The Perfect Heresy (11 page)

Trebuchet, mangonel, chatte, chain mail, destrier, gonfalon, halberd, crossbow, pike, ballista—the old words and weapons of warfare transmit a blunt message of ancestral trauma that neither rarity nor foreign origin can soften. The army that Raymond rode out to meet, at the river town of Valence, bore these awful weapons in its baggage, ready to shout down the debates of Dominic and the Cathars with the unanswerable argument of force. The monstrously large host, which had assembled in Lyons, stretched out for four miles on the march, its supplies bobbing alongside it on a flotilla of barges. There would be few sights more terrifying in all of the thirteenth century.

Like all great feudal armies, the crusading force of 1209 counted among its multitude hundreds of mounted knights, the armor-clad killers at the apex of the belligerent pyramid. Nobles instructed since boyhood in the hack and chop of hard-ridden collision, the knights were the commanders and, paradoxically, the main participants of any pitched battle. Each, according to his means, came with a retinue of grooms, handlers, infantrymen, and archers, whose loyalty to their lord outweighed any other consideration.

Less honor bound were the bands of
routiers
(mercenaries) that accompanied the army. Some of these routiers were mounted brigands, others foot soldiers in the cause of pillage. All were the shock troops of the feudal fighting machine, seconded by the unruly
ribauds
(whence the English word
ribald
), the unwashed mass of ragtag adventure seekers with nothing to lose and nothing to hold sacred. It is commonly thought that medieval society was an unmoving, if unpleasant, pastorale; in fact, the landless, the restless, and the desperate roved the countryside in large numbers. In a tradition rich in irony, the ribauds
elected a “king” from their midst at the start of each campaign. This king would negotiate on such matters as who would rob the corpses of the enemy and who would pay the whores. In hiring routiers and accepting ribauds, the crusade displayed a double standard. The use of mercenaries, who tended to wreak freelance havoc with monasteries, had been one of the main complaints brought against the nobility of Languedoc by the Church.

The host of 1209 far surpassed the average medieval army in fervor. There were pilgrims by the thousand, a cross sewn on the shoulder of their rough tunics. Crusaders had been promised a full remission of their sins, a moratorium on their debts, and a transfer of Church funds into their pockets. The expedition had all the advantages of an expedition to Palestine with none of the drawbacks of distance. For the French northerners, the proximity of Languedoc was ideal for doing one’s “quarantine”—the forty days of military service necessary to earn a crusader’s indulgence—then returning home in time for harvest and hunt, happy in the knowledge that heaven’s gate had swung open for one’s soul. The warriors did not consider the intended victims of their crusade to be fellow Christians. Heretics were not Christians; they were heretics.

Many of the nobles picking their way down the Rhône had ridden together seven years earlier on the strange Fourth Crusade. Encouraged by Innocent III, a cavalcade of French chivalry had set off to undo the damage wrought by Saladin’s reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187. They planned on succeeding where the Third Crusade of Barbarossa and Richard Lionheart had failed. Instead, they ended up being mercenaries for the mariners of Venice, who had demanded such an extortionate fare for passage to Palestine that the knights could afford only to give payment in kind. This they did by spending the winter of 1202–3 besieging and
sacking the Christian city of Zara, an Adriatic port that belonged to the Venetians’ commercial rival in the area. After Zara, the crusaders were taken by their shippers to Constantinople, which, by no coincidence, was Venice’s other principal maritime competitor. The crusaders saw a chance to salvage some respectablility from their sorry meanderings by deposing the Greek Orthodox emperor and installing a Latin puppet in his place. First, however, they had to take the city, which they did in 1204 with vandalous panache, destroying more works of art and cultural treasures during their action than at any other time in the entire millennium of the Middle Ages. The orgy of rapine and robbery lasted three days and nights.

Such bloody sideshows had come to characterize crusades. Whenever a mass of people intent on violence and assured of salvation got together, neutral bystanders knew to get out of the way. European Jewry, in particular, was subject to slaughter at the hands of the exalted en route to fight the infidel. A feudal host was already sinister; one that had God on its side was downright diabolical. The crusade to Languedoc promised to be no different.

On July 2, 1209, Raymond came into the encampment of Arnold Amaury, asking to join the holy cause. Arnold acceded to the count’s request, even if he, like the chronicler who recorded the event, suspected that the count was insincere in his militant piety and wished only to spare his lands from invasion. Arnold had received instructions from Innocent, who had appointed him to lead the crusade. The pope’s letter took the long view:

You ask us urgently what policy the crusaders should adopt with respect to the count of Toulouse. Follow the advice of the apostle
who said: “I was clever, I caught you by tricking you.” … Be wise and conceal your intentions; leave him alone at first in order to attack those who are openly rebellious. It will not be easy to crush the adherents of Antichrist if we let them unite for a common defense. On the other hand, nothing will be easier than to crush them, if the count does not aid them. Perhaps the sight of their disaster will really reform him. But if he persists in his evil plans, when he is isolated and supported only by his own forces, we can defeat him without too much trouble.

The crusade of 1209 did not turn its fury on the count of Toulouse. He was not the only lord in Languedoc.

I
N
J
ULY OF
1209, R
AYMOND
R
OGER
T
RENCAVEL
was twenty-four years old, the viscount of Albi, Carcassonne, Béziers, and all the lands that surrounded them. His family was ancient, powerful, one of the two great clans to control the lowland valleys of Languedoc. The news from Provence alarmed him: His mother’s brother, Count Raymond of Toulouse, was guiding a mass of armed men through the delta of the Rhône, telling the foreigners where to bivouac, where to find clean water, where to ford the myriad tributaries of the great river. The army would soon march into Trencavel territory.

