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Title: The Inquisition
        a political and military study of its establishment

Author: Hoffman Nickerson

Author of introduction, etc.: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: March 16, 2023 [eBook #70304]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Ltd, 1923

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INQUISITION ***





  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




  THE INQUISITION

  A POLITICAL AND MILITARY STUDY
  OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT

  BY

  HOFFMAN NICKERSON

  WITH A PREFACE BY

  HILAIRE BELLOC

  JOHN BALE, SONS & DANIELSSON, LTD.
  83-91, GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET
  LONDON, W. 1.

  1923




MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.




CONTENTS.


                                                                  PAGE

  DEDICATORY LETTER                                                iii

  PREFACE BY MR. HILAIRE BELLOC                                      v


  CHAPTER   I.—The Mediæval Recovery of Civilization                 1

      ”    II.—Languedoc and the Albigenses                         28

      ”   III.—The Preliminaries of the Crusade                     70

      ”    IV.—The Albigensian Crusade—The Early War               106

      ”     V.—The Albigensian Crusade—Muret and its Sequel        145

      ”    VI.—The Mendicant Orders and the Inquisition            191

      ”   VII.—Epilogue on Prohibition                             220

  BIBLIOGRAPHY                                                     253


TWO MAPS IN POCKET AT END OF BOOK.

  (1) Languedoc and Adjacent Lands in 1209.

  (2) (_a_) Town of Muret, 1213; (_b_) Battle of Muret, September 11,
  1213, 1st phase; (_c_) Battle of Muret, 2nd phase; (_d_) Battle of
  Muret, 3rd phase; and (_e_) Approximate Restoration of Toulouse in
  1217-1218 to illustrate its siege by de Montfort.




DEDICATORY LETTER.

To R. C. N.


  MY DEAR—

This book is rightfully yours for your unfailing help and
encouragement. In dedicating it I do but make a payment on account.

It was begun during a term in the New York State Legislature, when
I endured Prohibition lobbyists, and cast about for something which
might serve as a historical precedent in the way of religio-political
oppression on so vast a scale. I was not long before discovering that
traditional Christianity had more to say for the Inquisitors than for
the Prohibitionists, so that the parallel with Prohibition has been
thrust into an epilogue.

My thanks are due to many mutual friends. Among them are M. Joseph
Poux, Archiviste du Département de l’Aude; Father Astruc, Curé of St.
Vincent’s Church, Carcassonne; Father Villemagne, Curé of Castelnau;
Professor Joseph Anglade of the University of Toulouse; M. Galaberd,
Archiviste and Librarian of the City of Toulouse, and M. Jules
Chalande, also of Toulouse and of the Société Archéologique du Midi
de la France. To the studious man, France is a sort of paradise, for
the local scholars receive you with enthusiasm and lay themselves out
to forward your work.

Our good friend Belloc, the Master of those who would celebrate the
Middle Ages in the English tongue, besides his kindly preface, has
been good enough to read the manuscript and make several helpful
suggestions.

Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been
avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have me frank with
my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we
call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called
Anglo-Catholic party in that communion.

  HOFFMAN NICKERSON.

  _34, West 54 Street,
  New York, N.Y.
  January, 1923._




PREFACE.


Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in
the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish
inherited from the immediate past.

The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English
letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of
the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when
the wholesome reaction began.

In the first place it was not thorough.

In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic
tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition.

Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should
scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in
England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and
aristocratic institutions.

But the second defect was worse still. History may be scrappy
and superficial and yet, on the whole, right; but if its whole
orientation is warped by a wrong appreciation of the past, then,
however detailed and full of research, it is worse than worthless; it
is harmful and it had better not have been written at all.

These preliminary remarks apply to the history of Europe as a whole
and especially to the history of Europe between the coarsening of the
foundational Roman administrative system in the fifth century and the
rise of modern culture in the seventeenth.

They do not apply to late local history. Late (post 1600) local
history _was_ thoroughly well done. The history of England itself,
when it deals only with the England which sprang out of the
completed Reformation century (still more the local history of the
United States) was detailed and exact. What is more important than
exactitude in detail, it was consonant with the spirit of the thing
described. The writers on either side of the Atlantic, but especially
upon the American side, understood the material with which they were
dealing. Here in England (where I write this Preface) the work on
_later_ history was also national and well done, though it suffered
from no small defect in that the original Catholic England (which was
like a foreign country to the writers in question) lingered on as
a dwindling minority till at least 1715 and somewhat disturbed the
picture; so that our modern English historians are never really at
home until they get to the Hanoverian dynasty. Before that they have
to deal with a remaining remnant of the vigorous Catholic spirit, and
they are perplexed and bewildered by it, so that it vitiates their
conclusions. That is why they cannot write of the later Stuarts, and
especially of James II, with any proper sense of proportion. They
cannot conceive how strong nor even how widespread was the support of
the national dynasty, because that support was mixed up with the (to
them and in our time) utterly alien Catholic idea.

I say that the main task of an historian writing in the English
language is the shovelling away of rubbish; and this is particularly
true of the rubbish which has accumulated over the record of the Dark
and early Middle Ages (A.D. 500 to 1000; A.D. 1000 to 1500).

From the very beginning of the affair popular history was warped
by the spirit of ridicule (Voltaire’s creation propagated in the
English language by Voltaire’s pupil Gibbon) against the formation of
Christendom and that tremendous story of definition upon definition,
council upon council, from which emerged at last the full Christian
creed. The decisive conflicts of Nicea, of Chalcedon, were made a
silly jest, and generations of boys and young men were taught to
think of the most profound questions ever settled by the human mind
as verbal quips and incomprehensible puerilities.

Next the gradual transformation of our Catholic civilization from
the majestic order of our pagan origin to the splendid spring of
the twelfth century was represented with incredible insufficiency
as the conquest of the Occident by barbarian Germans, who, though
barbarians, possessed I know not what fund of strength and virtue.
Institutions which we now know to be of Roman origin were piously
referred to these starved heaths of the Baltic and to the central
European wilds. Their inhabitants were endowed with every good
quality. Whatever we were proud of in our inheritance was referred
to the blank savagery of outer lands at no matter what expense
of tortured hypothesis or bold invention. This warping of truth
was indulged in because the northern part of Europe stood (in the
nineteenth century when this false “Teutonic” school had its greatest
vogue) for a successful opposition to the rest of Christendom, and
for a schism within the body of civilized men.

But the worst fault of all, worse even than the superficial folly of
Gibbon’s tradition in our treatment of the great Christian foundation
and worse than the Teutonic nonsense, was the misunderstanding of
those four great centuries in which our race attained the summit
of its happiness and stable culture—the twelfth, the thirteenth,
the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And of these, the greatest, the
thirteenth, was in particular ignored.

Men did indeed (partly because it enabled them to “turn” the position
of true history by concession to, partly from the unavoidable effect
of, increasing historical knowledge) pay lip service in England,
during the later part of the nineteenth century, to the greatness of
the true Middle Ages. In his early period, Ruskin is a conspicuous
example of a writer who, without in the least understanding what the
Middle Ages were like, hating yet ignorant of the faith that was
their very soul, could not remain blind to the vivid outward effect
of their expression. Even Carlyle, far more ignorant than Ruskin and
far more of a player to the gallery, could not altogether avoid the
strong blast of reality which blew from those times.

But these concessions, these partial admissions, did but deepen
the blindness of such historians and their readers towards the
formation and the climax of our race; upon the Dark and the Middle
Ages, history as written in the English language was warped beyond
recognition.

Then came the reaction towards historical truth: it has already far
advanced and the book for which I have the honour here to write a
Preface is a notable example of that progress.

“History” (said the great Michelet in a phrase which I am never
tired of repeating) “should be a resurrection of the flesh.” What
you need for true history is by no means an agreement with the
philosophy of the time which you describe (you may be wholly opposed
to that philosophy) but at least a full comprehension of it and
an understanding that those who worked its human affairs were men
fundamentally the same as ourselves. Humanity has not essentially
differed from the beginning of recorded, or, indeed, of geological
time. Man as man (the only thing which concerns history, or, indeed,
the morals and philosophy of mankind) has been the same since first
he appears fully developed upon the earth. But in the case of Western
Europe during the Middle Ages the thing is far more intimate. We are
dealing with men who are not only of our genus but of our very stock;
wholly of our particular blood, our own fathers, our own family. What
is more, in those ancestors we should take our greatest pride. For
never did our race do better or more thoroughly, never was it more
faithfully _itself_, than in the years between the First Crusade and
the effects of the Black Death: 1100-1350. Those three long lifetimes
were the very summit of the European story.

Now I say that to treat properly of this affair it is not indeed
necessary to agree with the philosophy of those men—that is, with
their religion. It is certainly not necessary to agree with the
details of their action, as, for example, their lapses into cruelty
on the one hand or their fierce sense of honour on the other. We may
be baser, or more reasonable, or more gentle, or more lethargic than
they, and yet remain true historians of them. But what one must have
if one is to be an historian at all, and not a mere popular writer,
repeating what the public of “the best sellers” wants to have told to
it, is a knowledge of the spirit of our ancestors _from within_.

Now this can only be obtained in one fashion, to wit, by accurate,
detailed, concrete record. Find out _what_ happened and say it.
Proportion is of course essential; but to an honest man proportion
will come of itself from a sufficient reading, and only a dishonest
man will after a sufficient reading warp proportion and make a brief
by picking out special points.

The trouble is that this period has been dealt with in the past
without minute research. There has been plenty of pretence at such
research, but most of it was charlatan.

Let me take as a specific instance by way of example:

Freeman’s huge volumes upon the Norman Conquest were long treated as
a serious classic. He pretended to have read what he had not read. He
pretended to have studied ground he had not studied. He wrote what
he knew would sell because it was consonant with what was popular at
the time. He attacked blindly the universal Catholic religion of the
epoch he dealt with because he hated that religion. But scholarly he
was not and did not attempt to be; yet scholarly he pretended to be,
and upon supposed scholarship he based his false representation. I
will give three examples.

