Zoe Oldenbourg in Massacre at Montsegur (1959)
"The historian William de Puylaurens, who from 1241 was notary to the Toulouse bishopric, and from 1242 to 1247 chaplain to the Counts of Toulouse, speaks of this Bishop [Foulques] (who had been dead for at least forty years at the time when William composed his narrative) with admiration and reverence: Foulques must have left a good reputation behind him among ecclesiastical circles in the Toulouse area." (p. 99)Malcolm Barber in The Cathars (2000)
"... William of Puylaurens, who was not an outsider like Peter but brought up in a town little more than a day's journey to the east of Toulouse, ...." (p. 44)
"William of Puylaurens, who was born just before the crusade in c. 1200 and who did not die until at least 1274, was able to take a longer view than both the others, seeing the campaign to extirpate heresy as covering a period of seventy years, apparently dating its beginning to 1203 when Peter of Castelnau was first appointed legate in the region." (p. 111)W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (translators) in The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens (2003)
"... William of Puylaurens was a native of the city [Toulouse], who served two successive bishops, and later Count Raymond VII." (p. xv)
"William lived from about 1200, or a little before, to about 1275. He was thus a contemporary of most of the events covered in his work, and he also had the benefit of a long perspective. He served in the household of Bishop Fulk of Toulouse (d. 1231), who clearly had a major influence on him, and is much eulogised in his Chronicle. William served Fulk's successor, Raymond de Falgar, for a time, and was also for some time rector or prior of the church at Puylaurens, about 50 kilometres east of Toulouse. In the 1240s he was chaplain to Count Raymond VII himself." (p. xvi)
"The author's name does not appear in the Chronicle itself, but the earliest surviving manuscript ... states 'Incipit cronica a magistro Guillelmo de Podio Laurenti compilata', and other MSS refer to the author in similar terms. Duvernoy (p.1) quotes from De fundatione et prioribus conventuum, the work of Bernard Gui, the Dominican historian of the early fourteenth century (and a prominent inquisitor), a reference to our author as ... 'A man veracious and worthy of praise and eternal memory above all others of this generation, Master William, rector of the church of Puylaurens, but a Toulousain by origin'....Elaine Graham-Leigh in The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade (2005)
We do not know when William was born. On the basis of the reference in ch. I to William having seen, whilst he was still a child, Isarn Neblat the former lord of Verfeil, then a centenarian, Duvernoy argues that he was probably born in the very early years of the thirteenth century. However, in ch. II William refers to himself as having been an infans when he heard mention of Bernard Raymond 'the Arian', which he says was long before ... the arrival of the crusaders at Beziers (1209); this might suggest that he was born somewhat earlier than 1200.
E. Griffe affirms (Languedoc, cathare, 1190 a 1210, p. 14 n. 5) that in his youth he lived 'dans la familiarite' of Bishop Fulk; his later career and his knowledge of Latin confirm that he will have received a thorough and privileged education in Church circles from an early age. References in the Chronicle tseem to confirm his presence in Toulouse during his early years....
Moving forward some years Duvernoy reasonably surmises that -- having by this time achieved a certain standing in the Catholic Church -- William was during the period 1228-30 in the entourage of Bishop Fulk, since the Chronicle gives a great amount of detail in describing matters involving Fulk at this time. ... There are other cases when William recounts episodes about which he had clearly been told in person by Fulk. Indeed Fulk obviously made a great impression on William and parts of his Chronicle verge on a panegyric of the Bishop.....
It is also reasonable to assume that William was fairly close to Fulk's successor Bishop Raymond de Falgar, following the latter's election in 1231. .... On the other hand he does not seem to have been as close to Raymond de Falgar as he was to Ful,ann gies fewer details of his episcopate.
As we have noted, William's name begins to appear in various acts from 1237 onwards, and he is usually referred to as a priest or rector of Puylaurens, east of Toulouse. The earliest record shows him as a witness to the will of Sicard of Puylaurens in October or November of 1237; he is described as magister and rector of Puylaurens. In the following March he appears again as magister, but described as prior of Puylaurens, in connection with some ecclesiastical causes. We have already mentioned his appearance in an act of 1241 as notary to the Bishop of Toulouse.
A change in William's position then occurred about the beginning of the year 1245, since between March of that year and February 1248 we find him appearing in various acts as the Chaplain ('capellanus') of Count Raymond VII of Toulouse. We may also note that on 17 July 1245 a Master William, undoubtedly our author, appeared before Cardinal Octavian in an enquiry into the validity of the marriage between the Count and Marguerite of la Marche ....
