‘Stephen O’Shea certainly knows how to tall a story, and he has chosen a rousing tale to tell. Cruelty, loyalty, heroism, fanaticism and cynicism on an epic scale are its lifeblood … It is a story populated by knights and troubadours, saints and heretics, princes and the great anonymous crowds who suffered … Stephen O’Shea brings this lost world of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries alive with stunning vividness.’
— Bernard Green, The Tablet
‘After nearly eight centuries, the memory — one might almost say the spirit — of the Cathars lives on in the land in which they lived, suffered and died. To anyone visiting the region for the first time, this book will be the ideal introduction to their story.’
— John Julius Norwich
‘The Perfect Heresy is the fascinating story of an unorthodox movement in the south of France from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. After its flowering, its ideas were destroyed in Languedoc by a crusade led by the king of France and the barons from the north of the country; the last remnants of Catharism came together in the village of Montaillou, in the Pyrenees, at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Stephen O’Shea’s book is the work of a connoisseur of Languedoc, is written for a wide readership, and draws on his personal experience of France’s southern region.’
— Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, author of Montaillou
‘Apart from a racy, vivid account of the Crusade and the events that followed, he offers an intelligent analysis of the heresy and the conflicting theories surrounding it … All the way O’Shea shows deep knowledge and love of the region. He writes with enthusiasm and immediacy of a contemporary chronicler … The book is unputdownable.’
— Suzanne Lowry, Spectator
‘A very well-informed and highly readable account of one of the great religous and social crises of the Middle Ages. The Cathars have found in Stephen O’Shea a persuasive and passionate chronicler. This is a book to enjoy and ponder.’
— Norman F. Cantor, Emeritus Professor of History, New York University, and author of Inventing the Middle Ages and Medieval Lives
Stephen O’Shea is a Canadian writer and historian. He has lived for long periods in Paris and New York, and moved to southern France to research and write The Perfect Heresy. His first book, Back to the Front: an accidental historian walks the trenches of World War I, was published to great acclaim and his latest book, Sea of Faith is a magnificent narrative of the contacts and conflicts between Islam and Christianity in the Mediterranean world over a thousand years. He now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Revolutionary Life and Death of
the Medieval Cathars
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by
Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London EC 1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com
This edition published in 2001
First published in the United States of America in 2000 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc
10 9
Copyright © Stephen O’Shea, 2000, 2001
Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-10 1 86197 350 0
ISBN-13 978 1 86197 350 4
To
Jill, Rachel, and Eve
PRINCIPAL FIGURES IN THE CATHAR STORY
INTRODUCTION
1. Languedoc and the Great Heresy
2. Rome
3. The Turn of the Century
4. The Conversation
5. Penance and Crusade
6. Béziers
7. Carcassonne
8. Bad Neighbors
9. The Conflict Widens
10. A Time of Surprises
11. The Verdict
12. Toulouse
13. The Return to Tolerance
14. The End of the Crusade
15. Inquisition
16. Backlash
17. The Synagogue of Satan
18. Twilight in the Garden of Evil
19. Bélibaste
EPILOGUE: IN CATHAR COUNTRY
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Arnold Amaury (d. 1225): Head of the Cistercian order of monks. Papal plenipotentiary in Languedoc, he was later appointed archbishop of Narbonne. Arnold led the Albigensian Crusade at the infamous sack of Béziers in 1209.
Peter Autier (c. 1245–1309): Cathar holy man. Until middle age a wealthy notary in the mountain town of Ax-les-Thermes, Autier received heretical religious instruction in Italy and returned to Languedoc to spread the faith.
William Bélibaste (d. 1321): The last Languedoc Perfect. Sought by the authorities on charges of heresy and murder, Bélibaste exercised his ministry for over a decade among fellow exiles in Catalonia.
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153): Cistercian monk, founder of the abbey of Clairvaux in Champagne in 1115, canonized in 1174. Bernard advised popes, preached the Second Crusade, and sounded the alarm about the growth of Catharism.
Blanche of Laurac: The greatest matriarch of Languedoc Catharism. Two of her daughters made prominent marriages, then became Perfect; another ran a Cathar home in Laurac. Blanche’s fourth daughter and only son were murdered at Lavaur in 1211.
Domingo de Guzmán (1170–1221): Founder of the Order of Friars Preachers, or Dominicans, canonized as St. Dominic in 1234. A native of Castile, Dominic preached tirelessly in Languedoc in the years preceding the crusade. During the Cathar wars he became a confidant of Simon de Montfort.
Esclarmonde of Foix: Sister of Raymond Roger, the count of Foix. Esclarmonde embraced Catharism in 1204 at a ceremony attended by Languedoc’s leading families. She ran a heretical convent and, centuries later, became the object of an eroticohistorical cult.
Jacques Fournier (c. 1280–1342): Cistercian monk of Languedoc peasant stock. Fournier, a peerless inquisitor, uncovered the Cathar revival at Montaillou. He was elected pope Benedict XII in 1334.
Fulk of Marseilles (1155–1231): Bishop of Toulouse from 1205 until his death. Immortalized by Dante in canto IX of the Paradiso, Fulk showed uncommon eloquence and ruthlessness in combating Catharism.