He calls the Battle of Hastings “Senlac.” He found the term not
where he pretends, in Ordericus Vitalis, but in Lingard, who was the
first man to commit the error. Lingard was the great quarry from
which Freeman’s generation of Dons dug out its history without ever
acknowledging the source. “_Senlac_” could not possibly be a Saxon
place-name, but Freeman understood so little about the time and
was so ignorant of the genius of the language, that he took it for
Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps he thought in some vague way he was restoring a
“Teutonic” name; more “Teutonic” than Hastings itself!

To this religious motive of his there was undoubtedly added the
motive of novelty and of showing off. What the ridge of Battle was
originally called by the people of the place, before the Norman
invasion, we cannot tell. It may have been “Sandleg” (which would be
Sussex enough), or it may have been “Senhanger,” also sound Sussex,
or it may have been something ending in the Celtic and Latin “lake.”
But “Senlac” it most certainly could not have been; and that Freeman
should have pretended to scholarship in a matter of that kind damns
him.

The second point is far more striking and can be tested by
anyone who visits the localities mentioned in the five principal
contemporary authorities. He desires to reduce the numbers involved
in the battle; partly from a silly prejudice against anything written
by a monk, partly from a desire to belittle the actions of the early
Middle Ages and the whole of its civilization, partly (mainly,
perhaps) from a desire to be novel. He makes up the estimates out of
his head, grossly reducing the forces actually engaged.

We have contemporary evidence which allows for more than 50,000
men upon Duke William’s side and something of the same sort upon
Harold’s. The evidence not only of those who saw William’s host
mustered and who must actually have handled the lists on the Norman
side, such as the Duke’s secretary, William of Jumièges, but the
evidence of topography also proves this. Pevensey, the harbour in
which the great Norman fleet of 3,000 vessels moored, was a vast
expanse of water comparable to Portsmouth to-day; you may still
trace its limits accurately enough round the contour of the present
marsh. The position held defensively at Hastings by Harold’s command
is only just under a mile long and is one of the most clearly
defined positions in Europe, absolutely unmistakable. Freeman, with
no appreciation of military history, conceives this line of a mile
(held by men closely interlocked and in dense formation capable of
withstanding hurricanes of cavalry charges for nine hours) to have
been held by a handful of men! It is the wildest nonsense, and yet it
passed for a generation as history.

Lastly, as an example of bias and charlatanry combined, you have the
confident statement that Pope Sylvester had given a Bull to Duke
William in support of the invasion. Here Freeman has at least the
grace not to give a sham reference in a footnote, for the thing is
completely false. If Freeman had taken the trouble or had had the
science to look up the Bullarium, or even the letters and documents
of Sylvester in Migne, he might have been spared the contempt of
all competent critics. As it is he preferred a legendary piece of
nonsense in a piece of popular verse to exact history.

The motive through which Freeman invented this Bull was the motive of
his place, time, and generation: hatred of the Catholic Church, that
is, against the religion of the people with whom he was dealing, and
a desire to satisfy the animus of his Victorian readers against the
Papacy.

In contrast to nonsense of this kind, haphazard, ill-evidenced and
invented history, note the admirable description you will read in the
following pages of the battle of Muret.

Here is a real knowledge of ground and, what is more important, _a
careful estimate of time and movement_. I know nothing better in the
reconstruction of a mediæval battle than this first-rate piecing
together of evidence through common sense upon the flanking surprise
movement executed by Simon de Montfort against Foix’s division of the
enemy at Muret. It is an unbreakable chain of calculation, and at the
same time a full explanation of what happened. This piece of work, in
the fifth chapter of the volume here presented to the reader, is as
good as anything can be of its kind, and an excellent representative
of that new, modern, accurate work now ridding us of the loose stuff
which encumbered history through the past two generations. That is
the way to reconstruct a mediæval battle in the absence of detailed
evidence, to see the movements as they actually took place.

I have laid emphasis on this particular section of the book by way of
contrast to the insufficiency of so typical a name as Freeman’s. I
ought rather, perhaps, to turn to the book as a whole and then again
to certain other specific points of excellence which have struck me.

Mr. Nickerson’s study is mainly concerned with explaining the nature
of the early Inquisition; incidentally he gives us a very clear
view of the Albigensian War, and what is especially remarkable in
the clarity of his view is the arrangement of the episodes. I note
that the author has done what is of first importance in all military
chronicling, and that is, the division of episodes _not_ in equal
measures of time but by their separate military characteristics.

It is a principle too often forgotten even by professional military
historians. A war may take twenty years, or fifty, or one. It may,
by accident, divide itself naturally into two or three episodes
of fairly equal length in time or it may by coincidence fall into
episodes corresponding more or less with a successive series of
years (e.g.,) Marlborough’s Campaigns in Flanders in the early
eighteenth century. But much the greater part of military history
is concerned with episodes which have no relation to such more or
less equal time-chapters. The general rule is that three or four
successive phases of a campaign (or battle) occupy the most disparate
lengths of time. The proper way to treat _military_ history is to
give to the capital episodes their relative _military_ importance;
not, as in the case of a civilian chronicle, to weigh that importance
by the time involved.

For instance, no one can read a clear account, however short, of the
great European War without seeing it as a siege; it is therefore,
like every siege (not raised, nor degenerated into a blockade)
essentially divided into three episodes:—

(_a_) The preliminaries of containment, that is the war of movement
prior to the establishment of siege conditions.

(_b_) The siege itself.

(_c_) The storming of the siege line and the collapse of the besieged.

Now if we were to take the Great War in _years_—1914, 1915, 1916,
1917, 1918 would appear. If we divide it into chapters of more or
less equal lengths of time we have a confused, meaningless picture
such as is given us by nearly all the popular histories as yet
published of that great event. However much these accounts succeed in
pleasing each its national audience they fail as histories because
they think a month of war must be thirty times more important than a
day and need thirty times as much telling. The moment we divide the
Great War according to its _military_ values the scheme falls into
place and becomes clear. You have three divisions, of which you can
make, if you like, three volumes or three chapters. The first is
absurdly short in comparison with the length of the whole. It only
seriously begins with the great shock of August 20, 21, 1914, in
Lorraine and in Flanders, and it ends when the Germans went to earth
less than a month later—on the Aisne. From that moment onward the war
was a siege.

Next you get the second division, the completion of the siege lines
in the West to the sea (which is over before the middle of November,
two more months), and then the solid three and a half years of effort
on the part of the besieged to break out in great sorties and on the
part of the besiegers to break down the defence of the besieged.

In mere length of time this episode is prodigious and includes all
the better known stories of the war. It lasts for over forty-four
months and sees the collapse of Russia; the first sorties of the
besieged Prussian alliance through Poland; the tremendous efforts
made by the Allies to break the enemy’s siege-lines in Champagne, on
the Somme, and in Flanders, on the Asiago plateau and on the terrible
Carso Plateau in front of Trieste. It sees the failure of the attack
on the siege wall at the postern of the Dardanelles, and even in
remote Mesopotamia, as well as in the Balkans. It sees further great
sorties, especially the violent struggles of the besieged at the
end to get out of their net: Caporetto, St. Quentin, the Chemin des
Dames. That second division ends on July 15, 1918, when the last
effort of the besieged to get out was made against Gouraud and broken
by him in front of Rheims. On July 18, 1918, three days later, the
third division begins and lasts exactly four months to the Armistice
on November 11. It is nothing but the successive breakdown of the
defence, the crumbling of the siege wall and the collapse of the
besieged.

See the Great War on these lines, and you see it clearly, as it was.
Try to write of it by successive years, and you get nothing but a fog.

Now Mr. Nickerson has done exactly that right thing for the
Albigensian War. He clearly divides the struggle into its _military_
episodes; the first great rush; the long struggle of de Montfort;
the curious but inevitable fruit of the whole business after de
Montfort’s death in the lapse of the South to the crown of France,
that is to the North.

In this connection one cannot praise too highly the simple and clear
fashion in which the author has presented to the reader the real
nature of mediæval warfare. There are two points to be established
in which, I think, he has been permanently successful. First, in
making the reader understand the narrow limits of time to which
any effective work on a large scale by a powerful army was then
confined. Secondly, the contrast between the feudal forces which
were, as it were, normal to the times, and those supplementary
mercenary forces, which, though they were not regarded by the time
as normal, were the real backbone of all continuous military effort
in the West. It is an idea which one might develop in many epochs
of military history besides the Middle Ages. Over and over again a
particular form of recruitment is regarded as normal and after use
for some generations begins from causes inherent in itself to yield
insufficient results; whereupon a supplementary form of recruitment,
which for long continues to be regarded as exceptional, becomes, as
the close observer may discover, the essential of the new fighting
force, e.g., the Auxiliaries and the Legions after, say 180, and
especially after 312.

It was one of the advantages of the English, by the way, in the later
Middle Ages that the difficulty of transporting large feudal forces
over the sea led to an early development of their mercenary forces
and produced the highly trained professional bowmen who are the mark
of the Hundred Years War.

Mr. Nickerson is also right in saying how considerable was the degree
of military organization in the early thirteenth century.

Too often in military history anything earlier than the seventeenth
century or the middle of the sixteenth is treated unscientifically
by the writer, who seems to imagine that if he gets far enough back
he can treat armies as herds moving about at random. The truth is
of course that no great body of men ever so moved or could be moved
without a high degree of organization, and that when you are dealing
with the _rapid movement_ of a very large body the organization must
be nearly as detailed as it is to-day. There is a certain minimum of
organization below which you cannot fall without breaking down, when
it is a case of great bodies moving quickly; and that minimum is so
high that it does not vary very much between the very first epochs of
recorded history and the latest.

