The Perfect Heresy (41 page)

143
“It is a great pity that you who have lands to live on should have been such cowards as to lose them”: The insult is recorded in the
Canso
. Just prior to Muret, the chronicler known as Anonymous (see “Usage and Primary Sources” above) takes over from William of Tudela. The man who spoke so woundingly to Count Raymond was Michael of Luesia, who died fighting alongside Pedro later in the day.

143
Simon de Montfort ordered his knights to … get ready for battle: The prelude and aftermath of the battle are rich in contemporary accounts. There is, however, a remarkable paucity of sources concerning the actual fighting at Muret. There is also a remarkable lack of agreement about where exactly the batde took place and how the forces were arrayed. The work of Michel Roquebert, in the second volume of his
L’Epopée cathare
, is exemplary for its exhaustiveness and its evenhanded consideration of different theories. His conclusions, including a set piece on the battle (pp. 167–236), guided my brief evocation of the fight. The route taken by the crusaders along the towpath, for example, is Roquebert’s hypothesis.

143
“If we cannot draw them a very long way from their tents …”: Simon’s speech is set down by Anonymous in the
Canso
.

143
Masses were said, confessions heard: Pious legend—backed up by a plaque in the main church of Muret—has Dominic inventing the Catholic prayer cycle known as the Rosary during the vigil before the battle. Church historians have long since proved, alas, that Dominic was not among the clergymen at Muret on that fateful September day.

146
“Across the marshes …”: The descriptive passage is from the
Canso
(in Janet Shirley’s translation, p. 70).

148
A mass grave would be unearthed in the nineteenth century: The riverside spot is called Le Petit Jofréry. Floods of 1875 and 1891 uncovered makeshift cemeteries and thirteenth-century armor (source: Dominique Paladilhe,
Les Grandes Heures cathares
, p. 154).

11
.
The Verdict

150
the vicar of Christ stalked out of his cathedral: For the events at the Lateran Council, I relied on the work of Brenda Bolton (“A Show with a Meaning: Innocent Ill’s Approach to the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,”
Medieval History
1 (1991), pp. 53–67), which in turn led to S. Kuttner and A. Garcia y Garcia’s article “A New Eyewitness Account of the Fourth Lateran Council,”
Traditio
20 (1964), pp. 115–78. There was another eyewitness, the chronicler Richard of San Germano.

153
A chronicler told of how the session …: The chronicler is Anonymous of the
Canso
. It is possible that he attended the Lateran Council in the entourage of the Raymonds. At the very least, he talked to many of the principal participants. The speeches are all to be found in the
Canso
and are widely thought to give an accurate picture of the verbal sparring that must have occurred there. The version used is Janet Shirley’s translation.

156
“you take away Montauban and Toulouse …”: Montauban, a city on the River Tarn to the northwest of Toulouse, was the only other major center to resist Simon de Montfort’s rule.

12
.
Toulouse

158
Any unlucky besieger captured … according to a chronicler: In his
Hystoria albigensis
, Peter of Vaux de Cernay lists an impressive number of atrocities committed by the Toulousains. There is no reason to disbelieve him.

161
“When the count entered through the arched gateway …”: The eyewitness here is not Vaux de Cernay but Anonymous. In this chapter, the direct quotations relating to the siege are taken from the
Canso
, but much of the background material is found in the
Hystoria
and
the
Chronica
. All three sources are prolix about the great siege of Toulouse; only the
Canso
, however, has women operating the mangonel that killed Simon de Montfort. That twist of fate is too lovely not to be repeated.

167
As was the custom: It is William of Puylaurens who states that the boiling of the corpse was a French funerary custom.

168
“The epitaph says …”: The epitaph to which this remarkable passage refers has been lost. As for the funerary stone depicting Simon de Montfort, now affixed to a wall in the transept of Carcassonne’s St. Nazaire, it is now considered a hoax. Experts from Toulouse established in 1982 that the stone was carved between 1820 and 1829, at the behest of Alexandre Dumege, a local historian with an overheated romantic imagination (source: Michel Roquebert,
L’Epopée cathare
, vol. 3, p. 143).

