The Moral Calculus of the Albigensian Crusade

"Then there was so great a killing that I believe it will be talked of till the end of the world," wrote William of Tudela in Laisse 68 of the Canso as he related the fall of Lavaur to the crusaders in 1211.  Over nine centuries later, we are still talking of the massacres of the Albigensian Crusade.  The terrible stories of that time and place are still being retold again and again, as modern people struggle to explain what happened and, often, to justify it in moral terms.  "My lords," continued William, "it is right that they should be punished and suffer so terribly, for as I myself have both seen and heard, they refuse to obey the clerks and crusaders, they will not do as they are commanded."  In the twenty-first century, unlike in the thirteenth, this refusal to obey seems insufficient justification for the infliction of such terrible suffering and punishment.  A better moral defense is needed for the crusaders or else the memories of their victims will haunt us from across the centuries.

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."

Malcolm Barber's "The Albigensian Crusades: Wars Like Any Other?"

My next post will be on the moral dimensions of the Albigensian Crusade.  Historians debate the extent of the atrocities which occurred during the crusade, whether those atrocities were one-sided or committed by both parties, and whether they were justified by the standards of medieval warfare or by any special circumstances particular to the crusade. 

While I will focus on the treatment by historians of these seeming atrocities and historiographical efforts to emphasize or minimize them, it is always best to start with an examination of the primary sources and their descriptions of and reactions to the events in question.  An excellent starting point on this topic is Malcolm Barber's essay "The Albigensian Crusades: Wars Like Any Other?"  The essay is hosted on the tremendously useful deremilitari.org website.

http://deremilitari.org/2013/09/the-albigensian-crusades-wars-like-any-other/

R. I. Moore's public lectures at University of Nottingham

A LECTURE BY R. I. MOORE

On January 29th, I attended two public talks by R. I. Moore on the subject of the "Cathars". The second of these was the main event of the evening and was videotaped, so I'm hoping it will enter the public domain soon, where I can link to it. Both talks drew heavily on material presented in Moore's latest book "The War On Heresy". For now, I thought I'd mention the first of the talks, which had a much narrower focus. The hour and a half which Moore devoted to the subject was still only enough for a brief summary of the main ideas, but I'll present what I recall of them here as they bear on one of the main subjects of this blog -- the historiography of medieval heresy.

The lecture was about one very important primary source on 12th century heresy, Eberwin of Steinfeld's letter to Bernard of Clairvaux. This one document is both the first and the most comprehensive description of the medieval heresy or heresies that traditional historians would term 'Catharism'. Moore began with a handout for our perusal, which consisted of the primary source itself, in the original Latin and with an English translation. The latter follows along with Moore's introductory comments from the handout.

THE PRIMARY SOURCE

Eberwin of Steinfeld and heresy in Cologne

This letter from Eberwin, provost of the Augustinian canons of Steinfeld, near Cologne, to Bernard of Clarivaux, is the fullest description we have of a trial of heretics in the twelfth-century, and has been central to every account of the subject: see, e.g. Lambert, MEdieval Heresy (3 ed), 62 - 4, Moore, Origins of European Dissent, 168 - 72 -- but compare Moore, The War on Heresy, 131 - 40.  The difference, which is the focus of this master class, is the impact of Uwe Brunn, Des contestaires aux 'Cathares'.  Discours de reforme et de propagande antiheretique dans les pays du Rhin et de la Meuse avant l'inquisition (Paris 2006), especially at 124 - 60.  The translation, slightly amended, is from R. I Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy, 74 - 8 and the text from Migne, Patrologia Latina 182, col. 676 - 80.


To his reverend lord and father, Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, Eberwin humble minister of Steinfeld,

I rejoice in your eloquence as though I have found great treasure.  You remind us so forcefully of the goodness and sweetness of God in all your speech and writings, especially on the song of the groom and his bride, of Christ and the Church, that we can truthfully say, with that same groom, 'thou hast kept the good wine until now'.  (John 2.10)  He has appointed you to be our butler for this precious wine; do not cease to pour it, do not even pause, for you will not be able to empty the jug.  Weakness will not excuse you, holy father: in this task piety is more important than bodily strength.  Nor can you plead that you are busy, for I could propose nothing more necessary than this to our common work.

You can give us drink from so many jugs.  You have poured enough from the first, and it has made us wise and strong against the teaching and charges of the scribes and pharisees; from the second against the arguments and missiles of the gentiles; from the third, against the subtle deceptions of heretics; from the fourth, against false Christians; from the fifth against the heretics who will come at the end of time, as the Holy Spirit manifestly said through the apostle, 'in the latest times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy and having their conscience seared, forbidding to marry, to abstain from meats which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving.' (1 Tim 4.1)  Let the faithful drink from your sixth jug for strength against him who will surely be revealed in that revolt from the faithith as 'the man of sin, the son of perdition who opposeth and is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshipped ... whose coming is according to the second coming of Satan, in all power and signs and lying wonders and in all seduction of iniquity.' (2 Thess. 3.4)  After that, when the sons of men have been intoxicated by the richness of the Lord God and the torrent of his love, the seventh draught will not be necessary.

Good father, you have poured enough for us all for our correction, edification and elevation when we are setting out, while we are on the journey and when we have completed it, from your fourth jug, enough to avail until the end of time against the indifference and wickedness of false brethren.  Now is the time for you to draw from your fifth jug, and let fly against the new heretics who are rising on every side from the depths of the abyss, in almost every church, as though their leader is released and the day of the Lord is at hand.  There is a verse in the wedding song of the love of Christ and the Church which you must deal with, as you yourself have reminded me, 'Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines', (Song of Solomon 2.15) which is appropriate to this problem and calls for your fifth jug.  Therefore, father, I appeal to you to distinguish all the elements of their heresy which come to your notice, and produce arguments and authorities from our own faith to destroy them.

A group of heretics was found recently in these parts, near Cologne, some of whom readily returned to the Church.  Two of them, however, one who was called their bishop, with his companion, defied us at a meeting of clerks and laymen, at which the archbishop and some great nobles were present, and defended their heresy with quotations from Christ and the apostles.  When they saw that they were making no headway they asked for a day to be fixed on which they might bring forward men from among their followers who were expert in their faith.  They promised that if they saw their masters refuted in argument they would be willing to rejoin the Church, though otherwise they would rather die than abandon their views.  After this they were urged for three days to come to their senses, and refused, and then were seized by the people, who were moved by great enthusiasm, (though we were against it), put to the stake and burnt.  The amazing thing was that they entered and endured the torment of the flames not merely courageously, but joyfully.  I wish I were with you, holy father, to hear you explain how such great fortitude comes to these tools of the devil in their heresy as is seldom found among the truly religious in the faith of Christ.