The next point I have to notice is Mr. Nickerson’s presentation both
of the Inquisition as an _idea_ and of the contrast between its
_methods_ and those of modern times. The task undertaken is the most
difficult of any that lies before the historian; yet it is also the
most essential. The wrong way of dealing with the remote past when it
presents acts or states of mind quite unfamiliar, and even repulsive
to us, is to express horror or ridicule and leave it at that. Thus we
have Mr. Davis in his typical Oxford textbook upon the Angevin period
sneering at the massacre at Beziers as “pious butchery”; thus we have
another typical Oxford textbook, Mr. Oman’s, dealing with an earlier
period, sneering at the piety of Gildas; and thus we have yet another
textbook—from Cambridge this time—in which the Regius Professor of
History, Dr. Bury, sneers at a vision of St. Patrick’s as the result
of a “pork supper.”

Now that way of writing history, which is, I am sorry to say, still
the common way in our English Universities, is worthless. Your
business in writing of the past is to make the past comprehensible.
More: you ought, as I quoted at the beginning of this, to make it
rise from the dead; and that you certainly cannot do if you are so
little able to enter into its spirit that everything in it which
differs from yourself appears small, repulsive, or absurd. Anyone,
however ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in
standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how
detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that. The whole art
of history consists in eliminating that shock of non-comprehension
and in making the reader feel as the men of the past felt.

We have a very good example of the same difficulty in the case of
travel-books. We all know how intolerably boring is a book of travel
in which the writer can get no further than decrying or laughing at
the foreigner, and we all know how the charm of a book of travel
consists in its explaining to us, putting before us as a living and
comprehensible thing, some civilization which at first sight seemed
to us incomprehensible.

It is just the same with history. In the case of the Inquisition it
is particularly difficult to make the modern reader understand the
affair because all the terms have been, so to speak, transliterated;
but I think we can arrive at a fairly satisfactory result if we
translate the terms involved into things which the modern man is
familiar with. Instead of physical torture, for instance, read
cross-examination and public dishonour; instead of the sacrifice of
all civic guarantees to the preponderant interest of united religion,
read the similar sacrifice of all such guarantees to the preponderant
interest of a united nation; instead of clerical officers using every
means (or nearly every means) for the preservation of religious
unity, read civil officers using _every_ means for the preservation
of national unity in time of peril. If you do that, I think the
modern man can understand. Had you presented to the early thirteenth
century the spectacle of the whole male population medically
examined, registered, and forcibly drafted into a life where a
chance error might be punished immediately by death or by some other
terrible punishment; had you shown him men, doubtful in their loyalty
to the nation, condemned to years of perpetual silence, secluded
from their fellow beings after being made a spectacle of public
dishonour in the Courts; had you even sketched for him our universal
spy system whereby a strong modern central Government holds down all
its subjects as no Government of antiquity, however tyrannical, ever
held them down—could you have shown a man of the thirteenth century
all this, he would have felt the same repulsion and horror which most
modern men feel on reading of the Inquisition, its objects and its
methods.

A man who should so explain our modern life to a man of the
thirteenth century as to make it _comprehensible_ to him (a difficult
task!) in spite of his repulsion and horror at our cruelties,
blasphemies, and tyrannies, would be a good historian. The converse
also is true.

There are many special points in the book on the consideration of
which I would delay did space allow. Thus my own knowledge of the
time and place enables me to make certain suggestions. I see that
the author inclines to the Cerdagne route for the march of Pedro of
Aragon. I should do more than incline—I should be morally certain of
it—at least on the evidence to our hand; and that in spite of Pedro’s
presence at Lascuarre in August. If, which is very unlikely, further
evidence comes forward, we may have to accept the Somport sallent or
even the Val d’Aran, but the more I think of it, the more the latter
seems to me out of the question. I know the steep and dangerous
approaches upon either side, especially upon the Aragonese side.
I consider the great difficulty of reaching them from the point of
concentration at Lerida. The Cerdagne is the one really open road.
It was the only easy pass of value then to large armies; as for
the second pass, the Puymorens, into the valley of the Ariege, it
is perfectly easy, a mere lift of land. I have crossed it a dozen
times under all conditions of weather. Again I would find it most
interesting to contrast the procedure even of the late Inquisition
with contemporary civilian procedure, e.g., Torquemada’s procedure
with Henry VII’s Judges in a treason trial. It is to the advantage of
the former. Better still, a trial under Philip III and Cecil’s Judges
in his carefully nursed Gunpowder plot.

But such detailed discussion of a hundred matters of history raised
in this book would unduly prolong what is already too lengthy an
introduction of a work to which the reader must be anxious to turn.

  H. BELLOC.

  _Kings Land, Shipley,
  Horsham._




THE INQUISITION:

A Political and Military Study of its Establishment.




CHAPTER I.

THE MEDIÆVAL RECOVERY OF CIVILIZATION.


What was the society in which the Inquisition, that great attack
upon human liberty, succeeded? To answer this, in the case of that
other great attack of which we are the unhappy spectators, it would
be necessary to estimate first the chief forces active in the world,
and second their modification by local circumstance in America. A
man, having done this, is able to get a just idea of Prohibition. He
must get into the picture of the great nineteenth century expansion
of civilization, and the fact that this expansion was, in great
part, due to increased command over material nature through what we
call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay
of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration
upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme
importance attributed by our society to power over material things,
in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies,
and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the
masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although
morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are,
grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our
warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos,
and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.

What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar
“Inquisition” movement?

First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are
apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as
feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself in elaborately useless
pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with
our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages
most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government,
frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack
of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the
fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages
in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark
Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of
the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century,
men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as
we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all
sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden
and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth
century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and
the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in
the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the
expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full
of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have
the right to be anything but hopeful.

Although the twelfth century resembled the nineteenth in vastness
of achievement, it differed from the nineteenth in the quality of
that achievement, and in the nature of the forces which made it
possible. Of course the vigour of human will is the prime mover in
both cases. In the twelfth century men felt that their strength
had been magnified not so much by new processes giving them an
increased command over physical nature as by moral forces suddenly
making them aware of unsuspected strength within themselves. I do
not mean that the nineteenth century felt that it possessed no new
elements of moral strength. It did. The ideas of the American and
French Revolution thrilled it profoundly; to a lesser extent it was
touched by a limited but nevertheless keen, new, sympathy with those
very Middle Ages with which we are concerned. Nor do I mean that the
Middle Ages enjoyed no greater power over material things than had
been possessed by the simple and childlike Dark Ages immediately
preceding them. I do say that in the twelfth century, as compared
with the nineteenth, the sense of new power over physical nature
played a lesser, and the confidence in new powers within man’s own
nature played a correspondingly greater, part.

Two causes brought about this greater importance of the moral as
compared with the physical factors of power. First, the twelfth
century successes were, in all outward and secular things, no
more than the partial reconquest of the Roman order which, after
a fashion, men still remembered. Whereas the nineteenth century,
instead of partly restoring that which had been, and had then been
lost, conquered nature and barbarism in regions where such conquest
had never been attempted. Hence the twelfth century in the full flush
of its achievement was less subject to pride and the illusions which
wait upon pride. Second, the moral (and intellectual) life of the
twelfth century revolved about a single many-sided institution, the
Church, which affected all departments of human life.

It is the task of this chapter to set the stage for the events which
follow. The reader must have a notion of the slack and sunken age
of Gerbert (the great Pope of the year 1000), secondly the vigorous
fighting age of Hildebrand and the great Norman chiefs, of the First
Crusade and the Song of Roland, that is, the later eleventh century.
Next he must grasp the twelfth century itself, Abelard, the teaching
of the Roman law at Bologna, the enrichment and refinement of life,
chivalry, “feminism,” and the continuing quarrel of the central and
all-pervasive Church with the developing civil governments. Finally,
towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of
the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and
the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the
idea of nationality.

There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as
if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen
strokes of the pen. The analysis must of necessity be slight. I shall
try to make it just. Especially the influence of the Church must be
grasped and also (a thing often missed in accounts of the time) the
limitations of that influence.

Before entering upon such a task, I cannot refrain from warning my
reader of the necessary limitations and imperfections of history.

The scantiness of record, the bias and the inherent imperfections of
human testimony, the tendency of the striking and exceptional fact to
get itself recorded and thereby destroy the average (to which I shall
return in considering baronial and private wars and comparing them
with our strikes); all these things make us see the past not outlined
clearly but through a haze.

Finally, we must beware of trying to understand the past too well,
when we cannot even understand the present. What evil spell is over
the modern male to keep him in such ugly and often uncomfortable
clothes? The pedants used to go about solemnly pretending to assay
the most inward motives of the great of old time (who were better
men than they, and could they come back to the sunlight to deal with
these same pedants, would have soused and slimed them in the nearest
duckpond for their prying impudence). They went on doing this, I say,
until about the year 1905, when Chesterton asked them whether they
themselves put flowers on a dead man’s grave in the belief that their
dead could smell.[1] Since then they have been a little quieter.

And yet all this seems forgotten by most of the writers and
practically all the readers of history. Never mind. When the wretched
historians call on the name of “Science,” that modern Mumbo-jumbo
idol before whom we are all expected to bow down, let us save our
self-respect as honest men by thumbing our noses and wriggling our
fingers at such silly superstitions. They are all of a piece with
the venerable dotard of an idea that proclaims the Infallibility of
the Press and makes people believe a thing “because they see it in
print”—pah!

Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages
began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization
(which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with
ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great
energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly
about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the
economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under
a system of taxation such as our own time would call socialistic.
At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied,
more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting
in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the
professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire,
and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably
into political office. The manner and stages of this decline
(fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done)
do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of
degradation which was reached.

To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the
evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of
the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial
weighing of evidence in matters of law.

For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we
may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of
the principal towns of Roman Britain, the centre towards which the
road system of the island converged. From early in the fifth to the
opening years of the seventh century the place is not even mentioned
in any document known: so that (in defiance of all probability)
certain foolish scholars have been able to maintain that, in the
interval, London did not even exist. Like London, Paris had been a
capital, and to this day the blackened remains of its Roman palace
that look down upon the comings and goings of the Latin Quarter in
the “Boul’ Mich” are well out from the central “island of the city”
on which the place began. The amphitheatre is even further away,
behind the Pantheon, and anyone can appreciate how necessary it is
that a place of public entertainment should not be too far out from
the centre of things. And yet towards the end of the ninth century,
when the Viking pirates besiege the place, only the little central
island is held against them. Admitting fully that neither London
nor Paris meant to Britain and Gaul what they mean to-day, still, I
repeat, they were both very considerable towns, and it is entirely
fair to use them as tests. The cities of Western Christendom had been
“minished and brought low.”

