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Authors: Stephen O'Shea

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3.
The Turn of the Century
 

 

T
O BE ALWAYS WITH A WOMAN
and not to have intercourse with her is more difficult than to raise the dead.” So wrote a candid if frustrated Bernard of Clairvaux of the threat posed by the female to his pursuit of holiness. In this, the saint was roundly seconded by his fellow churchmen of the twelfth century. The days of powerful, pastoral abbesses, such as the Rhineland’s Hildegard of Bingen, or even of joint foundations like Robert of Arbrissel’s abbey for men and women at Fontevrault, were a distant memory in the era of Innocent III. Male monasteries that had sister convents began cutting ties of affiliation and withdrawing support. By the year 1200, the Church was turning its back on women. Henceforth they were to be nowhere near altar, school, conclave, or council. In the latter stages of the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary would be tapped as a body double for all banished women of influence, her stature of semidivinity, arguably, a bone thrown to the metaphysically dispossessed. For
many women, shut out of the sacristy and shut in the cloister, this was hardly enough.

As in so many other things, Catharism differed radically from the majority creed in its attitude toward women. In the three decades that lay between the meeting at St. Félix and Innocent’s procession in Rome, the dualist faith had spread unchecked throughout Languedoc, its message transmitted by a determined matriarchy of revolt. It was no longer like some heterodox hot potato, to be juggled artfully by a showman before an awestruck crowd. Instead, Catharism had migrated to the home, its beliefs deeply interwoven into the fabric of Languedoc family life. The women Perfect had been hard at work.

Female Cathars, unlike their male counterparts, rarely traveled to proselytize. Instead they established group homes for the daughters, widows, and dowagers of the local petty nobility and artisan classes. Girls would be raised and educated in these homes and then go out into the world to marry and rear children who would, inevitably, become believers in the faith of their mothers. The number of credentes grew accordingly with each generation, as did the number of females opting for the rigors of life as a Perfect. Many of the latter did so as middle age approached.

Once they had survived the rigors of serial childbirth and done their dynastic duty, nothing prevented the ladies of Languedoc from receiving the consolamentum and taking up an honored position in the community. The quasi divine status of a Perfect—the Church offered nothing as remotely prestigious to women—came coupled with the commitment of Cathar homes to stay open and welcoming to the world at large. There was no cloister, for there were labors, both manual and spiritual, to be undertaken. Instead of inspiring miracles, visions, pogroms, and
all the other trappings of popular Christian enthusiasms, Catharism became devastatingly domestic. When Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, one of the most determined enemies of the Cathars, reproached a Catholic knight for failing to punish heretics, the man replied, “We cannot. We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them and we see them living lives of perfection.” It was asking too much of anyone to hunt down his mother.

The maverick faith could not fail to appeal to beleaguered medieval womanhood. Not since the time of the gnostics had women had such a say in the affairs of the hereafter. Simple credentes could bask in the reflected glory of their stronger sisters and, more important, take solace in the knowledge that they were not some sort of afterthought of the divine mind. In any event, the Evil One had created the world, so the shibboleths of its organization—including its sexual pecking order—were there to be endured, not endorsed. Like the Kabbalists who were their neighbors in Languedoc, the Cathar women found comfort in the notion of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.

Not that the Cathars were entirely free of the prejudices of the time. Some believers questioned by the Inquisition in the fourteenth century spoke of male Perfect teaching that one’s last incarnation had to be as a man, if one were ever to leave this Earth for good. Clearly, this was a misogynist twist on earlier Cathar precepts. A few former female credentes, again under Inquisition questioning, told of being called sinks of corrupting temptation and blamed for encouraging procreation, an act which produced yet another prisoner of matter. Here, at least in its first proposition, was the familiar complaint of the medieval male ascetic, no matter what his faith. In this, some of the Cathar Perfect must have agreed with St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

Yet given the importance of women in spreading the faith, it is unlikely that such female-baiting formed a majority opinion in Catharism. The role of women was further enhanced by Languedoc’s system of partible inheritance, whereby families split legacies evenly. Unlike the north’s system, where everything went to the eldest son and the remainder of his siblings had to fend for themselves, the south’s splintering of estates gave many women a slim margin of independence that they would not have enjoyed elsewhere. Noblewomen, especially, founded, managed, and led Cathar homes. Raymond Roger, the count of Foix, a mountain capital at the foot of the Pyrenees, would applaud in 1204 as his sister, Esclarmonde, received the consolamentum from Guilhabert of Castres in a ceremony held in Fanjeaux, a town near Carcassonne. With her, in a ceremony attended by most of Languedoc’s nobility, were three ladies of equally exalted birth who would pledge their lives to spiritual perfection. When Raymond Roger’s wife, Philippa, decided that she too wanted to be a Perfect, the count offered no objections.

