The Perfect Heresy (10 page)

The debates failed to spur massive defection from the Cathar cause. Dominic converted anywhere from a dozen to 150 people in these years, the number varying according to the religious enthusiasms of the historian consulted. His most important spiritual conquests were several impoverished young noblewomen living in a home of a female Perfect. Again, this achievement comes complete with a fiery miracle narrative. As the Spaniard stood on the hilltop of Fanjeaux looking out over the golden farmland stretching to nearby Montréal, three flaming spheres
came streaking downward out of the sky. They touched down at tiny Prouille, a lowland hamlet in which, Dominic realized, he had to set up a convent for his girlish Cathar converts. At the prompting of these great balls of fire, the saint had once again put his mimetic finger on another strength of Catharism: its network of havens for surplus women in Languedoc society. On his deathbed in Bologna, according to French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, Dominic confessed, “I reproach myself for having always liked the conversation of old ladies less than that of young women.”

Dominic’s stamina, perhaps even his secret vice, was not shared by his companions. By early 1207, the meager harvest of souls, along with the ardors of life on the road, forced the papal legates to return to their former lives. Arnold traveled to Burgundy to preside over a general meeting of the Cistercian order; Peter, whose overweening nature had bloomed into obnoxiousness, went off to resume hectoring the nobility into arresting all of the people whom he had been recently debating. Brother Raoul of Fontfroide, discreetly encouraged by Dominic and Diego, thought it wiser to keep Peter away from the public discussions so as not to goad already hostile audiences. His debating place was taken by another strong-willed, if less antipathetic Cistercian, Bishop Fulk of Toulouse.

Within a few years, Dominic’s perseverance in the ways of poverty had won him a reputation rivaling that of the Perfect. The Spaniard’s ceaseless wanderings through the hinterlands of Foix, Toulouse, and Albi brought him deep within dualist country. At one point, according to legend, a group of heretical peasants intercepted him in the middle of a field and asked him what he would do if they attacked him. Dominic’s famous reply: “I should beg you not to kill me at one blow, but to tear me limb
from limb, that thus my martyrdom might be prolonged; I would like to be a mere limbless trunk, with eyes gouged out, wallowing in my own blood, that I might thereby win a worthier martyr’s crown.” He was left alone.

It was Peter of Castelnau who brought these years of talking to a close, although not in the manner he intended. In the spring of 1207, he visited the minor nobility of western Provence and ordered them to persecute heretics instead of using mercenaries in private wars that often harmed Church interests. At the time, the Provençals were in revolt against their titular overlord, Raymond of Toulouse. Although they swore to obey Peter on the subject of mercenaries, Count Raymond flatly refused. He could not conduct his business without hired troops, and he was neither inclined nor able to hunt down his people for their religious beliefs. Peter excommunicated him instantly, dissolving all feudal obligations owed to him by his vassals. He did this in front of a large gathering, thundering out the final flourish of his anathema: “He who dispossesses you will be accounted virtuous, he who strikes you dead will earn a blessing.” It was, historical consensus holds, an extraordinarily provocative act by Peter, which signaled an impatience with the campaign of preaching and debating.

Backed into a corner, Raymond did what he had always done since becoming count in 1194: He made promises he had no intention of keeping. He agreed to be the scourge of heretics and to drive the mercenaries from his lands. In August of 1207, Raymond was pardoned.

Summer turned to fall, and nothing happened. Dominic
preached at Prouille, Fulk debated at Pamiers, Raymond dallied at St. Gilles, Arnold conferred with Peter, and Innocent wrote again to the king of France. Finally, the churchmen sought to break the impasse.

Raymond was singled out for punishment again. As the most powerful lord of a Languedoc rife with heresy, he was held responsible for the hideous blemish disfiguring the face of Christendom. A list of offenses was drawn up once more: He had stolen Church property, offended bishops, outraged abbots, used mercenaries, given public office to Jews, and supported the Cathars. A new excommunication ensued. All of Europe was invited to disregard him, to take whatever was his with the blessing of the pope.

Raymond tried to negotiate again. He invited Peter of Castelnau for talks that winter in his castle at St. Gilles. According to the correspondence of Innocent III, our principal source for the incidents to follow, the negotiations led nowhere, and Raymond ended up physically threatening the legate in front of witnesses. No doubt the diplomatic count could no longer bear the meddlesome monk, in much the same way that King Henry II of England had lost his patience with Becket.

On January 13, 1208, the talks broke off amid much acrimony. Peter left St. Gilles with his retinue, bound for Rome. Early the next morning, opposite Aries, Peter and his escort rode out to the ferry crossing of the Rhône. As they waited by the riverside, the irreparable occurred. An unknown horseman bore down on them and drove home a sword through Peter’s back.

The legate of Pope Innocent III lay dead on the ground. The conversation was over.