This is their heresy.  They claim that they are the true Church, because the heritage of Christ survives in them alone.  They are the true followers of the apostolic life, because they do not seek the things of this world, houses or land or any other sort of property, just as Christ did not seek them, and did not allow his disciples to possess them.

They said to us, 'You join house to house and field to field, and seek the things of this world.  Those who are thought most perfect among you, monks and canons regular, possess things not individually, but in common: nonetheless they do possess all of these things.'  Of themselves they said:

We are the poor of Christ, wandering men; fleeing from city to city like sheep in the midst of wolves we suffer persecution with the apostles and martyrs.  We lead a holy life, fasting, abstaining, working and praying by day and night, seeking in these things the necessities of life.  We live thus because we are not of this world' you are lovers of the world, at peace with the world because you are worldly.  False apostles have corrupted the word of Christ for their own ends, and have led you and your fathers astray.  We and our fathers, the successors of the apostles, have remained in the grace of Christ, and will remain so until the end of the world.  To distinguish between you and us, Christ said, 'By their fruits you shall know them.' (Matt. 7.16)  Our fruits are the following in the footsteps of Christ.

In their diet they prohibit all milk, and anything which is made from it, and anything which is produced by procreation.  This is what they told us about their way of life.  They wear veils at mass, but openly confessed to us that when they eat daily after the manner of Christ and the apostles they consecrate their food and drink as the body and blood of Christ, by reciting the Lord's Prayer, to be nourished with the body and limbs of Christ.  They told us that they do not believe in the truth of the sacraments, which are only shadowy human tradition.  They claimed that they baptize, and had been baptized, not merely in water but in the fire and the spirit, adducing the evidence of John the Baptist who, after baptizing in water , said of Christ, 'He shall baptize you in the Holy Ghost and in fire', (Matt. 3.11) and 'I baptize in water, but there hath stood a greater in the midst of you whom you know not', (John 1.26) as though he would baptize by some other medium than water.  They tried to argue that such baptism should be performed by the laying on of hands, by referring to Luke's description of Paul's baptism, in the Acts of the Apostles, which at Christ's command he received from Ananias, where there is no mention of water, but only of the laying on of hands.  They take whatever references to the laying on of hands are found in the Acts of the Apostles or the Epistles of Paul as references to baptism.  Anyone who is baptized among them in this way is called electus, and has power to baptize others who are worthy of it, and to consecrate the body and blood of Christ at his table.  But first he must be received by the laying on of hands from among those whom they call auditores into the credentes; he may then be present at their prayers until he has proved himself, when they make him an electus.  They care nothing for our baptism.  They condemn marriage, but I could not discover the reason for this from them, either because they dared not tell it, or (more likely) because they did not know it.

There are other heretics in our area who are always quarrelling with these people.  Indeed it was through their perpetual wrangling and discord that we discovered them.  They hold that the body of Christ is not made on the altar because none of the priests of the Church has been consecrated.  They say that the apostolic dignity has been corrupted by involvement in secular affairs, and the throne of St Peter by failing to fight for God as Peter did, has deprived itself of the power of consecration which was given to Peter.  Since the Church no longer has that power, the archbishops who live in a worldly manner within the Church cannot receive it and consecrate others.  They cite in support of their argument the words of Christ, 'The scribes and Pharisees have sitten on the chair of Moses; whatsoever they shall say to you observe and do' (Matt. 23, 2-3), as though the power of speaking and preaching was conferred by this and nothing else.  Thus they empty the church of priests, and condemn the sacraments, except for baptism; even that must be for adult, and they say that it is conferred by Christ and not by the minister of the sacraments.  On the baptism of children they take their view from the words of the evangelist, 'He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.' (Mark 16.16)  They hold that all marriage is fornication, unless it is between two virgins, both the man and the woman, citing the words of the Lord when he replied to the pharisees, 'What God hath joined together let no man put asunder,' (Matt 19.6) as though God joins such people in the manner of the first men, because the Lord said to the same opponents against their argument for divorce, 'From the beginning it was not so,' and, in the same place, 'He that shall marry her that is put away committeth adultery,' (Matt 19.9) and, in the apostle, 'Marriage honourable in all, and the bed undefiled'.  (Hebrews 13.4)

They do not believe in the intercession of saints, and hold that fasts and other penances which are undertaken because of sin are unnecessary, because whenever the sinner repents all his sins will be forgiven.  They call all observances of the Church which are not laid down by Christ or by the apostles after him superstitions.  They will not admit the existence of the fires of purgatory, because when the soul leaves the body it passes at once either to eternal rest or eternal punishment, according to the words of Solomon, 'If the tree falls to the south or to the north, in what place soever it shall fall there shall it be.' (Eccles. 11.13)  Consequently they condemn the prayers and offerings of the faithful for the dead.

I appeal to you, holy father, to awaken your vigilance against this many-headed evil, and direct your pen against these beasts of prey.  Do not reply that the Tower of David to which we flee is already adequately provided with bulwarks, that a thousand shields hang from its walls, and that it is furnished with every weapon for the valiant.  We want those weapons to be collected together by your labour, on behalf of us simpler and slower people, so that they will be the fitter to track down these monsters, and the more effective in resisting them.  You should know that the heretics who returned to the Church told us that they have a great multitude of adherents all over the world, including many of our own clerks and monks.  Those who were burnt told us while they were defending themselves that their heresy had been hidden until now ever since the time of the martyrs, and persisted in Greece and other lands, and these are the heretics who call themselves apostles and have their own pope.  The other lot deny our pope, but at least do not claim to have another one instead.  These apostles of Satan have women among them who are -- so they say -- chaste, widows or virgins, or their wives, both among the credentes and among the electi, alleging that they follow the apostles who permitted them to have women among them.

Farewell in the Lord.

ANALYSIS OF THE PRIMARY SOURCE

After giving his audience a chance to read this text, Professor Moore solicited reactions and questions from the audience and thereby discussed some of the salient points of the letter. Although I cannot do justice to this part of his talk with a summary, I'll try to reiterate some key points from his lecture, his book and my own reading. I will not make a clear distinction here between those ideas which he presented in his talk and those which I have inserted into the discussion, save to say that I'm sure any true insights belong to Moore and any errors to me.

It was written in around 1147 and addressed to Bernard of Clairvaux who was, at the time, one of the most pre-eminent and powerful men in the Church. Nothing else by its author, Eberwin of Steinfeld, has survived and Bernard's answer is not known. No other sources describe these heretics, the meeting at which they defended their views, or the burning. Nonetheless, many historians have used Eberwin's letter to trace the development of a distinct heretical tradition (or even an organized heretical church) which can be termed "Cathar". That label, in fact, contributes to a sort of circular reasoning fallacy. If Eberwin's heretics, to whom he never gives any kind of title, are "Cathars" and the heretics of the Languedoc, who were also never called "Cathars" at the time of the Albigensian Crusade, are also "Cathars" then any similarities between the two groups of described heretics is a common trait of "Cathars", thus showing the continuity of "Cathar" belief and practice between the locations and times presented in the sources.