Second, as to the loss of the power to build. That loss was well-nigh
complete. Any history of architecture in England will parade before
its reader the puny relics of Anglo-Saxon building. Paris has a few
such things as the rude tower of St. Germain des Prés and a few
doubtful stones in the low little church of St. Julien le Pauvre.
In Italy, the “carnivorous” Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly
identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters,
is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and
twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the
rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is
hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging
to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000.
Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures
that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves
of a building. Usually they could not even keep them from decay. Even
repair was beyond them.

By what processes of law were civil disputes judged in these
diminished cities in which architecture was growing ever ruder,
feebler, and more squat? These men, our own ancestors, whose
ancestors again had enjoyed the Roman law, decided between litigants
by a series of tests or “ordeals” which are a catalogue of trivial
stupidity. Merely to give the list will be enough to allow the reader
to judge them. There was the “wager of battle,” which was not a duel
on the point of honour, but a deliberate judicial test; plaintiff and
defendant fought, and the victor won his case. Perhaps the greatest
man of the Dark Ages, Charlemagne, is found striving against this
custom. In his will he provides that disputes between his heirs as to
titles to land are not to be so settled. And for it he substitutes a
mild form of ordeal much in favour in settling titles to land, that
of the cross. The disputants held out their arms horizontally, and
he that endured the longest had the land! There was the ordeal by
boiling water, red hot iron, or by fire, all three of which scalded
or burned the guilty and spared the innocent. Sometimes lots were
drawn, and sometimes the truth or falsity of a statement was tested
by whether or not the taking of the consecrated eucharist harmed
him who maintained the statement in question. Of course all these
tests were accompanied by religious ceremony, and were believed to be
especially subject to the direct interposition of God. But the mental
stature of those who maintained them:—

  “Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.”
  (We will not speak of them but look and pass on).

The mention of the direct interposition of God brings us naturally
to the supernatural bias of the time. Here judgment is not so easy.
It is possible to represent the replacement of the old positivism
of the educated ancients (by supernaturalism and the transcendental
formulas of the creeds) as part of the general decline. It is equally
possible to represent it as the one leaven in an unsatisfactory lump.
Certainly the divorce between the thought of the (largely positivist)
educated class of our own day and that of the populace, now (as ever)
full either of religious or political superstition and careless both
of philosophic theory and scientific fact, this divorce, I say, is
certainly evil. But in the Dark Ages popular superstition ran riot
without qualification or corrective.

It is a commonplace that the officials of the Church retained a
measure of organization and discipline when civil government was
going to pieces, that the Church was the central institution of the
time, and that most of its outstanding personalities were churchmen.
What is not always seized is the extreme importance of the monastic
institution. The monk scholars, whom the Church alone sheltered,
could at least hand on the knowledge of the great books of the past,
although when they wrote they could make only huge, dull commentaries
on those same books.

How then did such a time get any business done at all? Economically,
by raising the slave to a serf; politically, by an increase of local
power.

With the decay of communications and police, the slave could simply
run away and could not be brought back. Clearly, to get any work out
of him at all, it must be made to his interest to stay. This was
done by requiring of him only a fixed and comparatively small amount
of his produce as dues for the land he tilled, and permitting him
to enjoy the surplus which he could increase up to the limit of his
power. This arrangement “worked” after a fashion. In giving to the
labourer more dignity and independence, it had an intimate (although
apparently quite unconscious) connection with the Church’s doctrine
of an equal worth of all souls in the sight of God.

Politically, the financial exhaustion of the central governments,
and the slackening of communications, as the great Roman roads were
not kept up, helped to throw more and more power and initiative upon
local governors; until at last, instead of appointed officers they
became almost local kings who could, and did, hand their offices to
their sons as they could their property. This last capital change
did not occur until midway in the ninth century, the second of three
centuries of attacks from without which broke upon the degraded Roman
society and almost destroyed it.

I have spoken of the society as degraded Roman because I believe
that the entire weight of the evidence is against the idea of a
conquest of civilization by rudely noble “Teutons” who then proceed
to invigorate the decaying Roman system. The fact is that the coming
of the little barbaric war bands, who were not “Teutonic” at all
but of mixed bloods, was only a step, although an important step,
in a long and gradual process of decay from within. No contemporary
writer, except St. Jerome, seems to have seen anything particularly
significant or striking in the event when the barbarian “Auxiliaries”
(who for a hundred years had made up the chief part of the imperial
armies) sacked the city of Rome itself. Such forces were the
“Colonial troops” of the time who would occasionally run amuck in
the course of their squabbles with other bands of auxiliaries, or
with the impoverished government which had contracted to pay them.
Throughout the greater part of the Empire, they seem never to have
dreamed of an organized campaign against civilization although they
indulged in occasional outbreaks of plundering and disorder. I have
not space here in which to combat the vague notion of a sudden
destruction and thereafter a distinctly “Teutonic” renewal. Let it
suffice that not one single institution not common to all primitive
folk, such as the council of warriors or of the elders of the tribe,
appears. The tie of personal devotion and loyalty to a chieftain,
which they brought with them, belongs not only to every barbarian but
also to every schoolboy.

Another line of reasoning which would tend to prove the gradual
nature of the decline and the absence of definite break with the past
would be to trace the considerable beginnings in the “lower” or later
Empire, of the tendencies recognized as marking particularly the Dark
Ages. Depopulation, building with the fragments of older and better
work, in letters the replacement of any criticism of life by glamour
and marvels, all these go back to the fourth and sometimes even to
the third century. Nor does the list end here. The fourth century
saw cavalry replace infantry as the main reliance of armies, and the
third century already saw the wise man thought of more as a magician
than a philosopher.

Upon this degraded Roman society fell the triple scourge of
Mohammedan, Viking and Magyar. It is perhaps the best answer to
the assertion that the “Teutons” had poured new life into Western
Christendom to note that it barely weathered the storm. For most of
these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It
was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly
the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But
it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb.
All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman
civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which
had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where
so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in
the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for.
They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made
the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of
the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By
900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little
more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the
inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so
long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the
thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle.

Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and Magyar) the
conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched
time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock
of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of
these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they
did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious
fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her
letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered
here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it
were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world
around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use
of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy
tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them
the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most
apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the
widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession,
and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately
used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had
given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know
that many of our public men think of government not as something
to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of
prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a
political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete
control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local
leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the
first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when
each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help
seeing that it was to his own immediate personal benefit to see that
his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change
would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive
some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we
have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of
serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a
free man.

These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set
purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of
any sort of defence and production. The men who established them (or
rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political
theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their
simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds
growing on a ruin.

This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut
break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king,
continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the
count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory,
and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings
and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and
emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord
to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage
of their own needy little vassals to them.

There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors,
kings, and nobles alike, to make of the officers of the Church
the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local
noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to
“invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been
unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the
preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral
ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just
to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a
disintegrating tendency.

There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming
principally from the monks and especially from the new order of
Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement.
Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the
outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared,
sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to
breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year
1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting
above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.

The great Gerbert, Pope in the year 1000 under the name of Sylvester
II, stands as a symbol. Great as an intriguer, to us he is even
greater as a scholar. He had studied mathematics and “al-gebra” (the
word is Arabic) with the Arabs in Spain, and like every scholar
worthy of the name he loved the classics. His mathematics made
him feared as a wizard, and when writing to a friend in Italy for
unchurchly, Latin books, we find him asking that they be “procured
quietly,” promising that he will tell no one of the favour done him.

I have called Gerbert a symbol of his time. To call that time the
“Dark Ages” is just to a degree that few of the stock epithets of our
school are just. They were the morasses from which the Mediæval rise
begins.

For, after the doubtful pause of which I have spoken, Europe arose.
The Normans conquer England and Sicily, and set up systems of
government and administration fit to be models for all the West. The
Hildebrandine reforms free the Church from the feudal anarchy, and
the Church in her new strength fills Christendom with a new sense of
unity and common purpose. This common purpose hurls Europe against
Asia, in the tidal wave of the First Crusade, which breaks down the
barrier between East and West and begins a new day.

It is important to note how short was this Norman-Hildebrandine
period, and how many-sided was its accomplishment.

At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first
stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes
after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar
year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus,
if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to
the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government
than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They
were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are
from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it.
Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found
London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it.
The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on
the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century.
Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great
accomplishment falls into the little space of years I have marked
out. It is an astonishing time.

In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in
“Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long
tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s
new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private,
specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At
any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over,
has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.

And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how
to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up
extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just
passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm,
reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God
exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern
Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his
Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as
strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. The new Norman
race was ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and
method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war,
that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire
power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.[2] In military
engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great
square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles,
they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered
height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect
of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too.
Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can
stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely
powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought
for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages
had begun.

What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to
feel it in their buildings and writings, but the answers to such
questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind
can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time,
with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us
in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a
self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the
heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense
of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic
never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its

  “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,”

as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or
uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh
century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites
and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not
love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving
stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into
strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is
extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound
his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to
their death.

Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were
monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to
the lawman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.

In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned.
They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen
the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a
new time, the twelfth century.

I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just
so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that
it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the
divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but
also the barrier between Europe and the East. But the expression of
a tidal wave is incorrect in suggesting a levelling and destructive
force. For what followed was the continuation and enlargement of what
the Norman-Hildebrandine eleventh century had done, with greater
riches, complexity and refinement. There appear, also, new forces,
but there is no conscious break with the immediate past.

In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came
increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of
wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which
had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow
stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the
knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great
sense of the State.

