The Perfect Heresy (36 page)

Montségur
(Jean Pierre Pétermann)

In the remnants of the castle at the summit, what looked like an extended family—grandmother, parents, teenage children—stood off to one side and sang. The effect was lovely. The eldest boy later explained that they were Filipinos and that his father had always wanted to come here. Why? He didn’t know.

I walked through a gap in the walls to where the village of the Perfect had once stood. A few ropes cordoned off the ledges on which archaeologists would be perched once the fine weather returned. I rounded a corner of a rampart and saw, to the south, Mount St. Bartholomew stretching into the sky. I closed my eyes, felt the wind.

Silence. The clamor of Cathar country lay far below, in the souvenir shops and the cities. Albi was so far away that even its awful shout had been stilled.

I opened my eyes. The Cathars had won after all. They no longer existed.

I opted to anglicize most proper names. Some language groups have no problem with such blanket transformations (the French, for example, can call Michelangelo
Michel-Ange
without a twinge of embarrassment), yet making the switch for
The Perfect Heresy
meant defying present-day Occitan political correctness. May my friends in Languedoc forgive me, but the vagaries of spelling—I’ve seen the Occitan for
Peter
rendered as
Peire, Peyre
, and
Pere
—proved daunting. While it is true that the many Raymonds of the story might have styled themselves
Raimon
or
Raimond
or some other cognate, to my eye such unfamiliar spellings put up obstacles to understanding. (The names of the two troubadours I mention, however, have been left as found.) A few other exceptions to my linguistic imperialism occur, for reasons of euphony, nationality, or avoidance of the ridiculous.
King Peire/Peyre II
of Aragon became
Pedro
, not
Peter
or
Pierre
; the Italian
Lotario
resisted becoming
Lothar
; and
Guilhabert of Castres
simply refused to be called Wilbert. As for the numerous French figures in the text, there too I have anglicized names in the interests of
easier comprehension. In this I am not alone: The thirteen-volume
Dictionary of the Middle Ages
, edited by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Scribners, 1989), has comforted me in many of my decisions. The French
particule
(i.e., de or des) is retained only when a long-standing convention has been established (e.g., Simon de Montfort) or when I have determined the name is a patronymic. Thus the murderers of Avignonet include a William
of
Lahille, a man from the village of Lahille near Fanjeaux, and a Bernard
de
St. Martin, whose last name appears to be just that—a last name. If my desire to make the text more accessible is an insufficient argument in the face of debatable judgment calls, I will gladly fall back on the excuse made famous by French Communists: “Ce sont mes contradictions!” (Such are my contradictions).

In the same arbitrary mood, I have embraced anachronism in geography. For our period, as mentioned in the introduction, it is premature to speak of
France
or
England
as established national states or governments, yet it would be tiresome to continue repeating “that patchwork of feudal arrangements that would one day coalesce into what we now call
x
.” A recent book on the Cathars adopts the following nomenclature: Carolingian France is referred to as
Gaul
; the area under the suzerainty of the early Capets is then termed
Francia
; and the confines of the state after King Philip Augustus is called
France
. Masterly distinctions; muddy waters. As long as it’s recognized as such, a little anachronism is better than a lot of confusion.

Readers should know of the principal primary sources for the Cathar drama before consulting the notes. First among equals is the thirteenth-century
Canso
, or, as it is now translated,
The Song of the Cathar Wars
. A 10,000-line Occitan-language chanson de geste—that is, a rhymed narrative song—the
Canso
has the peculiarity of being the work of two authors, both of whom witnessed many of the events of the crusade. The first third of the poem was written by the pro-crusade William of Tudela, a cleric assumed to have received the patronage of Baldwin, Count Raymond VI’s brother. When the traitorous Baldwin, a partisan of Simon de Montfort, was captured and hanged by his kinsmen shortly after the battle of Muret, William’s inkwell ran dry. The story from 1213 on was taken up
by an anonymous continuator, who was ferociously pro-Toulouse in his leanings. The
Canso
thus switches sides. The last two-thirds of the poem brings the action up to 1219, as Toulouse is about to repel its third siege in eight years. The continuator, usually referred to as Anonymous, appears to have been a devout Catholic and, most probably, a companion of the young Count Raymond VII. Janet Shirley, in the introduction to her welcome English prose translation of the
Canso
(Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996), distinguishes between the two writers: “Another and considerable difference between these two authors, one that is all but lost in translation, is that William was a good competent writer but his successor was a man of genius. William can tell a good story and is careful to leave us in no doubt that he was a well educated literary man… . The Anonymous, however, can toss showers of words into the air and catch them again.”