The traditional analysis of this text therefore focuses on the beliefs and practices of the heretics described by Eberwin and identifies those which are the same or similar to beliefs and practices described in other texts about other groups of heretics, in order to demonstrate a historical connection between them. For example, the vegetarianism of Eberwin's heretics ("in their diet they prohibit all milk and anything which is made from it, and anything which is produced by procreation") has been linked to the heretics of the Languedoc seventy years later, about whom Peter des Vaux-de-Cernay said that they "renounced meat, eggs and cheese". Other traits which appear in Eberwin's description, such as the hierarchical ranks of "electi," "auditores," and "credentes" have been linked to heretics described by Byzantine authors, even if those authors only described two ranks -- "perfecti" and "credentes". This type of reading of the text allows for a great deal of loosely-reasoned identification and has allowed the "Cathars" to be seen as directly linked to pre-Christian Gnostics, early Chistians before the formation of the Catholic Church, various early heretics in the first centuries after the formation of the Catholic Church, early medieval Byzantine heretics, contemporary Italian and German heretics, and as precursors to the Protestant movement, or the modern Evangelical movement. If all that is needed is a shared idea, or even a fairly similar idea, to demonstrate a historical connection between groups of people separated by time and geography, then it is easy to begin to believe, as contemporary monks did, that all heretics were part of a conspiracy dating back to biblical times. It is, however, necessary for historians to discount these authors' further belief that this conspiracy worshiped the Devil and was a sure sign that the end times were imminent in the 12th or 13th century as mere monastic fantasy.


R. I. Moore has turned away from this traditional view of history and used this first evidence of "Cathar" heresy in the west to show how our reading of texts about heresy can be informed by context. The crucial question, Moore stressed, which historians did not really address until the 1990s was "Who was Eberwin of Steinfeld?" Moore, building on the work of Uwe Brunn, then painted a picture of Catholicism in Europe in the early 12th century, and of Eberwin's place in it.

SOME CONTEXT ABOUT THE 12th CENTURY CHURCH

At the end of the 11th century, Pope Gregory VII had undertaken a serious reform of the church and the first effort to clearly define and enforce its rules and hierarchy throughout Christendom. He had attempted to stop the selling of religious offices, wrest control over appointments from secular powers, prevent clergy from taking wives and having children, and institute various other reforms with greater or lesser success. Often resisted by the powerful bishops and archbishops, Gregory set the precedent of using charismatic preachers and monastic orders as the spearheads of his local reform movements and when later reformers addressed the same problems after his pontificate, they tended to use the same types of people.

Gregory's reforms had a profound impact on the Church and on Christendom, but the Catholic Church in the first part of the 12th century had only recently begun to resemble the organized hierarchy that we are more familiar with today. Nearly every papal election was contested, often militarily, and most popes had rival "anti-popes" who excommunicated them and vice versa. Deciding which claimant was legitimate was no easy matter -- some of those now seen as the "anti-popes" ruled from St. Peter's throne in Rome while their rivals, now seen as the "popes" endured their pontificate in exile. In most of Europe, monarchs and the nobility controlled the investiture of bishops and abbots and the Holy Roman Emperor contested that he had the ability to do so for the Papal See itself.

In a time of such uncertainty and schism in the Church's hierarchy, one could not be certain that any particular pope would maintain his authority against his rivals. Papal approvals and condemnations, therefore, could only be as strong as the perceived supremacy of the pope over other claimants to the Holy See. Furthermore, popes around this time frequently died after only a brief term in office, meaning that an individual or an order which did not find approval from Rome could expect to find another opportunity to gain favour within a few years. Although nominally imbued with supreme authority, no pope in this time period succeeded in wielding it. Even within Rome, several popes found themselves stymied by the hostile power of established political families and more than one ended up driven out of Rome by angry mobs. With papal power in such disarray, bishops and abbots in the rest of Europe often ruled their dioceses and monasteries as if they were independent dominions. In some cases, they essentially were. Where local aristocracy were free to appoint members of their own families as heads of the Church in their areas, Church lands and benefices could be expected to be run for the benefit of those aristocracies. Where Church offices could be passed down to the sons of Church officers, or even sold off without higher approval, those offices tended to feel no particular loyalty to the nominal authority of one or more far-off Supreme Pontiffs.

This environment was, indeed, ripe for reform and it was not just Pope Gregory and his successors who acted on that need. Popular resentment of the corruption of the Church was frequently nurtured and expressed by those whose mandates as reformers were less clearly established. Some lay reformers were given permission by sympathetic bishops to preach in their dioceses. Some drew their authority from being followers of those who had official approval. Some had had papal approval at one point or were in hopes of receiving it at some point in the future. Some felt that they needed no external approval and drew their authority from the Scriptures or, at least, from their own understanding of the Scriptures. Among these reformers, there may have been a great deal of disparity in beliefs. The majority were never accused of any heresy and in the absence of such an accusation there are almost no records of what preachers taught or what ordinary people believed. To a great extent, the only records of people's beliefs which have come down to us exist in the context of heresy accusations. We are thus ill-equipped to gauge the possibly extremely heterogeneous beliefs of large proportions of the population of Europe and the extent to which communities accused of being 'heretical' were, in fact, different from their unaccused neighbours.


Bernard of Clairvaux was the best-known preacher of his age, one of the founders of the powerful Cistercian order, and a powerful force throughout the church. His friend and, much later, fellow saint Norbert of Xanten was also a well-connected and charismatic preacher, but was unaligned with any order as prestigious as the Cistercians. Norbert was one of the many rabble-rousers of his day who adopted an apostolic life of stark contrast to the wealth and power of the church authorities. He practiced asceticism so stringent that his first three followers died of starvation or exposure while accompanying him. Dressed in animal skins and working miracles, he traveled around Europe spreading his message and proving to be thorn in the side of the local church establishment, whom he criticized. Although he angered many in the Church with his outspoken attacks and opposition to established authority, he was well-connected and couldn't be easily removed. He was denounced by the canons of his home town of Xanten but traveled to Rome where he received permission to preach directly from Pope Gelasius II.