Gregory IX (1170–1241): Ugolino dei Conti di Segni, elected pope in 1227. His appointment, in 1233, of the Dominicans to lead the fight against heresy is usually cited as the founding act of the Inquisition.
Guilhabert of Castres (d. c. 1240): The greatest of the male Languedoc Perfect. Although in constant danger as the Cathar bishop of Toulouse, Guilhabert eluded capture and organized the strategic retreat of the faith into the Pyrenees.
Innocent III (1160–1216): Lotario dei Conti di Segni, elected pope in 1198. He launched the Albigensian Crusade in 1208 and convoked the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. One of the most feared and admired medieval pontiffs, Innocent died in Perugia en route to brokering a peace between Genoa and Pisa.
Peter of Castelnau (d. 1208): Cistercian monk and papal legate whose demise prompted the call to crush the Cathars.
Amaury de Montfort (1192–1241): Eldest son of Alice of Montmorency and Simon de Montfort. Embattled lord of Languedoc from 1218 until the cession of his rights to King Louis VIII of France. Captured by the Muslims at Gaza in 1239, held captive in Babylon for two years, Amaury died in Calabria on his homeward journey.
Blanche of Castile (1185–1252): Queen of France, then regent after the death of Louis VIII and during the minority of her eldest son, Louis IX (St. Louis), as well as during his extended crusading absences in Palestine. Arguably, France’s greatest thirteenth-century ruler.
Bouchard de Marly (d. 1226): First cousin of Alice of Montmorency and comrade-in-arms of her husband, Simon de Montfort. Held hostage for a time by Cathars in Cabaret, Bouchard subsequently led the second corps of cavalry at the battle of Muret.
Louis VIII (1187–1226): King of France after the death of his father, Philip Augustus, in 1223. Louis ordered the massacre of Marmande and launched the decisive royal crusade of 1226.
Pedro II (1174–1213): Monarch of the unified kingdom of Aragon and county of Barcelona, victor over the Moors at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. King Pedro the Catholic allied himself to the cause of Languedoc and led the greatest army ever assembled to fight the crusaders.
Philip Augustus (1165–1223): King of France. He successfully whittled down the Plantagenet continental presence of Kings Richard (Lionheart) and John (Lackland) of England to a small corner of Aquitaine. Philip’s barons were the principal leaders of the Albigensian Crusade.
Raymond VI (1156–1222): Count of Toulouse. Three times excommunicated and five times married, the leader of Languedoc was formally dispossessed at the Lateran Council of 1215.
Raymond VII (1197–1249): The last count of Toulouse of the Saint-Gilles clan. Despite having driven the French from his lands, Raymond was eventually forced to agree to a harsh peace that obliged him to subsidize the Inquisition.
Raymond Roger of Foix (d. 1223): The most belligerent of the southern nobles opposed to the French invasion. Brother and husband of Cathar holy women, he distinguished himself for ferocity on the battlefield and bluntness before the pope.
Simon de Montfort (1165–1218): Champion of the Catholic cause in the south. After showing conspicuous bravery in battle, he was made viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne in 1209. Years of brilliant, brutal generalship led to his becoming lord of all of Languedoc.
Raymond Roger Trencavel (1188–1209): Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, suspected of strong Cathar sympathies. He stood alone during the summer of 1209 against the might of the north.
The Perfect Heresy
ALBI, AS IN ALBIGENSIAN, the most notorious heresy of all time. On a bright summer afternoon several years ago, I found myself walking the silent streets of Albi in the company of my brother, surprised at having stumbled across a town whose name was familiar. We had come to Albi by chance, having rented a car in Paris a week earlier for an aimless drive southward through the French countryside. It was our version of what the English call “a mystery tour,” a trip with an unknown destination. Once the slate roofs and off-white walls north of the Loire had given way to the warm terra-cotta of the Midi, we began feeling pleasantly disoriented. In Clermont-Ferrand, we had our first confirmed beret sighting; in Aurillac, we backed into an accident; in Rodez, we watched as our waitress fell out of her dress. We had reached Languedoc, France’s Mediterranean southwest.
After a long lunch at a truck stop, we cruised into Albi, the town with a whiff of infamy to its name. The Albigensian Crusade, we knew, was a cataclysm of the Middle Ages, a ferocious campaign of siege, battle, and bonfire during which supporters of the Catholic Church sought to eliminate the heretics known as the Albigenses, or the Cathars. That thirteenth-century crusade, directed not against Muslims in distant Palestine but against dissident Christians in the heart of Europe, was followed by the founding of the Inquisition, an implacable machine expressly created to destroy the Cathar survivors of the war. As a result of the upheaval, Languedoc, once a proudly independent territory, was annexed to the kingdom of France. Crusade, Inquisition, conquest—Albi’s place in history, if not in fond memory, was assured.
To our eyes on that summer day, the town looked as if it had opted for drowsy amnesia about its past. We strolled through a deserted old quarter, past siesta-shuttered shops and homes, the wine-red bricks of walls and windowsills bathing us in a rosy glow. A white cat slept on a doorstep, undisturbed by any ghosts. It was hard to square Albi’s blush of forgetful well-being with its singular legacy. I needed only think back a decade or so to remember a college instructor describing the Albigensian Crusade as nascent colonialism and, in a more obsessive vein, a potheaded roommate rambling on and on about how the heretics had been hunted down by the original thought police. Now that I was actually in Albi, such recollections seemed inappropriate, a rude intrusion into the town’s pink dream.
