The story of the Albigensian Crusade is an emotional one. The tale of the Church's first crusade within Christendom, of the loss of Occitan independence and culture, of the burnings of accused heretics, and of the struggle to define Christianity itself is one which touches people in many ways. The story is, indeed, one of blood and faith and also has tenuous ties with issues of national independence and with popular historical conspiracy theories, so it is small wonder that it remains evocative. It is what one anonymous online commentator called "raw and powerful history". Popular historians tend to focus on creating descriptions particularly to appeal to the emotions of the popular audience. Academic historians, on the other hand, tend to shun any style of writing which conveys their own feelings about the topics they discuss. Nonetheless, I'd guess that behind the carefully distanced approach of many an academic historian, lies an emotional certainty about the Albigensian Crusade which drew them to the topic initially, and which informs and sustains their work on it.
I first read about the Albigensian Crusade on the Internet and the series of short articles and web pages I encountered gave me an idea of a vibrant Occitan people, a persecuting Roman Church, a secretive network of devout heretical holy men, a series of epic sieges and massacres, and an outcome which resulted in modern France and the Inquisition. I was drawn in because several of these things struck a chord within me. My first book on the Albigensian Crusade was Zoe Oldenbourg's "Massacre at Montsegur" -- a well-researched but wholly partisan popular history, which occasionally indulged in passionate rhetoric on behalf of its Cathar protagonists. Oldenbourg's was the first popular book on the "Cathars" translated into English, but many since then have followed the same course, focusing on the supposedly idyllic culture of the Languedoc, its Occitan troubadour poetry, its tolerant and progressive heretics, and the overwhelming cruelty of the genocidal wave of warfare, terror, and persecution which swept them away.
There is, however, another side to the story which can elicit emotional reactions just as strong. Much as some modern spiritual people identify with and see their beliefs reflected in the descriptions of the heretics, so also some modern Catholics empathize with and see their beliefs reflected in the descriptions of the medieval Church. To comfortably accommodate such a view, the Church's actions during and after the Albigensian Crusade must have been at least necessary, a forced reaction to a virulent and destructive rival church, the worst actions of the crusaders must not have been anticipated or endorsed by the church and these acts must not have been more brutal than those of their contemporaries, or alternatively the most famous atrocities of the war must have been exaggerated. After the smoke had cleared, a grave threat to humanity must have been brought under control, saints on the crusading side must have earned their beatifications, and the Church must have saved itself and the souls of those it had converted. To portray the story otherwise is to undermine the very nature of the story's protagonist -- an act which perverts everything which the story demonstrates.
It is tempting to trace the origins of these two views to the opposed partisanships of the Anonymous Continuator (of the Canso) and Peter des Vaux-de-Cernay (of the Historia), who portray many of these biases in their separate contemporary accounts of the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade. Those who identified with the lost Occitan culture of the Languedoc, or with the heretics who supposedly inhabited it, could find much to draw upon in the affecting poetry of the Canso. Similarly, the elements of a ready defense for the crusaders and the Church could be found in the Historia. It does not appear to be the case, however, that a continuous historical tradition emerged following either of these authors and continuing until the present day. The Albigensian Crusade was all but forgotten for many centuries until a revival of interest occurred among early modern historians. Many of these were particularly interested in describing the blameworthiness of the Catholic Church for its part in the persecution of "heretics" who were seen as early examples of the Protestants who were in conflict with the Catholic Church of the writer's own times. Fox's "Book of Martyrs" (1563) covered the "Persecution of the Albigenses" with a section on the history of the Albigensian Crusade. Later critics of the church followed in a similar vein. Voltaire's "On the Crusade against the People of the Languedoc" (1756) continued the attack on the Church, discussing largely the same events. These early writers spent little time considering the theology of the "Albigenses" or the "People of the Languedoc" and never called them "Cathars". Their focus was on using the persecution of these people several centuries earlier as a damning condemnation of the repressive tendencies of the Catholic church, past and present. Naturally, those who felt drawn to the opposite side of the argument also felt the need to put their own views forward. An apologist version of the Church's role developed in response. This effort, by contrast, did need to pay attention to the theology of the crusade's victims in order to vilify it. Today, the Catholic Encyclopedia has this to say about the need to extirpate Catharism:
"But the worst danger was that the triumph of the heretical principles meant the extinction of the human race. This annihilation was the direct consequence of the Catharist doctrine ...." (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03435a.htm)Against such a danger, what measures might not be taken? And to someone who believes that the human race faced the possibility of extinction in 1209 due to the rise of a Cathar church in Europe, what atrocities might not appear to have been justified by the necessities of the crisis?