A few years later, the following Pope, Calixtus II, found that Norbert's anti-clerical rhetoric and his growing following were still causing trouble and commanded him to settle down and found a stable, religious house for his followers. Norbert did so at Premontre, and the members of his new order were called Premonstratensians. Norbert attempted to found an order which would own no property and live a genuinely austere life. Five years after its founding, the growing order was formally approved by another new Pope, Honorious II. The effort at quieting the fiery Norbert was unsuccessful, however, and the following year Honorious tried another tactic -- he appointed Norbert as Archbishop of Magdeburg, possibly in the hope that the troublesome preacher would find martyrdom there. He nearly did, surviving a number of assassination attempts as he brought his brand of stern reform to the border between the Holy Roman Empire and the lands of the Slavic peoples. When Honorious died a few years later, yet another schism split the Church (and Europe) as Innocent II and Anacletus II emerged as rival claimants for the papacy. Norbert and Bernard were heavily involved on the side of Innocent II and Norbert is credited for convincing the Holy Roman Emperor, Lothair, to march on Rome and evict Anacletus, securing the papacy for Innocent by force of arms in the third year of his pontificate.

Norbert died the next year, in 1134, and the nascent Premonstratensian order he left behind him was as wrought with strife and schism as the rest of Christendom. In the area around Cologne, where some of the first Premonstratensian houses had been settled, Archbishop Frederick was sympathetic to Norbert's attempts at clerical reform, but not his harsh kind of extremism. The Archbishop of Cologne was appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor and was the secular ruler of the city as well as the spiritual head of its diocese. Eager for members of the church whom he could use in an attempt at sparking reform in the Rhineland, Frederick conferred on the Premonstratensians duties such as parish service, baptism, and confession, along with the churches, tithes, and lands which provided material support for those services. Needless to say, these duties and the remuneration from them were taken from existing churchmen who were, presumably, in need of reform. In return, the German Premonstratensians were to use this backing to undertake their reform work. The acceptance of these lands and monies was a clear break with Norbert of Xanten's vision of the order and it caused a split. Those who stayed within the order accepted compromises and became, at least partly, part of the system against which their founder had preached. Those who left attempted to preserve the apostolic example of asceticism in their lives, but lacked any official mandate or acceptance for their religious way of life.

Other changes within the Church assailed the new order, particularly on the topic of women. Norbert had both men and women in his following and, indeed, many were married couples who undertook a religious life together. The first Premonstratensian houses were all of mixed gender. Indeed, it is quite possible that many early Cistercian houses were mixed as well at the start of the 12th century. By the 1130s, the Church had shifted strongly away from according any significant role to women in its organization and no one was more vociferously opposed to women than Bernard of Clairvaux. The mixed houses were broken up and the women's houses, probably poorly endowed in the process, disappeared quickly.

One of two German Premonstratensian houses, Steinfeld was at the centre, both of the Archbishop of Cologne's efforts at reform, and of the factional in-fighting which occurred between "official" and "unofficial" followers of Norbert in the wake of his death. Although we do not have any biographical account of Eberwin, he was the Premonstratensian superior of Steinfeld in 1147 when he wrote this letter to Bernard, 22 years after the Pope's acceptance of the Premonstratensian rule and 13 years after Norbert's death. 

RE-INTERPRETATION OF EBERWIN'S LETTER

In this context, we can re-interpret the "heretics" to whom Eberwin refers, and against whom he requests Bernard's authority, as fundamentalist followers of Norbert who challenged the newly monied and political house at Steinfeld as being a corruption of Norbert's teaching. "This is their heresy.  They claim that they are the true Church, because the heritage of Christ survives in them alone," Eberwin wrote of these people who challenged the Church's (and his) authority. "They are the true followers of the apostolic life, because they do not seek the things of this world, houses or land or any other sort of property, just as Christ did not seek them, and did not allow his disciples to possess them.  They said to us, 'You join house to house and field to field and seek the things of this world. Those who are thought most perfect among you, monks and canons regular, possess things not individually, but in common: nevertheless they do possess all of these things.'"

This initial description of the heretics makes sense if we imagine them as followers of Norbert's apostolic tradition who struggled against the integration of their movement into the established wealthy Church until they found themselves altogether outside of it.  "We are the poor of Christ," Eberwin quotes them as saying, "wandering men; fleeing from city to city like sheep in the midst of wolves we suffer persecution with the apostles and martyrs. We lead a holy life, fasting, abstaining, working and praying by day and night, seeking in these things the necessities of life. We live thus because we are not of this world; you are lovers of the world, at peace with the world because you are worldly. False apostles have corrupted the word of Christ for their own ends, and have led you and your fathers astray." This tension over righteous authority was inevitable in a Church where authority could not clearly flow from Rome through a reliable and effective hierarchy. Instead, Norbert of Xanten and others like him had taught alternative ways to distinguish between true and false apostles. "To distinguish between you and us, Christ said, 'By their fruits you shall know them.' Our fruits are the following in the footsteps of Christ," concluded the heretics in Eberwin's summation of their statements.

Eberwin's description goes on to detail their dietary restrictions and here it must be noted that extremes of fasting and rejection of certain foods, especially meat, were not unique features of a particular heresy, but rather ascetic ideals embraced by monastic houses, apostolic preachers, and often repeated in the lives of saints. Norbert's extremes of self-denial were enough to kill off some of his enthusiastic followers -- certainly, nothing claimed by these heretics was so rigorous.

There are other features of the heretics' practices and beliefs which Eberwin describes and which can also be understood as the features of a fundamentalist tradition which believed itself to be following in Norbert's footsteps.  Norbert had not been the lone authority in the organization of his followers; he had established communities under monastic rules and overseen the appointment of local leaders.  As those communities fractured in his absence, it is not surprising that different splinter groups would have different ideas about how they should be structured.  The creation of those called electi, with the power to baptize others, and their division from the auditores and credentes of the community, could easily be seen as a feature of this fracturing. The alternative explanation -- that these communities had received their structure by joining a larger, international heretical movement of "Cathars" -- must wrestle with the fact that although "Cathars" in other places were said to also have ranks, they had only two (perfecti and credentes) and not three.

At the time when Eberwin wrote, there was little or no formal structure belonging to heresy trials or accusations. The Church Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries had classified the heretics of their era and established Church law for their condemnation and punishment. No such easy classifications existed for contemporary dissenters in the 11th and 12th centuries. Opponents of local church authority were not clearly the Donatists or Manichees who existed seven centuries earlier in other parts of the world. Therefore, the well-established laws condemning them were not so easily applied. Furthermore, even powerful churchmen of the day may have been unsure of their authority to condemn anyone to death. Despite their worldliness, priests were still supposed to avoid the shedding of blood and the neat division which inquisitors would later claim between Church conviction and secular execution still lay almost a hundred years in the future. By appealing to the most respected churchman of his day, Bernard of Clairvaux, to "awaken [his] vigilance ... and direct [his] pen against these beasts of prey" so that Eberwin and his community would "be the fitter to track down these monsters, and the more effective in resisting them" Eberwin sought to gain the best authority he could find against dissent in a world and a church where authority was hotly contested.