On a height above the River Tarn, the narrow streets opened up into a wide plaza. My brother and I glanced at each other. This was more like it.
There, looming over a terraced tumble of riverside dwellings, stood a red fortress, monolithic and menacing, a stupendous mountain of bricks piled 100 feet high and 300 feet wide. Sullenly rectangular, its windows little more than elongated slits, the building looked indestructible, like a glowering anvil hurled from the heavens. Its thirty-two buttresses, shaped like smokestacks cut in half lengthwise, ringed cyclopean walls on all four sides and rose as far as the flat line of an impossibly distant roof. In silhouette, it resembled an appallingly large change dispenser, of the type once worn by bus conductors and waitresses—one buttress holding pennies, another nickels, and so on. Yet that homely comparison was spoiled by an even taller structure, a tower, a red-brick rocket shooting 100 feet higher than the roof alongside the west wall.
The Cathedral of Ste-Cécile, Albi
The tower held bells that toll on Sunday. The building was a church.
We had been dead wrong about Albi’s amnesia. The fearsome oddity that is the Cathedral of Ste-Cécile will never let the townspeople forget their Albigensian connection. Erected from 1282 to 1392, the building is a massive bully that dwarfs and dominates its neighbors. There is no transept; thus the church does not even have the redemptive shape of the cross. For centuries, it had just one small door. Unlike the other great French cathedrals in Paris, Chartres, Rheims, Bourges, Rouen, and Amiens, there were no messy markets under Ste-Cécile’s soaring vault, no snoring wayfarers on its floor, no livestock droppings to slop out in the mornings, no grand portals to let in the air breathed by ordinary men. The church’s exterior was—and still is—a monument to power.
Bernard de Castanet was the medieval bishop who approved the plans, raised the money, and started the construction. As he was doing this in the 1280s, Castanet was also accusing many prominent townspeople of heresy, even though the Albigensian Crusade had ended two generations earlier and the inquisitors had been assiduously intimidating the populace ever since. The bishop’s opponents, particularly one outspoken Franciscan friar named Bernard Délicieux, claimed that Castanet was using the threat of Inquisition prisons to silence free men and to extort funds. Whatever the truth, the fortress church rose, brick by unforgiving brick, until its larger message became clear: Submit or be crushed.
There was nothing subtle about the appearance of Ste-Cécile, nothing that demanded a specialized monograph detailing gargoyles, grace notes, and the like. We walked around the hulking giant, marveling that the midafternoon silence of Albi had been so deceptive. The red cathedral was, in the end, an enraged bellow from Bishop Castanet and his successors. They had seen their world—their power, privileges, beliefs—imperiled by the subversive creed of the Cathars, and they had roared out their anger in this monstrous mountain of brick. It filled our eyes and our ears. Only a disagreement over something as fathomless as the soul of a civilization could elicit a shout so loud that it was still audible across a chasm of 700 years.
Not surprisingly, that afternoon echoed for a long time in my memory. In the years to follow, the Cathars and Albi came to mind again and again, appearing unbidden in books and magazines and the conversations of the Parisians in whose midst I lived. A lot of people had heard the shout. I began haunting the booksellers’ stalls by the Seine. Friends reached into their bookshelves, invariably producing yet another French-language study of the Cathars for me to discover. Specialized libraries contained hard-to-obtain translations of chronicles, correspondence, and Inquisition registers. In 1997, years after my first glimpse of Ste-Cécile, I moved to southwestern France to look—and listen—more closely in the places where the Cathars had lived and died. The Perfect Heresy, it turned out, was the destination of my mystery tour.
“Kill them all, God will know his own.” The sole catchphrase of the Cathar conflict to be handed down to posterity is attributed to Arnold Amaury, the monk who led the Albigensian Crusade. A chronicler reported that Arnold voiced this command outside the Mediterranean trading town of Béziers on July 22, 1209, when his crusading warriors, on the verge of storming the city after having breached its defenses, had turned to him for advice on distinguishing Catholic believer from Cathar heretic. The monk’s simple instructions were followed and the entire population—20,000 or so—indiscriminately murdered. The sack of Beziers was the Guernica of the Middle Ages.
Whether Arnold Amaury actually uttered that pitiless order is still a matter for debate. What no one doubts, however, is that the phrase neatly illustrates the homicidal passions at work during the Albigensian Crusade. Even in an era commonly considered barbarous—“a thousand years without a bath,” runs a benign putdown of the Middle Ages—the campaign against the Cathars and their supporters stands out for its stark cruelty. The stories of Béziers and other Church-sponsored atrocities shock at first, then play into the belief that the millennium lying between antiquity and Renaissance was an unrelieved nightmare. Popular culture, drawing on the Gothic imagination of the nineteenth century, has exploited that notion; in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, to take a well-known example, an enraged mobster hisses at an enemy, “I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ ass!” Just the word makes us wince.
