Holy Warriors (37 page)

Peter of Castelnau was hailed as a martyr and when, several weeks after his death, the legate’s body was transferred to its proper tomb it was “found to be as whole and unimpaired as if it had been buried that very day. A marvellous perfume arose from his body and clothing.”
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In contrast to this story of Catholic purity, the Church portrayed the heretics as vile, depraved creatures who engaged in endless orgies and barely clung to the vestiges of humanity. One writer described how a Cathar “fell into such depths of madness that he emptied his bowels beside the altar in a church and by way of showing contempt for God wiped himself with the altar cloth.”
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In the autumn of 1208 Cistercian preachers toured northern and eastern France to whip up support for the crusade. Recruits wore the sign of the cross and received all the privileges, protection, and spiritual rewards of a crusader to the Holy Land. King Philip was too worried about a possible invasion by King John of England to take part, but many senior nobles took the cross. The duke of Burgundy, the count of Nevers, the count of Saint-Pol, and the count of Montfort all committed themselves to God’s cause. These families had proud traditions of crusading that stretched back to the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The count of Saint-Pol’s predecessor, Hugh, had been one of the leading knights on the Fourth Crusade until his death from gout in January 1205. Count Simon de Montfort was another veteran of that expedition, although, as we saw, he could not stomach the idea of attacking the Christian city of Zara and so left the campaign in the autumn of 1203 to sail directly to the Holy Land. With the guiding hand of Pope Innocent at his back, Simon would emerge as the champion of the Church and over the next decade his struggle with Count Raymond came to inflict horrific suffering across the towns and castles of southwestern France.

The first target of papal rage was the count of Toulouse, a man who had been excommunicated in 1207 for his apparent tolerance of the heretics. “You cherish heretics, you yourself are strongly suspected of heresy . . . you stand convicted as an adversary of the Gospel . . . we cannot allow such an injury to the Church to go unpunished . . . [your] territory will be taken
from you. . . . The wrath of the Lord will not be turned from you,” thundered Innocent.
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In reality, Count Raymond was probably not an active Cathar, but he was undoubtedly sympathetic to their cause and resented what he came to see as a blatant attempt by the northern French crusaders to steal his lands. Raymond’s career attracted starkly opposing assessments. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, a partisan of the Montforts, stated that “the count was a vicious and lecherous man . . . from early youth he lost no opportunity to seek out his father’s concubines and felt no compunction about bedding them—indeed none of them could please him unless he knew that his father had previously slept with her. . . . Always he acted as a limb of the Devil, an enemy of the Cross . . . a veritable treasury of all sins.”
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To his supporters, however, he was “valiant, joyful and strong,” and when, later in the crusade, he entered Toulouse to eject the French he was greeted as “the morning star, risen and shining upon us! Our lord who was lost!”
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With the crusade poised to attack his lands Count Raymond tried to deflect the Church’s ire and made a humiliating public submission to the papal legate in Saint-Gilles, the town of his family’s patron saint. Today Saint-Gilles is a sleepy village a few miles distant from the Mediterranean, yet it still possesses one of the most famous Romanesque churches in Europe and its magnificent tympanum features imagery connected with the rich crusading history of the counts of Toulouse.
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In the course of his supposed reconciliation Raymond was led naked to the church doors where, in the presence of the papal legate and other leading clerics, he swore to obey the papacy. He was then robed and scourged by the legate to absolve him of his sins and taken into the church. So great was the crowd that Raymond had to leave through the crypt and pass—by neat irony—the tomb of the murdered legate, Peter of Castelnau. The count then took the cross himself, although this was soon declared the act of a false and faithless man by the hostile Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay.
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The main crusade continued to head relentlessly southward and soon it entered the lands of another man accused of harboring heretics: Raymond-Roger
Trenceval, the viscount of Béziers. His hometown stands on a commanding hilltop location overlooking the broad floodplain of the River Orb. On July 21, 1209, the citizens who lined its walls caught their first glimpse of a distant dust cloud: slowly it grew bigger and bigger; movement rippled underneath the billowing mass and gradually came into focus. Sunlight reflected off armor, banners bearing bright red crosses cracked in the early evening breeze, warhorses snorted and whinnied beneath their masters while cart horses strained to haul heavy wagons. This was a force with lethal intent: an army of twenty thousand crusaders set upon the destruction of the Cathar heretics, some of whom sheltered defiantly behind the town walls.
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Bishop Reynald of Béziers stood in his cathedral and tried to convince the inhabitants to surrender. His voice breaking with fear, he urged the people to reconsider their resistance. He brandished a list of the names of the 220 individuals suspected of heresy and warned of the dire consequences if they were not handed over. The citizens’ response was crisp—they told the bishop “they would rather be drowned in the salt sea than take his advice.” They cared little for the distant authority of Rome and had faith in their own beliefs and the strength of their town walls; as one contemporary dryly observed, however, “an evil gift the men of Béziers received when they were told to stand firm and give battle.”
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Reynald carried the news out to the crusader army. Grim-faced, Abbot Arnold Amalric of Citeaux, the papal legate and leader of the expedition, ordered the siege to begin on July 22. At first the defenders were confident—one crusader was seized, mutilated, and thrown off a bridge. The senior crusading nobles gathered to discuss strategy; Béziers appeared very well fortified. Yet as they talked, cries of “To arms! To arms!” rang out from their lines. The most unpredictable element of the crusader army, known as the ribauds—basically the servants and hangers-on—had become fed up with the citizens’ mockery and charged toward the walls. Armed with little more than clubs and picks they began to batter and smash away at the defenses and their ferocious onslaught provoked panic.

