The Perfect Heresy (13 page)

Everyone in the town, from graybeard Cathar Perfect to newborn Catholic baby, was put to death in the space of a morning. In the days before gunpowder, to kill that many people in so short a time required a savage single-mindedness that beggars the imagination. To the crusaders bitter about the lost booty of
affluent Béziers, there was consolation to be had in knowing that they had done God’s work so efficiently. Personal salvation had been ensured by this stunning victory. In his letter to Innocent, Arnold marveled at their success. “Nearly twenty thousand of the citizens were put to the sword, regardless of age and sex,” he wrote. “The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.”

A threshold had been crossed in the ordering of men’s minds.

T
O APPROACH CARCASSONNE
for the first time is to dream with your eyes open. The turrets and bastions of the old city stand on a deceptive rise in the valley of the River Aude, so that the crenellated citadel appears suddenly, floating in the middle distance, a visitor from another time. The tan stone blocks of the ramparts turn auburn, then mauve in the late afternoon sun. In sight of the Trencavels’ restored battlements, long-vanished combatants ride into the periphery of awareness, their clamorous quarrel a faint murmur carried on the wind. For Carcassonne, in the summer of 1209, came after Beziers.

Like any atrocity worthy of the name, the deed done at Béziers spread fear far and near. Following the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, the crusading army spent three days encamped upwind from the scene of its triumph. One local notable after another rode up to to offer his homage to the new arbiters of legitimacy. Most of these minor lords came from the lowlands between Béziers and Carcassonne, through which the northern host would have to march if it were to attack the Trencavel capital. Fright dictated these surrenders, which would later prove as shifting as the grass upon which the crusaders trod.

Carcassonne

(Jean Pierre Pétermann)

At Carcassonne, the scarcely believable news from Béziers disabused Raymond Roger of any hope that this was to be a conflict like any other. In an era where populations numbered in the tens of thousands, rather than in the millions of today, the deliberate annihilation of 20,000 lives administered a direct, animal shock to Languedoc, like the amputation of a limb. The viscount took drastic action to make his country inhospitable to the crusade. For miles around Carcassonne, he ordered every windmill destroyed, every crop burned, every animal slaughtered
or brought into the embrace of the thick city walls first traced by the Romans, then reinforced by the Visigoths.

In Raymond Roger’s castle, built by his great-grandfather and still standing as a stolid mass of hewn stone dominating the medieval city, the viscount welcomed the loyal lords who had heeded his call for help. These men, unlike the lowland nobles exposed to imminent attack, came from the rugged highlands on either side of the Aude valley: to the north, the Montagne Noire and the Minervois, rugged heights cut by waterfalls and shrouded in dense forests; to the south, the Corbières, bald mountains slashed by sudden gullies and guarded by massive castles. It was these hinterland vassals who would be Catharism’s stoutest defenders in the early years of the Albigensian Crusade.

The northerners arrived on August 1. Leery of the bolts and quarrels from Carcassonne’s crossbows, the crusading nobles ordered their tents and pavilions pitched well out of range. An impulsive Raymond Roger, according to a chronicler, urged an immediate surprise attack. “To horse, my lords!” the viscount shouted. “We’ll ride out there, four hundred of us with the best and fastest horses, and before the sun has set, we shall defeat them.”

Cooler heads prevailed over this absurd bravado—the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered. The most convincing counsel for caution was voiced by Peter Roger of Cabaret, lord of a gold-mining fief on the Montagne Noire. Béziers had shown that an ill-prepared sortie could finish as a fiasco (the Biterrois had been “stupider than whales,” sniffed one chronicler), and the crusaders before Carcassonne were not a tired or disgruntled besieging army, easily surprised and defeated. In any event, the
crusader camp was too far away to storm by surprise. The seigneur of Cabaret rightly surmised that the northerners would first assail the two fortified suburbs of Carcassonne that stood outside the city walls. He argued for barreling out of the Trencavel capital once the suburbs came under attack; the crusaders would be closer, and harder-pressed, and the surprise just as total.

The next day, August 2, 1209, was a Sunday, and both sides waited in pious impatience. At dawn on Monday, the northeners struck; they chose Bourg, the weaker of the two suburbs. Battering rams, chanting monks, clambering soldiers on their ladders, charging knights on warhorses—the medieval phantasmagoria came to life in all its brutality. Within two hours the bloodied defenders of Bourg scattered in panic as the flimsy walls of their settlement let in the mob. From atop the rock-solid battlements of Carcassonne, archers and bowmen loosed flight after flight into the crusaders, but the wave of warriors could not be stopped. Neither Raymond Roger nor Peter Roger sallied out to Bourg to counterattack. Curiously, none of the three chroniclers who are our sources for this engagement gives a reason for the abandonment of their plan.