So also building was continued, and the bases of design do not
change, but the severity of the older work begins to be lost in
encrusted masses of sculptured detail. Most of the carving strikes
us as crude; a good deal of it is meant to be grotesque and much of
the rest is grotesque—unintentionally. But there is vigour about it;
and an effect of richness, through painstaking repetition of simple
motifs. This richness of decorative sculpture links up naturally with
the new social tendency to refinement in manners.

With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with
that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his
bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have
relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail
and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s
great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a
totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the
time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with
an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the
eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany
had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political
struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social
observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the
United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement
had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern
France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and
along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin.

This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the corresponding
change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father,
now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious
reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God.
What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition
can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of
religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone
loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and
pretty things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life,
so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In
poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the
tremendous outpouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth
century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.

Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something
unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible
only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find
the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming
to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the
Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social
decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism.
If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a
growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of
civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the
wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by
which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman
in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and
beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day
despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing
that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his
superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of
to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there
is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess
has never lasted long.

The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new
refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes
of men and women worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of
civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,”
practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought
their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when
they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were
turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses
we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of
to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in
themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies
of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the
ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence
we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they
brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the
craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition
between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his
independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after
them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to
feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the
Gothic. All these things they did, not because of any rule or precept
but spontaneously, for their own sake, as things that ought to be
done.

While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country
serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The
arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up
the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members
of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we
should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or
do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some
town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make
things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century,
out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal
dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the
new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The
unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary
literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in
fact, free. The independent “villeins” of “Aucassin and Nicolette”
or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of
to-day.

Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was
that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery
into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as
churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time
reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical
foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the
great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years ...” (as Belloc
says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his
misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the
picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public
to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate,
is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to
say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became
secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the
faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became
matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational
demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders,
ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its
own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in
substance, universities.

I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that
is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant
came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled
themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But
one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower)
of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new
municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and
he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution
his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that
his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called
themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century.

So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads,
buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and,
like God, seeing that its works were good. Its cities were growing
fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests until their
extent was reduced almost to what it is to-day.[3] No new process to
spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power
over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated
with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to
experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping
energy of its own vigorous will.

In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic
and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of
Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly
to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first
time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings,
Christendom feels a great calamity.

The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay
spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the
pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent
upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line
gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of
their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and
buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.

While the pointed arch was beginning to be seen in building, the
texts of Aristotle were coming in from Spain. Abelard’s time had
known of Aristotle only his Logic. But now scholars might read in
Latin (translated from the Arabic) the Physics, the Metaphysics,
and Ethics. Thus, these men, with their keen and active minds, were
suddenly face to face with one of the greatest, if not the very
greatest, intellect of all mankind. Upon the crowds of students full
of discussion and debate, believing confidently that they could build
themselves a tower of logic that would reach heaven, the effect was
electric. For such men to have for their study Aristotle’s enormous
range of thought, to feel his luminous common sense, was to give
them more than their youth had dreamed, the discovery of a new world.

Meanwhile, behind the endless political squabbles, the vast idea
of nationality could be seen just looming up, faint and dim, but
enormous. It harked back to the dim, prehistoric forces that had
wrought out the words “Gaul,” “Britain,” “Italy,” and “Spain.” Such
words had never been represented by governments. They had stood
always for ideas only. But in France, where ideas have power, a sort
of underlying force in men’s minds was conjuring up, behind the
king, the nation. This force acted through the Roman law which was
illuminating the active intellect of the time, but the soul of it was
a blind instinct.

This growing and vigorous time that had made and done so many new
things, had forgotten what it was to feel a check, until, towards the
end of the century, Saladin broke the Syrian Franks at Hattin, and
took Jerusalem. The disaster did not seem hopeless. Christendom began
forthwith to hum with preparation for a new crusade. Nevertheless,
this first great experience of failure throws into high relief, as it
were, the buoyancy of the time, and gives us, therefore, a point from
which we may survey its accomplishment and seek to fix its spirit.

First of all, it is necessary to insist upon the straightforwardness,
the downright directness of that spirit. It is true that the Courts
of Love preached far-fetched doctrines, but they were a conscious
revolt against grossness of manners, a sort of counter-excess.
With this exception, the time nowhere attempted extravagance. The
elaborate sculpture of its buildings is framed in structural lines
that are firm and even severe. As yet the Gothic (which was to be
the expression of the mediæval temper in its completeness and in its
decline) gives only here and there a hint of its coming. Height is
indeed attempted, but everywhere the general lines of the buildings
remain square and solid. Wherever the architect has expressed his own
thought in altering the inherited arrangement of the Roman column
and arch, the change tends towards frankness and logic. Each part
aims to express its function, whether structural or decorative, in
relation to the whole. The classic forms begin to be rationalized so
as to be not a façade but living parts of the structure; the column
begins to be wedded to the arch. As in architecture, so in the other
arts and handicrafts. In general, clothes were cut on simple and
serviceable lines without hint of theatricality or excess, either
fitting close to the body, or falling in simple and graceful folds.
Arms, and especially armour, remained light and simple. In the second
half of the century the cylindrical pot-helm, completely covering the
face, came in and took the place of the open conical helmet with its
nose-guard. Already before the new fashion in helmets had come in,
the mail shirt had had its sleeves lengthened to the wrist, and now
mittens and separate leg coverings of mail were in use also. But the
heavy body armour of plate that was to encumber the warriors of later
centuries was unknown. The horse-equipment, too, was simple, made for
use and not for parade. In all things the time observed simplicity
and, as it were, a natural and effortless logic in the outline of
that which it made.

The seeming contradiction between the simplicity everywhere aimed
at by the men of the twelfth century and the confusion of their
society was the natural and inevitable result of the conditions
which limited their action. They, with their keenness of mind, could
almost remember ancestors who had been half barbarians. The material
with which they had to work was painfully scanty. It was not only
that the time, with its fluidity and the swiftness and extent of its
social changes, had as yet found no formula that might approach a
definition of its inmost spirit. That difficulty was met a generation
later in the mid-thirteenth century, with Aquinas, St. Louis, and the
culmination of the Gothic. The underlying trouble was that, even at
their best, the Middle Ages had no sufficient accumulation either of
knowledge or of material resources. For want of ordered and detailed
knowledge, the complexity of problems could not be grasped, and for
want of resources the material disasters of the fourteenth century
were to be fatal to the mediæval experiment. As yet, about the year
1200, synthesis and such near approach to perfection as is permitted
to man were in process of attainment. There was no muddle-headed
modern illusion of the necessary goodness of change under the name of
“progress.” It was because the new things that they had made were
certainly good that men felt that they had reason to hope.

Our books over-emphasize the deficiencies of the Middle Ages as
compared with ourselves. But it is true that they were unable to
transform completely the unpromising material they had at hand.

Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all
springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus,
in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial
combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these
populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity.
Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight
and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day.
Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is
conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the
Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of
weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public
way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked
streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried
to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them
conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have
been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable
town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its
streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he
would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea,
more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or
of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that
connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such
as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller
over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from
the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between
nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves
and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes
(often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a
mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such
disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole.
But to protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers,
government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before
the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to
have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have
tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later
mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would
sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by
accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to
give the commander some notion of the enemies’ position and movements.

One must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished
portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time
was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager
spirit.

Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone
of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was
practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive
moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the
Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to
ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new
forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means
adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one
looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the
men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without
regret.

This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the
corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and
pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united
learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and
all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery
served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were
not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the
shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or
too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal
worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of
her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between
classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use
of Latin, made for understanding and community of feeling between
localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of
mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure
of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality”
and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together.
This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by
her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by
accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one
of another.

We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which
the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all
society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere
in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only
unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century
Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the
happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in
so many schoolbooks. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia
could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered
their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned
religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly.
Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for
suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent—

  “Half devil and half child ...”

Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in
reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the
action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies
with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability.
But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western
Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have
been.

The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an
answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou
shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not
so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed
daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly
mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham
priest, covered with an ass’s false head burlesqued the mass before
the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay.
So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at
least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when
so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of
the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the
language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that
in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell
us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman
Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious
opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At
any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against
Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia,
religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross
and some refined.

I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned.
Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her
teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any
society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which
control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both
master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time
is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will
be active. Accordingly we find the moral and intellectual forces
opposed to the Church clearly defined.

In the great Investiture quarrel between the papacy and the secular
governments from the Empire down, the faith and morals of the
Church were not at stake. But, at the same time, the claims of her
champions in her good effort to untangle herself from feudalism were
so extravagant that they suggested a downright theocracy, actual
government by the ministers of religion, which has always been
hateful to men of our European stock. Further, the twelfth century
man, in so much fighting against the infidel, had learned that his
enemy was no such bad fellow after all. We find at least one ruler,
Henry Plantagenet in the heat of his quarrel with Becket, crying out
that he would rather turn Mohammedan than yield to the Church! And
the outburst does not seem to have weakened his position. Evidently
the world was moving fast in his day. The noble, so far surpassing
his fathers in riches, luxury, and refinement, often failed to see
eye to eye with the churchman. The story of the time is full of
despoilments of the Church and consequent excommunications. Now and
then a commune, at the height of political struggle with its bishop,
would physically maltreat him (or even kill him) and go off into a
short spasm of blank irreligion.

Moreover, the Church had foes, or at least very lukewarm servitors,
of her own household. We have seen that the student was usually
still in minor orders. But now he was no longer shut up under
strict control in a monastery, but free to wander at will. Under no
constraint, and full of his classic learning with its glorification
of every passion and appetite, he carelessly kicked clear over the
monkish interpretation of the Christian ethic, and as often as not
went wild altogether from any sort of check on his desires. John
Addington Symonds has collected, and translated into English out
of the original Latin, a number of these students’ songs, under
the title of “Wine, Woman and Song.” They are often charming, but
I cannot imagine literature better calculated to enrage a monk, or
indeed anyone of a puritanic cast of mind.

Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious
moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of
Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about
“the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any
definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on
an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the
world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed.
The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride
in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor
of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete
demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said
that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as
low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up
coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women
parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of
to-day.

Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of
feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting
her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the
first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders,
Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is,
in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” ... was ...
“laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”[4]

Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a
dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the
Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the
attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation
was strained.

Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift
new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that
course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society
and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position
that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working
against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for
it a different, hostile body of doctrine.

In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That
spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form
the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine
which has usually been called Albigensianism (inasmuch as one of its
chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis
was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next
chapter shall consider.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the
Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905.

[2] By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.

[3] “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New
York, _Geographical Review_, September 1920: “In Central Europe the
period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was
practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.”

[4] “... tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39.




CHAPTER II.

LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.


I have chosen to call the district in question “Languedoc” because
the literature which was the mark of its distinctive culture was
written in the “langue d’Oc” (in contra-distinction to the North
French langue d’Oïl which later became the master idiom), and
because the actual fighting to be described in the fourth chapter
took place within (or just outside) the territories later known as
the Province of Languedoc under the French monarchy, until the old
administrative divisions were wiped out by the Revolution. I have
rejected the various more definite names given by recent historians
to the heretical movement in question because the word “Albigenses”
is in general usage, and because I believe that general usage ought
not to be lightly disturbed by the preciosity of individual scholars
careless of the bewilderment of the non-specialist reader.

First, then, of the general physical characteristics of the
country with which we are concerned. The southern half of France
is definitely bounded by great mountain chains. The Alps separate
it from Italy, the Pyrenees from Spain. It is true that there is a
little room for doubt in the Roussillon and around Nice where the
Pyrenees and the Alps respectively approach the Mediterranean Sea,
but, on the whole, the natural boundaries are quite clear, and modern
France in establishing them has resumed the natural frontiers of
ancient Gaul, one of those major divisions of Europe that go back
beyond recorded history. This southern part of France, besides the
mountains which limit it, contains within itself a lesser mountain
mass central to itself, the Cévennes. It contains two principal river
basins, on the east that of the Rhône, which flows almost due south
to the Mediterranean, draining the country between the Cévennes
and the Alps; on the west that of the Garonne, which flows in a
general direction north-west to the Atlantic, draining the country
between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees. It contains also a curved
strip of coastal plain from the mouths of the Rhône west and south
to the eastern Pyrenees, and between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees
a region of moderate uplands, broken by a single notch, so low that
the highest point of its watershed between the Atlantic and the
Mediterranean lies below the 200-metre line.

With the upper basin of the Rhône this study has little to do. The
lower Rhône country enters into our story, although not as the main
theatre in which its events took place. We are mainly concerned
with the upper Garonne basin, the strip of Mediterranean coastal
plain curving from the lower Rhône to the Pyrenees, the mountain
slopes which border upon these two regions and the passage, or gap,
of Carcassonne which connects them. For in that space (roughly of
a hundred by a little over a hundred and fifty English miles) was
decided the failure of the first attempt to break the moral unity of
mediæval Christendom. And in that struggle the Inquisition for the
first time definitely appears.

Even this small stretch of country presents great differences of
climate and of appearance.

The landscape of the coastal plain between the Rhône and the Pyrenees
is of the typical Mediterranean sort which hardly changes all around
the inland sea. The sea itself is intensely blue and the boats upon
it are rigged with slim lateen sails pointed like sharks’ fins.
Within sight of the sea are mountains, great stark masses of rock
like the bare bones of the world. No forests, but between the sea and
the mountains extends a strip of land systematically cultivated down
to its last square inch, showing everywhere the vine and the olive,
and built up in terraces wherever there is a slope. This strip of
land is always narrow—from the town of Beziers, for instance, both
mountains and sea are full in sight. When rain falls it comes down
fiercely as it does in America, unlike the gentle misty rains of
England and Northern France. Usually the air is so clear that all
outlines come out sharp and strong—one thinks of the trenchant Latin
phrase and the fixed lines of classic columns. The sun is dazzling
and powerful, and the roads are full of white dust. The houses are
of stone, flat topped or nearly so, and generally roofed in red tile.

The people, as befits the heirs of an immemorial and still vigorous
civilization, are loud-voiced, vivacious in gesture, ceremonious in
compliment, and both easy and dignified in repose.

Westward from Narbonne, a sharply defined valley, deep and regular
like a vast trench, seems to open a path toward the Atlantic. A man
going east or west is held to this valley; to leave it is to be
caught in the deep irregular gorges of the Montagne Noire (which is
the southernmost outlier of the Cévennes) to the north of the valley,
or in the equally hopeless gorges of the Corbières (which are the
north-eastern outliers of the Pyrenees) to the south of it.

This valley culminates in what may be called the gap of Carcassonne,
for in the neighbourhood of that town it is deepest and most clearly
marked, although the actual water parting between the Atlantic and
the Mediterranean is somewhat to the west.

The Montagne Noire, the northern limit of the gap, is well named, for
it is all of dark slatey rock. The Corbières, on the contrary, are
of white limestone, and a man standing a little way above the valley
floor can see behind them the snow peaks of the high Pyrenees.

To the west of Carcassonne the hills are lower but the gap continues
none the less, with Montreal and Fanjeaux, each on an outstanding
buttress of hill, for sentinels upon its southern side. Of these
two Montreal stands out against the horizon as one looks west from
Carcassonne, and in turn hides Carcassonne as one looks east from the
height of Fanjeaux. West from Fanjeaux the hills become mere downs,
and the landscape quite loses its Mediterranean look and becomes that
of the Toulousain.

About Carcassonne itself the landscape is of an intermediate sort
between the Mediterranean and the Toulousain. Between the bare hills
one still sees the olive, but more rarely than on the Mediterranean
side, and (as in the Toulousain) grain fields begin to alternate with
the vine.

The Toulousain, although it is altogether of the south, is a
different sort of country from the Mediterranean slope. In the first
place it is not a mere strip of land between sea and mountains, but
a broad, fan-shaped arrangement of valleys running together in the
general neighbourhood of Toulouse, and separated only by ridges or
downs regular in outline and no great height. As on the Mediterranean
side the ground is minutely and intensely cultivated; still one sees
more trees and shrubs growing freely, although by no means as many
as in Northern and Central France. The type of cultivation, too,
is different. One no longer sees the olive, and the vineyards are
outnumbered by grain fields. Furthermore, it is not the valleys alone
that are cultivated, the flat or gently rolling summits of the downs
are worked as well.

Although the people are the same, their houses are different from
those of the Mediterranean in that their material is brick. Indeed,
one sees no masses of rock in the Toulousain, and the bits of stone
in the larger buildings are brought from outside the district.

In spite of these physical differences in their country, the men of
the three regions have a distinctive character of their own. The
north Frenchman will tell you that they are noisy and boastful, fond
of jewellery and all sorts of display, better suited to politics than
to soldiering. And yet both Joffre and Foch are from the Pyrenees.
Certainly the Southern Frenchman’s skin is darker and his speech is
not quite the same as that of the Northerner; it is nearer to the old
Latin speech in that Gascon and Provençal alike have followed the
Italians and Spaniards in keeping the grand broad vowels that make
the southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. In the early Middle
Ages this tongue of theirs, the langue d’oc, was spoken as far north
as Geneva on the east and Poitou on the west (the first troubadour
that we know was Count of Poitiers, not far from the central Loire),
but the royal province afterwards called Languedoc was much smaller,
and included, roughly, only the land already marked off as the
theatre of the Albigensian war.

Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded
history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the
Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city
states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and
intense local patriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean
became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so
for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts
but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to
make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing.
The schoolboy remembers how throughout the Commentaries there is
continually talk of calling drafts for the cavalry from “Tolosa
et Narbone.” This country came to be called “The Province,” _par
excellence_; the name survives in the modern word “Provence.”

Incidentally it is interesting to note that “Provincia” was not
confined to the Mediterranean lands. Scarcely had the Romans occupied
these than they went forward, over the gap of Carcassonne, the saddle
between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees, where the railway and the
canal go to-day. They took the upper Garonne country, then as now
centreing about Toulouse as its chief town, and connected it for
administration with the Mediterranean coastal plain from the Rhône to
the Pyrenees.

This arrangement, after enduring for five hundred years under the
Romans, reappears in the Dark Ages under the Counts of Toulouse,
and, first under them and later under the Kings of France, lasts for
eight hundred years more. It is astonishing to see how closely the
Roman administrative division called “Narbonensis Prima” of B.C. 100
corresponds with the province of Languedoc of the French monarchy of
A.D. 1790.

Everywhere she went Rome stamped upon the land its permanent
form. But nowhere, outside of Italy itself, does she seem to have
“Romanized” more thoroughly than in “Provincia.” To this day, “The
valley banks of the Rhône ... have still a greater mass of imperial
remains than the city [of Rome] itself,”[5] and the churches of
Toulouse show the round arch and the small Roman bricks.

When the Empire became Christian, Toulouse still grouped itself, as
it does to this day, around its municipal building, the “Capitol.”
That building and the “Place du Capitole” continued central in the
town. The churches of Toulouse are fitted in like after-thoughts in
the town plan. They do not dominate everything as do the cathedrals
of the old towns of Northern France, as Notre Dame must have
dominated mediæval Paris. This difference in town-planning[6] seems
to be accompanied by a greater measure of continuity in municipal
institutions: mediæval Toulouse called her chief magistrates
“consules.”

In the decline, when the Roman auxiliaries were fighting their
aimless civil wars (much as if the “colonial troops” of to-day
were to become dominant in armies and go about setting up their
Europeanized leaders as chief executives), Toulouse was for a time
the capital of one of their shifting sovereignties, that of the
Visigoths, whose power, at its greatest, extended from the Loire and
the Alps clear down to Gibraltar. After a few years, another little
group of auxiliaries, the Franks, defeated the Visigoths, drove
them out of south-western Gaul clear down to the Pyrenees, and took
Toulouse. But although the Frankish chiefs would now and then raid
Spain itself for plunder, they never cleared the Goths out of the
coastal plain from the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees. So matters
stood when the first of the three great scourges of the Dark Ages,
the Mohammedan Saracens, fell upon Europe.

