Holy Warriors (38 page)

The final phase of the conflict saw the papacy make its most calculating effort to destroy the heretics.
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Churchmen realized that warfare and preaching could be avoided by those who wished to escape detection and so they developed a new mechanism to flush out the heretics and to create fear and suspicion in the very heart of their communities. The result was the fearsome Inquisition, headed by the crack troops of the medieval Church, the Dominican friars. They were university-trained experts in theology, yet their personal poverty and mendicant vocation meant they lacked the worldly trappings of the Church hierarchy and so could not be accused of the greed or moral failings of many of their predecessors.

The Inquisitors’ powers were unfettered: homes could be searched, anywhere a heretic was known to have stayed was to be destroyed, repentant Cathars were resettled in places where no heresy had been discovered.
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No one other than churchmen was permitted to possess copies of the Old and New Testament, and those whose confession of heresy was obtained under torture were to be imprisoned as a penance. The new measures made it far harder for the Cathars to move around and to live peacefully. A
Manual for Inquisitors
from 1245–46 gives a stark insight into the sophisticated disputation procedures available to extract confessions. If a village was suspected of heresy, all males over fourteen and females over twelve were required to come forward and make a statement of orthodoxy. If under suspicion—and anyone could, in complete anonymity, point the finger at a fellow villager—they had to confess, to recant from all heresy, and swear to pursue and seize other heretics. Everyone known to have given perfecti food and hospitality, or listened to sermons, had their names recorded; many came to the friars of their own volition, trying to preempt arrest. Those who confessed had to perform pilgrimages and other acts of penance and to wear a yellow cross for the rest of their lives. People who refused to abjure the heresy were
handed over to the secular authorities and burned to death. One measure that aroused special ire was the practice of condemning deceased heretics and then exhuming their bones to be burned “in detestation of so heinous an offence.”
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All of this generated—as it was intended to do—a climate of fear and suspicion that would fragment communities for decades. From the point of view of the Church, it began to yield results and many perfecti were forced to live as outlaws, or were identified and handed over to the authorities.

Inevitably, people reacted violently to this intrusive and arbitrary justice. At Albi in 1234, the inquisitor, Arnold Catalan, went to dig up the bones of a woman but he was confronted by a crowd led by a local knight. They began to hit Arnold on the chest, to slap his face and drag him away by his clothing and he only narrowly escaped being pushed into the River Tarn. Arnold retreated to the safety of the cathedral where a frenzied mob demanded his head be cut off, put in a sack, and thrown into the water. The inquisitor excommunicated the entire town, a measure which led to peace negotiations and the withdrawal of the censure. Many of his colleagues were not so lucky and a number of clergymen were assassinated as they tried to implement the inquiry.

On May 28, 1242, William Arnold, the leader of the Inquisition, was ambushed and slaughtered in a remote town, twenty-five miles southeast of Toulouse, by men from the castle of Montségur, the focal point of Cathar resistance. Such an atrocity inevitably provoked a response and troops sent by Louis IX (1226–70) invested the Cathar stronghold the following summer. Penned into the fortress were 361 people, including children, of whom 211 of the total were perfecti.
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Montségur stands almost four thousand feet above sea level on a rocky outcrop around fifty miles south of Toulouse: it remains resonant of its role in history, shrouded in mist, a melancholy and ravaged structure that stands over a place of death and destruction. It was not until March 1244 that a group of servants were able to scramble up the precipitous northeastern edge of the crag. They took the guards by surprise and captured the tower. The larger part of the fortress remained secure, but the besiegers’ foothold allowed them to bring up more men and to intensify their assault. The defenders realized their resistance was futile—or as William of Puylaurens, a near-contemporary author, commented: “the faithless could not withstand the onset of the faithful.” They accepted a promise that their lives be spared while the Cathar believers were handed
over. William related that “the heretics were invited to accept conversion, but refused. They were confined to an enclosure made of pales and stakes. This was set on fire, they were burned and passed on to the fire of Tartarus.”
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The fall of Montségur in March 1244 marked a watershed. With the death of so many perfecti the Cathars lost a major part of their spiritual elite. This last intervention by the French crown, combined with the rigor of the Dominican inquisitors, had finally cracked the heretics’ resistance and while their beliefs persisted for a few more decades, fundamentally they had been broken. While Innocent’s crusade had failed, its successor, the Inquisition, proved a far sharper and more subtle weapon in the fight against heresy.