Astonished by the ribauds’ progress the crusading knights rushed to put on their armor and to join the fray. At the sight of the heavy knights gathering in formation, courage deserted the men defending the city and they abandoned the walls and the gates. The crusaders swarmed into Béziers, inflamed
with religious zeal and determined to reap material rewards for their success in the holy war; the ribauds scented riches beyond their wildest dreams and began to seize and hoard everything they could. With a frenzied energy the crusaders started to ransack the houses, shops, and palaces; meanwhile the inhabitants sought refuge in the cathedral. Soon it was packed full with desperate people; the priests sensed their impending fate and donned vestments for a Mass for the dead and the bells tolled a funeral lament. As the town fell, the crusaders faced a dilemma because they could not decide who was guilty of heresy and who was not. They were painfully aware that Catholics—even those tainted by association with the unbelievers—were mingled among the heretics. “What shall we do, Lord?” they asked Abbot Arnold Amalric. Might some of the Cathars pretend to be Catholics to avoid death and then continue to spread the contagion of heresy once the crusaders had gone? The abbot was stony-faced; an example had to be made to all the enemies of the Church. Calmly he uttered one of the most chilling phrases in the history of medieval Europe, words that sealed the fate of thousands of innocent men, women, and children: “Kill them all. God will know his own.”
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At this uncompromising edict the massacre began. The ribauds and the knights went to work with, to a modern reader, a stomach-churning enthusiasm and soon the piercing shrieks of the dying assailed the ears of those inside the cathedral. The smell of smoke began to permeate into the building as nearby houses and shops were torched in the anarchic, frenzied atmosphere of the sack. Soon the flames spread to the cathedral itself and, barricaded inside their supposed place of sanctuary, thousands were incinerated in the house of God. So intense was the heat that the cathedral split into two and central Béziers became one enormous funeral pyre. Warfare in western Europe had reached a new level of horror, and all in the name of God. The message was plain: heresy would be extinguished at all costs.

Carcassonne was next in line to the crusaders and it surrendered relatively quickly; the viscount of Béziers (who had fled there for safety) was taken prisoner and he soon died in custody. By the autumn of 1209, however, the crusaders began to melt away because their terms of service were set at only forty days’ fighting and they wanted to return home. Only a few remained in the south and the rebels started to regain much of their lost land.

