narbonne, who pitched his richly appointed tent below Montségur and waited for the sanctuary to disgorge its diabolical congregation.

The wait would be long. For all their thousands, the besiegers did not have enough manpower to encircle completely the two-mile perimeter of the mountain’s base. In many places, Montségur’s steep rock face ended in treacherous, scrubby ravines,
their hidden defiles impossible to seal off entirely. Although Hugh’s position was not nearly as bad as Simon de Montfort’s at the great siege of Toulouse—there were no Garonne barges replenishing the stores of Montségur—the terrain was such that siege engines were out of the question. Fearsome trebuchets and tall cats were of no use on the hardscrabble slopes of the Pyrenees.

Summer and fall passed in stalemate. Within Montségur, Peter Roger of Mirepoix had dug in and built up his defenses well. As the Perfect could not fight, he had a mere ninety-eight able-bodied combatants on the mountaintop to marshal into an effective defensive garrison. The royal armies repeatedly swarmed up the goat paths leading to the summit, only to be repulsed by a well-directed rain of missiles loosed by crossbow and catapult. Urged on by the seneschal and the archbishop, the attackers tried to cling to the gorse-covered slope but always had to retreat to the safety of the camp far below.

The men of Montségur, crushingly outnumbered, dared not risk a sortie for hand-to-hand combat or ambush; thus they had to keep a constant vigil and sight their fire carefully. Peter Roger could not afford to make a mistake. When any of his men sustained a mortal wound, that meant one fewer pair of eyes to peer down into the morning mists. The casualty was carried to the houses of the Perfect, to receive a deathbed consolamentum witnessed by his grieving family. Over eight months, the hard-pressed defenders lost nearly a dozen men to the deadly flights of enemy archers. As the weather turned colder and the supply of food dwindled, the work of Bertrand Marty gradually became just as important as Peter Roger’s, for Montségur desperately needed prayer.

Just before Christmas 1243, Hugh of Arcis saw that the paradox
of siege warfare was affecting his shivering army: In the absence of any progress, the besieger grew as demoralized as the besieged. It was time to take a risk, and for that he needed volunteers. A troop of Gascon mountain men heeded Hugh’s call, even though the task set before them verged on the suicidal. They were to take the bastion atop the Roc de la Tour, a vertiginous spike of stone rising up on the easternmost point of the summit ridge of Montségur. The bastion, separated from the main castle to the west by a gentle incline several hundred yards in length, could not be approached directly by the easier western route, since that would entail running the gauntlet of the defense. To reach the Roc, the attackers had to scale the cliff to the east.

In the dead of night, the Gascons ascended the rock face, wary lest the sound of pebbles bouncing into the void alert the defenders. It was a long and perilous climb in the blackness, the task of the mountaineers made even more difficult by the weight of their heavy steel weapons. The daredevil tactic worked. The occupants of the bastion were caught off-guard and either killed instantly or wounded and then thrown to their deaths from the top of the cliff. A chronicler relates that at sunrise the victorious Gascons looked down in horror at the dizzying drop and swore that they would never have made the ascent by daylight. The route they had taken was too terrifying.