The Perfect Heresy (38 page)

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The great man was laughed out of town: The story is alluded to in Geoffrey of Auxerre’s medieval
Life of Saint Bernard
and expanded upon in the first chapter of William of Puylaurens’s chronicle.

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dualists were sighted everywhere: Perhaps the strangest incident of heresy detection in the twelfth century occurred near Rheims, when a cleric named Gervase of Tilbury, out riding with the archbishop and some senior prelates, spotted a pretty girl working alone in a vineyard. A chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall, relates: “Moved by the lewd curiosity of a young man, as I heard from him myself after he had become a canon, he went over to her. He greeted her, and asked politely where she came from, and who her parents were, and what she was doing there alone, and then, when he had eyed her beauty for a while, spoke gallantly
to her of the delights of love-making.” She turned him down, saying that she would always remain a virgin. His suspicions now aroused as well, Gervase learned that the peasant girl believed, on heretical religious grounds, that her body must not be corrupted. He tried to get her to change her mind, in the timeless manner of one who will not take no for an answer. Their arguing finally attracted the attention of the archbishop, who rode over and soon became scandalized. Not by Gervase’s conduct, but by the girl’s faith. He had her arrested and brought back to Rheims for questioning. The farm girl refused to recant, and she was burned. (Source: R. I. Moore,
The Birth of Popular Heresy
, pp. 86–88.)

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labeled the unfortunates
Cathars
: The name originated in Eckbert of Schönau’s
Thirteen Sermons against the Cathars
, written in 1163. Eckbert also called the Cathars “wretched half-wits.”

30
the question of oath taking: The refusal to swear oaths was frequent among heretics, and not just of the Cathar variety. One justification is found in Matthew 5:33–37: “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago: ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’‘No;’ anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

31
Cathar dioceses were drawn up: Among those who concede that the St. Félix meeting took place, there is further argument about what happened there. Some believe that Nicetas (often styled
Niquinta
) laid down the dualist law, convincing the Languedoc Cathars to move from “mitigated dualism” to “absolute dualism”—the latter being a more hard-core belief positing an almost co-equal evil divinity. Others hold that the tale of Nicetas’s dogmatic authority is baseless, caused by a misreading in the 1890s (by historian Ignaz von Döllinger) and repeated unwittingly by generations of historians throughout the twentieth century. What
is
certain is that Nicetas warned the Languedoc Cathars against divisiveness and approved their diocesan organization.

2. Rome

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the pontiff’s superiority over all the crowned heads of Christendom: The chutzpah of Gregory VII can still take one’s breath away. In a volume of his correspondence, historians found a list that contains the following statements: “The pope can be judged by no one; the Roman church has never erred and never will err till the end of time; the Roman church was founded by Christ alone; the pope alone can depose and restore bishops; he alone can make new laws, set up new bishoprics, and divide old ones; he alone can translate bishops; he alone can call general councils and authorize canon law; he alone can revise his own judgements; he alone can use the imperial insignia; he can depose emperors; he can absolve subjects from their allegiance; all princes should kiss his feet” (source: R. W. Southern,
Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages
, p. 102).

37
–
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the church of SS. Sergio and Bacco: The church of Lotario’s cardinalate no longer exists. Neither does the tower that was erected on top of the arch of Septimius Severus.

37
The church was a treasure house of relics: There may be a six-or seven-year anachronism in the list of some of the relics to be found at the Lateran in 1198. A lot of relics came on the market following the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204; thus some of the objects listed may not have found their way to Rome until after that event. For example, Enrico Dandolo, the wily old doge of Venice, brought back from Constantinople the lions that stand in front of St. Mark’s, as well as a piece of the True Cross, the arm of St. George, a vial of Christ’s blood, and a chunk of John the Baptist’s head (source: Marc Kaplan, “Le sac de Constantinople,” in
Les Croisades
, ed. R. Delort).

38
it was he who definitively nudged the papal court to … the Vatican: Innocent would eventually wind up back at St. John Lateran, however, when a disgruntled nineteenth-century papacy moved his body to the church as a symbolic riposte to constitutional liberalism. He now lies in the transept, his recumbent stone effigy a study in lordly calm,
guarded by a pair of statues depicting women. One holds the light of wisdom; the other, the banner of crusade. It is rumored that his remains were transferred from Perugia to Rome in the suitcase of a seminarian traveling in the second-class compartment of a train.

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Lotario must have absorbed the lesson behind that beatification: There is no documentary evidence proving that the young Lotario was impressed by the canonization of Thomas Becket in neighboring Segni. It is, however, a fairly reasonable assumption and one that is repeated by several of Innocent’s biographers. Jane Sayers, in her
Innocent III
, states that Lotario toured the saint’s shrine in Canterbury on a student visit to Britain (p. 19). Historian Edward Peters, in “Lotario dei Conti di Segni becomes Pope Innocent III” (from
Pope Innocent III and his World
, ed. J. C. Moore) dates the visit at 1185 or 1186 (p. 10).