While Raymond of Toulouse had lain low during these events, his patent lack of enthusiasm for the crusade soon brought him into open opposition to the Church once more. As noted above, his principal opponent was Simon de Montfort, a man who perfectly fused the secular and spiritual motives of a crusader. Simon was driven by a deep conviction that he was doing God’s work and a sense of moral certainty that he was entitled to take over the lands of the heretics. Physically, he was a powerful man, which caused the pope to pun that the lord of Montfort was “the Strong Mountain”
(mons and fortis)
sent by Christ to defend the Church. A contemporary admirer described him as “eloquent of speech, eminently approachable, a most congenial comrade-in-arms, of impeccable chastity, outstanding in humility, wise, firm of purpose, prudent in counsel, fair in giving judgement . . . and totally dedicated to the service of God.”
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To an opponent, he was a man who “destroys and devastates, a man devoid of pity.”
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As time moved on, however, his desire to conquer and hold lands in his own right even began to provoke disquiet in the Church and aroused ever more fierce opposition in the south.

In 1213, the prospect of a new crusade to the Holy Land brought a brief cessation to hostilities, but so embedded were the respective hatreds that this calm lasted only a matter of months. Between 1209 and 1218 Simon fought no fewer than thirty-nine sieges; some lasted only hours, others took months. He was capable of terrible atrocities: at the castle of Bram all the defenders except one were blinded and had their noses cut off. The remaining prisoner was blinded in only one eye and told to lead this pitiful procession of brutalized troops back to the rebel lands.
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On another occasion he ordered the buildings of Toulouse to be so ravaged that a man could pass straight into the city without pause. Roofs, workshops, chambers, and doorways were ripped out: “such was the noise, dust and damage,” wrote William of Tudela, “that it felt like an earthquake . . . in every street, men were in tears, their hearts and spirits overcome by darkness.”
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Yet Raymond’s resistance—in large part an attempt to hold on to his own ancestral lands—enabled Catharism to survive, especially in the more remote areas of the Languedoc where its adherents continued to practice their beliefs and spread their gospel. The perfecti moved from village to village, preaching to
the people and setting up formal Cathar communities of men and (separately) women, rather like monasteries. The fight swayed back and forth as every year, waves of crusaders arrived, the heretics retreated to the countryside and then came back to the towns and castles once the danger had passed. It was like a simmering pot that all too often came to the boil, but Simon was iron-willed in his determination to bring the Languedoc to orthodoxy and to take the lands and titles of those whom he defeated. He had spent eight months besieging Toulouse when, on June 25, 1218, he was struck on the head by a catapult stone.

The anonymous continuator of William of Tudela reported that the machine was worked by noblewomen, girls, and wives—perhaps a sign that everyone was involved in the defense of their city. Such a comment was also intended as a slight on Simon with the suggestion that “mere” women had fired the fatal shot. In any case, “a stone struck Count Simon on his steel helmet, shattering his eyes, brains, back teeth, forehead and jaw” and he died immediately.
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He had certainly brought the power of the Catholic Church and the northern French nobility to the Languedoc, and at times, he had borne down hard upon the heretics. Unsurprisingly, he was loathed by the southern French as this scathing assessment of the epitaph on his tomb shows: “[It says] that he is a saint and a martyr who shall breathe again and be seated in the kingdom [of heaven]. . . . If, by killing men and shedding blood, by damning souls and causing deaths . . . by kindling evil and quenching good, by killing women and slaughtering children, a man can in this world win Jesus Christ, certainly Count Simon wears a crown and shines in heaven above.”
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Four years later Count Raymond died, marking the end of the first phase of the war.

The Church continued to fulminate against the heretics, but for a time the military situation became a little calmer. Amaury de Montfort and Raymond VII of Toulouse, the sons of the two great warriors, moved toward a compromise. In the mid-1220s, however, a new player appeared. King Louis VIII of France (1223–26) hitched his territorial ambitions in southern France to the papacy’s ongoing holy war against the Cathars to trigger a new crusade.
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Louis was, of course, following in the crusading footsteps of his father, Philip, his grandfather Louis VII, and his great-uncle Hugh of Vermandois, although they had all been to the Holy Land. In 1226 the king led a large army southward and received the submission of Avignon and Albi. At the Treaty of Paris in 1229 the lords of southern France were compelled
to accept royal authority and a concerted attempt was made to deprive the heretics of their places of refuge.
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Yet the Cathar belief system still persisted and with less military action during the 1220s it recovered much of its vigor. While there had been periods when the crusade made great progress, ultimately, it must be judged to have failed to uproot Catharism.