The Perfect Heresy (9 page)

The Cathars fell back on the New Testament, which they knew in both its Latin and Occitan translations, and on the stellar example of their own lives of poverty and self-denial. According
to their lights, Catharism was the true faith, the one descended from the simplicity and sanctity of Jesus’ apostles. That a beastly Roman cabal had somehow hijacked a straightforward message was proof, if any more were needed, of the workings of Evil.

The churchmen, having forbidden any vernacular version of Christian Scripture to avoid just such twisted intepretations of revealed truth, looked at their interlocutors, quite literally, as demagogues from hell. The champions of orthodoxy relied on centuries of biblical exegesis, on a tradition that stretched back to the days of Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, and on an institutional legitimacy that doubled as the wellspring of European culture.

The debates lasted for days, drew thousands of onlookers, appealed to the judgments of the audience. A chronicler lamented: “O dolorous case! To think that among Christians the ordinances of the Church and the Catholic Faith should have fallen into such disregard that secular judges were called in to pronounce upon such blasphemies!” The Cathars no longer needed to conceal their heterodox beliefs, as they had done two generations earlier in Lombers. Their friends in the nobility—Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel, Count Raymond Roger of Foix, King Pedro II of Aragon—had no intention of lighting any bonfires.

Neither side hid its contempt for the other. In a debate of 1207, when a female Perfect rose to rebut a point of discussion, a monk snapped at her, “Go back to your spinning, Madame, it’s not your place to speak to such an assembly.” Cathar debaters, smarting from years of incendiary slander in which they had been accused of infanticide and performing the obscene kiss, referred to the Church as “the mother of fornication and abomination.”

The impetus behind this flurry of insult was Pope Innocent III. Innocent was willing to try anything to stem the tide of heresy, even if it meant talking to those who should be roasting. Raymond had proved deaf to his entreaties and overtures: One of Innocent’s first acts as pope had been to pardon the count, excommunicated by his predecessor in 1195 for bad behavior toward the monastery at St. Gilles, yet the ingrate leader of Languedoc remained unconcerned about heresy in his homeland. The pope’s subsequent hectoring had met similar indifference. In 1200, Innocent promulgated a decree that called for asset forfeiture, the medieval template of what modern justice does to drug smugglers. The property of heretics would be turned over to their persecutors, and blameless family members would be disinherited. Not only that, Innocent declared that the property of Catholics who refused to hunt heretics was also liable to seizure. In Languedoc, however, these radical measures amounted to little more than whistling in the wind.

At the same time as he was approving the debates, the pope discreetly tried to interest the powerful in more ambitious schemes. Innocent attempted again and again to organize a punitive campaign against the Cathars. Papal letters in 1204, 1205, and 1207 to King Philip Augustus of France promised the monarch all of Languedoc if he would raise an army and put the land to the sword. The king demurred, out of feudal scruple—Raymond was technically his vassal—and out of his consuming need to fight England’s King John. Besides, he did not want the pope telling him what to do.

For all his dislike of heresy and the nobility of the south, Innocent recognized that the Church had to reform in Languedoc. His colorful appraisal of the Narbonne clergy—“dumb dogs who can no longer bark”—extended to other dioceses. A
council in Avignon asked bishops, among other things, to refrain from hearing matins in bed, gossiping during mass, and spending enormous sums on lavish hunting livery for themselves and their mounts. The bishop of Toulouse in 1201, Raymond of Rabastens, had mortgaged Church property so that he could hire mercenaries to conduct a protracted personal war against his own vassals. The diocese soon went broke, but the bankrupt bishop retained the warm friendship and support of that inevitable irritant, Count Raymond. The pope replaced Rabastens with Fulk of Marseilles, who spent his early days as bishop beating off creditors; it was said that he didn’t dare send his mules to get water at the public well for fear of their being impounded. The ineffectual prelates of Carcassonne, Albi, Béziers, Narbonne, and other Languedoc towns eventually were forced from office, but only after years of arm-twisting.

To do all this talking, preaching, and deposing, Innocent relied heavily on Cistercian monks, whose order had drawn men of exceptional talent to the Church throughout the twelfth century. The decision to bestow the disorganized diocese of Toulouse on Fulk of Marseilles was judicious. A Cistercian cleric who had been a rich merchant before finding his vocation and heading to a monastery, Fulk possessed the worldly expertise needed to bring order to the financial mess left by Rabastens. What’s more, Fulk had also been a troubadour; Dante, in his
Divine Comedy
, placed him in Venus’s quarter of the heavens. A man of three callings—spiritual, material, artistic—was precisely the type suited to champion the Church in the vibrant and complex city on the Garonne.

As papal plenipotentiaries, or legates, to Languedoc as a whole, Innocent appointed three southerners who had risen far in the Cistercian world. Arnold Amaury was the head of the
order, the man in charge of its 600 abbeys and thousands of monks. The other two papal legates, Peter of Castelnau and a certain Brother Raoul, hailed from the monastery of Fontfroide, an exquisite place for prayer and meditation that still stands in the hills above Narbonne. Peter, a lawyer-monk with no patience for disagreement, seems to have been the most overbearing of the three, for his stays in cities and remote parishes occasionally gave rise to death threats. Not that he and his colleagues expected adulation. As regular clergy, the secular priests distrusted them; as emissaries of Rome, the Cathars loathed them; as dispensers of excommunications and interdicts, the nobility and townspeople despised them.