In this sense, the story of the Cathars is surpassingly medieval. The Albigensian Crusade, which lasted from 1209 to 1229, was launched by the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages, Innocent III, and initially prosecuted by a gifted warrior, Simon de Montfort, under the approving eye of Arnold Amaury. A mail-fisted response to the questions posed by a popular heresy, the crusade set baleful precedents for Christendom’s approach to dissidence by laying waste to Languedoc, the great arc of land stretching from the Pyrenees to Provence and including such cities as Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Béziers, and Montpellier.
The crusade’s two decades of salutary slaughter then gave way to fifteen years of fitful revolt and repression, which culminated in the siege of Montségur in 1244. A lonely fortress atop a needle of rock, Montségur eventually surrendered, and more than 200 of its defenders, the leaders of the embattled Cathar faith, were herded into a snowy clearing to be burned alive. By then the Inquisition, guided since its founding in 1233 by the steely intellects of the Dominican order, had developed the techniques that would torment Catholic Europe and Latin America for centuries to come and, in the process, provide the model for latter-day totalitarian control of the individual conscience. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Inquisition had razed any residual trace of the Albigensian heresy from the landscape of Christendom, and the Cathars of Languedoc had vanished. The stations of their calvary—the mass burnings, blindings, and hangings, the catapulting of body parts over castle walls, the rapine, the looting, the chanting of monks behind battering rams, the secret trials, the exhuming of corpses, the creakings of the rack—match our phantasmagoria of the medieval only too well.
Were the tale just that, a sort of pulp nonfiction for the prurient, then the Cathars should be relegated to a footnote in the annals of terror. Yet their rise and fall call up other connotations of the medieval—the sublime, mysterious, and dynamic Middle Ages that often gets obscured by the flash of armored knights. The Cathar heresy, a pacifist brand of Christianity embracing tolerance and poverty, rose to prominence in the middle of the so-called renaissance of the twelfth century, the time when Europe shook off the intellectual torpor that had afflicted it for hundreds of years. It was a period of change, experimentation, and broader horizons. After 1095, the year Pope Urban II had urged Christendom to retake Jerusalem, tens of thousands had gone charging off to Palestine in search of adventure and salvation—and returned as men and women who had seen, if not understood, that life was organized differently elsewhere. At home, the towns began to grow for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, and the great era of cathedral building got under way. Schools formed, as yet unfettered by the strictures of a watchful hierarchy. The spread of new ideas and the birth of new ambitions often led to dissatisfaction with an early medieval Church more suited to a benighted age of huddled monks and shivering peasantries. The great awakening of the twelfth century ushered in an era of spiritual longing that searched and often found the sublime outside the fortress of orthodoxy. The Cathars were joined by other heretical groups—notably the Waldensians, or the “Poor Men of Lyons”—in lashing out at the mainstream religion.
Catharism thrived in regions farthest along the road from the Dark Ages: the merchant cities of Italy, the trading centers of Champagne and the Rhineland, and, especially, the fractious checkerboard of familial holdings and independent towns that made up Languedoc at the end of the twelfth century. The fate of the Cathars became wedded to the destiny of Languedoc, for it was there where the heretics prospered most and won disciples in every quarter of society, from mountain shepherd and hillside yeoman to lowland noble and urban merchant. When attacked, the creed’s small priestly class—that is, the ascetics known as the Perfect—found a militant multitude of protectors from among its far-reaching network of kinsman, convert, and anticlerical sympathizer. The Perfect heresy was ideally, indeed perfectly, suited to the tolerant feudalism of Languedoc, and for that its people would pay a terrible tribute. The region entered the thirteenth century a voluble anomaly in the chorus of European Christianity, its culture enlivened by poetic troubadours and revolutionary Cathars; 100 years later, Languedoc had been swallowed whole by the kings of France, its fearful towns the proving grounds for ambitious inquisitors and royal magistrates.
Without the Cathars, the nobles beholden to the Capet monarchy and its small woodland territory around the city of Paris—the Ile de France—might never have found a pretext to swoop down on the Mediterranean and force the unlikely annexation of Languedoc to the Crown of France. Languedoc shared a culture and language with its cousin south of the Pyrenees, the kingdom of Aragon and Barcelona, one of the Christian fiefs that would eventually roll back the Muslim Moors from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. Arguably, Languedoc “belonged” with Aragon, not with the Frankish northerners who would someday create the entity known as France.*Without the convulsion of the Albigensian Crusade, the map and makeup of Europe could very well have been different.
Although firmly anchored in the politics and society of its era, the story of the Cathars also forms an important—and harrowing—chapter in the history of ideas. The heresy hinged upon the question of Good and Evil. Not that one side in the struggle over Languedoc was good and the other bad, even if propagandists for both sides claimed that such was the case. Rather, the fundamental disagreement between Catholic orthodoxy and Cathar heterodoxy, their irreducible bone of contention, concerned the role and power of Evil in life.
For the Cathars, the world was not the handiwork of a good god. It was wholly the creation of a force of darkness, immanent in all things. Matter was corrupt, therefore irrelevant to salvation. Little if any attention had to be paid to the elaborate systems set up to bully people into obeying the man with the sharpest sword, the fattest wallet, or the biggest stick of incense. Worldly authority was a fraud, and worldly authority based on some divine sanction, such as the Church claimed, was outright hypocrisy.