In July 1247 William, Chaplain to the Count, appears as a witness to an act in which Raymond VII designated Raymond d'Alfaro to represent him in the enquiry into whether the body of his father (Raymond VI) could be allowed to receive a Christian burial. In the text of the Chronicle itself, he gives what appear to be first hand accounts of some events in Raymond's last years, and his close knowledge of the circumstances of Raymond's death in September 1249 suggest that he may have been present with the Count.... In December 1249 William appears as a witness to the oaths of loyalty sworn by nobles and consuls before representatives of Alphonse of Poitiers, Raymond's successor.
William was involved in the enquiries conducted by papal inquisitors in Languedoc in 1253 and 1254. There is then a considerable gap in references to him until 1273 when 'master William of Puylaurens' is cited as a witness by Aimeric de Rouaix (a member of the prominent Toulousian family) in a case in which his rights to certain lands given to him by Raymond VII were being contested by Royal officials....
The last events recorded in the Chronicle ... relate to the years 1273-6. In that chapter King James I of Aragon is referred to as still living; he died on 26 July 1276, and it is thus reasonable to assume that the Chronicle itself was completed in 1275/6, and that William probably died at about this time." (pp. xxi-xxiv)
"The author of the chronicle, who is anonymous in the text, identifies himself as a native of Languedoc, quoting at one point a memory of himself in the streets of Toulouse as a child. At some point he was probably associated with the Bishop of Toulouse's household, as he refers to having spoken personally to both Bishop Foulques of Toulouse and Bishop Guillem Peire of Albi. The earliest surviving manuscript of the chronicle names its author as Guillaume de Puylaurens in an incipit added by either the owner of the copyist of the manuscript and this attribution has been accepted by modern scholars of the work. The only problem has been locating the correct Guillaume de Puylaurens.Laurence Marvin in The Occitan War (2008)
The author of the chronicle is usually linked with the master Guillaume who was rector of the church of Puylaurens in the 1230s and 1240s and a notary to successive bishops of Toulouse who also worked with the Toulouse Inquisition. However, a master Guillaume was also chaplain to Raimond VII of Toulouse at around the same time, and there has been considerable debate about whether these two Guillaumes were, in fact, one and the same. Neither Duveroy nor Sibly and Sibly, the modern editors of the chronicle, have seen any difficulty with viewing Guillaume de Puylaurens as associated with both the bishops and the count of Toulouse; Sibly and Sibly comment that Raimond VII was reconciled to the Church and the French Crown after 1245 and had made some efforts against heresy. On the other hand, it is certainly the case that throughout his chronicle Guillaume showed himself firmly in favour of the crusade and entirely unsympathetic to those, including the counts of Toulouse, who opposed it. In this view, Guillaume's Toulousan origins did not give him any identification with the victims of the crusade. Dossat commented of Guillaume that he was 'a royalist writer ... Guillaume de Puylaurens represents the opinion of those who were easily reconciled to the loss of their independence [to the French Crown]', an impression of the author which sits uneasily with the idea that he was chaplain of any count of Toulouse, however chastened and reformed.
The debate about the notary and the chaplain in Toulouse in the 1240s has, however, obscured some problems with the identification of either of these figures as the author of the chronicle. Master Guillaume the notary was probably born in or before c. 1200 as, if he was a different person, would master Guillaume the chaplain of the count of Toulouse have been. The chronicle was probably composed in 1275/1276, which would place the author in his late seventies when it was written. It is no wonder that Sibly and Sibly conclude that he 'probably died at about this time'. While it is perfectly possible for master Guillaume to have lived to this age, it is an unlikely age to have begun such an ambitious and complex work.
In the chronicle, the author made great efforts to imply the authority of personal memory for everything which he related; as he said in his introduction, he would only relate 'those things which I have either seen or heard or have heard from the closest sources or have extrapolated from other writings left for posterity'. This echoed Pierre des Vaux's similar statement in the prologue to the Historia Albigensis, demonstrating how personal memory was seen, even in the later thirteenth century, as more reliable than the written sources on which the author would otherwise have been dependent. It was therefore important for the author to create the impression that he had a personal connection to all the events he described, and this extended even to the period long before the crusade. Although he cannot possibly have been an eyewitness to either St Bernard's preaching at Toulouse in 1145 or Henry of Marcy's attack on Lavaur in 1178, the description of both events is given a personal connection to the author and the implication that these were also based in personal recollection.