38
5,000 ounces of gold: In Paul Johnson’s
A History of Christianity
(p. 267), the visit in 1511 of the Dutch scholar Erasmus to the shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury is evoked: “Erasmus’s account makes it clear they were deeply shocked by what they saw. The riches which adorned the shrine were staggering. Erasmus found them incongruous, disproportionate, treasures ‘before which Midas or Croesus would have seemed beggars;’ thirty years later, Henry VIII’s agents were to garner from it 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of plain silver and twenty-six cartloads of other treasure.”

3. The Turn of the Century

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“To be always with a woman …”: This nugget of misogyny is quoted in R. W. Southern’s classic
Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages
(p. 315). Southern makes his point about the Church turning its back on women with other selected quotations. One of the most remarkable was penned by a Premonstratensian abbot: “We and our whole community of canons, recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than that of our
bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals.”

42
“… We cannot. We have been reared in their midst.”: The Catholic knight who made this oft-cited admission to Bishop Fulk was Pons-Adhemar of Roudeille. The anecdote is related by William of Puylaurens.

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entirely free of the prejudices of its time: Peter Autier, the leader of the Cathar revival in the early 1300s, taught that one had to be a male in one’s last incarnation if one was to join the good god. The idea that women were sinks of corruption and carnality, an oft-repeated theme in medieval Catholicism, appears to have cropped up in Catharism during the time of its persecution. For a levelheaded and exhaustive examination of Cathar beliefs, see Anne Brenon’s excellent
Le Vrai Visage du cathar-isme
.

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Noblewomen, especially, founded, managed, and led Cathar homes: Again, the work of historian Anne Brenon should be consulted, especially her
Les Femmes cathares
. The role of women in Catharism, long neglected by Catholic and Protestant historians feuding over the doctrinal implications of dualism, is now seen as one of the most remarkable sociological aspects of the heresy. Of the great Cathar matriarchs, Blanche of Laurac was undoubtedly the most notorious. On becoming a widow, Blanche and her youngest daughter, Mabilia, received the consolamentum and ran a Cathar home in Laurac, the town that gave its name to the Lauragais region. Another daughter, Navarra, left her husband, Stephen of Servian, when he repented of his heresy to Dominic. Navarra moved to Montségur. Another of Blanche’s daughters, Esclarmonde, married into the Niort clan and became the mother of the most dangerous family in Cathar history. The last of Blanche’s daughters was Geralda of Lavaur, a Cathar believer murdered by the crusaders in 1211. Blanche’s only son was Aimery of Montréal.

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the elder man invited a bevy of prelates to sniff out Catharism in his capital of Toulouse: The unsuccessful mission of 1178 included the head of the Cistercians, Henry of Marsiac, a powerful cardinal, Peter of Pavia, as well as the bishops of Bourges and Bath. Marsiac returned in 1181, at the head of an armed force and captured the town of Lavaur, a settlement between Albi and Toulouse that had a reputation for heresy.
Although Marsiac’s occupation of Lavaur was fleeting, an ominous precedent had been set.

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a troubadour named Peire Vidal: Vidal was by no means the only troubadour in Raymond’s court. Indeed, the count’s secretary for many years was Peire Cardenal, a troubadour who was an accomplished composer of
sirventes
—rhymed songs that usually skewered the enemies of the man who commissioned them.

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hotly contested sources of money: The splintering effect of partible inheritances that worked wonders for low-maintenance female Perfect was disastrous for their petty noble kinsmen, on whom Raymond should have been able to call for support. By the first decade of the thirteenth century, many towns and villages had thirty to fifty “co-lords”—fifty in Lombers, thirty-five in Mirepoix (source: Walter L. Wakefield,
Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250
, p. 52)—the result of successive pie splitting, and thus everyone involved was more or less broke or quarreling with each other over a few far-flung acres of vines. Not many nobles could stable a military establishment. The recourse to freelance
routiers
(armed mercenaries) as a means of resolving disputes only added to the anarchy. These routiers, often landless younger sons from the neighboring kingdom of Aragon, were notorious for overstaying their welcome and wreaking havoc with a terrified peasantry.

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approximately 150 in all at the turn of the millennium: The estimate stands for the year 975 (source: Michael Costen,
The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade
, p. 5).

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led the Christian armies into Jerusalem: Raymond IV of Toulouse wrote to the pope of the holy massacre perpetrated by his crusaders on storming the mosques and synagogues of Jerusalem in 1099: “And if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.” Christian sources put the number of victims at 10,000; Arab sources claim 100,000 were killed. (Source: Friedrich Heer,
The Medieval World
, p. 135.)

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“The chief cause of all these evils is the archbishop of Narbonne …”: Innocent’s famous feud with Archbishop Berengar lasted
well over ten years. The corrupt prelate, who used mercenaries to collect his tithes, was able to hang on to his lucrative post so long in the face of papal displeasure primarily because of his splendid family connections. He was the illegitimate son of a count of Barcelona and the bastard uncle of King Pedro II of Aragon.