Both professional and amateur historians have preconceived notions which form the unspoken basis of their view of history. These biases create the background setting in which historical tales are told. Like novelists, historians inevitably convey information in constructed stories. Real events do not have protagonists or antagonists, beginnings or endings, plots, themes, or dramatic modes. Stories do. When historians turn events into stories, they must make decisions similar to those of a novelist. Regardless of the historian's professionalism, feelings of impartiality, or attention to detail, his own ideas about the setting of the story and the nature of the characters within it will inform all of the decisions which go into crafting his story, from whom he chooses as his protagonist, to when that story draws to a close, to what elements of the story are possible or impossible, likely or unlikely. In an undergraduate history course, I once heard students discussing the authenticity of a ninth century monastic document. In response to the allegation that the monks had forged a document which enhanced their rights and privileges, one of the students retorted: "I just don't think that holy men would lie like that." The integrity and character of medieval monks and their literary productions were already established in this student's mind. The document under discussion now just had to be fit into that world.
While that example relies on the forthright admission of an as-yet-untrained historian, serious scholars are by no means exempt from telling stories in that same world. Consider the simple assertion that monks of the Dominican Order, shortly after the time of Dominic's death, invented and propagated a largely false historical narrative about their founder. Christine Ames, an academic historian, demonstrates this in her fascinating book Righteous Persecution. But she expends considerable effort to avoid suggesting that these monks lied:
"We see among these Dominicans a different engagement of the past, of history, with time and with truth. The form and content of the past itself was governed by -- and vulnerable before -- the very transcendent, divine truth promoted by inquisition. Details were handmaidens to Christian truth generally and the truth of combat against heresy specifically. In this methodology of obedience, the coordinates and premises of the universal ecclesia predominated, and a contextualized idea of Christian soteriological temporality and eternality, and of the order's 'time' against heresy, retroactively revised the text of the past." (p. 96)
Whether we are ready to believe that monks never lied about the past, lied frequently about the past, or formed "a different engagement of the past ... with truth" informs how we read the texts in which monks made claims about that past. Where more than one source exists and the information is incompatible, these sorts of unstated preconceptions inform our choices in establishing reliability. Where the source in unclear (and most medieval documents are wonderfully unclear) it is a preconceived world from which we fill in the details and make our interpretations.
There was a time, perhaps fifty or a hundred years ago, when the preconceived world of crusading stories was fairly clear to a Western audience. This was the world of chivalrous knights battling the infidels for faith and honour, winning salvation in the conquest of Jerusalem. In these stories, crusading warriors like Richard the Lionheart were heroes and their enemies were "Musselmen" antagonists, the best of whom, like Saladin, could darkly reflect the chivalry of their Christian rivals. The Albigensian crusade has never granted such an archetypal aura of sanctity to its crusaders. Their actions are, at best, excused. The crusade's opponents, meanwhile, no longer engender the horror once shown for heretics, schismatics and witches. Toleration of different religions and different forms of the Christian religion is now nearly universally acclaimed as a virtue and the persecution of religious dissidents condemned. This modern view recasts the villainous heretics of the medieval text into the persecuted protagonists of a modern story about the past, and their sanctified persecutors as antagonists -- bloodthirsty warriors and sadistic inquisitors. It is this form of the story which dominates current popular history about the "Cathars" and which also underlies the beliefs of some of the most respected scholars on medieval heresy. Just as much as with the Catholic construction mentioned earlier, to undermine the nature of the story's protagonist is to pervert the moral coherence of the story itself and is liable to cause offense.
Nowhere was that expressed more clearly than in a recent heated argument between two great scholars of medieval heresy, Peter Biller and R. I. Moore. Biller had just attended Moore's lecture on "Catharism" at the University of Nottingham and wrote a scathing review of Moore's most recent book, "The War on Heresy". (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1546) For those not familiar with Moore's latest work, it includes a contentious re-evaluation of the existence of the "Cathar" heresy as an organized, identifiable religious movement prior to the Albigensian Crusade. Moore's contention is that no such organization existed, except in the minds of its persecutors. There were religious reformers and dissidents with varying amounts of official approval, some of whom were certainly heretics, but there is no unassailable evidence for the existence of the "Cathars" until after the Albigensian Crusade ended. Those persecuted as heretics in the preceding century were, in Moore's view, separate groups of people who shared no common doctrine other than perhaps shared criticisms of the church, but who were painted with the same brush by a series of politically-motivated authors. The term "Cathar" itself is an anachronism applied to these separate groups which gives them the illusion of all being members of a coherent faith emerging in different places and times.