Another primary source of importance is the
Hystoria albigensis
, a Latin chronicle written by the pro-crusader Peter of Vaux de Cernay, a Cistercian monk. The nephew of a prelate who was a faithful friend of Simon de Montfort, Peter took part in many of the crusade’s actions and is a valuable, if unswervingly partial, eyewitness. At this writing, the definitive translation was to the French: Pascal Guébin and Henri Maisonneuve,
Histoire albigeoise
(Paris: Vrin, 1951). An English version of Vaux de Cernay’s chronicle, translated by W. A. and M. D. Sibly was published in 1998 (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell).

The last of the trinity of contemporary accounts was written at mid-century by William of Puylaurens, a notary for the Inquisition once in the employ of Count Raymond VII. Telegraphic in style, yet covering a greater chronological span, the
Chronica magistri Guillelmi de Podio Lau-rentii
backs up the detail found in the
Canso
and the
Hystoria
. Puylaurens appears to have spoken to the survivors of the crusade in their old age. The most commonly used translation from the original Latin was effected by the dean of French-language Cathar studies, Jean Duvernoy (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1976). The
Chronica
is not sympathetic to the Cathar cause, but neither does it spare the crusaders abuse for their often underhanded tactics.

The primary sources used for later periods of the Cathar story are
discussed in the chapter notes that follow. Full publishing information on most of the books mentioned in the notes can be found in the bibliography.

The Perfect Heresy
was written to be accessible to all readers curious about the past. For points of well-established fact and excerpts of medieval documents to be found in most studies of the Cathars, I did not think it necessary to credit the sources. Serious points of disagreement among them, however, are outlined in the notes, as well as any information that I deemed subsidiary, or distracting, to the flow of the narrative. Some of this “off-topic” information, I like to think, is interesting in its own right.

Introduction

4
There was nothing subtle about the appearance of Ste-Cécile: Lest any admirer of this peculiar church criticize me for neglecting the interior of Ste-Cécile, it should be mentioned that the side chapels and ceiling of the cathedral are a riot of colorful portraiture. Around the choir, occupying fully half of the nave, a pale lattice of carved limestone houses dozens of statues in its niches. This flamboyant Gothic rood screen is among France’s finest ecclesiastical treasures—a testament to the wealth of the see of Albi. At the back of the church, however, is an enormous fresco of the Last Judgment, four stories tall and as wide as the building itself. Commissioned by Louis d’Amboise, a late medieval bishop, it is a masterwork of the macabre, teeming with scores of figures in various stages of agony as reptilian demons and slimy toads torture them for eternity. Although the Cathars had long since vanished when Bishop d’Amboise had Florentine artists execute the work between 1474 and 1480, the fresco’s grotesque depiction of the consequences of sin seems less than innocent in this red-brick menace of a cathedral. Further queasiness is caused by another accident of art history. A bishop of the baroque era, Charles Le Goux de la Berchère, punched a huge hole in the center of the fresco to build a chapel in the base of the bell tower. In the top half of the painting—that part dedicated to the souls heading heavenward—the modification had the unfortunate effect of obliterating God, the judge of the Last Judgment. The solace of the divine is thus nowhere
to be seen in this horror show, as if the painting sought solely to scare rather than to uplift. Again, given the history of the area, the result is almost too fitting to be a coincidence.

6
Whether Arnold Amaury actually uttered that pitiless order is still a matter for debate: “Kill them all, God will know his own” first appeared in the
Dialogus miraculorum
of the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, who wrote his admiring account of the crusade some thirty years after the fact. It had long been a historian’s reflex to shrug off the order as apocryphal and absolve Arnold Amaury of any such brutal eloquence. Recent scholarship, however, has pointed out that the wording echoes passages to be found in 2 Timothy (2:19) and Numbers (16:5). As the scrupulous Malcolm Lambert states in
The Cathars
(p.103): “This makes it a little more likely that these words from the mouth of an educated member of the hierarchy [i.e., Arnold Amaury] were authentic.” Whatever the truth of its birth, the expression continues to live on. Culture critic Greil Marcus, in his
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), claims that the expression “Kill ‘em all, God will sort ‘em out!” was a T-shirt slogan favored by fans of punker Johnny Rotten and, in a Spanish version, by members of Guatemalan death squads. The
New York Times
reported that Karla Faye Tucker, the ax-murderer executed in 1998 in Texas, used to wear a “Kill ‘em all” T-shirt in her bad girl days.

6
“a thousand years without a bath”: The
mot
is attributed to Jules Michelet.

6
“I’m gonna get medieval …”: Tarantino’s zinger about the Middle Ages is rivaled by the memorable couplet concocted in the 1960s by satirist Tom Lehrer about segregationist Dixie: “In the land of the boll weevil/Where the laws are medieval.”