The god deserving of Cathar worship was a god of light, who ruled the invisible, the ethereal, the spiritual domain; this god, unconcerned with the material, simply didn’t care if you got into bed before getting married, had a Jew or Muslim for a friend, treated men and women as equals, or did anything else contrary to the teachings of the medieval Church. It was up to the individual (man or woman) to decide whether he or she was willing to renounce the material for a life of self-denial. If not, one would keep returning to this world—that is, be reincarnated—until ready to embrace a life sufficiently spotless to allow accession, at death, to the same blissful state one had experienced as an angel prior to having been tempted out of heaven at the beginning of time. To be saved, then, meant becoming a saint. To be damned was to live, again and again, on this corrupt Earth. Hell was here, not in some horrific afterlife dreamed up by Rome to scare people out of their wits.
To believe in what is called the Two Principles of creation (Evil in the visible, Good in the invisible) is to be a dualist, an adherent to a notion that has been shared by other creeds in the long course of humanity’s grappling with the unknowable. Christian Cathar dualism, however, posited a meeting place between Good and Evil: within the breast of every human being. There, our wavering divine spark, the remnant of our earlier, angelic state, waited patiently to be freed from the cycle of reincarnations.
Even a cursory description of the Cathar faith gives an idea of how seditious the heresy was. If its tenets were true, the sacraments of the Church necessarily became null and void, for the very good reason that the Church itself was a hoax. Why then, the Cathars asked, pay any attention to the Church? More concretely, why pay any taxes and tithes to it? To the Cathars, ecclesiastical trappings of wealth and worldly power served only to show that the Church belonged to the realm of matter. At best, the pope and his underlings were merely unenlightened; at worst, they were active agents of the evil creator.
Neither was the rest of society spared the revolutionary ramifications of Cathar thought. This was particularly true of the movement’s treatment of women. The medieval sexual status quo would have been undermined if everybody had believed, as the Cathars did, that a nobleman in one life might be a milkmaid in the next, or that women were fit to be spiritual leaders. Perhaps even more subversive than this protofeminism was the Cathar repugnance to the practice of swearing oaths. Minor though this may seem to us now, medieval man thought otherwise, for the swearing of an oath was the contractual underpinning of early feudal society. It lent sacred weight to the existing order; no kingdom, estate, or bond of vassalage could be created or transferred without establishing a sworn link, mediated by the clergy, between the individual and the divine. As dualists, the Cathars believed that trying to link the doings of the material world with the detachment of the good god was an exercise in wishful thinking. With startling ease, the Cathar preacher could portray medieval society as a fanciful and illegitimate house of cards.
Catharism was, in short, perfect heresy to the powers-that-were, and it consequently inspired a loathing that knew few bounds. Rome could not allow itself to be publicly humiliated by the success of the Cathars. Although their teachings were often misunderstood by their opponents, fantastic slanders were concocted and repeated—in good faith—about their practices. Their name, once thought to mean “the pure,” is not their own invention; Cathar is now taken as a twelfth-century German play on words implying a cat worshiper. It was long bruited about that Cathars performed the so-called obscene kiss on the rear end of a cat. They were said to consume the ashes of dead babies and indulge in incestuous orgies. Also common was the epithet bougre, a corruption of Bulgar—a reference to a sister church of heretical dualists in eastern Europe. Bougre eventually gave English bugger, which is yet another proclivity once ascribed to Cathar enthusiasts. The term Albigensian, snubbed by modern historical convention for circumscribing the geographic reach of Catharism, was the invention of a companion of the crusade who related that the heretics believed that no one could sin from the waist down. We now know that the Cathars referred to themselves, rather soberly, as “good Christians.”
Yet rumors about cat fondling and baby burning found listeners, as did more accurate accounts about the rise of an alternate Christian creed. The might of feudal Europe fell upon Languedoc in a righteous fury. In many ways, the hatred aroused by the heretics masked a deeper antipathy, one that pitted the twelfth century’s spiritual ebullience against the thirteenth century’s culture of lawmaking and codification. In its largest sense, then, the Cathar wars arose because Western civilization had reached a crossroads—historian R. I. Moore has provocatively seen the years around 1200 as a watershed that led to “the formation of a persecuting society.” Choices were made that would take centuries to undo. Less grandly, the fate of the Cathars can be viewed as the story of a dissidence unprepared for the vigor of its opponents. The Languedoc of the Cathars was too weakened by tolerance to withstand the single-minded certainties of its neighbors.
This telling of the Cathar drama, intended for nonspecialists, relies on the diligent research conducted by academic historians in the last half century. The principal primary sources behind the story will vary according to which act is unfolding. For the rise of the heretics from the 1150s on, the documentary record is spotty, and those documents that do exist—principally letters and the acts of Church councils—were penned by their enemies. If the Cathars had a written corpus at that time, it was destroyed by the Dominican inquisitors charged with extirpating the heresy 100 years later. Ironically, it took a twentieth-century Dominican friar, Antoine Dondaine, to dispel the fog of calumny and guesswork surrounding early Catharism by scouring archives to uncover heretical catechisms and treatises previously unknown to historians.
