God's War: A New History of the Crusades (94 page)

While the activity of 1178–81 led nowhere, church policy towards heresy was clarified in Lucius II’s decree
Ad abolendam
(1184), which provided for convicted heretics to be handed over to the secular authorities for punishment, unspecified.
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Yet in Languedoc, Catharism became, by the early years of the thirteenth century, so rooted ‘that it could not easily be dug out’,
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a process assisted by limp ecclesiastical control and absentee bishops. Until the accession of Innocent III in 1198, the main Catholic vigour in the area seemed to have been reserved for the patronage of Cistercian monasteries. The new pope adopted a typically active if cerebral approach. As early as April 1198,
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Innocent despatched his confessor to investigate and followed this with a series of legatine missions, in 1198, 1200–1201 and 1203–4. The pope’s alarm seems to have grown as he became aware of the ineffectiveness of his legates’ preaching and disputations, the full extent of the crisis in Languedoc and the strength of Catharism not just in southern France and Italy but throughout the Balkans as well. He began a radical overhaul of the Languedoc episcopacy and urged his legates to a more aggressive stance. In 1204, when adding Abbot Arnaud Aimery of Cîteaux to his fellow Cistercians Master Ralph of Frontfroide and Peter of Castelnau, Innocent offered Holy Land indulgences to those who ‘laboured faithfully against the heretics’.
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In tune with his crusading policies elsewhere, Innocent was moving towards a military solution. This was encouraged by the stalling of his latest legatine mission, apparently through the indifference or obstruction, as the legates saw it, of the secular rulers such as Raymond VI of Toulouse (1194–1222). A fresh approach in 1206–7 adopted by new recruits to the preaching campaign, the Spanish Bishop Diego of Osma and his canon Dominic Guzman, achieved little.
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They travelled as if in mirror image of
perfecti
, in simple clothes, walking barefoot along the footpaths and byways to a series of disputations with Cathar leaders. Although this later bore fruit in the creation of Dominic’s Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, immediately it produced no tangible reversal of the heretic tide. Still less did it deal with the problem of the Cathars’ powerful protectors.

Local solutions, as envisaged in 1179 or even by Innocent III himself
as late as 1204, had not worked. Unlike Peter II of Aragon, who took measures against heretics in his realm, the count of Toulouse appeared unwilling or unable to act in the church’s interests. This problem was compounded by the poor relations that developed between Raymond and the legates, one of whom, the brusque Peter of Castelnau, made himself extremely unpopular with local opinion.
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To force the issue, the legates excommunicated Count Raymond in 1207 and 1208, draconian action that merely served to expose their impotence. If Raymond refused or was unable to take measures against the heretics, some external force would be required to compel or replace him. In 1205 and 1207 the pope attempted to interest Philip II of France in intervening. On the second occasion, in a letter of 17 November 1207, Holy Land indulgences were offered. Implicit was the pope’s recognition that the enemies of such a campaign stood to be disinherited and their lands confiscated. Not even this incentive could attract Philip, who argued that he was busy enough defending himself from his enemies John of England and Otto IV of Germany, awkwardly one of Innocent’s protégés. The pope’s own strategy was still hedged with qualifications: ‘we want you to bear in mind’, he told the French king, ‘the needs of the Holy Land, so that no aid is prevented from reaching her’. However, Innocent’s attitude towards the Cathars and their supporters was ominously clear: ‘wounds that do not respond to the healing of poultices must be lanced with a blade’.
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Almost immediately, the pope was presented with a perfect
casus belli
. On the morning of 14 January, the legate Peter of Castelnau was assassinated on the west bank of the Rhône north of Arles, ten miles from the abbey of St Gilles, by a servant of the man with whom the legate had held a fierce row the previous day, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse.
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THE CRUSADE