13. The Return to Tolerance

169
Every man, woman, and child in Marmande: The massacre provoked almost as much comment as Beziers and became a staple among northern chroniclers. Anonymous, in the
Canso
, lets out all the stops in his description: “But clamour and shouting arose, men ran into the town with sharpened steel; terror and massacre began. Lords, ladies and their little children, women and men stripped naked, all these men slashed and cut to pieces with keen-edged swords. Flesh, blood and brains, trunks, limbs and faces hacked in two, lungs, livers and guts torn out and tossed aside lay on the open ground as if they had rained down from the sky. Marshland and good ground, all was red with blood. Not a man or a woman was left alive, neither old nor young, no living creature, unless any had managed to hide. Marmande was razed and set alight” (Janet Shirley’s translation, pp. 188–89).

170
“Roma trichairitz
…”: The troubadour’s song appears, with a translation by Roger Depledge, in Yves Rouquette’s
Cathars
., pp. 162–63.

176
his body was denied a public Christian burial: Discredited legend long had it that the remains of Raymond VI were left to rot outside a cemetery gate, picked over by rats, but the truth of his ultimate fate may yet turn out to be less unseemly. Just before Christmas 1997, some
775 years after the count’s death, workmen restoring a medieval building in old Toulouse discovered a hitherto unsuspected hollow in a wall containing the hidden sarcophagus of a thirteenth-century nobleman. At this writing, DNA tests are being done to determine whether its occupant is the long-vanished Raymond, and the ever loyal city of Toulouse has formally petitioned the current pope to lift the excommunication that still hangs over his soul. There is a slim hope that the bones found might turn out to be, plausibly, those of Raymond VI. In the side of the great church of St. Sernin in Toulouse is a portal known as the Counts’ Door, where tenth- and eleventh-century members of the Saint Gilles clan had been laid to rest. Some of these sarcophagi have been pried open, and the jumble of 900-year-old bones therein is being genetically mapped. If some of these bones produce a familial “match” to the jumble found in 1997 in the sarcophagus hidden in the niche of the former Toulouse headquarters of the Knights Hospitallers (later the Knights of Malta), then the metropolis on the Garonne will no doubt build a worthy mausoleum for its beloved count. Toulouse’s mayor, Dominique Baudis, is somewhat of a Cathar enthusiast. His novel,
Raimond “le Cathare
,” tells a first-person story of Raymond VI and, on its publication in 1996, was fairly well received in neo-Cathar circles. One such group based in Toulouse, La Flamme cathare, circulated a petition—
Manifeste pour la Réconciliation
—asking Pope John Paul II to come to the church of St. Sernin in the year 2000 and apologize to Languedoc for the actions of his predecessors. The first signatory of the petition was Mayor Baudis. The pope never came.

177
through diplomacy, guile, and feats of arms, he had subdued his enemies: As his barons were helping out Simon de Montfort, King Philip Augustus had been thrashing his enemies in the field. In the year after Muret, he repelled an English force under King John, who had used the upheaval of the Cathar struggle to try and enlarge his holdings in northwestern France. In the decisive battle of Bouvines on July 27, 1214, the French routed the forces of Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Germans were neutralized; the English thrown into disarray.

178
Amaury had, in fact, lost everything given to his family nine years earlier in Rome: In a bar at Montségur, I was assured by several
patrons that
un amaury
or
un maury
is a local dialect word meaning “a loser.” Alas, I was unable to find a similar entry in any regional dictionaries of the Midi.

14. The End of the Crusade

181
in 1216, Louis had briefly accepted the crown of England at the invitation of the barons: On the death of King John of England in 1216, his successor, the future Henry III, was only nine years old. The ever-rebellious barons of Britain saw their chance to unseat the Plantagenets by inviting in Louis.

183
Michel Roquebert has argued convincingly… : Roquebert makes his case for a collective panic in chapter 22 (“Le Printemps de la grande peur”) of volume 3 of his
L’Epopée cathare
.

185
–
86
Romano and Blanche sharing more than just prayers: The long-lived rumor was apparently spread by the irreverent students of the Latin Quarter. Romano’s power at the Louvre and in the Cité was resented by the schoolmen of the Left Bank. The rumor was reported by the English chronicler Matthew Paris (source: Krystel Maurin,
Les Esclarmonde
, p. 88). In any event, Blanche, as a mother of eleven, might have grown leery of the consequences of close male company.

186
Gregory IX, a nephew of Innocent III: It is almost certain that Ugolino dei Conti di Segni was Lotario’s nephew. More in dispute is his birthday. In the past, historians have relied on information provided by the chronicler Matthew Paris, who held that Gregory was nearing his hundredth year at his death in 1241. It is now thought more likely that the nephew of Innocent was ten years younger than his uncle, which would place his birth year at around 1170.