The Perfect Heresy (40 page)

90
“To horse, my lords!”: The direct speech is reported by William of Tudela, author of this section of the
Canso
(p. 22 in Janet Shirley’s
translation). Unless indicated in the text, the quotations are from the
Canso
.

90
Peter Roger of Cabaret: Cabaret is now called Lastours, after the ruins of the four castle keeps (towers) that dot its hillside.

90
“stupider than whales”: The expression is William of Tudela’s. Translator Shirley wryly states in a footnote:
“La balena
, the whale, is the rhyme word; there is no reason to suppose medieval whales were a byword for stupidity” (p. 20).

95
“In Jesus’s name, baron …”: Again, the direct speech is reported by William of Tudela in the
Canso
.

100
the discretion of the pro-crusade chroniclers: Although all sources skate suspiciously fast over the incident, they are at variance over what precisely was offered to Raymond Roger. In the
Chronica
, William of Puylaurens states it was the young Trencavel who lost his nerve and agreed to be held hostage. Peter of Vaux de Cernay, who makes no mention of King Pedro’s failed attempt at mediation, implies that the crusade always intended to keep the viscount a captive indefinitely. The
Canso
seems to be missing a passage at this crucial juncture. For a full discussion of the incident, see volume 1 of Michel Roquebert’s
L’Epopée cathare
, pp. 275–78.

8. Bad Neighbors

104
“Et ab joi li er mos treus …”: The Occitan text is taken from Ernest Hoepffner’s
Le Troubadour Peire Vidal, sa vie et son œuvre
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961). The French translation is in Michel Roquebert’s
L’Epopée cathare
, vol. 1, p. 314. The English translation, from the French, is my own.

106
the grotesque march: Some of Simon’s defenders, most recently Dominique Paladilhe in
Simon de Montfort et le drame cathare
(pp. 115–19), point out that it was not the northerner who started this awful practice of mutilation during the crusade years. In the winter of 1210, a particularly ferocious Occitan noble by the name of Gerald of Pepieux cut off the facial features of a handful of crusaders he had captured. The
sheer scale of Simon’s riposte at Bram—as well as his presence at the sack of Beziers—has usually silenced those who seek excuses for his behavior.

107
Simon’s fourth son, another Simon de Montfort: It is the younger Simon de Montfort who is better known to students of British history. A leader of the baronial party opposed to the foreign adventurism and spendthrift ways of King Henry III, Simon got his monarch to agree to the Provisions of Oxford (1258) and the Provisions of Westminster (1259), which held that a council of nobles would exercise some control over the treasury and royal appointments. The king broke the agreement, and civil war ensued in 1264. Before being killed in the decisive Battle of Evesham in 1265, Simon began summoning lesser knights and townsmen to his parliament—thereby initiating the institutional practice that would mature as the House of Commons.

107
a great mane of hair: The champion of homoerotic Montfort idolatry is without a doubt Peter of Vaux de Cernay. The author of the
Hystoria albigensis
speaks of Simon’s “elegant face,” his “broad shoulders,” “muscular arms,” “gracious torso,” “agile and supple limbs” (source: Paladilhe,
Simon de Montfort
, p. 25).

115
the more zealous northern pilgrims complained: In a nice lexical coincidence, the leader of the grumblers who were worried that the heretics might escape was a French baron, Robert of Mauvoisin, a name that resembles that of the infamous trebuchet, Malvoisine. Unless indicated in the text, all of the incidents and speeches following the surrender of Minerve are attributable to the
Hystoria
.

115
Three of the women, however, abjured the dualist faith: Curiously enough, the person responsible for changing their minds was Mathilde de Garlande, the mother of Bouchard de Marly, the crusader held captive in Cabaret. Mathilde apparently yanked them off the bonfire as the flames were just getting going.

9. The Conflict Widens

118
the Toulousains left for Rome: Before going to Rome to complain to the pope, Raymond had gone to Paris to complain to the king.
Philip Augustus gave him a sympathetic hearing but did nothing to help out the beleaguered count.

119
“foxes in the vineyards of the Lord”: Innocent was not the only churchman to use this image. It was a fairly common trope for heresy in the Middle Ages, echoing a passage from the Song of Songs (2:15).

126
tears welled up in the count’s eyes: Peter of Vaux de Cernay notes the tears of Raymond but is quick to attribute them to “rage and felony” rather than “repentance and devotion.”

127
King Pedro of Aragon tried to prevent the war: Pedro bent over backward to keep the peace and, in the process, keep both sides off-balance. He offered his son in marriage to Simon’s daughter. War would break this betrothal. At the same time, he wed his sister to Raymond’s son. Since Raymond VI was already married to another sister of Pedro’s, he (Raymond) and his son became brothers-in-law—a relation which raised a few eyebrows. In the Trencavel matter, Pedro behaved as decently as could be expected. In exchange for getting Simon to agree to pay a pension to Agnes of Montpellier—the widow of Raymond Roger Trencavel—Pedro recognized Simon’s legitimacy. Agnes and her infant son Raymond then moved to Aragon, where they lived with the royal family. The disinherited son would twice roar back over the Pyrenees and try to reclaim Carcassonne after he had grown to manhood.