A
BUNDLE OF BIRCH CUTTINGS
came whistling through the hush and landed with a crack on pale white flesh. The sharp twigs came down again and again. The crowds surging up the steps of the church at St. Gilles watched in fascination as their lord was scourged like the meanest of villeins. It was always a pleasure in the caste-conscious Middle Ages to watch the high and mighty humbled in public. Stripped to the waist and chafed by a rough cord around his neck, Count Raymond swore over sacred relics his undying obedience to the pope and his legates. The twenty or so bishops in attendance, like the northern chronicler who recorded the episode, must have been pleased to see Raymond so thoroughly humiliated.

Count Raymond, now in his early fifties, had given his consent to this public scourging in his ancestral fief. This day—June 18, 1209—may have been an agony of mortification, but it was also the culmination of eighteen months of frantic diplomacy.
Ever since Peter of Castelnau was felled by an assassin, Raymond had maintained that he was innocent of the crime. For him to have ordered one of his men to kill the legate, he claimed, would have been a blunder of monumental proportions, even if he had had angry words with Peter in that fateful January of the year previous. All his life Raymond had avoided confrontation, preferring to defer promises and drown disagreement in a murky pool of diplomacy. Had he wished to murder Peter, he insisted, he certainly wouldn’t have had it done a stone’s throw from his own home. Besides, the poisonous monk had made many enemies in Languedoc.

Still, Raymond was the prime suspect in what would remain an unsolved murder mystery. It would have upset the designs of too many people not to have the crime pinned on the count. Furthermore, his pretensions to diplomatic genius were undermined when he sent Raymond of Rabastens as one of his advocates to Rome. Rabastens, the spendthrift who had reduced the diocese of Toulouse to indigence, would have been a noxious presence to Innocent III—the pope had expended five years of effort to oust Rabastens in favor of Fulk.

Not that Rabastens stood much of a chance anyway. From the moment the news of Peter’s murder reached Rome, the curia was crying for Count Raymond’s hide. On March 10, 1208, Innocent called for a crusade, which was to be preached by the wrathful Arnold Amaury and the eloquent Fulk. The two white-robed furies ranged across Europe, asking for armed support in crushing the Cathars. The kings and emperors of the north equivocated. They were too busy fighting among themselves to accede to this proposed breach of feudal custom. They had no quarrel with their vassals in Languedoc; why should they take up arms against them? But Innocent, Arnold, and Fulk insisted
throughout 1208, bombarding the lords with letters and exhortations. Finally, King Philip Augustus of France relented and released his most powerful barons to go and make war on their southern kinsmen. Nobles whose names are unfamiliar now—Eudes, duke of Burgundy; Hervé, count of Nevers; Peter of Courtenay, count of Auxerre—then commanded respect and awe because of their vast estates and the mass of mounted knights they could field. These nobles, accompanied by tens of thousands of footsoldiers, were heading south as Raymond underwent his degrading penance.

Raymond’s scourge was Milo, a curial notary who had been named the new papal legate. So great was the crush of onlookers that the two principals, penitent and punisher, had difficulty leaving the square to regain the sanctuary of the church. They elbowed their way past the crowd and squeezed through a portal in the facade. The pairing of the two men owed nothing to chance. It was Raymond who had been instrumental in Milo’s promotion—in his rush to come to terms, he wrote to Innocent that he was willing to negotiate with anyone except Arnold Amaury. Even so, the conditions that Raymond accepted at Milo’s prompting were unusually harsh: He had to give up all rights over any religious foundation in his domains, hand over seven of his castles, never again use mercenaries, let the legates pass judgment on any complaint filed against him, apologize to all the bishops and abbots he had offended, dismiss all Jews from his service, and treat as heretics all those who were designated as such by the Church.

And he had to submit to this day of disparagement, half-naked before his people, beaten by the clergy, for a crime he continued to deny having ordered and for which he had not been tried, much less convicted. He was indeed being treated as if he
were a latter-day Henry Plantagenet atoning for the murder of Thomas Becket, a comparison that escaped no one, least of all Pope Innocent, who remembered his boyhood in the Campagna.

When the service in the church of St. Gilles came to an end, Raymond was at last free to go. Only he could not; the dense throng of curiosity seekers in the nave would have made any attempted departure out the front door a gauntlet of further shame. The count was hustled down a stone stairway leading from the altar to the crypt, out of which there was a subterranean exit. The priests forced Raymond to make one last stop—at the grave of Peter of Castelnau. This was their final reproach to the nobleman whom they had at last bludgeoned into obedience. Raymond stood, in the words of the chronicler, “naked in front of the tomb of the blessed martyr … whom he had assassinated. This was God’s just judgment. He was forced to pay respect to the body of him he had scorned during life.”

Fourteen days later, the count of Toulouse traveled north with his knights to join up with the crusading army as it descended the left bank of the Rhône. He was a Saint Gilles, of the family that stormed Jerusalem in 1099. Raymond had announced after his scourging that he wanted to take up the cross, hound the heretics, punish all those who sheltered the Perfect. He did not say that all he really wanted was to make sure that the crusaders stayed off his lands; they could not very well harm the possessions of one of their own. Events would show that the count of Toulouse had not changed in the slightest and that his aversion to persecution remained strong. Raymond the penitent was, in fact, unrepentant.