It is these connections which have been used to support the idea that the author of the chronicle was born in c. 1200. On Bernard of Clairvaux's preaching, the author related how St Bernard cursed the lords of Verfeil and commented that as a child (infans) he has seen the principal lord of the place, Isarn Neblat, then a cententarian, living in great poverty in Toulouse. Similarly, he described how he remembered people talking as a child about a heretic, Bernard Raimond the Arian, whom Henry of Marcy had converted back to orthodoxy and who had become a canon, and commented how this was 'a long time before the crusade came to Beziers'. However, it is not necessary to read either of these passages as confirming an early birth date for the author.
Isarn de Verfeil was still a lord of Verfeil in 1202, when he witnessed an agreement between the counts of Foix and Toulouse and it is most likely that he lost his lands as a result of the crusade. The author of the chronicle himself attributes the problems of Verfeil under Bernard's curse not only to weather and barrenness, but also to war. If Isarn was a young lord of Verfeil in 1145 and was one hundred years old when the author saw him as an infans, usually meaning a child under seven, this could have been as late as 1225 and is unlikely to have been earlier than 1215. In the same way, the passage on the 1178 attack on Lavaur attempts to connect the author to the events he describes but does not necessitate his birth in c. 1200. Sibly and Sibly have argued that this means that the author heard the gossip about Bernard Raimond the Arian as a child in c. 1204, not a very convincing explanation for the author's statement that this was a long time before the crusade. This comment is the last sentence of the entire passage and it is more likely that it refers to the events of 1178 and not simply to the author's memory of hearing about them; 1178 being more legitimately regarded than 1204 as a long time before 1209.
Bishop Foulques of Toulouse died in 1231 and Bishop Guilhem Peire of Albi in 1230. If the author of the chronicle was born c. 1210-1215, it is perfectly possible that he encountered them while attached to the episcopal household as a young man, possibly acquiring the 'thorough and privileged education in Church circles' that Sibly and Sibly argue the quality of his Latin indicates he must have received from an early age. As Duvernoy commented, the level of detail in the passages relating to Foulques in the last years of his episcopate imply that the author was connected to his household in 1228-30.
The references to master Guillaume the notary, who was hitherto active in episcopal and Inquisition circles, cease in 1254 and the records are then silent for almost twenty years. In 1273, however, a master Guillaume de Puylaurens was named as a witness for Aimery de Rouaix in a case against the royal authorities. The most likely explanation for this gap is that the master Guillaume who had been the notary to the bishops of Toulouse and possibly chaplain to Raimond VII of Toulouse died in c. 1255 and that another Guillaume, who unlike the first used de Puylaurens as his toponymic, was active in Toulouse in the 1270s and wrote the chronicle of the Albigensian crusade. In so doing, Guillaume went to great lengths to imply that he had witnessed the entire seventy years' war, but it is unlikely that he did so. While the claim to authenticity echoes that of the Historia Albigensis, Guillaume de Puylaurens' chronicle was not a contemporary account of the early years of the crusade. While his focus on Toulouse provides valuable details not contained in other sources, his account is that of a man of the later thirteenth century, looking back on events from before he was even born." (pp. 37-39)
"The last major source comes from William of Puylaurens, who did not witness the Occitan War and wrote at least a generation later than the other three authors. Though we have a name for him he never actually mentions one in his work, so the name we have may be a later addition. His name and background are actually more problematic than first appears, as there was a William of Puylaurens who was priest of the church of the same name during the mid-thirteenth century. He also may have been a notary in Toulouse, or a chaplain of Raimon VII, or perhaps all three. At certain points his writing suggests he knew the people he was talking about, as in his recounting of the battle of Muret. He states that the young Count Raimon related that he was not allowed to participate in the battle because of his age (he was about sixteen at the time), but observed it from the hills west of the battlefield. Since Raimon VII died in 1249 and William's chronicle goes to 1275, William would have been fairly old to have served the last Count of Toulouse and still be writing more than twenty-five years later. Still, it is not impossible to believe that the count's chaplain and the chronicler was one and the same person." (pp. 26-27)William of Puylaurens' bias
Jacques Maudale in The Albigensian Crusade (1967)
"... Guillaume de Puylaurens, a good Catholic, related to Bishop Foulques of Toulouse, but also a good patriot ..." (p. 91)Malcolm Barber in The Cathars (2000)
"William of Puylaurens, a cleric from Toulouse who offers an overview of events from a mid-thirteenth century perspective, even though a much less biased commentator than Peter, was equally provoked [by the heresies spreading from Lavaur]." (p. 34)W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (translators) in The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens (2003)
"William was unquestioningly opposed to heresy, and he was unswervingly loyal to the Catholic Church and especially to the bishops of Toulouse. He supported the Crusade and the efforts of the crusaders and later of the French Crown to extirpate heresy from the Midi, just as he supported the work of the early inquisitors. In his Prologue he blames the people, prelates and princes of the Midi for their neglect, which allowed heresy to become implanted in the South, and he regarded the Crusade, and all the destruction it brought, as the inevitable consequence.