As for the twilight years of the heresy, the Dominicans again played a role crucial to our understanding. However destructive they were of Catharism in general, the medieval friars proved splendid curators of its decline by taking down the proceedings of their investigations. The transcripts of Inquisition interrogations, the spoken words of long-vanished peasants and burghers, have been made widely available in recent years and form an inestimable boon to students of the period. One need only refer to Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s classic work on one of the last redoubts of Catharism, to see the value of Inquisition registers in reconstructing the past.
The heart of the story, however, takes place between the Cathars’ rise and fall, in the momentous time of open conflict that began with the sack of Béziers in 1209 and ended at the fall of Montségur in 1244. Fortunately, there were four contemporary chroniclers—only one of whom took the side of Languedoc—to witness and record the sudden triumphs and reversals of this eventful period, as well as several later medieval commentators who quite rightly found the tale to be compelling. Taken together—the manuscripts bequeathed to us by chroniclers, commentators, inquisitors, clergymen, and lords—the sources offer a detailed and complex picture of a time abounding with people of great conviction and courage. The Church and its allies counted, among others: Lotario dei Conti di Segni, the charismatic Roman baron crowned Pope Innocent III; Domingo de Guzmán, the barefoot St. Dominic crying out in the Cathar wilderness; Simon de Montfort, a devout warrior intent on building an empire; Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, a troubadour turned persecutor; and Arnold Amaury, the papal legate lacking even the ghost of a scruple. In the other camp stood Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, the leading lecher, diplomat, and nobleman of Languedoc; Raymond Roger of Foix, a mountain lord given to exacting horrific revenge; Guilhabert of Castres, a prominent Cathar fugitive who eluded both crusader and inquisitor; Peter Autier, a wealthy notary turned heretical ringleader; and William Bélibaste, a murderous holy man whose burning in 1321 marked the disappearance of the faith.
Cathar missionaries walked the pathways of rural Languedoc two full centuries before the era of Joan of Arc; three, before Martin Luther; four, before the Mayflower. The immense distance between us and them would be even more daunting were it not for the truth behind the axiom enunciated by a disciple of David Hume: “The past has no existence except as a succession of present mental states.” The epilogue of this work will therefore survey the luxuriant oddness of Catharism in our own day, which has seen the Cathars come in from the shadowland of the recondite and enter the unruly marketplace of European memory. Indeed, the Cathars have been championed, with varying degrees of seriousness, by vegetarians, nationalists, feminists, treasure hunters, New Agers, civil libertarians, Church bashers, and pacifists. Their former hideouts—shattered castles in the foothills of the Pyrenees—have become hiking destinations. Their less benign admirers have included Nazis and, more recently, self-immolating members of the Order of the Solar Temple. A recent French novel even has neo-Cathars combating the forces of American corporate imperialism. In some quarters, the Cathars inspire the same mixture of awe and occult respect surrounding the native peoples of the New World. The heretics of Montségur have become European stand-ins for the Hopis, their beliefs pointing to a spiritual choice etched not against the dreamscape of the desert but against the background of medieval nightmare. Despite the great gulf of centuries, the Cathars still haunt the timeless highlands of Languedoc.
*In the interest of brevity, The Perfect Heresy will use such terms as France and England to describe the twelfth- and thirteenth-century constellations of feudal arrangements that would not evolve into states until much later.
LANGUEDOC’S PATCHWORK OF olive groves and vineyards stretches from the sea to the mountains, an arc of hardwon prosperity reaching from the salty mouth of the Rhône to the lazy flood of the Garonne. The land, scorched by the sun and scoured by the wind, seems created for a tale of sudden change. In the reedy marshes of the Mediterranean coast stand the cities of Nîmes, Montpellier, Béziers, and Narbonne, already lively outposts of empire when the centurions of Rome called the area the provincia Narbonnensis. By the time of the Cathars, these centers of rough civility had long since come in out of the night of chaos following the collapse of the classical world. Their dockside warehouses overflowed anew with wine and oil, wool and leather; their richer townspeople, clad in costly silks and brocades, traded with their counterparts in Spain, Italy, and beyond.
The warm littoral plain of the traders quickly gives way to more rugged surroundings. Close to the shore rise the bleached heights of the Corbières, a range of limestone peaks that stretches inland to the south of the River Aude. The summits of these mountains, now crowned with ruined castles, were ideal for watching the tramp of armies in the river valley below. There, in the Aude’s rumpled geometry of field and village, ranks of cypress trees compete with grapevines in giving order to the landscape. Far away to the north loom the rocky plateau of the Minervois, its parasol pines teetering over steep ravines, and the Montagne Noire (the black mountain), a brooding forested prominence that lies across the countryside like some great beached whale.
Beyond the turrets and ramparts of Carcassonne, some forty miles from the coast, the Corbières and the Montagne Noire disappear, and the earth fans out into a succession of gentle ridges. In the summer, the land bakes and the cicadas sing; irregular swatches of cultivation soften the long hogbacks in the rolling panorama. This fertile area comprised the heartland of Catharism. In such towns as Lavaur, Fanjeaux, and Montréal, dualism won its largest following.