In their first rush north from Spain, the Mohammedans swept the
Mediterranean coastal plain. Narbonne resisted them, and saw its
people duly massacred, but some of the cities seemed to have
surrendered (as many of the Spanish towns had done) on condition
that their laws should be respected. The “Visigothic” State was a
flimsy affair. That part of Gaul which submitted to the Saracens
corresponded almost exactly to that which the Goths had held.
Carcassonne, Beziers, Agde, Maguelonne, Lodève, and Nismes had
Mohammedan garrisons. East of the Rhône they went beyond the Gothic
boundaries, and for three or four years, with the support of local
rebels, held Arles and Avignon.

Toulouse they never could take. Once they raided up the Rhône and
Saône and burned Autun, but with Toulouse in Christian hands they
could never hope to do much with the central Rhône valley. It was
the successful defence of Toulouse, quite as much as the victory of
Charles Martel, that checked their greatest effort in the familiar
year 732. Coming over the west central Pyrenees, they turned
north-east to attack Toulouse, compelled (like Wellington in 1814) to
deal with such a centre of population and communications in order to
secure their right flank for a move northward. So that when Toulouse
held out, their stroke which took Bordeaux and failed against Charles
Martel near Poitiers, was no longer a regular campaign, but merely a
plundering raid on a great scale.

It is worth insisting on the resistance of Toulouse to the Mohammedan
invasions in order to emphasize the importance of the town. But
although the infidel could not take Toulouse, he held Narbonne,
eighty miles away, for forty years. He was in Saragossa for just over
four hundred years until 1119, and Saragossa, the great town and
road centre south of the Pyrenees (corresponding to Toulouse to the
north of them), is only 250 miles from Toulouse as the crow flies.
Sometimes, from either city, the crest of the mountain chain can be
seen. The two faced one another, Toulouse as the untaken pivot of the
Christian defence, Saragossa as the bastion of the long, but finally
unsuccessful, defence of Islam. For about the same length of time as
that which separates Americans of 1920 from the death of Christopher
Columbus, Saragossa stood for Asia in the face of Christian Europe.

Naturally, Languedoc felt the Moslem influence in every sort of way.
The other two foes of the Dark Ages, the Viking and the Magyar,
appear and ravage the country but leave no trace except ruins. Alone
of the three the Mohammedan remained long close by, and he differed
from the other two in that he knew that cities were meant to live in,
as well as to burn, and in that he had ideas of a sort of his own.
It was too much trouble to keep fighting him all the time, and, in
the intervals of peace, his ideas sifted in through the intercourse,
north and south, over the border. In his train, as it were, came also
the Jew; already, in the early eighth century, an archbishop of Lyons
was troubled by the “aggressive prosperity” of Jews in Southern Gaul.

In vain we ask ourselves how much all this fighting and plundering
left standing of the institutions of the country, and how far
it destroyed them. Later we find the cities governed by elected
magistrates under the name of “consuls,” while similar magistrates in
the French towns outside of Languedoc go by other titles. At first
blush this seems to suggest that the Roman municipal organization
had been kept up. But whether or not this is true, we cannot tell.
The weighty opinion of Brutails is against the idea of continuity.
He makes the point that in Roussillon no title deed reposing on any
right of ownership before the Mohammedan invasion has come down to
us. He reminds us that Charlemagne’s father and grandfather when
driving out the Saracen pillaged the country quite as heartily as any
misbeliever. Still, the Roussillon of which he writes was the last
foothold of the Saracen in Gaul, whereas Toulouse, as we have seen,
was never theirs. Therefore the question remains doubtful.

The sudden eleventh century rise out of the sleepy Dark Ages into
the true Middle Ages shows us the Counts of Toulouse among the
greatest lords in Europe. The office had become hereditary around
the middle of the ninth century, about the same time as did so many
of the imperial offices. Count Raymond IV, sixth in descent from
the first Count who had handed down Toulouse to his son, was the
richest of the chiefs that took the Cross for the First Crusade.
Already, between the “Provençal” southerners and the North French
who were still called simply “French,” there was bad feeling, at
least on the part of the latter. A “French” chronicler seems to
lump Burgundians, Auvergnats, Gascons, and “Goths” (that is, men
from the Rhône-Pyrenees coast plain) all together under the name of
“Provençals,” and says that they excelled in nosing out foodstuffs,
and were accordingly very useful in times of famine, but had little
stomach for fighting. The antagonism is significant. Whether it was
justified or not is another matter; the accusation of cowardice does
not clearly appear in the records of the fighting, and does not seem
to have affected Raymond’s position. One fancies that, in such an
age, his riches would not have kept him among the half-dozen leaders
of the Crusade had his eleventh century Provençals been really
notorious cowards. Certainly the North Frenchman’s prejudice against
the “meridional” as a soldier remains to this day.

Even before the Counts of Toulouse appear as one of the richest
families in Europe, we can trace the beginning of the troubadour
poetry. It is probably the most distinctive contribution by the
lands, now Southern France, to the world’s history. The word
troubadour to-day means a poet of lyric love.

The twelfth century was its golden age, although we can just hear its
notes beginning in the eleventh, and dying away in the thirteenth.

The language of the troubadour poetry was the “langue d’oc” (as
opposed to the North French “langue d’oïl” or “langue d’oui”). It was
spoken over a stretch of country far more extensive than was later
the province of Languedoc. Thus there were troubadours in the central
mountain mass of Auvergne and in the broad Atlantic coastal plain
from the Pyrenees up to the Loire. Nevertheless, Toulouse remained
its centre.

The first thing that strikes its readers is the familiarity of many
of its rhythms. The Greek and Latin classic rhythms have to be
learnt. The “Song of Roland,” with all its power, strikes uncouthly
on the modern ear. But the troubadour poetry, after seven centuries,
sings itself as if it had been written yesterday, in such stanzas as
this of Bernard de Ventadour:—

  “Quan la douss avra venta
  Deves vostre pais
  M’es vejaire qu’ev senta
  Odor de paradis.”

Notwithstanding English blank verse from the sixteenth century on,
and notwithstanding the pathetic efforts of our contemporary crew of
“free versifiers” feeling ignorantly back to unrhymed rhythms such
as the ancients knew, notwithstanding these, I say that Provençal
stanza, with its rhyme and regular accents, still represents exactly
the sort of lyric rhythm we use. As far as verse form goes, the
troubadours were beyond all question the first of the modern poets,
in the easy skill and variety of their measures, some simple, some as
intricate as any verse ever written. Dante revered them second only
to Virgil.

What is most important to us is the picture they give of their
society. First of all they represent the chief end of man to be the
worship of woman. We have seen in the last chapter that feminism
in religion, i.e., the cult of the Virgin, was one of the twelfth
century master-passions. In Italy, towards the end of the thirteenth
century, poets intertwined love with philosophy, somewhat as the
Platonists had before them. The troubadours concerned themselves not
at all with philosophy and little with religion. Here and there they
bring in religion as a sauce to flavour more piquantly their love for
their lady, very much in the manner of our modern decadents. Thus the
poet may protest that he loves his lady “more than God loves Our Lady
of Puy de Dôme.” Incidentally, the devotion of the poets is almost
always for someone else’s wife.

The essential thing about all this “courteous love” is that it is
unmistakably the most cultivated and civilized thing that had been
since Rome had fallen asleep.

Furthermore, the appearance of the troubadour poetry in Southern
Gaul is still another fact proving that the Dark Ages were not a
murder but a sleep. The foolish historians of the last generation who
attributed the vigour and the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages
to an infusion of “Teutonic” blood, got a hard knock when Belloc[7]
noted that after the Dark Ages a comparatively high civilization
expressing itself in poetry full of the “romantic” idealization of
woman arose in precisely one of the districts least affected by
the handfuls of barbarian auxiliary troops of the fifth and sixth
century. The soul of Europe was not moulded anew by the barbarians
of the northern forests. That soul fell asleep, as it were, from
weariness, and then having slept, it awoke and sang.

The courtly fashion set by the troubadours overspread Christendom.
Indeed, it became a characteristic of the later twelfth century, as
we saw in the last chapter. Treitschke has a lively passage on the
“chivalrous, polished” time of the Hohenstaufen in Germany, “the
age of gallantry and the Minnesingers, quite distinctly feminine in
its universal attempt to adorn itself with womanly graces,”[8] in
contrast to the harsher time which had preceded it. But the fact that
the new fashion so quickly became European must not blind us to the
fact that it began in Languedoc. The troubadour poetry is already
fully developed in William Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine,
who was born in 1071. The first Hohenstaufen king did not reign over
Germany until 1138, and it was Count William’s granddaughter Eleanor,
Queen to Henry II, who first brought the cultivation of Provence to
England about the middle of the twelfth century.

Even in the troubadours, however, the near savagery of the Dark Ages
had been merely overlaid and not destroyed. Vivid memories of a time
at once feeble and gross swelled up in them sometimes. One poet,
that Sordello whose name Dante and Browning have combined to keep
alive, when singing the death of a brave knight, amiably suggests
that a long list of coward princes would do well to eat of the dead
man’s heart to better their courage! The idea was familiar to our Red
Indians.

Unfortunately, as events were to prove, their society which still
kept something of the underlying spirit of the savage, was losing the
spirit of the soldier. The statement needs qualification, especially
in the case of one of the greatest troubadours, Bertran de Born, who
was never happy without a fight unless he was rhyming about one.
But, although a striking exception he was only an exception. Even if
none of the troubadour poetry had survived, we could perhaps prove
that the “Provençal” was less warlike than the North Frenchman, or
even than most Christians of the time, by the fact that local wars
had to be fought with a larger proportion of mercenaries than was
the case elsewhere; so large indeed that their roving bands became a
serious “social problem,” as we shall see. Even if we assume that the
high proportion of mercenaries was due to the wealth of Languedoc,
still it is hard for us to imagine any twelfth-century hero of song
or story, outside of Provence, who would lose himself so deeply in
day dreams of his beloved as to be captured by his enemies, like
Aucassin in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” without so much as striking a
blow in his own defence.