The murder of Peter of Castelnau failed to elevate the victim to sanctity, even the pope admitting to the absence of customary martyr’s miracles.
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Otherwise it matched the more famous death of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170 in propaganda value and easily outstripped the Canterbury martyrdom in direct political consequences. News of the assassination was taken to Rome by Peter’s fellow legate, Abbot Arnaud Aimery, who convinced Innocent of Count Raymond’s complicity. The count
was excommunicated, and, on 10 March 1208, Innocent III delivered a fulminating call to arms. The culprit was unequivocally identified as the ‘changeable, crafty, slippery and inconsistent’ Raymond. Full Holy Land indulgences were promised the ‘knights of Christ’. Innocent’s language avoided compromise. ‘According to the judgement of truth we must not be afraid of those who kill the body’, so ‘the strong recruits of Christian knighthood’ must attempt ‘in whatever ways God has revealed to you to wipe out the treachery of heresy and its followers by attacking the heretics with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, that much more confidently than you would attack the Saracens because they are worse than them’. Even if he repented, Raymond’s penalty should be the confiscation of his and his followers’ lands. ‘Catholic inhabitants must be put in their place.’
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Combining religious conquest with political annexation complicated this new papal holy war. By legitimizing land grabbing, Innocent invited exploitation by acquisitive adventurers he proved characteristically powerless to restrain.

The new crusade was regarded as an extension of the previous legatine missions, recognized by the appointment of Arnaud Aimery as chief propagandist and recruiting agent. The theoretical justification rested on subtly different bases than the Holy Land crusades even if the rhetoric evoked similar images and the privileges tapped identical spiritual aspirations. Greater emphasis was placed on the crusade being a just as well as holy war, a slant made easier by the material crimes of heresy and murder. In his bulls of 10 March 1208, Innocent set out the juridical argument for violence against the heretics as a form of defence both spiritual and material: ‘the perverters of our souls have become also the destroyers of our flesh’. Raymond VI was an excommunicate and a murderer. In a manner impossible when tackling Islam, the Cathars were portrayed as ‘rebels’ against Christ and His church, their heresy ‘treachery’, in that legalistic sense ‘worse than Saracens’. These are categories of just war, increasingly familiar to contemporary canon lawyers and, as Innocent hinted, more amenable to explanation than the transcendent demands of holy war. Revenge was common to both – vengeance for the death of legate Peter but more fundamentally vengeance for the insult to Christ. The full panoply of vow, cross, plenary indulgence and temporal privileges were deployed, a logical extension of twelfth-century precedents, such as Canon XXVII of the Third Lateran Council, as well as patristic theory derived from Augustine of Hippo.
The crusade was being applied to a just war to restore the order of Christendom.

As such the Albigensian crusade displayed familiar features to emphasize Innocent III’s conception of the universal embrace of holy war. The plenary indulgence and cross, absent in 1179, were prominent. Crusade temporal privileges were insisted upon and the crusade leaders attempted to impose sumptuary rules on their followers.
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A Burgundian benefactor to the Cluniac monks in 1209 was recorded as joining the Albigensian campaign for the traditional reason of ‘the remission of my and my parents’ sins’. In a charter in favour of the abbey of Cluny, Odo III duke of Burgundy, the grandest of the 1209 recruits, is described as ‘crucesignatus contra hereticos Albigenses’.
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Sympathetic contemporary chroniclers refer to the crusaders generically as
peregrini
, pilgrims, although the object of any penitential pilgrimage is hard, if not impossible, to identify. During the fighting at the sieges of Lavaur in 1211 and Moissac in 1212, the crusader army clergy sang the hymn
Veni Creator Spiritus
, which became the crusaders’ anthem.
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The crusades’ opponents were ‘enemies of Christ’ to the recruited as well as the recruiters and war propagandists. To his enemies, Raymond was ‘the cruellest persecutor of Christ’. Innocent and preachers, such as James of Vitry and the Englishman Robert of Curzon (Courçon), succeeded in creating an atmosphere of spiritual crisis and crusading duty. Within a few years a crusade preaching manual in England was including uplifting stories of heroic deaths in Languedoc to set beside the deeds of Holy Land martyrs.
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According to James of Vitry, his pet holy woman, Mary of Oignies, was a great enthusiast for the cause, experiencing visions showing Christ’s care for the fate of Languedoc and, usefully for recruiters like James, angels lifting the souls of dead crusaders ‘to heavenly bliss without any purgatory’.
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This congruence with Holy Land wars of the cross was reinforced by the presence in the ranks of the Languedoc
crucesignati
of veterans from other crusades, including four prominent Fourth Crusade dissidents at Zara in 1202–3 – Abbot Guy of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, Enguerrand de Boves and Simon and Guy of Montfort – and the inveterate
crucesignatus
Leopold VI of Austria, who was recruited in 1210, as were the brothers Philip bishop of Beauvais (who went again in 1215) and Count Peter of Dreux, who had seen service in Palestine on the Third Crusade. Other recruits later joined the Spanish crusade against the Almohads in 1212, led by the Languedoc legate
Arnaud Aimery. Such international experience of crusading lent flesh to Innocent’s ideology of almost eternal armed struggle against the spiritual and material forces of evil.

