An Overview of the Albigensian Crusade

AN INTRODUCTION

This blog is mainly about the historiography of the Crusade, that is the ways in which the story of the Albigensian Crusade has been told, both by contemporary chroniclers and modern historians.  However, over the past two weeks I've been very pleased to gain some readers for whom the Albigensian Crusade is an unfamiliar chapter in medieval history.  I'm therefore writing this post to summarize some of the main events of the Crusade and hopefully begin to share my enthusiasm for examining it in more detail.

I'm also writing this because I know of no other site online to which I can direct my readers for a decent overview of many of the major topics.  In a future post, I will discuss why I disagree with just about every statement on the Wikipedia page for the Albigensian Crusade.  My previous post on the primary sources explains what the texts are that give us most of our knowledge about the events of the crusade.  I've also already written about how I was drawn in to the study of the crusade -- its story and its storytellers. I'll try to avoid repeating things from those posts here, except where they seem really necessary. 

I'm quite self-conscious as I write this.  I have examined rather critically the way other authors have gone about the task of telling this story and in posting this particular essay, I am joining their ranks in some sense and opening myself up to criticism about the way I tell it.  Probably the harshest of such criticism will be my own reflections on it, due to the very questionable choices I have to make as soon as I begin.

Hayden White, in his historiographical book Metahistory, pointed out that every historian constructs a narrative out of past events when he writes a history.  Beginnings, middles and ends are necessary features of stories, but they do not occur objectively in the series of events which constitute our knowledge of the past.  Instead, the historian makes selective decisions which immediately begin to transform the supposed events of the past into a sort of dramatic plot to which an audience can relate.  What follows is one of many possible emplotments.

A BEGINNING

In March 1210, a procession of one hundred men stumbled through the spring snows from the fortress at Bram towards that of Lastours.  Their faces were badly mutilated.  Their noses and lips had been cut off and their eyes had been gouged out, with the exception of one who had been left with a single eye and now led their macabre march.  They had been soldiers, captured after Bram fell in a short siege, and were now being sent as living warnings to Pierre-Roger de Cabaret, the lord of Lastours.

The man who ordered this spectacle was Simon de Montfort, the leader of a crusade called by the Pope against fellow Christians within Europe.  De Montfort had taken over the leadership of the crusade at the request of its previous leader, the papal legate Arnau Amalric, who had presided over the crusading army's first great atrocity almost a year earlier.  Arnau Amalric, the Pope's representative and the head of the Cistercian order of monks, had set the tone of terror which now continued to play out in gruesome fashion.

That previous summer, in 1209, the crusading army had begun a holy war.  At the command of Pope Innocent III they had gathered and marched into what is now southern France, although it was then separate, politically and linguistically -- its inhabitants spoke Occitan, not French, and were ruled not by King Philip Augustus of France, but by powerful Counts such as Raymond V, Count of Toulouse, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, the young Viscount of Beziers, Carcassonne, Agde and the Razes, and Raymond-Roger, the Count of Foix.  For convenience, I will refer to this area as the "Languedoc", although the term is not contemporary.

The Languedoc was also culturally quite different from its neighbours, although the poetic literature of the troubadours was widely admired and imitated.  The nobility of the Languedoc had, perhaps, less formal feudal control over their inferiors than elsewhere, territory was more often held communally and inheritances more often divided between many children.  More importantly, the Church reforms of the past century which had aimed to wrest control of the local churches and monasteries away from noble families and transfer it to Rome had been less successful here than elsewhere.  Preaching, public debates, replacement of bishops and threats of excommunication and interdict had together failed to produce the desired change and increasingly the Languedoc had come to be seen as a hotbed of religious dissent and opposition, a region whose people and their lords fomented independence from and therefore schism within the Roman Church.


The crusade had been called after the murder of Peter of Castelnau, another papal legate.  Crusade propaganda claimed that a vassal of Count Raymond of Toulouse had been the assassin, although Raymond protested his innocence and the Pope and his legates appear to have believed him.  Furthermore, Pope Innocent III had been urging military intervention in the area since at least 1204, long before the assassination.  Peter of Castelnau's murder, however, provided an invaluable propaganda tool to muster support for the war.  The Church not only sanctioned and preached the war, but offered the same benefits to crusaders in this war in Europe that were given to crusaders in the Holy Land.  Further, the wealth and territories of the crusade's enemies could be taken and held by crusaders with the sanction of the Church.

Although the crusade was ostensibly intended to combat "heresy", what that meant to the crusaders of the early 13th century might not be initially recognizable to us today.  "Heresy" was often seen less as theological difference or doctrinal error, but rather as opposition to the Church and especially its new efforts at consolidating its control over Christendom.  Pope Innocent III saw himself as the feudal overlord of all of Christendom and had made the greatest monarchs of Europe swear their loyalty to him and receive their crowns from his hands.  His legates had energetically carried his reforms throughout the diocese of Europe and, in the Languedoc had ruthlessly replaced established local bishops with Cistercian monks of proven loyalty and excommunicated anyone who opposed them, from the citizen consuls of towns, to the Count of Toulouse himself.  The Count of Toulouse and his neighbours were accused by the Church of supporting heretics but also, in the same breath, with supporting mercenaries and, in some cases, the demand to remove the mercenaries gained prominence over the demand to persecute heretics.  In actual fact, once the army arrived in the region, it did not engage in theological evaluations.  Anyone who opposed the crusaders was deemed a heretic and treated accordingly.

