The Perfect Heresy (30 page)

Within the walls of Montségur, the fall of the bastion was rightly seen as a disaster. Bertrand Marty assembled the treasury of the Cathar village—gold, silver, and coins—and had four Perfect smuggle it down into the valley under cover of night. Peter Roger watched as parts of catapults and mangonels were winched up to the Roc by royal engineers; heavy stone projectiles soon began crashing into the outer barbican of his fortress. As the snow swirled, the attackers drew ever nearer to Montségur,
moving inexorably forward up the sloping incline from the Roc, entrenching, then creeping forward again. Each week brought the enemy closer, and the catapults within better range. The giant stones flew into and over the walls, causing death and injury. In February 1244, the final messenger to reach Montségur from the lowlands encouraged the exhausted defenders to hold fast, for Count Raymond might come to their aid. There was even a wild rumor about the Emperor Frederick sending a force to lift the siege. When, at last, the weary Cathars could no longer believe in the chimera of deliverance, Peter Roger walked out of the gate to negotiate. On March 2, 1244, ten months after the banners of the fleur-de-lis and the cross had first fluttered in the meadows below the mountain, Montségur surrendered.

By all accounts, the negotiations did not last long. The capitulation was like no other in the Cathar wars, for the victor showed a measure of mercy to the vanquished, an indication of the sense of finality surrounding the fall of Montségur. A two-week truce was declared, after which the laypeople on the mountaintop were free to go. Their past crimes—including the murders at Avignonet—were forgiven, and their sole obligation entailed a promise to submit to a full interrogation by the Inquisition. The record of the defenders’ confessions, compiled by a Catalan inquisitor named Ferrer, provides the basis of our knowledge of the events at both Avignonet and Montségur.

Then there were the Perfect, for whom no clemency was possible. The Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition in Languedoc had established one dark, immutable axiom: To dedicate one’s life to a Christian creed outside the bounds of medieval
orthodoxy was a capital crime. Only those who renounced the Cathar creed would be spared the flames of ecclesiastical justice. Bertrand Marty and his 200 companions had a fortnight to think over their stark choice: recant or burn. Not one of the Perfect came forward to beg mercy of Archbishop Amiel. They parceled out their meager belongings among their neighbors on the mountaintop and comforted their weeping relatives. As their time left on Earth dwindled with each passing day, the men and women of the dualist faith steeled themselves for an awful death. From atop the walls of Montségur, the archbishop’s men could be seen at work in a field far below, stacking a large enclosure with dry wood scavenged from the surrounding forests.

On Sunday, March 13, ten days into the two-week wait, twenty-one credentes approached the Perfect and asked to be given the consolamentum. They too were willing to brave the fire. It was the most eloquent moment in the whole sad saga of Catharism, a testament to the devotion inspired by the holy men and women whose preaching had convulsed an era. Now, as they were on the threshold of death, twenty-one people stepped forward to join them. It was an act of defiance, solidarity, courage, and, in the end, faith. These companions of the last hour came from all stations of feudal society. Raymond of Pereille’s wife, Corba, and daughter, Esclarmonde, decided to leave their noble families for the timeless embrace of the Good. With them went four knights, six soldiers (two with their wives), two messengers, one squire, one crossbowman, one merchant, one peasant woman, and one lady. The Perfect of Montségur administered the consolamentum to all of them and welcomed them into their ranks. They had three days of life remaining.

The lugubrious procession of March 16, 1244, began in the early morning. It wound down the sinuous track leading from the summit to a clearing at the base of the hill. The 220 or so condemned walked past the last patches of snow on the brown winter grass until they reached a palisade of logs. Friend and enemy looked on. The leaders of the Cathar faith, barefoot and clad only in coarse robes, climbed the ladders propped up against the wooden walls. Groups of them were lashed together, their backs to the tall stakes sticking up from the colossal bier. At a sign from the archbishop, his men threw burning brands into the enclosure. The low murmur of prayers was overtaken by the crackling sound of flame, spreading underfoot, curling the first of the fiery twigs and setting the hems of garments alight. Within minutes, the crackling had become one great oceanic roar.