The regularity and persistence of this preaching sustained an atmosphere of immediate spiritual crisis. One unexpected and not entirely welcome response later became known as the Children’s Crusade (discussed in the next chapter). Stirred by the claims of the dangers besetting Christendom, a series of revivalist penitential processions in northern France converged on St Denis in the summer of 1212, calling for general moral reform, a clear echo of the papal programme of reform. The heretic scare and the annual round of preaching and cross-giving contributed to the sense of alarm. A Norman chronicler suggested that many of those who marched were later recruited to the Albigensian crusade.
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The war against heresy formed an important religious as well as political context for the Fourth Lateran Council announced by Innocent in 1213 to be held in Rome in 1215, the council’s third decree expressly dealing with the Albigensian crusades, which were equated with aiding the Holy Land.
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However, not all the language or practice of the Albigensian crusades replicated Holy Land models. The euphemism of ‘the business of faith and peace’ represented a more temporal legalistic slogan than ‘the business of God’ or other tags attached to the eastern campaigns. Fighting within Christendom, for most within their own kingdom, with authorized territorial profit held particular repercussions. To cement local support in Toulouse, Bishop Fulk instituted the White Confraternity, a militia aimed at combating heresy and usury (a very Innocentian combination). Members received the cross and remission of sins so they would ‘not be deprived of the indulgences which were being granted to outsiders’. Although reflecting civic identity as much as piety, and challenged by a rival Toulouse association called the Black Confraternity, Bishop Fulk’s association possessed sufficient cohesion and commitment to supply troops at the siege of Lavaur in May 1211.
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The Albigensian crusades were the first great political as well as anti-heresy crusades, aimed as much against Christians as against heretics. Participants understood that the Languedoc war, however equal in merit, was not the same as the Jerusalem war. There was almost no military involvement by the military orders, despite their strong presence in the area. Wars in Languedoc were easier to fight than in Palestine,
more accessible, less physically demanding, less time-consuming. The 1208 offer of indulgences invited a rather casual approach, if not blatant abuse. Recruits showed little commitment or staying power, judging a brief appearance in the field adequate to gain spiritual reward, and perhaps hoping for a share of the clerical taxes being raised for the project. The latter was not forthcoming, many crusaders probably reckoning that the war in fact offered them no profit, only loss, and, until the 1220s, served the material interests solely of the Montforts. By the autumn of 1210, the legates had become seriously alarmed that indulgences were distorting the military viability of the operation. Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, nephew of Abbot Guy, wrote a detailed and well-informed contemporary account of the crusades, often as an eyewitness. He recorded the measures taken to mitigate the problem:

the papal legates, aware that most of the crusaders were somewhat lukewarm in their enthusiasm for the campaign and perpetually anxious to go home, had laid it down that the indulgence promised to the crusaders by the pope would not be granted to anyone who failed to complete at least one full period of forty days in the service of Jesus Christ.
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