To the west of these sleepy settlements lies the broad rich plain of Toulouse, leaden green in the heat. The great city, surpassed in size only by Rome and Venice in the Latin Christendom of 1200, sits on a bend of the River Garonne as it uncoils slowly on its long journey to the Atlantic. The river rises far in the south, in the rock and snow that separate France from Spain. The bleak black majesty of the Pyrenees marks the limit of Languedoc with a towering finality. It was within sight of their summits that such outposts as Montségur and Montaillou witnessed the ultimate stages of the Cathar story.
Wedged between more celebrated cousins—to the east, Provence; to the west, Aquitaine; to the south, Aragon and Catalonia—Languedoc has never been redeemed from its original sin of sheltering heresy. Incorporated by force into the kingdom of France as a result of the Albigensian Crusade, the region took generations to rediscover the nascent nationalism that northern knight and Dominican inquisitor first aroused, then crushed, in the thirteenth century. Today, it is still more an imaginary construct than a cohesive entity. It doesn’t exist as a full-fledged nation or province, all of which suits its role as standard-bearer of the Cathar invisible.
Even its name reflects the chimerical. Languedoc is a contraction of langue d’oc, that is, the language of yes—or rather, the languages in which the word yes is oc, not oui. The patois of Paris and its surrounding Ile de France eventually evolved into French; the languages of oc, or Occitan and its related dialects—Languedocien, Gascon, Limousin, Auvergnat, Provençal—were far closer to Catalan and Spanish. Over time Occitan was decisively exiled to the outermost fringes of the Romance conversation, and the butter-smooth tongue of the French northerners came to dominate Languedoc. Yet the memory of the displaced idiom abides, if only in the twangy way French is now spoken in the south. Whereas the hubbub of café debate in say, Normandy, sounds like a mellifluous exchange between articulate cows, the tenor of the same discussion in Languedoc is akin to a musician tuning a large, and very loud, guitar. This, the echo of old Occitan, can be heard everywhere.
It was in the Occitan language that troubadour poetry first flowered in the twelfth century. In the fields and groves of Languedoc, love was discovered and the erotic rekindled. Jongleurs—the performers of troubadour works—sang of a coy, courtly game of deferred pleasure, exalted sublimation and, ultimately, adulterous fulfillment. The idea of fin’amors was a fresh, heady breeze of individual transcendence imbued with the spirit of medieval Languedoc. While beyond the Loire and the Rhine noblemen were still stirred by epics about the viscera dripping from Charlemagne’s sword, their counterparts in the sunny south were learning to count the ways. The ethos of amorous longing, so much at odds with the mix of rapine and piety that passed for normal behavior everywhere else, gave a different cast to Languedoc’s life of the mind.
The region’s distinctiveness showed up elsewhere during this period. In the coastal cities, the Jews of Languedoc were inventing and exploring the mystical implications of the Kabbalah, proving that spiritual ferment was by no means confined to the Christian majority. In the more material world, the burghers of Languedoc were wresting power from the feudal families who had ruled the land since the time of the Visigoths. Money, the enemy of the agrarian caste sysem, was circulating again, as were ideas. On the paths and rivers of the Languedoc of 1150, there were not only traders and troubadours but also pairs of itinerant holy men, recognizable by the thin leather thong tied around the waist of their black robes. They entered villages and towns, set up shop, often as weavers, and became known for their honest, hard work. When the time came, they would talk—first, in the moonlight beyond the walls, then out in the open, before the fireplaces of noble and burgher, in the houses of tradespeople, near the stalls of the marketplace. They asked for nothing, no alms, no obeisance; just a hearing. Within a generation, these Cathar missionaries had converted thousands. Languedoc had become host to what would be called the Great Heresy.
The small town of St. Félix en Lauragais, huddled on its prow of granite in a sea of waving green, teemed with visitors in early May of 1167. From the windows of their hostelries, the newcomers could look out over fields of spring wheat and be thankful for the felicity of a time without famine. Not that they thought the good god had had a hand in such material good fortune, for the guests of St. Félix were dualist grandees—heresiarchs—from distant lands. They had gathered here to talk, openly, without fear of persecution or contradiction, at a great conclave in the castle of a local noble. It was the first and only meeting of its kind, a Cathar International of spiritual dissent. The Catholic bishop in his palace in Toulouse, a day’s ride to the west, would not have received an invitation.
The townspeople no doubt greeted the robed heresiarchs by bowing deeply and reciting a prayer that asked for assurance of a good end to their lives. This ritual, known as the melioramentum, marked the supplicants as believers in the Cathar message. These believers, or credentes, were not, properly speaking, Cathars but rather sympathizers who bore witness and showed deference to the faith. The credentes had to await a future life to accede to the status of the Cathar elect.