A thirteenth-century drawing of a Cathar’s fate

(Archives Nationales, Paris)

By midmorning, a choking black nimbus billowed through the ravines and valleys leading from Montségur. Shepherds on nearby hills would have seen it rise slowly, heavy with the stench of fear and pain and man’s inhumanity to God. The wind took the cloud and, as it had done so long ago at Béziers, lifted it high into the skies of Languedoc. The particles of smoke drifted and dispersed, then disappeared.

F
AITH GAVE WAY TO FAITHLESSNESS
. After the fall of Montségur, the valedictory of the Cathars in Languedoc began in earnest, the sea of words collected by the inquisitors over the next three generations spilling out from one repetitive, destructive source: betrayal. The believers in dualism no longer caused armies to march or monarchs to fall; public acts of battlefield heroism and communal resistance were replaced by sordid deeds of private cowardice and delation, as people turned on their neighbors and families to save themselves from impoverishment, imprisonment, or death. No longer protected by the great and the powerful, the humble Cathar adherent now stood alone before a judge who tolerated neither temporizing nor evasiveness. Not everyone had a taste for martyrdom.

The contagion of treachery spread faster and farther than the teaching of the Perfect ever had. In Toulouse, a Cathar believer named Peter Garcias, a consul and successful money changer,
began meeting in 1247 with his kinsman William, a Franciscan friar, to discuss the tenets of their respective faiths. Their conversations took place discreetly in a common room of the Franciscan house—the open debates of Dominic’s time forty years earlier were now impossible. Confident in the company of a kinsman, Garcias gave vent to his disdain for the medieval Church and the stern god that it worshiped: “If I got my hands on this God who created so many souls to save but a few and damn all the rest,” the Cathar exclaimed, “I’d rip him apart with my fingernails and my teeth.” As for the Church’s pretensions to equity, Garcias looked back at the bloody recent past, then enunciated a view that is still ahead of its time: “Justice cannot condemn a man to death. An official who judges someone a heretic and has him put to death is a murderer. God did not want a justice of death sentences. It is not right to go on a crusade … against the Saracens, or against a village like Montségur that opposed the Church… . The preachers of crusades are criminals.”

Unfortunately, we know of Peter Garcias’s dangerous opinions because he was denounced. His Franciscan kinsman, also ahead of his time, hit upon the medieval equivalent of wearing a wire. Whenever he and Garcias met, four other friars lay hidden in a gallery of the common room, silently scratching notes as the Cathar spoke. The ties of family and friendship counted for nothing in this new, perfidious Languedoc. Betrayal became virtue, as Garcias and others learned to their grief. The Perfect who had not been trapped at Montségur now had to live on the run, their sole refuge gone and their flock scattered, frightened, and pressed into becoming informers.

In the end, Count Raymond VII joined the hunt. Having failed to ride to the rescue of Montségur, the epigone of the once-tolerant Saint Gilles family helped persecute his own people. In June 1249, he shocked his friends among the surviving Cathar gentry by ordering eighty people burned in Agen, a city on the Garonne to the northwest of Toulouse. By September of that same year, he was dead at fifty-two, shortly after having contracted a fever in the back-country town of Millau. His body was taken to Fontevrault, the abbey in the Loire Valley founded by Robert of Arbrissel, the charismatic preacher of the early twelfth century. In death Raymond deserted Toulouse, to lie in Fontevrault alongside his mother, Joan of England, his uncle, Richard Lionheart, and his grandparents, King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The count who had once vanquished both Simon and Amaury left his homeland defenseless. His daughter Jeanne would die childless in 1271, thereby ending the Saint Gilles line and allowing her husband’s family, the Capets of France, to annex Languedoc permanently. After Raymond VII’s passing, there was no one to resist the northerners or curb the agents of doctrinal cleansing. In this closing half century of humiliation, even those who had thrown in their lot with the French, notably Roger Bernard of Foix, were as unprotected as those who had remained loyal. In 1269, as a posthumous indignity to the family of Foix, the body of Roger Bernard’s wife, Ermessinde, was dug up and thrown out of a Catholic cemetery on suspicion of heresy.