Moore has been writing about the persecution of heretics for a long time without previously earning Biller's vitriol for his earlier works. Moore's "The Formation of a Persecuting Society" even seems to achieve some praise and respect in Biller's commentary. As he later admits, Biller has a hatred of medieval persecution as embodied by the figure of the inquisitor, and feels that he shares this hatred with Moore. While Moore had given more consideration to the persecutors in his previous work, he had already challenged some of the accepted ideas about "Cathars" accepted by traditional historians like Biller. For instance, he rejected the idea of Catharism spreading from the Greek East, as some medieval authors claimed and as most historians had usually accepted. That was not enough to stir up the kind of enmity belied by this review. The fundamental story of the "Cathars" remains intact with or without a Balkan origin. At the heart of Biller's anger seems to be the new deconstruction of the nature of the protagonists of his own accepted story.
"I am puzzled about the difference between my hatred of medieval persecution and Moore’s. My hatred does not have to be helped by the notion that whenever an inquisitor ordered someone to be burnt to death his own imagination had conjured up what that person believed. I can see the moral calculus at work, that persecutors who get it wrong are even worse than persecutors that get it right: so add that to their indictment. But the cost is high: denying to men and women in 13th-century Languedoc what they believed in when they chose an agonising death."
These two historians might feel similarly towards the persecuting antagonists of their stories, give or take some moral calculus, but if you take away the protagonist's motivation by "denying ... what they believed in" then you must tell a fundamentally different story. Biller's protagonists are the "men and women in 13th-century Languedoc" who "chose an agonising death" because of "what they believed". If you tell a story about these same people where they had no coherent common beliefs, then you rob the plot of its main reason for action and unfairly appropriate the story's protagonists for a conflicting narrative. Faced with such an aberrant refashioning of a story in which he has an emotional investment, Biller exceeds the usual polite disagreement of academics in this field and his attack on Moore is revealing. Biller clearly implies throughout his criticism that Moore has been quite selective in his use of evidence in order to construct an argument which will lead to his presupposed conclusion. Overall his criticism is one of biased methodology, as if history were a science with an experimental method instead of an exercise in storytelling. If Moore's results from his empirical observations of historical evidence differ from his own, then flawed methodology must be the cause. When you test falsifiable hypotheses, you cannot have two opposite conclusions fairly drawn from the same evidence. Therefore, Moore must have introduced a bias which ignored evidence in order to draw a faulty conclusion.
The problem is that historians are not engaged in a work to which the scientific method easily applies. As Moore's response demonstrates, he and Biller are not working with different sets of evidence, nor has Moore purposefully ignored part of the evidence in order to draw his conclusions. Rather, Moore has constructed an alternative and conflicting narrative featuring a substantially different heretical protagonist from the same building blocks of historical evidence that Biller and others had previously used to construct their own stories. For someone whose entrenched feelings on what this story should be and what it should mean are as strong as Biller's, that deviance from the established narrative could only be the result of sinister motivation -- Moore's manipulation of the "moral calculus" to make the antagonists "even worse" than they already were.
It is strikingly honest of Biller to acknowledge that "moral calculus" informs historians' portrayals of the rights and wrongs performed by their characters. It is willful blindness, however, to assert that this applies only to Moore and his named confederates, Mark Pegg and the unfortunate history student Hilbert Chiu whose Master's thesis has earned such an unusual excoriation. Every author who writes about the Albigensian crusade makes decisions about how much emphasis to place on different events and it would be a poor historian who could not read his own entries on the tables of the "moral calculus" of the story.
To take just a single, easily accesible example from the Albigensian crusade, consider the massacre at Beziers. In a previous post, I examined how different historians came to different conclusions from the same evidence about the famous command "Kill them all! God will know his own" that was said to precede that massacre. But when it comes to the massacre itself, perhaps the best known atrocity of the Albigensian crusade, historians can quickly be divided into those who seek to enhance or maximize the severity of the event and those who reduce or minimize it.
Zoe Oldenbourg and Laurence Marvin might serve as examples of the two categories, although neither is extreme in their positions. Both have read the same primary sources about the massacre, both have noted that Peter des Vaux-de-Cernay claims the unrealistic number of 7,000 murdered in one church alone, both are aware that the legates claimed 20,000 total killed and were explicit that the crusaders had spared neither men nor women, old or young. Their tellings of the story, however, diverge when they fill in details from their own assumptions or imaginations.