A great deal has been made of Eberwin's claims that the heretics in his area belonged to a "heresy [that] had been hidden until now ever since the time of the martyrs, and persisted in Greece and other lands, and these are the heretics who call themselves apostles and have their own pope." We do not know if Eberwin invented this, or if he heard it from colleagues who had embellished it, or if it accurately reflects the statements of the heretics he spoke to.  We cannot even be sure if Eberwin's heretics were real and if we should believe any of the contents of his letter.  If Eberwin was accurately reporting the beliefs of heretics he had heard, we cannot know why they might have thought that their movement stretched geographically as far as Greece and temporally as far as "the time of the martyrs". It is a common trait of all denominations of Christianity to claim a tradition deriving from Christ and extending historically from his time to the present. Certainly, Norbert had claimed to be following an apostolic tradition derived from Christ and his apostles. Probably, Norbert had had little restraint in matching his teachings to the traditional truths promulgated by the Catholic Church.  Possibly, these claims of a separate tradition originated with Norbert or, just as likely, with those who took leadership of parts of his movement after his departure from Premontre. The main point is that of many possible explanations, the real existence of the international, historical, heretical conspiracy claimed in Eberwin's letter is not the most compelling.

ADDITIONAL NOTES FOR FURTHER EXAMINATION

There are some other features of Eberwin's letter which interested me, but which Professor Moore did not touch on in the time he had for his lecture. I was struck by Eberwin's lengthy use of the metaphor of Bernard as butler for seven jugs of wine. In this unwieldy construction, Bernard pours from each jug and Eberwin's "us" drink and are thus "made wise and strong against" the rhetoric of various types of adversaries, who are categorized with a separate jug made ready against each. In providing this categorization, Eberwin reveals a number of surprising assumptions, which I have not yet found explanations for, about his opponents and, indeed, his world.

The first category of opponents are "the scribes and pharisees", the second are "the gentiles", the third are "the heretics", the fourth are "the false Christians", the fifth are "the heretics who will come at the end of time", the sixth appears to be the Antichrist, and the seventh is undefined as the draught from that jug "will not be necessary".  It seems strange that Eberwin categorizes "heretics" separately from "false Christians" and "the heretics who will come at the end of time".  Eberwin emphasizes that Bernard's efforts against "false Christians", that is his pouring from his fourth jug, has already been "enough to avail until the end of time".  But Eberwin suggests that Bernard has not yet dealt with the problem of "the heretics who will come at the end of time" when he says "Now is the time for you to draw from your fifth jug" as if Bernard's work has not already done so.


What is the difference between "the heretics" of the third jug and "the heretics who will come at the end of time"?  Possibly, by "the heretics" of the third category, Eberwin means those heretics of antiquity who had already been well defined and anathematized by the Church fathers, as opposed to his contemporary heretics. Tellingly, Eberwin expresses the belief that the "end of time" is already upon him since these fifth-category heretics are now "rising on every side from the depths of the abyss, in almost every church, as though their leader is released and the day of the Lord is at hand".  Eberwin, like other monks before and after him who wrote about heresy, was not temperate in his rhetoric or reluctant to suggest that his opponents were literally the servants of the devil. The discussions of the divergent methods of baptism or rejection of the sacrament of marriage may seem minor enough to the modern reader, but to Eberwin and churchmen of his day these differences may well have been proof of the utter evil in the souls of those against whom they fought. It is perhaps from his apocalyptic, millenialist view that the idea came of heretics as eternal enemies of the church, present in ancient writings, who had remained hidden until they would unleash their maleficence upon the world at the end of days.  It certainly appears that the biblical representation of heresy was influential in Eberwin's depictions of his own local heretics.  He quotes in his letter 1 Tim 4:1 "in the latest times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy and having their conscience seared, forbidding to marry, to abstain from meats which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving."  Eberwin certainly seems to have gone to efforts to subsequently repeat each of these features and associate them with the communities against whom he sought Bernard's authority. 

Who were "the false Christians" of the fourth jug, against whom Bernard of Clairvaux had done enough to last until the end of time, however soon Eberwin might have thought that was?  It would be incautious to begin to try to match Bernard's biography to Eberwin's jugs, given Bernard's wide-ranging activities and the vagaries of our understanding of Eberwin's categories.  By 1147, Bernard had been engaged in many controversies.  He had successfully persecuted Abelard, had energetically supported popes against their rivals, had vigorously defended the Cistercians from the rival Cluniac order, and was still quite active in the ongoing struggle between the two houses. 

He had also, most recently, preached against Henry of Lausanne in the area around Toulouse.  Henry was a former Cluniac monk about whom we know very little, save what Bernard alleged about him.  He was an itinerant preacher, critical of church authorities, and a follower of the denounced Peter of Bruys.  In this sense, he does not seem to have been that different from Norbert of Xanten and his later followers, save for Norbert's family connections and papal approval.  Henry of Lausanne was arrested, after Bernard's intervention, and held in prison at Toulouse, most likely until his death.  Bernard's efforts against Henry and his followers began in 1145 and ended, after Henry's imprisonment, with Bernard's letter to Toulouse at the end of 1146 warning them to take action against any remaining followers of the condemned man.  In current historical writing about the subject, this is generally seen as Bernard combatting heresy in the Languedoc.  Many traditional historians, of course, have portrayed it as combatting the "Cathar" heresy there.  It is quite odd, then, that in 1147 Eberwin would write to Bernard praising all of his efforts, but suggesting that Bernard had done more than enough about "false Christians" but had not yet turned his attention to "heretics" such as those recently discovered around Cologne.  It seems unlikely that Eberwin would have been unaware of Bernard's well-publicized actions or would have chosen to ignore them.  Perhaps we now have the date of Eberwin's letter wrong, or perhaps there is a broader misunderstanding of what Eberwin means by "heretics" as opposed to his other categories.

Lastly, I find Eberwin's manner of describing the heretics to be remarkably inconsistent. When he describes them in the beginning they are creeping out of the depths of the abyss to follow their leader, the Antichrist. When he mentions them again at the end they are "apostles of Satan".  But in between these epithets, he stops to remark on the courage and stoicism of their martyrdom. "The amazing thing was that they entered and endured the torment of the flames not merely courageously, but joyfully.  I wish I were with you, holy father, to hear you explain how such great fortitude comes to these tools of the devil in their heresy as is seldom found among the truly religious in the faith of Christ". The depiction of heretics showing joy as they burned, or rushing of their own accord into the fires, is one that would often be repeated in later accounts of the burnings of heretics.  I continue to be puzzled as to whether this could possibly have truth to it, or whether it constituted some particularly beloved trope of Church authors in discussing their burnt opponents.  Nonetheless, Eberwin, who is the first example of this trope that I am familiar with, makes it clear that he is presenting virtues on the part of his enemies and that these demonstrations of virtue are in need of explanation.  Similarly, in his lengthy discussions of the beliefs of the heretics, he bases their views in Scripture and provides the logical connections between the biblical passages and their "heretical" interpretation.  In this, he shows far more understanding and empathy than would be expected from his hyperbolic condemnation of his opponents as Satanic evildoers.