In spite of Pope Innocent’s unsuccessful efforts to regain the Holy Land, one startling manifestation of popular support for crusading took place in 1212—the near-legendary Children’s Crusade.
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Over the centuries this strange event has metamorphosed into a tale of lost innocence, greed, debauchery, and sheer fantasy. As early as the mid-thirteenth century, writers started to gild the story. One claimed that the whole episode was initiated by two clerics who had been imprisoned by the leader of the Syrian Assassins, the Old Man of the Mountains. The men were freed on the promise that they would bring him back a group of young boys; therein lay the “explanation” for the crusade. For some commentators, the naïveté of the young was fit to be mocked; for others, it was an excuse to blame unscrupulous Italian merchants who allegedly sold their hapless passengers into slavery; a few were dispatched to Baghdad where they were said to have been martyred or set to hard labor.
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In reality, the Children’s Crusade was far less exciting than these exotic vignettes, although for us, its importance lies in its ability to illuminate the age of crusading under Innocent III.

In essence, the Children’s Crusade was an unauthorized, popular movement. It has become known as a crusade because of its aims—to recover Jerusalem and the True Cross; in fact, within a year of its demise a preacher calmly commented on the “innocent children who became crusaders the other year.”
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The idea that a group of children and young people could
reach, let alone recover, the Holy Land from the Muslims was, of course, utterly ridiculous. What it reflected, however, was a sense of frustration with the efforts of the powerful and the wealthy, that is, the failure of the Third Crusade and the diversion of the Fourth. In line with contemporary admiration for apostolic poverty and a belief in the virtue of the poor and the pure, the sense that divine providence would bring victory to this most worthy enterprise took these adventurers far from their homes and created an extraordinary legacy.

The “crusade” began in the late spring of 1212 near the town of Chartres, about sixty miles southwest of Paris. This was a region with a rich history of crusading—some relics from the Fourth Crusade had been given to the cathedral, although in the form of Simon de Montfort, at least one notable local figure had shown his disapproval for the events of 1203–4. At the feast of Pentecost (May 13), groups of peasants, shepherds, and servants gathered at the cathedral for the ceremonial display of an important relic, the tunic worn by the Virgin Mary as she gave birth to Christ. A week later prayers were said for the fight against the Muslims in Spain, and this combination of religious ceremony and preaching stirred a fervent, if unexpected, response. The “Chronicle of Mortemer” noted: “In the realm of France, boys and girls, with some more mature males and old men, carrying banners, wax candles, crosses, censers, made processions, and went through the cities, villages and castles, singing aloud in French, ‘Lord God, raise up Christendom! Lord God, return to us the True Cross!’ . . . this thing, unheard of in past ages, was a wonder to many.”
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The tender years of many of these devotees has aroused much comment and it seems likely that, at this stage at least, a large proportion of young children aged between seven and fourteen took part in these processions. The lack of clergymen involved is conspicuous, again an indication of the popular nature of this movement, while the desire to recover the True Cross shows the undimmed significance of this relic to the people of the West, even twenty years after its loss to Saladin.

To stimulate the enthusiasm of these people further would need a charismatic leader, and the sources name a young shepherd, Stephen of Cloyes, as the figure who emerged. Stephen had a vision from God in which Christ appeared to him as a pilgrim. The shepherd treated him kindly and so the pilgrim revealed his identity and gave him letters to deliver to the king of France at Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. Stephen and the pueri headed
toward Saint-Denis, gathering even more adherents en route, and by the time they reached the town the group numbered several thousand. Saint-Denis was a place rich in crusading history, as we saw at the time of the Second Crusade. Stephen handed over his letters to royal counselors and they duly held discussions with the king. Taken to its logical conclusion this was an attempt to pressure the king to lead a new crusade, but Philip was resolutely not interested. Given Stephen’s many followers there must have been some concern about public order and the king was advised to command the pilgrims to disperse. The “Chronicle of Laon” said: “And so this boyish revival was terminated as easily as it had begun. But it seemed to many that by means of such innocents gathered of their own accord, the Lord would do something great and new upon the earth, which turned out to be far from the case.”
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This seems a regrettably tame ending to such an effusion of religious fervor, but over the next few weeks some of the pueri, undeterred, stayed on the road and headed eastward toward Cologne and the Rhineland, set to follow the old route taken by Peter the Hermit on the First Crusade.