There was no slaughter on this day. Instead, the men of the crusade crashed past the burning houses and down the slopes leading to the River Aude—and its precious wells. The inhabitants of Bourg had time to stumble beyond the barbicans of Carcassonne and to safety behind its fortifications. They would place still more strain on the overcrowded city’s resources. The crusaders had captured the northern approach to the Trencavel capital and, more important, commandeered its water supplies. The action at Bourg had been a hard-fought tactical victory, in which
one minor noble from the north had distinguished himself for his bravery. Simon de Montfort, until then a respectable if shabby presence in the silken company of his betters, would rise to prominence in the siege of Carcassonne. The crusaders made their plans for the attack on the second suburb, Castellar, to the south of the city.

The unfolding of Simon’s destiny was delayed the next day by the unexpected arrival of 100 armored horsemen. The crusaders, who were at table “eating roast meat,” William of Tudela helpfully noted, rose to greet the newcomers warmly. Gold-and-red pennants fluttered on the tips of their lances, identifying the splendidly caparisoned warriors as nobles from Aragon and Catalonia. Their leader, King Pedro, a vigorous man in his midthirties, first sought out the tent of his brother-in-law, Count Raymond of Toulouse. (Raymond’s fifth wife, Eleanor, was Pedro’s sister.) It is reasonable to assume that Raymond was a noncombatant at both Béziers and Carcassonne, given the absence of any mention of him taking part in the actions. In all likelihood, the count had simply stood by and watched as his northern peers behaved as badly as any band of marauding mercenaries. At his tent, pitched on a leafy hill at a distance from the main encampment, he and the few other nobles of Languedoc with the crusade would have told King Pedro what they had witnessed at Béziers.

Pedro then met with the leaders of the crusade. Arnold Amaury, who had begun his rise to power as an abbot in Catalonia, knew that the young king was held in high esteem in Rome. On coming to the throne, the monarch had made over his kingdom to the Holy See. In so doing, he became a direct vassal of Innocent III, who, in his drive to fill Church coffers and enforce respect for the papacy, welcomed the spiritual and material obeisance of a great prince. The king’s orthodox credentials were impeccable. Even if he did not enforce the antiheresy laws he had drawn up for his kingdom, his belligerence toward the Muslim majority in the Iberian Peninsula had made his a blessed name at the Lateran. Pedro the Catholic could not be ignored.

Seal of King Pedro II of Aragon

He had a legitimate grievance. Viscount Raymond Roger of Carcassonne was his vassal and thus part of his extended feudal family. It was true that Pedro’s own suzerain, Innocent, had organized this assault on Trencavel, but that did not necessarily mean that the Aragonese was any less distressed by this trampling on his jurisdiction. A great lord, feudal custom held, always had a say in the fate of his vassals. Pedro announced that he had come to see Raymond Roger Trencavel, his embattled young protégé.

The wounded dignity of the Spaniard underscored the misgivings of the northern nobles beholden to King Philip Augustus of France. They might very well have wondered who had the authority to threaten a seigneur like Raymond Roger and deprive him of his birthright. Ever since the pontificate of Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century, successive popes had argued that the Church could depose any unsatisfactory baron, but the men with the swords had disagreed. Innocent, the ablest man to wear the tiara in two centuries, had launched this crusade partly to put some backbone in the papacy’s theocratic posture. That the punitive expedition took so long to organize showed the reluctance of lay rulers, especially Philip Augustus, to cede any ground on the treacherous terrain of sovereignty. At heart, the greatest nobles of the crusade sympathized with the Trencavels and the Saint Gilles, although they may have been puzzled by both clans’ tolerance of heresy. Pedro served notice that even the most orthodox of monarchs were ready to show their displeasure with the ambitions of Rome.

Pedro gave up his destrier, or warhorse, for the finer-looking palfrey that his grooms had brought for him. Accompanied only by three men and riding, as William of Tudela reported, “without shields or weapons,” he spurred the mount up the slopes to the walled city. The drawbridge came creaking down and the portcullis was raised amid much cheering. When Pedro had stayed there five years earlier, to preside over the debate between Cathar and Catholic, Carcassonne had been a peaceful, prosperous place. As he entered the city now, the stench must have hit him; it is estimated that more than 40,000 people had taken refuge behind its walls.

When Raymond Roger tried to greet his liege lord as his savior, he was soon put back in his place. A chronicler related
Pedro’s speech to his vassal, in an admirable passage summing up the younger man’s plight. Raymond Roger had just complained of the horrors wrought by the crusaders when Pedro replied:

In Jesus’s name, baron, you cannot blame me for that, since I told you, I ordered you to drive out the heretics, as there are so many people in this town who support this insane belief… . Viscount, I am very unhappy for you, because it’s nothing but a few fools and their folly that have brought you into such danger and distress. All I can suggest is an agreement, if we can get it, with the French lords, for I am sure, and God himself knows, that no further battle with lance and shield offers you any hope at all, their numbers are so huge. I doubt very much whether you could hold out to the end. You are counting on the strength of your town, but you have got it crammed with people, with women and children; otherwise, yes, I think you could see some hope in that. I am very sorry indeed for you, deeply distressed; for the love I bear you and for our old friendship’s sake, there is nothing I will not do to help you, barring great dishonor.