A public lecture by R. I. Moore

Next Wednesday, I'll be attending a public lecture by Professor R. I. Moore entitled "Who Were The Cathars?" as well as a class on the study of religious dissent entitled "'You couldn't make it up.' What was heresy for in medieval Europe?"  Both are at the University of Nottingham, which is launching its Medieval Heresy and Dissent Research Network.  It appears that Claire Taylor (author of "Heresy in Medieval France") has organized this event and I'm very much looking forward to it and to blogging about it here next week!

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/history/events/who-were-the-cathars.aspx

The Targets of the War on Heresy, part 2

HISTORIANS ON THE DECISION TO ATTACK THE TRENCAVEL LANDS

By the time twenty years of war over the Languedoc drew to a close with the Treaty of Paris in 1229, much had happened, but the immediate effect on the Occitan nobility was not as great as might be expected.  The Counts of Toulouse, though defeated by the French crown, were still lords of their domains.  The Counts of Foix still ruled theirs.  It is only the Trencavels who lost utterly, and their loss was both the first and last effect of two decades of holy war throughout the region.  Their lands had been the first to be attacked in the campaign of 1209; their Viscount imprisoned until his untimely death; their capital at Carcassonne seized and used as the crusaders' headquarters.  Their last heir, Raymond II, had fought against the crusaders alongside his neighbours the Counts of Toulouse and Foix, but at the Treaty of Paris, he was formally dispossessed of all of his lands and sent into exile while they were not. In this light, the Albigensian Crusade could appear to be a war against the Trencavels rather than against heresy or against Count Raymond of Toulouse. 

The previous post examined the question of why the crusade initially attacked the Trencavel lands as presented in the primary sources: the Pope's letter and the tales of William of Tudela and Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay.  This post will present subsequent historians' different answers to this question.  It would not be fair to go further without pointing out the debt this analysis owes to Elaine Graham-Leigh, whose book "The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade" is devoted to this subject.

The following points, established from the primary sources in the previous post, should be kept in mind:

1.  Both Raymond of Toulouse and Raymond-Roger Trencavel attempted to submit to the Church in order to avoid invasion by the crusaders.  Raymond of Toulouse's submission was accepted while Raymond-Roger Trencavel's was refused.

2.  Raymond of Toulouse's submission and the resultant safeguarding of his lands was anticipated by Pope Innocent III when he called the crusade, and Raymond's delegations had been received in Rome well in advance of the crusade's muster.  His reconciliation was therefore, presumably, anticipated by the papal legates leading the crusade.

3.  The authors of the primary sources do not discuss any decision-making process on the part of the crusaders.  Both William of Tudela and Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay note that the crusade marched towards Beziers without explaining why.

THE HISTORIANS

Zoe Oldenbourg in "Massacre at Montsegur" (1959):

"Though Raymond VI was no longer an Enemy of the Faith, the Crusaders had not gone to all this trouble for nothing.  The Legates had already marked down their first victim for destruction, the first of many 'abettors and instigators of heresy' in Languedoc.  The property of the Viscount of Beziers had long been regarded as 'heretic's land' par excellence, and the young Viscount possessed neither the boldness nor the duplicity which characterized his uncle and liege lord, the Count of Toulouse."  (p. 110)

Oldenbourg here differs from many later historians in claiming that the leaders of the crusade planned, in advance, to target the young Viscount as "their first victim."  While this does seem likely, it is not at all clear that Oldenbourg's contention that the Viscount's property had "long been regarded as 'heretic's land'" is supported.  Three generations earlier, in 1145, Bernard of Clairvaux had preached against alleged heretics in the Languedoc, but his tour of the area did not specifically focus on the Trencavel lands, and the more recent legatine preaching campaigns had not focused on them either.

Jacques Maudale in "The Albigensian Crusade" (1967):

"It was [Arnaud-Amalric] who was responsible for the appalling massacre of Beziers and the burnings at Minerve and Lavaur.  It was he who refused to listen to the luckless Raymond-Roger Trencavel, the first victim of a Crusade directed not primarily against him but against Raymond VI of Toulouse." (p. 64)

Maudale does not venture an opinion on why Raymond-Roger Trencavel was "the first victim" of the crusade, but does attribute the decision solely to the papal legate, Arnau Amalric, who led the army at that time.

Jonathan Sumption in "The Albigensian Crusade" (1978):

"Then, on 22nd June, Raymond [of Toulouse] took the cross himself, promising on the Gospels to help and advise the army of God and to do all that its commanders asked of him.  This last act was possibly Raymond's shrewdest political stroke ....  Raymond knew that it was too late to halt the crusade ....  But by taking the cross he would earn the immunity of a crusader; his titles and dominions would be protected except perhaps for those that were in the hands of the Cathars.  He would become a leader of the crusade which would thereby be transformed into a war against Raymond's greatest enemy, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, viscount of Beziers.  When the crusaders had destroyed the Trencavels, their resources and perhaps their enthusiasm would be exhausted and Raymond would be left in effective control of his principality for the first time since his accession."  (p. 84)

Sumption is the first of the historians in my collection to blame Raymond of Toulouse for the initial direction of the crusade.  After this assessment, many other historians followed suit, forming a collective portrayal of Raymond as a malignant and clever opportunist who manipulated the confused and directionless crusaders into attacking the Trencavels in order to further his own political aims.  Sumption goes further than anyone else by suggesting that Raymond, despite his vilification by the Pope, became "a leader of the crusade" capable of transforming not only its direction but its purpose.

 Malcolm Lambert in "The Cathars" (1998):

"Raymond [of Toulouse] warded off imminent threat by professing repentance, accepting terms and submitting to a humiliating penance ....  He joined the army as crusader for the minimum forty days, perhaps in his cunning way hoping to gain by an attack on his rival, the 24-year-old Raymond-Roger, viscount of Beziers, who had declined to join with Raymond in submission." (p. 102)

Lambert follows Sumption in assessing the targeting of the young Viscount as due to Raymond of Toulouse's "cunning".  He differs from Sumption in portraying Raymond as a somewhat reluctant crusader -- "for the minimum forty days" -- rather than as one of its leaders.  Lambert's assessment that Raymond-Roger Trencavel "had declined to join with Raymond in submission" doubtless comes from William of Tudela's report cited in the previous post.  However, William clearly portrayed Raymond's discussions with his nephew as a request for a cease-fire and defensive alliance: "[Raymond] begged him not to attack him; let them stand together in defence."  There is no indication that Raymond of Toulouse ever requested his nephew to submit to the Church.  Nonetheless, the young Viscount did attempt to submit and was refused -- a vital fact ignored by Lambert.