The trio of Cistercians set about their work with determination. They went on elaborate revivalist tours to overawe the populace and bring them back into the fold of Catholicism. City governments and local lords were forced to swear allegiance to the Church, on pain of instant excommunication. The legates offered and accepted invitations to debate the Cathars. At Carcassonne in 1204, at the behest of the young King Pedro of Aragon, Peter and Raoul stood their ground against the Perfect Bernard de Simorre while a jury composed of thirteen Cathars and thirteen Catholics adjudicated the proceedings. As Cistercians trained to obey unquestioningly, they spoke of the beauty of submission and the need for absolute authority. This was not, obviously, a line of reasoning fated to win applause in Languedoc, and the debate ended inconclusively. The legates continued their mission, admonishing lax bishops, bullying petty nobles into teaming up against Count Raymond, crisscrossing the landscape in the hope of working an evangelical miracle. In Montpellier during the spring of 1206, the three tired monks concluded that they had failed. Peter of Castelnau had tried to resign a year
earlier, only to be rebuffed by the pope. Now all three wanted to abandon their legatine mission. The number of heretics they had converted was derisively small, and the pleas and threats expressed in their sermons had been whisked away like flies. Worse yet, in many places they had become figures of fun.

Two strangers approached them in Montpellier—Spaniards. The Cathar story was about to take a final twist before the dogs of war were loosed. The younger of the two men, Domingo de Guzman, the future St. Dominic, would not put an end to the heresy, but the Order of Friars Preachers, or the Dominicans, that he went on to found ten years later would be crucial, and cruel, in eliminating Catharism. As Latin wordplay has it, they were the
domini canes
—the dogs of god.

Saints and heretics have the same problem: Their stories have been so distorted by biased biographers that their lives are obscured by lies. What can be discerned about Dominic, through the thicket of hagiography, is his clear-eyed itinerary of piety and his effect on his contemporaries. Like Innocent III, he was a leader of great faith and adamantine conviction. As a brilliant student in Castile, he impressed the local nobility, of which he was a member, by offering to sell himself into slavery in order to free Christians held captive by the Moors. Noticed by Diego de Azevedo, the bishop of Osma, Dominic accompanied the older man on two diplomatic missions to Denmark before finally heading to Rome in the winter of 1205–6 to meet with the pope. Innocent, ten years Dominic’s senior, recognized spiritual power when he saw it. He denied the Spaniards’ request that they evangelize the Baltic countries and ordered them to Languedoc instead.

Saint Dominic

(Museo di San Marco, Florence/Art Resource, New York)

In March 1206, according to the saint’s many biographers, Dominic and Diego interrupted the commiseration of Arnold Amaury, Peter of Castelnau, and Raoul of Fontfroide in Montpellier. The two newcomers had several suggestions to make. They had passed through Languedoc on their travels and seen the Cathar Perfect at work. What struck them, and what was doubtless a source of the heresy’s popularity among the laity, was the sincere, saintlike poverty of the Cathar leaders. They lived as the apostles had, with the utmost simplicity, their only possessions a few sacred books and the garment on their backs. It was no wonder that the legates could make no headway against them. As princes of the Church and envoys of the pope,
the Cistercians traveled in great state, a suite of retainers, bodyguards, servants, and sycophants always at their beck and call. To the spiritual seekers of Languedoc, the legates appeared as pampered hypocrites, unable to speak to the soul. The times called not for feudal swank but for genuine material destitution.

Dominic and Diego had correctly identified the most winning trait of their opponents: apostolic poverty. Another heterodox Christian sect, the Waldensians, went around as dirt-poor preachers and implored other churchmen to do likewise. (Reformers at heart, the Waldensians had been rashly anathematized as heretics in 1184, thereby radicalizing them only more.) And the lure of the pauper was not limited to Languedoc. In 1210, an unwashed beggar who had been drawing crowds in central Italy was brought for questioning before Innocent III at the Lateran. After telling his visitor to take a bath and then spending a restless night dreaming about what the man had said, the pope astutely gave his approval to the supremely unorthodox Francis of Assisi. On the ceiling of the Assisi basilica honoring the ever-popular saint, Giotto immortalized Innocent’s dream, which led to the foundation of the other great order of friars, the Franciscans. Ragamuffin piety hardly matched the pope’s ambitions for a revitalized Church, but no one, it seems, could turn down the gentle Francis.

In Montpellier, Dominic and Diego did not trigger any dreams, but they were similarly persuasive. The Cistercian grandees agreed, at least temporarily, to do without the perquisites of their high office. Heretical Languedoc must have looked on in stupefaction as the barefoot legates, led by the saintly Spaniards, stumbled through the summer of 1206, begging alms and preaching tirelessly. Debates were held in Servian, Béziers, Carcassonne, Pamiers, Fanjeaux, Montréal, and Verfeil, the last being
the place where an apoplectic Bernard of Clairvaux had been silenced in the mid—twelfth century. The Perfect rose to the challenge, the weeklong conversations punctuated by stinging invective and theological grandstanding. It was an astounding moment in the history of religion.

The champions of Catharism included its preeminent preacher, Guilhabert of Castres; a nobleman-turned-Perfect, Benedict of Termes; a former knight from heretical Verfeil, Pons Jordan; and an acid-tongued ascetic aptly named Arnold Hot. Diego and Dominic, according to the Catholic chroniclers who are our sole historical sources, gave as good as they got. In Fanjeaux and Montréal, Dominic argued before crowds that were blatantly hostile to Catholicism. The grande dame of the area was an admired Perfect, Blanche of Laurac; three of her four daughters had followed her example, and her only son, Aimery of Montréal, made no attempt to disguise his disgust with the papal legates. Later Dominican lore has Dominic inspiring a miracle during one debate. A heretic tossed the saint’s notes into a fireplace three times, but they would not burn. The paper then wafted upward, charring a ceiling beam—which now adorns the church in Fanjeaux—before floating back down to an awestruck assembly.