Oldenbourg, noted above for her passionate book Massacre at Montsegur, summed it up this way:
"The doors of the churches were forced open, the place of refuge was revealed as a trap. All inside were slaughtered wholesale -- women, invalids, babies, and priests, the latter clasping the Chalice or holding aloft a crucifix. Pierre des Vaux de Cernay asserts that in the Church of the Madeleine alone seven thousand persons were done to death. This figure is obviously an exaggeration, since the church could not possibly hold so many; but the exact numbers are unimportant. What all the evidence confirms is that this was a general massacre, and that no individuals were spared; if one or two did manage to escape, they owed their lives either to speedy flight or some other accident quite independent of their conqueror's will." (p. 116)
Marvin, in his military history The Occitan War, warns his readers that after the fall of Beziers "the story tends to get inflammatory". After rejecting the possibility of the legate's utterance of the famous "Kill them all!" command, he turns to minimizing the massacre:
"What has proven equally controversial is the scale of the massacre inside the city. The sources all agree that a mass killing took place, but modern commentators have had trouble analyzing the sources to come up with a realistic number for those who died. One prominent scholar has simply opted for complete annihilation of the city. The number killed in the sack reported by the legates, 'almost 20,000' ... is by any stretch of the imagination more than the entire population of Beziers, since the city probably had fewer than the 14,500 inhabitants reported in the first reliable population figures for it more than a century after 1209. Peter Vaux-de-Cernay estimated that 7,000 people died in once church alone, La Madeleine. The structure of La Madeleine is still largely extant, and many observers including myself have concluded that the church is simply not large enough to accommodate that many people, even terror-stricken people packed in like cordwood.
Fire may have caused the death of thousands. Both William of Tudela and Peter Vaux-de-Cernay reported that the crusaders, or more specifically the ribaldi, set fire to the city. Based on other pre-modern fires, however, such as those in Constantinople in 1203-4 and in London in 1666, conflagrations rarely caused many deaths relative to the total population. In these fires, which took place in cities with populations of 200,000 or more, no more than a few hundred died. For example, in the second fire of Constantinople on 19 and 20 August 1203, when the inhabitants did not have warning and large sections of the city were destroyed, fewer than 200 people were killed as a direct result of fire.
There is also the unsavory possibility that hundreds or thousands died as the result of deliberate murder while they ran for their lives, but how many died after the city fell cannot be known. As bad as the destruction was in the city, clearly most of Beziers's population survived, since the castrum continued to function as a major population center. Less than a month after the sack, the new Viscount of Beziers, Simon of Montfort, gave the Cistercians a house (domus) which had belonged to a Cathar, suggesting that at least some private residences escaped destruction." (pp. 43-5)
Marvin's adjustment of variables in the moral calculus is astonishing. The population of Beziers before the massacre must have been smaller than it was after the massacre and an ensuing century. Since Peter des Vaux-de-Cernay's figure of 7,000 people killed taking refuge in the church of La Madeleine is certainly inaccurate, the fact that crusaders were massacring civilians inside the church is passed by. In fact, even the idea that people were killed while they ran for their lives is merely an "unsavory possibility". Few would have died in the fire which ravaged the city, since few people died in two other city fires, ignoring that those cities were not under siege. And how bad could things really have been if there was a house left over which could be given to the Cistercians?
Marvin is clearly uncomfortable with the murder of civilians by members of the crusading army and Oldenbourg, just as clearly, thrives on it. It is, indeed, rather "inflammatory" stuff, but efforts to insert graphic images of priests being cut down as they hold their crucifixes aloft, or efforts to reframe the massacre as an unfortunate fire with unsavory possibilities tell us more about the preconceptions and storytelling decisions of the historians than they do about events themselves.
The moral calculus of the Albigensian Crusade, the evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of the war itself, of the massacres, of the burnings, of the inquisitions, should not be a game played between the lines of historical writing. This is the grain of truth in Biller's misguided attempt to call out R. I. Moore for constructing a skewed perspective of 13th century heretics in order to manipulate the moral calculus of the persecution. Whatever our opinions on it, the feelings the Crusade arouses are what drew many of us to first read more about the subject. These feelings inform our reading of texts and our understanding of the characters who wrote them. These feelings are what drive so many scholars to continue to argue about the details. They are what bring students into history classes about heresy and what bring readers into the Cathar section of esoteric bookshops. They are why we will talk about the massacres, such as Beziers and Lavaur, "till the end of the world."
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