Malcolm Barber in "The Cathars" (2000):

"However, Raymond VI, after a fruitless attempt to persuade Raymond Roger Trencavel to make common cause with him, decided to cut his losses by undergoing a penitential scourging and then, in June, joining the crusaders.  ...  Nevertheless, this did mean that the main force of the crusade was initially directed against the two chief Trencavel cities of Beziers and Carcassonne, despite William of Tudela's view that Raymond Roger was 'certainly Catholic', and despite the fact that, until this time, the pope had been almost exclusively concerned with placing the blame on the shoulders of Raymond of Toulouse.  By turning to the weapon of the crusade, the Catholic authorities had in practice abandoned the attempt to unpick the strands of Languedocian society and thus isolate the heretics." (pp. 120-121)

In this summation, Barber reports the facts much as they appear in the primary sources.  His conclusion in the last sentence, however, suggests that "the Catholic authorities" in attacking the Trencavel lands were no longer trying "to unpick the strands of Languedocian society".  This would be true if the Trencavel were not already isolated and if an attack on them might serve to unite the other nobles of Languedoc against the crusade.  A few years later, however, Elaine Graham-Leigh would present a powerful argument that the choice of the Trencavels was an astute one, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of those very strands of Languedocian society.

Elaine Graham-Leigh in "The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade" (2005):

"Based on military considerations, the decision to aim the first crusade campaign against Beziers and Carcassonne appears to support the view of the crusade as unrelated to the politics of Languedoc, selecting targets according not to who owned them but to their strategic importance.  However, it is by no means certain that such straightforward military reasoning was paramount in the choice of the targets of the crusade.  It can be argued on the contrary that Raimond Roger's lands were attacked by the crusade because they were held by Raimond Roger and that in making such an attack the crusaders were engaging with the political and social realities of early thirteenth-century Languedoc." (p. 46)

"That the crusaders' campaign against Beziers and Carcassonne was specifically directed at Raimond Roger himself, and not simply at two desirable towns affected by heresy, is indicated by the crusaders' attitudes to Narbonne.  Narbonne was a large and important town, the seat of the Metropolitan and a wealthy commercial centre, situated east of Carcassonne and south-west of Beziers.  ...  The crusaders appear to have received the submission of Narbonne in 1209 ....  The crusaders, however, do not seem to have bothered to take control of the town themselves.  Following his surrender, Viscount Aimery [of Narbonne] gave some rather unenthusiastic support to the crusaders, but they themselves do not appear to have maintained any presence in the town. ... In their acceptance of Aimery's surrender and their subsequent departure from Narbonne, the crusaders demonstrated a different attitude towards the town than towards Beziers and Carcassonne, one which cannot be readily accounted for.  If it is assumed that the crusaders were embarking on a war of conquest in Languedoc, Narbonne should have been rich and important enough to attract their attention, while, if they are credited with more religious motives, there is no evidence to suggest that Narbonne was notably free from heresy in comparison with its neighbours." (pp. 51-53)

"Raimond Roger's attempted surrender to the legate indicates that the difference in the treatment received by Narbonne from that meted out to Beziers and Carcassonne by the crusaders cannot be explained simply in terms of the apparent difference in responses which the crusaders encountered from these towns.  It suggests that the significant difference between Narbonne, Beziers and Carcassonne was that the latter were towns belonging to Raimon Roger and the former was not." (pp. 54-55)

Graham-Leigh goes on to build a convincing case that it was ecclesiastical policy, set by Innocent III and carried out by Arnaud Amalric and then by Simon de Montfort which dictated the conquest of the Trencavel lands.  She explains that the Trencavels lacked serious military allies in their neighbours, especially the Counts of Toulouse and Foix, who in the event made peace with the crusade in the first campaign season even while Beziers was burned and Carcassonne taken.  Even within what might be considered the domain of Raimond Roger Trencavel, lesser lords such as Pierre Roger de Cabaret and Bernard de Saissac, were more concerned with defending their own castles than hastening to the young Viscount's side when he faced the crusading army.  In this light, the special treatment singled out for the Trencavels seems to have been quite astute -- the first target of the crusade was one which would not unite the Languedoc in opposition. 

Claire Taylor in "Heresy in Medieval France, 1000-1249" (2005):

"It [the Crusade] mustered in Lyon in June 1209 and approached the Languedoc via the Rhone valley, anticipating the confiscation of such lands as it could wrestle from the protectors of heretics.  The excommunicate Raymond VI sought reconciliation with the Church as it approached, not only because of this army but because his lands in the Agenais had been attacked by an earlier expedition.  ...  This they [his clerical friends] did successfully in Rome, so that when the main crusade arrived Raymond had already, on 18-22 June, taken the cross and could not be attacked.  The lands of Viscount Raymond-Roger Trencavel in the eastern Languedoc were targeted instead."  (p. 188)

In describing the crusaders' anticipation, Taylor suggests that they had no particular plan other than to attack any lands held by "protectors of heretics" but without specifying how they would determine that any given land-holder was one. 



Christopher Tyerman in "God's War" (2006):

"The main expedition mustered at Lyons on 24 June 1209 and set out down the Rhone at the beginning of July.  By this time the whole strategic context of the expedition had been thrown into confusion from which it never properly emerged.  The expected target, Raymond of Toulouse, suddenly became an ally, no doubt to the relief of those of his vassals and close relatives who were marching with the crusaders.

...

Cheated of their expected victim, the crusaders turned their attention to the Trencavel lands, incontestably riddled with heretics, even though the young and engaging viscount himself was recognized as orthodox.  This made little difference.  The crusade needed an enemy; Raymond of Toulouse short-sightedly promoted an opportunity to destroy a troublesome vassal while escaping attack himself." (pp. 589-590)

Tyerman here follows previous historians in blaming Raymond of Toulouse for selecting his nephew as a target.  He differs from them, however, in considering the choice to be "short-sighted" rather than "cunning" or "shrewd".  Even if Raymond could have directed the course of a crusade which initially set out to fight him, however, Tyerman does not offer any suggestion of what a more "far-sighted" course would have been.