Their arrival prompted a new outbreak of enthusiasm among the poor and the young, and thousands are said to have taken the cross determined to make the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to recover the True Cross, and to seek a better life. Cologne Cathedral holds a magnificent reliquary that houses the relics of the Magi (the three kings) and was, therefore, an appropriate place to begin a pilgrimage. The crowds drawn to the adventure believed that they had been chosen by God, and at this stage they were warmly received by locals as they headed south through Germany in July and August. People gave them gifts and food and others joined the expedition. By now the crusade was headed by another charismatic young man, Nicholas of Cologne, who carried a T-shaped cross (known as a tau), a symbol of the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt; they, of course, had followed their leader and crossed the sea dry-footed—perhaps some of Nicholas’s followers believed the same would happen when they arrived at the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately for the pilgrims their march coincided with one of the hottest summers on record and the effort needed to cross the Alps sapped the strength and the conviction of many in Nicholas’s band; every day more of his troupe fell by the wayside or returned home in shame. By late August the few thousand survivors had reached the port of Genoa in northwestern
Italy. Unsurprisingly, the pragmatic sea captains refused to offer free passage to such a rabble and quickly extinguished the dreams of many of these hopeful, yet utterly naive, travelers. Some settled in Genoa, others went west to Marseilles where they were also rejected by the seafaring community. The remainder wandered home, no longer welcomed so kindly, but ridiculed for their stupidity. Nicholas probably went to Rome, and although he did not meet Innocent in person the pope undoubtedly heard about the young pilgrims’ activities. The Children’s Crusade was an unofficial popular movement, but it had demonstrated the desire of nonknightly classes to contribute to the crusades, and Pope Innocent was sharp enough to try to harness this in his next formal crusade appeal for the Holy Land.

Quia maior
, issued in April 1213, marked a significant change in the direction and form of papal appeals.
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As we shall see below, it urged everyone to become involved in the campaign, not just knights and nobles but also townsmen, the poor, and the infirm. It is no coincidence that Innocent took this step in the few months after the Children’s Crusade reached Italy and this, rather than the legends of later writers, represents its true legacy. Nicholas himself managed to hang around Rome and southern Italy and he left Brindisi with the armies of the Fifth Crusade in 1217. Thus he became a “legitimate” crusader after all, and took part in and survived an expedition to the East.

After the successes of the Second Crusade (1145–49) the pace of reconquest in Iberia slowed and the character of the crusading movement in the peninsula changed. In contrast to crusading in the Holy Land there was little involvement of external forces and most progress was a consequence of local and regional initiatives.
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The concept of the Military Order proved immensely popular in Iberia and the foundation of several organizations, such as the Order of Santiago (1170) and the Order of Calatrava (1158), institutionalized the struggle with Islam. While the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain began to grow in strength, the Muslims of Iberia experienced a period of upheaval with, by 1172, the removal of the ruling Almoravid dynasty at the hands of the austere Berber tribesmen of Morocco, a group
known as the Almohads.
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In 1195 Almohad armies exploited rivalries between the Christian kingdoms to crush them at the Battle of Alarcos, near Toledo.
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So soon after the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin this latest disaster raised fears that Islam was poised to sweep aside Christianity in the peninsula as well. Such had been the antipathy between the warring factions of León and Castile that prior to this battle the ruler of the former had preferred to ally with the Muslims rather than join with his coreligionists. The shock of Alarcos was sufficiently profound to prompt a degree of Christian cooperation and with the accession of Innocent III the papacy began to offer increasing encouragement to the Iberian crusade. As we saw earlier, the most spectacular manifestation of this was the 1212 penitential procession in Rome. When King Peter II of Aragon called for outside help, Innocent appealed to the French and, with a positive response, the Christians assembled their most formidable force for years. At the same time, the Almohads were struggling with rebellions in North Africa and, to exacerbate their situation, Calpih al-Nasir was a weak, paranoid figure who executed many of his most able lieutenants.
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