128
Arnold did not disappoint: Arnold’s outrageous offer occurs only in the
Canso
, leading some historians to question the reality of the proposal. One of the more influential doubters is Joseph R. Strayer, who, in
The Albigensian Crusades
, calls William of Tudela a “not entirely trustworthy writer” (p. 78). In the same passage, however, Strayer concedes that the general tenor of the demands makes sense.

129
Enguerrand of Coucy: The great barons of the crusade of 1211 included Robert of Courtenay (a first cousin of Raymond VI of Toulouse), Juhel of Mayenne, Peter of Nemours, and Enguerrand of Coucy. The last should be familiar to readers of Barbara Tuchman’s
A Distant Mirror
, her account of the Coucy family in the “calamitous 14
^th
century.” The Enguerrand at Lavaur is an ancestor of Tuchman’s hero of the same name. It was our Enguerrand who, in 1225, began the construction of the
great castle at Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique that figures so prominently in Tuchman’s tale. The Coucy fortress—the grandest medieval castle in France—was blown up by the Germans during their strategic retreat from the Noyon Salient in 1917, in one of the most devastating, and gratuitous, acts of vandalism of the Great War.

130
under the direction of Bishop Fulk of Toulouse: The number of Fulk’s contingent of singers and soldiers swells according to the sources consulted, from a few hundred to 5,000. What is certain is that these men were firebrands of orthodoxy. In a nettlesome question of usage, I have opted to follow Joseph Strayer’s example and have referred to the bishop throughout as
Fulk
. He appears in some histories as
Foulquet
when a troubadour and
Foulque
or
Foulques
in his later incarnation as bishop.

130
Montgey: The mass murder at Montgey deeply shocked chroniclers and churchmen throughout Europe. For one, it was the only slaughter en masse of pilgrims during the entire twenty years of the crusade. Also, the job of mutilating and finishing off the wounded was left to peasants and villeins—which was an almost intolerable transgression of the social order. This might, if one were disposed to make excuses, account for Simon de Montfort’s savagery toward Lady Geralda and the eighty knights at Lavaur, which violated all customary practices toward captives of noble birth. Near Montgey today, there is a plaque at a roadside calvary in the village of Auvezines, memorializing the lost column of armored pilgrims. To embrace anachronism for a moment: The plaque must be unique in France for deploring the demise of an invading German army.

130
The leader of the defeated defenders was Aimery of Montréal: The village of Montréal bears no relation to the great city on the St. Lawrence River. First garrisoned by the Romans, the gentle height became a village in the ninth century and owes its name to a corruption of the Latin
Mons Regalis
(royal mount) or
Mons Revelatus
(bare mount). Its sister in Catharism, Fanjeaux, is said to derive its name from
Fanum Jovis
(temple of Jove). The tale of Aimery’s hulking corpse bringing down the gallows originates in the
Hystoria
of Vaux de Cernay. The average height of the warriors of thirteenth-century France was five-foot-two or five-foot-three. As for Geralda, a later Catholic chronicler claimed
that she and Aimery had several children borne of their incestuous couplings, a fairly standard libel leveled at heretics.

10. A Time of Surprises

132
led by four Christian kings: Kings Alfonso VIII of Castile, Sancho VII of Navarra, Alfonso II of Portugal, and Pedro II of Aragon.

141
his historic flip-flop: Innocent threatened Pedro at the end of his letter dated May 21, 1213: “Such are the orders which your Serene Highness is invited to obey, in every last detail; failing which … We should be obliged to threaten you with Divine Wrath, and to take steps against you such as would result in your suffering grave and irreparable harm” (source: Zoé Oldenbourg,
Massacre at Montségur
, p. 163). It is amazing that Pedro should have gone from being Christendom’s hero—the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa took place in July 1212—to the pope’s nemesis, all in the space of ten months.

141
Simon … had made his last will and testament that morning: Peter of Vaux de Cernay recounts this telltale act on the part of a nervous Simon. Much of our information about the actions of Simon comes from his chronicle. It should be noted that from January 1213 to May 1214 Vaux de Cernay was in France; thus he was not present for the fateful battle. However, he would have spoken to Simon and his men about the events once he had returned to Languedoc and rejoined the crusade.

142
Pedro … relaxed with his mistress: There are two dubious historico-erotic tales told of Pedro’s actions before the battle. The first has Pedro writing a letter to a married lady of Toulouse in which he proclaims that his sole reason for fighting is to impress her enough to get into her bed. Vaux de Cernay tells of Pedro’s letter being intercepted by a prior in Pamiers and shown to Simon de Montfort as he marched to Muret. There is much tut-tutting by Simon about the indecency of the king’s motives. Historians, while not doubting the existence of the intercepted letter, believe Pedro’s missive was a standard, poetic greeting couched in the courtly language of the day, and addressed to one of Pedro’s sisters in Toulouse—it will be remembered that Raymond the elder and Raymond the younger had both married into the Aragonese
royal house. Vaux de Cernay, significantly, does not give the identity of the addressee. The other rumor has Pedro so tired after his amorous activities on the eve of the battle that he can barely stand up in the morning. This originated in the
Llibre dels feyts
, a chronicle that Pedro’s son commissioned when he had reached manhood and become King Jaume (or James) the Conqueror. Although delightful (and unlikely), the story is thought to be the invention of a Catalan chronicler who wanted to explain how the otherwise unbeatable Pedro could have been slain on the field of battle. The poor fellow was exhausted, so it wasn’t a fair fight.