Mark Gregory Pegg in "A Most Holy War" (2008):

"The enmity [of the other crusaders] toward Raimon was understandable -- he certainly understood it -- as all those who had signed themselves with the cross had done so weeks and months earlier with the fierce intention of assailing him and expunging heretics from his territories.  Yet -- remarkably, importantly -- even though the count was apparently no longer the enemy of Christ, the thrill and purpose of the crusade was no less dampened and no less focused.  Raimon as a crusader did not change the fact that the serpents and little foxes were invading Christendom from his cities and castra.  A landscape of pestilence still existed between the Garonne and the Rhone that needed to be cleansed through holy war and, while the peccant roots of heresy were momentarily beyond His sword, the shoots and branches of the plague could be sheared and hacked.  Arnau Amalric, with this in mind, surveyed the horizon and, gauging what lay between him and His eventual victory over the Provinciales heretici, decided to attack the lands of the twenty-four-year-old Raimon Roger Trencavel, viscount of Beziers, Carcassonne, Razes, and Albi ...." (p. 69)

"[Milo the papal legate] always intended to attack Raimon Roger sooner or later, as he (and so Arnau Amalric) despised the nephew almost as vehemently as they did the uncle.  Guilhem de Tudela's excursus into why the Trencavel territories were targeted by the crusaders, a contrary tale that blamed (and praised) everyone, was no more than songful supposition about a fateful decision he did not understand.  The troubadour was not alone in his ignorance.  There can be no doubt -- despite arguments to the contrary, then and now -- that Raimon was startled by the selection of his nephew as the new objective of the holy expedition.  The count, of course, wanted to deflect the crusade away from himself, but, as to where or to whom, that is far from clear; he never suggested Raimon Roger." (p. 70)

Pegg asserts, as Graham-Leigh had suggested, that it was the intention of the legates (Milo and Arnau Amalric) to attack Raimon Roger Trencavel and he firmly rejects the idea that Raymond of Toulouse could have or would have made the decision.  In stating that the Count of Toulouse was "startled" by the decision, however, the same problem arises as in Tyerman's statement of the opposite: if the target had not been Raimon Roger Trencavel, then whom else?  Surely no one considered that the crusaders would go turn around and go home with their pledge to wage holy war unfulfilled.


Laurence Marvin in "The Occitan War" (2008):

"By 24 June the bulk of the crusader army had formed in the city of Lyon.  Up until that point the leaders intended to invade the heretically infected western lands of the Count of Toulouse, since he was the main noble villain identified by the church as harboring heretics.  That changed when the count became a crucesignatus himself on 22 June.  He immediately made use of his new status and met the crusader army as it left the city of Valence, ninety-one kilometers south of Lyon along the Rhone valley.  At a meeting with the crusade leadership, Raimon VI managed to convince them of his sincerity ....  Since the leaders and rank and file of the army were still determined to punish someone for heresy, Raimon convinced the crusade leadership to invade his nephew's lands in the viscounty of Beziers, Carcassonne and Albi.  Though Raimon VI was Raimon-Roger Trencavel's maternal uncle, the Raimondine and Trencavel houses had been at odds for most of the past century.  Convincing the crusade to attack his nephew must have relieved and delighted Raimon VI, since he had deflected a huge army bent on destruction from his own lands to those of one of his greatest rivals." (pp. 37-38)

As another historian following the tradition of blaming the Count of Toulouse for the decision, Marvin emphasizes the suddenness of the decision, as if to suggest that a great confusion came over the crusaders on 22 June when Raymond joined them and that it was this sudden confusion which allowed them to be convinced to begin their campaign at Beziers.  This ignores, however, the months of diplomatic efforts which preceded Raymond's formal ritual of reconciliation.  Raymond had discussed his submission with Arnau Amalric much earlier.  He had sent delegations to Rome to obtain the Pope's approval.  The formalities of 22 June had been previously arranged by Milo, the papal legate.  It is simply not possible that this took anyone by surprise.

R. I. Moore in "The War on Heresy" (2012):

"Without hope of repelling such a force, the only move left to Raymond was to join it, earn the crusader's immunity for his own lands and turn the storm against the vicomte of Beziers.  Raymond-Roger, grasping at last the depth of his danger, met the army at Montpellier with protestations of innocence and regret and offered to submit on the same terms as Raymond of Toulouse had done.  Arnold Amalric declined to hear him and proceeded to Beziers, which on 21 July was sacked, plundered and destroyed by fire.
...
Raymond-Roger himself was seized and chained, despite the safe conduct he had been promised, and died in prison three months later, to be remembered as youthful -- twenty-four years old when he died -- handsome, gallant and foolish, or betrayed.  All that he may have been, but he was also the unfortunate legatee of the long and bitter rivalry between the counts of Toulouse and of Barcelona, now kings of Aragon, in which the Trencavel lands were strategically pivotal.  There is no real reason to think that the region was especially given to heresy, but it had repeatedly been portrayed as such by those who hoped to dominate it, at least since Count Alphonse Jordan of Toulouse pointed St Bernard in that direction in 1145." (pp. 247-249)

Here, R. I. Moore discounts the theory that the Trencavel lands were attacked because they were more rife with heresy than their neighbours and points out the different treatment of the attempted submissions of Raimon Roger Trencavel and Raymond of Toulouse.  He does, however, also follow the tradition of crediting the Count of Toulouse with "turning the storm" against the Trencavels for political reasons.

SUMMARY

There is no consensus among historians about how the Trencavels came to be attacked first in the campaign of 1209.  It has been suggested, and refuted, that their people were notably heretical.  This theory dovetails nicely with the idea of the Albigensian Crusade as a "war on heresy", but there is little or no evidence to support it.  It has more frequently been suggested that Raymond of Toulouse, either deftly or foolishly, manipulated the crusaders into attacking his nephew Raimon Roger Trencavel.  As the Count of Toulouse was the originally declared target of the crusade, this requires one to believe that the crusaders gave over the leadership of their war to their intended enemy -- a problem which can be mitigated by exaggerating the suddenness or unexpectedness of Raymond's reconciliation with the Church.  Lastly, historians differ on whether the choice of the Trencavel lands was short-sighted and blunt or whether it reflected a more nuanced understanding of the Trencavels' vulnerable position in the society of Languedoc.

The question of how the Trencavel lands came to be initially targeted instead of other cities in the Languedoc, is similar to the question of why the Trencavels were permanently dispossessed while other comital families remained in control of their lands despite having fought the crusaders and lost.  In their answers to these two questions, historians go a long way towards describing the nature and result of the entire Albigensian Crusade.  Considering the paucity of evidence in the primary sources, it seems more likely that it is their attitudes towards the Albigensian Crusade itself which inform their arguments about the treatment of the Trencavels.  Those who see the Crusade as a holy war against religious dissent suggest that the Trencavel lands were especially heretical; those who see it as a primarily expedient military exercise  stress the strategic significance of the territories; those who see it as a personal struggle over the allegiance or faith of individual rulers emphasize Raymond of Toulouse's role.  In the absence of agreement on this crucial issue, future historians remain at liberty to tell the story in the way which best suits their overall perspective.

After the initial conquest of the Trencavels, Simon de Montfort was made leader of the crusade.  It is often said that, under his leadership, the course of the Albigensian Crusade diverted from its original goals to serve his personal hunger for power.  In the next post, I'll explore the evidence for and against this proposition and speculate on whether Simon was a power-mad, bloodthirsty warlord (as he is sometimes portrayed) or whether he ended up as a scapegoat for policies and strategies which he had no hand in forming.