When Viscount Raymond Roger had first heard of the ominous preparations in the north, it was generally assumed that the crusade’s target would be Toulouse. In early 1209, he had rebuffed Count Raymond’s proposal of a defensive alliance, presumably on the strength of that assumption. He, like many others, would have believed that it was Count Raymond who,
notwithstanding his protests of innocence, had ordered the murder of Peter of Castelnau. In Raymond Roger’s view, the boldness of that crime was now surpassed by the sheer gall shown by Raymond in joining forces with the crusade that he, in effect, had conjured into existence. The consequences of the count’s latest trick were obvious to Raymond Roger: His lands, not Raymond’s, had become the quarry.

The young Trencavel realized the extent of his peril when his spies told him just how large the crusading host appeared to be. In mid-July, the viscount saddled up and galloped east to the Mediterranean, then northward along the coast road, the Via Domitia, laid out a millennium earlier for Roman legionaries. His destination was Montpellier, a city devoid of tolerance for Catharism and the last stopping-point of the crusaders before they entered his lands. Four years previously, Raymond Roger had wed Agnes of Montpellier, a strategic marriage that ensured a tranquil border to his north and pleased the suzerain overlord of both Carcassonne and Montpellier, King Pedro II of Aragon. None of that web of feudal connections mattered now; the invading northerners were welcomed in Montpellier, which the pope had explicitly instructed them to spare.

Raymond Roger met with Arnold Amaury and the French barons. He announced that the Trencavels were willing to submit to the wishes of the Church. Like the count of Toulouse, he too would hound the heretics from his lands. If some of his vassals had been infected with the Cathar leprosy, they would be punished. Raymond Roger presented himself as a stout Christian who demanded nothing more than to join the holy crusade.

This was a change of heart that was even more preposterous than the one announced a few weeks earlier by Count Raymond of Toulouse. Arnold Amaury, as a churchman who had spent so much of the last decade in Languedoc, would have known that the young Trencavel was a friend to the Cathars. Upon the death of his father in 1194, Raymond Roger had had as his guardian Bertrand of Saissac, the heretic who violated churches and dug up dead abbots. During the viscount’s boyhood, the regent for Trencavel had been the count of Foix, the mountain man with a sister and a wife who had become Cathar Perfect. Arnold Amaury would have seen that as the boy grew older, the indignities to the Church only worsened. The Catholic bishop of Carcassonne had been chased out of the city for daring to preach against heresy. His replacement was popular with the Trencavels, because he was ineffectual and compromised by the astounding fact that his mother, his sister, and three of his brothers had received the consolamentum. Another crime in Arnold’s eyes would have been the viscount’s willingness to let a Jew be his bayle, or representative, in Béziers. To the monk leading the crusade, the young viscount had violated so many of God’s laws that his feigned eleventh-hour orthodoxy could be viewed as yet another insult to the Church.

Seal of Raymond Roger Trencavel

(Hôtel de ville, Béziers)

Arnold dismissed Raymond Roger. It had taken almost ten years for the holy father to bestir the ferocious warriors of France from their torpor. He would not disband the crusade on the eve of its first great action.

Returning to Béziers, Raymond Roger called for an assembly of the townspeople to tell them the bad news. There was to be no truce, no reprieve. The northerners were less than a day’s march away, and they would not listen to reason. The people of Béziers—the Biterrois—were fearful but not terrified. Their town stood overlooking the River Orb, its tall fortifications built on an ocher hillside. Although the three pro-crusade chroniclers who are our sources for this episode variously describe the Biterrois as “fools” and “madmen,” one of them, William of Tudela, conceded that the townspeople thought they could easily withstand a siege. They had provisions stocked, and the peasants from the countryside crowding the town had brought with them enough food to sustain the Biterrois for weeks. The very size of the besieging host, they believed, could prove its greatest weakness. “They were sure the host could not hold together,” William of Tudela stated. “It would disintegrate in less than a fortnight, for it stretched out a full league long.” With so many mouths to feed under the pitiless glare of the summer sun, the Biterrois hoped, the attackers would be forced to move on, just to survive. And once their quarantine was up—their forty days of service—most of the soldiery would no doubt head home, their swords rusty from disuse. By this reckoning, Beziers would not collapse; the crusade would.

The bishop of Béziers, who was part of the crusading force,
arrived from Montpellier with a final offer. He had a list of 222 names—the Cathar Perfect of the town. He demanded that they be handed over for immediate punishment or else the crusaders would arrive the next day to lay siege to the city. The impassive burghers of Béziers, as one chronicler put it, “thought no more of his advice than of a peeled apple.” Like the city fathers of Toulouse, they had fought hard for their independence from noble and bishop; it was out of the question that they should surrender any of their own townspeople to strangers from the north. In 1167, in the city’s Church of St. Mary Magdalene, the burghers of Béziers had murdered Raymond Roger Trencavel’s grandfather for interfering with their liberties. His son, the current viscount’s father, had retaliated two years later, on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, by perpetrating a massacre. The memory of that slaughter had entered civic culture as a reminder of how dear was the cost of winning their freedoms. The merchants and traders of Béziers would not abandon them now. The Perfect would not be betrayed, by either Catholic or Cathar. A chronicler had the townspeople replying to the bishop, “We would rather drown in a salty sea than change anything in our government.” The bishop got on his mule and rode back to the crusader camp; many of his clergy remained behind, out of solidarity with their parishioners.