In the numerous small fortified settlements dotting the landscape between Toulouse, Albi, and Carcassonne, Catharism touched a third to a half of the population. A network of religious women, whether Cathar grandmothers or daughters-in-law, was supporting the work of the itinerant men. In the prescribed absence of church buildings or even chapels, credentes gathered in homes run by female Perfect to listen to the visiting male Cathars from the cities. The most influential Perfect hostesses—Blanche of Laurac, Esclarmonde of Foix—had previously resided in the local castle. There, in the evening, the troubadours and jongleurs would come to entertain the same people who had been uplifted by the Cathars in the afternoon. The Perfect and the troubadours coexisted in the hearths of the
Languedoc nobility. From the dualists’ love your neighbor to the jongleurs’ love your neighbor’s wife all in the course of a day, the Occitan culture of piety and fine feeling was slipping the traces of traditional Christianity.
Amor
was indeed the opposite of
Roma
. The consensual scholarly guess puts the number of Perfect at 1,000–1,500 in the Languedoc of the year 1200. Among the most effective of these were what one Occitan troubadour called, admiringly,
bela eretga
—the fair heretics.

 

None of Languedoc’s spiritual eccentricity would have been possible without the tacit assent—or fecklessness—of its overlords. By the year 1200, the cause of religious sedition was well served by the region’s fractured feudalism. The consolidation of power between king and clergy that would soon hoist the Ile de France and its dependencies into the first rank of medieval nations was singularly lacking in the south. Instead, Languedoc’s nobles and churchmen fought like fishwives, often over the revenues that the merchants of the towns were appropriating for themselves. In such an anticlerical environment, an alternate faith like Catharism could prosper.

At the top of the shaky ladder of precedence was Raymond VI, count of Toulouse. His mother, Constance, who had attended the public hearing of the Cathars at Lombers in 1165, was the sister of the king of France. Raymond’s father, Raymond V, appears to have been the last in his line to evince open support of the Church. In 1177, the elder man invited a bevy of prelates to sniff out Catharism in his capital of Toulouse, only to have the churchmen quickly discouraged by the immensity of the task. The one man convicted, a rich merchant, was forced to go on a pilgrimage to Palestine; on his return three years later, he was acclaimed a hero and given a position of high civic responsibility. In the household of the count, the younger Raymond no doubt failed to notice this outrage to the faith. Just turned twenty, he had already embarked on a precocious career of stealing his father’s mistresses. His mother, citing marital mistreatment, had by that time fled Languedoc for the court of her brother in Paris, and her marriage to Raymond’s father was annulled.

 

Seal of Raymond VI of Toulouse

 

(Archives Nationals, Paris)

 

By the year 1200, Raymond VI was in his early forties, having inherited his title six years earlier. He had just buried his fourth and penultimate wife, Joan of England, the sister of Richard Lionheart and John Lackland. To the horror of the orthodox, Raymond’s court was a cosmopolitan mix of Cathar, Catholic, and Jew, and his friends were not distinguished for their piety. One, a troubadour named Peire Vidal, once disguised himself as a wolf to woo the loveliest woman in Languedoc, Etiennette de Pennautier, whose licentious nickname was Loba, or she-wolf.
Although unsuccessful in winning the favors of Loba (unlike Raymond Roger, the count of Foix), Vidal won fame for his exploits and composed songs for the edification of his noble patron. It is not recorded whether Count Raymond courted Loba.

Presumably, Raymond had other compensations; certainly, he had other worries. In theory, his family held sway from the hills of Provence to the lowlands of the River Garonne; in practice, the situation was a dog’s breakfast of conflicting allegiances, power-sharing arrangements, and hotly contested sources of money. After the ninth-century breakup of Charlemagne’s empire, which had stretched from Saxony to Catalonia, the lands of Languedoc were parceled out among a myriad of warring factions. The noble families of the region, approximately 150 in all at the turn of the millennium, fought obscure territorial skirmishes for generations, ensuring that the countryside bristled with castles and defensive fortifications. Through shrewd marriages and successful sieges, Raymond’s family, the Saint Gilles, had by the turn of the twelfth century established its preeminence, if not its dominion, in Languedoc.

Yet they were never to develop into a putative royal family of the south. Any chance the Saint Gilles clan had of increasing its power at home was squandered by its fondness for foreign adventure. Raymond’s great-grandfather, Count Raymond IV, answered the call for the First Crusade and in 1099 led the Christian armies into Jerusalem. He then decided to stay in the East, carving out a kingdom for himself in what is now Lebanon,
*
and consigning a bastard son to look after the family possessions at home. Years of fitful struggle ensued in Languedoc, during which the Saint Gilles lands became fair game for neighboring clans, including those from Aquitaine, to the west, and Aragon, to the south. By the time a legitimate Saint Gilles had grown to manhood and moved from Palestine—Alfons-Jordan, so named for his baptism in the River Jordan—the family had let slip the opportunity to increase its power and lay the groundwork for a future kingdom. Elsewhere in the early twelfth century, such prominent families as the Capets of France had begun the long process of reining in their fractious barons, and the Plantagenets of England and Hohenstaufens of Germany hovered in the wings of power. Closer to Languedoc, the ruling families of Barcelona and Aragon had merged to form a coherent, powerful kingdom just south of the Pyrenees.

BOOK: The Perfect Heresy
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