A MIDDLE

Count Raymond of Toulouse was the region's most powerful lord and the target of much of the Church's rhetoric.  As the crusading army gathered, however, he engaged in negotiations with the Pope and the legates and promised his submission.  He was ritually humiliated and made to confess past sins, to give specific promises and assurances of future obedience, and to hand over certain territories to the Church.  He was then admitted back into the Catholic church, after which he immediately joined the crusade.  This gave some safety to his own territories and people, who could now not be targeted by the crusading army.  Instead, the army turned towards the territories of the young Viscount, Raymond-Roger Trencavel.

When this army reached Beziers, the first of the young Viscount's cities, its leader, then still Arnau Amalric, was famously asked how the crusaders were to differentiate the heretics from the faithful and is said to have replied: "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius", that is "Kill them all.  God will know his own."  The city quickly fell and immense carnage followed.  The legate boasted in his letter back to the Pope that his army had "spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people."

Shortly thereafter, the young Viscount himself was besieged in his fortified city of Carcassonne.  He entered into negotiations with the crusading leadership and then, in circumstances never quite satisfactorily explained, was imprisoned within his own dungeon where he died some time later amid rumours of foul play.  It was when Carcassonne fell that Simon de Montfort was elevated to the position of "athlete of Christ" -- leader of the crusading army and paladin of its holy cause.

Over the next years of the war, de Montfort earned a reputation, not just for cruelty as a ruler but also for invincibility as a commander and personal courage as a warrior.  He presided over mass burnings of hundreds of civilians at a time, won battles against surprising odds and seemed never to hesitate to risk his own life to save the soldiers and knights who fought on his side.  The towns, cities, and castles which he conquered were taken from their former rulers and given over to him personally, not just by the right of military force, but by the formal sanction of the Church.  Raymond of Toulouse did not manage to maintain his exemption from the rapacity of the crusaders and was again excommunicated.  His territories and subjects were despoiled and conquered, despite staunch resistance.  

AN END

For twenty years, devastating warfare and genocidal oppression ravaged the Languedoc.  Some of the middle ages' most impressive sieges and pivotal battles were fought, and both sides faced sudden and unexpected reversals of fortune.  The war itself constitutes a fascinating tale, which I do not have adequate space to recount here.

In 1229, an exhausted Languedoc finally submitted to the French crown, which by then had taken over the prosecution of the war.  A generation had passed and the counts, kings and warlords who had figured prominently at the start of the conflict had mostly been succeeded by their children. Yet in this time, very little had been done about "heresy" as such.  Perhaps this was due to the general understanding of heresy as opposition, as described above, but once military opposition to the Church's armies had finally stopped, a new kind of persecution almost immediately began.

The Inquisition, as it is popularly known, had some basis in old Roman law and in individual instances of inquiries conducted by bishops in the preceding two centuries, but in Toulouse in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade, it came to resemble the formal institution with which the public is more familiar.  Dominic de Guzman, who had been involved in the preaching efforts before the crusade and had been a friend of De Montfort and the crusade leadership during it, was authorized to form his own monastic order and began an increasingly systematic and determined program in Toulouse and the surrounding area.

The monks who followed him were known as the Dominicans or, in Latin, Dominicani, giving rise to the pun Domini Cani or "hounds of God".  The Church was finally able to command the cooperation of secular authorities in the Languedoc to arrest, hold and punish those whom it named, and the Dominican order carried out its mandate with zeal.  Although the creation of false accusations and false confessions is generally well known, it is more often popularly attributed to torture than perhaps it should be.  The real engine driving the apparent success of the Inquisition at finding new victims was social and economic in nature.  The property of a condemned heretic was forfeit and was divided between the Church, the secular authority, and the accuser.  In the all too frequent cases where an already deceased person was accused of heresy, their inheritors could be dispossessed.  When faced with the dreaded accusation of heresy, mere protestations of orthodoxy were insufficient -- the accused could be obliged to accuse others in order to demonstrate cooperation.  It is easy to see how such a flawed methodology produced constant false accusations, turning up heretics everywhere they were sought.  Nor were contemporary people blind to the problem -- criticism of the Inquisitors was surprisingly rampant, despite the danger it brought with it, and violent opposition was not uncommon.

It was during this organized persecution that broader and more fanciful descriptions of heretics began to be produced by monastic authors.  Relying on descriptions of heretics written many centuries earlier, they conceived of their victims as belonging to a Satanic conspiracy stretching back to the time of the Roman Empire.  Often asking about events decades in the past, they viewed respected people who preached or who represented their communities as heretical priests sowing opposition to their theology.  They interpreted local cultural practices of courtesy as formal rituals of a secret rival Church.  When they interrogated local people, they asked formulaic questions in Occitan, but recorded the questions and answers in Latin, using a standardized set of terms which invariably confirmed the existence of heretical features which they assumed to exist.

Over time, engaging in the courteous practices which the Inquisitors documented became dangerous and the respected community members they repeatedly asked about, the "good men", became hunted fugitives.  Some vanished or abandoned their former habits, but others continued in their old cultural ways in secret and a new generation which had never known life before the crusade began to identify the culture of their parents and grandparents according to the paradigm of its persecutors.  Those who were nostalgic for the lost culture of the times before the crusade tried to emulate what they understood of it.  Thus, after a fashion the Inquisitors created something resembling what they had always suspected -- a secretive organization with hidden practices for them to root out and destroy.  No one yet called them "Cathars" -- that would come much later -- but the process by which general resistance to the Church's will was characterized as the hidden actions of a secret organization had begun.