Nevertheless, as will appear from our discussion later in this Introduction, he was no blind partisan. He can see the faults of the crusaders, including even Simon de Montfort, the great hero of the Crusade. He was clearly an intelligent man, able to appreciate the complexities of the events he describes without losing sight of his overall loyalties. He takes no pleasure in the warfare and disruption of these years, which he regrets; and the tone of his narrative is in marked contrast both the simplistic and naive support for the crusaders which characterises Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay's Historia, and to the pro-southern stance of the anonymous writer of the second part of the Chanson. Sometimes his partiality, and perhaps his devotion to Bishop Fulk of Toulouse in particular, leads him to take what we might see as a one-sided view, but in general he gives much more of a sense of critical detachment than the other contemporary narratives." (p. xvi)
"Overall therefore an impression emerges of a discerning and fair-minded man, inclined by nature to give a true rather than a distortedly partisan account. We have mentioned his high regard for Bishop Fulk, whom he frequently represents as a generous and compassionate man, and it is perhaps not too much to suggest that the Bishop served as his role model." (p.xxviii)William of Puylaurens' style
W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (translators) in The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens (2003)
"... William is no 'Dryasdust': the Chronicle, as the product of an intelligent and knowledgeable man, is also very readable in its own right." (p. xvi)
"Like very many writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries William had a good knowledge of Latin, and a wide vocabulary. However his prose does not flow freely. His style is frequently condensed and very tortuous, less straightforward than that of many of his contemporaries and often incapable of being rendered literally into English. William enjoys indulging in rhetoric -- especially when he is commenting on events rather than merely relating them." (p. xviii)William of Puylaurens' reliability
Jonathan Sumption in The Albigensian Crusade (1978)
"With Simon's strong hand removed, they [Amaury de Montfort's vassals] plundered and murdered at will, and according to William of Puylaurens publicly flaunted their concubines and ill-gotten luxuries. The exaggerations of this strait-laced notary must be treated as such, but they were certainly symptoms of a profound malaise in the crusading army." (p. 202)W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (translators) in The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens (2003)
"Much of the chronicle is based on a close knowledge of the people and events being described, which adds greatly to its importance." (p. xv)
"He himself undoubtedly witnessed many of the vents he describes and was closely connected with Bishop Fulk and Count Raymond VII of Toulouse. Taken together, this all means that he is greatly to be valued as a source." (p. xvi)
"Bearing in mind what we know of William's life it seems reasonable to suppose that many of the episodes which receive particular attention were those which he witnessed personally, or played a part in, or knew about from the testimony of eyewitnesses. This would apply to some of the earlier content of the Chronicle and to most of the content covering the period from, say, 1220 at least to the death of Raymond VII in 1249" (p. xxv)
"William's chronology is sometimes problematic. At times it can clearly be demonstrated that he is wrong (for instance over the question of which legate was in office when the Dominicans were appointed as inquisitors, ch. XLI, n. 49). ... At other times his ordering of events is confusing, as in his account of events in 1210-11 (ch. XVII) or in the mid-1220s (ch. XXXII).
The Chronicle differs very much in its general approach from the other two main narrative sources for the Albigensian Crusade (Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay (PVC) and the Chanson), but where the three accounts can be directly compared there is general agreement on factual matters: we tend to find differences in detail and presentation rather than of substance. It is possible that William may have been familiar with both PVC and the Chanson....
It is then appropriate to consider whether William's sincere Catholic beliefs, his loyalty to the Church, and his consequent dislike of heresy justify any strong reservations about his reliability. The basic answer is 'no', and here we may contrast the attitude of Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, who regarded anyone who opposed the Crusade as utterly evil, with that of William, whose approach is quite different and much more moderate, critical, and measured.
...
However, a close study of the Chronicle would not support a view that William in general allowed his faith or his loyalties to induce him to falsify or distort his record of events, inadvertently or otherwise. On the contrary, a strong impression emerges of an intelligent and fair-minded man, keen to give a true account ... and aware of the complexity of the Church's problems in the Midi." (pp. xxvi-xxvii)
Laurence Marvin in The Occitan War (2008)
"Even if the composer lived later than traditionally believed, or was actually more than one person, he or they provide many original details not available in the other major sources .... On most events William of Puylaurens is a valuable supplement, but obviously his account gets better the closer it draws to his own era. Therefore his greatest strength lies in events after 1218." (p. 27)
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