Throughout Languedoc the believers overwhelmingly outnumbered the holy few, whom the Church would later label the Perfect—as in perfected, or fully initiated, heretics. It was the Perfect, the black-robed visitors to St. Félix, who were the true, seditious Cathars. An austere class of monks-in-the-world, the Perfect showed by example alone that there was a way out of the cycle of reincarnation. Their holiness made them living saints, equal in stature, in the view of the credentes, to Jesus’ apostles. Having arrived at the last phase of worldly existence, the Perfect prepared for a final journey; their lives of self-denial ensured that at their death they would not return. Rather, their imprisoned spirit would at last be freed to join the eternal, invisible Goodness. Eventually, all people would be among the Perfect, in the sere and spartan waiting room of bliss. In the meantime, the simple Cathar believers could conduct themselves as they saw fit, but it was best to follow the teachings of the gospels: Love your neighbor and the peace that goodness and honesty bring.
The Perfect in St. Félix acknowledged the homage of the credentes with a ritual response to the melioramentum. Normally, the utterances would have been exclusively in Occitan, the lingua franca of the rolling farmland in which St. Félix was just one of many small settlements. But, given the uniqueness of the occasion, some of the Perfect answered in the langue d’oïl, the ancestor of French. A certain Robert d’Epernon, leader of the Cathar faith in northern France, had come to the meeting along with several of his fellow Perfect. The melioramentum response was also given in the tongue that would mature as Italian. This was spoken by a Milanese gravedigger named Mark, one of the pioneers of Catharism in Lombardy, where the growing towns were wracked by strife between the pope and the Germanic emperor. In this year of 1167, the towns and the papacy founded the defensive Lombard League to thwart the designs of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In the cracks caused by this power struggle, the heretical faith of Mark and his fellows was allowed to flower.
Mark had come to St. Félix as an escort. Nicetas, his traveling companion, spoke Greek, a language not heard in these peasant surroundings since the local Latin gentry recited it in their literary academies some 800 years previously. Nicetas, whose identity has never been fully established, was most probably the bishop of Constantinople for the Bogomil faith, a dualist creed that had arisen in eastern Europe when a tenth-century Macedonian monk known as “Beloved of God” (Bogomil, in Slavonic) started spreading the good-and-evil news. Dualism, a metaphysic known to Christianity since the gnostics of antiquity, had a following in several lands controlled by the Byzantine Empire. Although mystery surrounds the genesis of the Cathars, it is reasonable to assume that the Bogomils*may have initially acted as mentors to the Western heresy, especially as the contacts between Greek East and Latin West increased after the turn of the first millennium.
As a heresiarch from the East, Nicetas brought an impressive pedigree of dissent to the meeting in St. Félix. One of his predecessors, a certain Basil, had openly tried to convert the Byzantine emperor to the ways of dualism in the year 1100. The emperor was not amused, and Basil the Bogomil was burned for his temerity just outside the hippodrome of Constantinople. For the Cathar Perfect, however, the martyrdom suffered by the Bogomils, no matter how glorious, mattered less than the conduit of legitimacy they represented.
Through Nicetas’s fingers passed the power of the consolamentum, the sole dualist sacrament. It transformed the ordinary believer into one of the Perfect, who then, in turn, could “console” others ready to live their final, holy life. Baptism, confirmation, ordination, and, if received at death’s door, extreme unction all rolled into one, the consolamentum entailed the laying-on of hands and repeated injunctions to live a flawlessly chaste and ascetic existence. The Perfect had to abstain from any form of sexual intimacy, pray constantly, and fast frequently. When allowed to eat, they had to avoid all meat and any byproduct of reproduction, such as cheese, eggs, milk, or butter. They could, however, drink wine and eat fish, as the latter was believed by medieval man to be the product of spontaneous generation in water. One slip in this strictly enforced regimen—be it as minor as a nibble of veal or a stolen kiss—and the status of Perfect vanished. The backslider had to receive the consolamentum again, as would all others whom the imperfect Perfect had “consoled” in his or her career. The Catholic precept of ex opere operato, non ex opere operantis ([grace] results from what is performed, not who performs it), through which a sacrament remains valid no matter how corrupt its celebrant, was rejected out of hand by the Cathars. The consolamentum had to be immaculate.
For the Perfect in St. Félix that day, there was no ecclesiastical hierarchy, no church as such, not even a building or chapel. The northern French Cathars would have shrugged at the laying of the cornerstone of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral four years earlier. To the dualists, the continuity of the consolamentum from the time of the apostles was the invisible edifice of the eternal, literally handed down from one generation to the next as a kind of supernatural game of tag. The sacrament was the lone manifestation of the divine in this world. The Cathars believed that Jesus of Nazareth, an apparition rather than a gross material being, had come to Earth as a messenger carrying the dualist truth and as the initiator of the chain of the consolamentum. The Nazarene’s death, if indeed he did die, was almost incidental; certainly it was not the unique redemptive instant of history as proclaimed by the Church.
The Perfect maintained that the cross was not something to be revered; it was simply an instrument of torture, perversely glorified by the Roman faith. They also looked on aghast at the cult of saintly relics. Those bits of bone and cloth for which churches were built and pilgrimages undertaken belonged to the realm of matter, the stuff created by the evil demiurge who fashioned this world and the fleshy envelope of the human. He had created the cosmos, tempted the angels out of heaven, then trapped them in the perishable packages of the human body. What counted, in the greater scheme of things, was only one’s spirit, that which remained of one’s nature as a fallen angel, that which remained connected to the good. To think otherwise was to be deluded. The sacraments dispensed by the Church were nothing more than codswallop.