The evidences of the wealth and refinement of this cultivated
and unwarlike society are not confined to the written records of
chroniclers and poets. Their buildings prove the same thing. For
combined breadth of composition and elegance of detail the porches of
such churches as St. Trophimus at Arles or the great church at St.
Gilles, are equalled by nothing in the Romanesque. Often their detail
is exactly that of the antique world to which they looked back over
the intervening lowlands of the Dark Ages.

Further, we have seen that the society for which the troubadours sang
was close to the Moslem, and was moved by currents Asiatic in their
origin both Moslem and Jew. Moslem coins circulated freely there.
The fact is proved beyond reams of learned stuff by such unconscious
evidence as that of one troubadour’s simile:—

“... Like a child which a man makes stop crying with a ‘marabotin’
...”

The poet does not think it necessary to stop and explain that a
marabotin was a Moorish penny, and being unconscious his testimony
cannot be challenged. Of the Universities, while Bologna studied law
and Paris theology, Languedoc in her greatest University, that of
Montpellier, studied medicine. This fact again proves her intercourse
with the “Paynim,” for it is a commonplace that the Arabs of Spain
were the great physicians of the Middle Ages. Saracen slaves, and
negroes brought from Africa by Saracens to be slaves, continued to
be held there centuries after slavery was extinct everywhere else in
Christendom. As for the Jews, they were so many and so prominent that
some chroniclers called Languedoc “Judea secunda.”

In such a society, it would have been strange if the different forces
which worked against the Church had not been active. No word remains
to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II
of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn
Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western
French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in
the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:—

“In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I
may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to
Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There
go old priests, and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and
all night crouch before altars, and in old crypts, and are clothed
with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags, who are naked and
footbare, and sore, who die of hunger and want and misery. These go
to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do. But to Hell I am willing
to go; for to Hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who die
in tourneys and in glorious wars, and good men-at-arms and the well
born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair courteous
ladies which have two or three friends besides their lords also
thereto. And the gold, and the silver go there, and the ermines and
sables; and there go the harpers, and jongleurs, and the kings of the
world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very
sweet friend, with me.”[9]

It is clear that the idea of “Heaven for climate and Hell for
company” is not new. Nietzsche himself has nowhere put it better.
And it is perhaps significant that of all that glittering company of
servants of the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the
pride of life, first of all come churchmen—the “fine scholars.”

Of course, all this sort of thing is not heresy. Logically it might
just as well have ended in mere negation. These volatile southerners
with their envy of the riches of the Church and their contempt, too
often well deserved, for her ministers—so that instead of saying
like most Christians “Rather than do so and so I would be a Jew,”
they said, “I would rather be a priest”—might have gone on their
way without troubling themselves about things not of this world.
Nevertheless, they lived in an age which hardly took Nature and her
secrets seriously, so absorbed were its thinkers in the nature of
God and man and their relation to each other. The other world of the
supernatural was as real and vivid to them as, in a different way, it
was to the New England Puritans. Irrespective of their own temper,
the currents of their time carried them away from secularism and mere
denial.

Like practically all keen and vivid times, the twelfth century was
full of religious debate. Among the learned the discussion turned
largely upon philosophy. The speculative and transcendental doctrines
of the Church might be called in question. In this way heresy, that
is religious error among those who claimed to be Christians, might
arise from intellectual speculation upon intellectual and philosophic
themes. Thus the early Church, in the high Imperial time before the
Dark Ages, thought of heresy first of all as erroneous speculation.
But theology and morals are not and can never be really separate.
The very idea of their possible separation could not have arisen
except in an age so bent upon “observing” as to be contemptuous of
reason. Theology and morals being merely mutually indispensable
different sides of religion, it therefore follows that speculative
heretics tended to become moral heretics. Now, in the Middle Ages,
as we have seen, the scholars were always in minor orders. At least
outside of Italy, learned heretics were rare. Therefore a good deal
of speculative heresy and near-heresy could, and did, exist without
doing much harm to the Church as an institution. A scholar who fell
foul of authority with regard to some article of faith was punished
of course, but his punishment was merely a matter of internal Church
discipline about which the “general public” usually knew or cared
very little.

It was very different when a dissenter, instead of confining himself
to philosophy, went further and took the logical next step of
“stirring up the people” by attacking not only the doctrine of the
Church but also the moral conduct of her officials. To-day when a man
attacks the idea of property as such, we smile. But when he attacks
the excessive inequality of its distribution, that is more serious,
because, however false some of his conclusions may be, a part of his
major premise is undeniably true. Just so, in the twelfth century,
the Church realized that her wealth laid her open to envy, and the
evil conduct of many of her ministers was a scandal. Her own true
leaders, those who were the most zealous for her honour, spent much
of their energy in trying to bring about a wider distribution of
morals within the ranks of her own clergy, just as to-day those who
believe in the idea of private property would do well to work for a
wider distribution of that. Accordingly heresy in the Middle Ages,
although necessarily arising, like all heresy, in speculation, based
its propaganda upon moral protest.

The tireless Lea has made a long list of preachers who went up and
down crying against the wealth and vices of the clergy. Sometimes
they opposed a crude abuse of Christian symbols as tending towards
idolatry. Sometimes they taught that the sacraments had no virtue
when administered by a priest unshriven from mortal sin. This idea,
however strongly it might appeal to natural feeling, was utterly
anarchic. For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore
entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a
charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced
null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years
afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when
he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s
land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar
with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse
of established Churches. The early twelfth century shouters began
by playing lone hands, like our own Billy Sunday and his tribe.
Their stormy careers left little definite trace. At most they set in
motion a general criticism of the wealth and pride of the Church in
comparison with the poverty of her founder and of the humility which
she taught.

After a while these sporadic reformers, each setting up his own
little whirlpool or eddy, began to be merged into distinguishable
currents each flowing in a definite direction. In the third decade of
the century we begin to hear of “Waldenses,” members of a religious
body so called after its founder Waldo, a rich but unlearned merchant
of Lyons. The Waldenses began in reform and ended in heresy. They
are heard of principally in Languedoc, in North-Eastern Spain,
and in Lombardy. They were loosely organized, consequently their
teaching varied; but, in general, they prized the letter of the
Gospel and minimized the distinction between clergy and laity. They
translated the Scriptures into the vernacular, read them zealously,
and applied rigorously their commandments against lying or oaths
of any sort whatsoever. To forbid even “white” lies is certainly
harmless enough, although if pushed to an extreme it partakes of
the character of impossibilism and eccentricity which the Catholic
Church has always avoided. But, in a society knit together by the
feudal oath of allegiance, to say that a Christian man ought not to
take any sort of oath smelled of nihilism and anarchy. So too, the
Waldensian enlargement of the functions of the laity. Granting, for
the sake of the argument, that even in those times it might have
been wise to enlarge the part to be played by laymen in the work of
Christian teaching, still nothing but harmful irregularities could be
expected from the Waldensian idea that “any good man” might perform
the Sacraments. For instance, take their practice of confession to a
layman. Personal and private confessions give to the one who hears
them great power for good or evil in families and communities. If his
secrecy cannot be guaranteed by the strongest possible means we must
admit (whatever our view of confession in general) that the thing
would be dangerous. Further, the Waldenses seem to have gone beyond
even the Quakers, in that they had their doubts as to the moral right
of judges to punish. Nevertheless, Waldensianism had considerable
momentum.

At first they insisted vehemently that they were good Catholics, and
came not to destroy but to fulfil. After being forbidden to preach by
the Archbishop of Lyons, they appealed boldly to the Lateran Council
of 1179. When that Council forbade them to preach without permission
from the local bishop the turning point came. Waldo, their leader,
preferred his own private judgment to obedience to constituted
authority, and refused to abide by the Council’s decision. In a
phrase that many have since used he said that he preferred to obey
God rather than man.

Still they were slow to break completely with the Church. Not
until 1184, five years after the Council, were they definitely
excommunicated by the Pope, Lucius III. This was done at the Council
of Verona, an assembly of which we shall hear again. Even then, a
distinction was sometimes made between them and more pestilent forms
of heresy. The fact that, as late as 1218 in the ninth year of the
Albigensian crusade, a sort of Waldensian Council including delegates
from north and west of the Alps could meet in Bergamo may possibly
stand as evidence of an easy-going attitude of the authorities
toward them. To-day, the Protestant remembers affectionately that
their Provençal translation of the Scriptures, or at least of
the New Testament, was the first rendering of the Bible into the
vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and the most that a militant
Roman Catholic can find to say of their system is that it was a
“vapid degradation of religion.”[10] Now “vapid degradations” do not
produce great wars like the Albigensian crusade or great systems of
persecution like the Inquisition established after that crusade. For
my own part I am convinced that, had the Waldenses been the only
heretical body in the field, there would have been no crusade against
heresy and perhaps no Inquisition.

The movement which called out such resistance from those who
repeated the ancient creed of Europe was of a different sort. On its
negative side it echoed the same charges brought against the Church
by the isolated heretics and by the Waldenses, repeating them so
exactly that certain superficial Protestant scholars once maintained
that it was little more than a protest against Roman abuses. Even
Limborch, whose learning forces him to admit that it was more than
this, naively remarks à propos of their genial custom of starving
themselves to death as the highest possible act of faith:—

“’Tis rather to be wondered at, that in so barbarous an age, they
should throw off so many errors rather than that they should retain
some.”[11] It now seems certain that the movement based itself on a
philosophy fundamentally hostile to Christianity and nauseous to us
who have breathed no other air than that of Christendom.

Before considering the nature of this philosophy, and of its logical
developments in the sphere of morals, let us reject the various
names by which it has been called by modern scholars, and refer
to it as the “Albigensian” movement. It is true that “Manichean,”
“neo-Manichean,” and “Catharist” (after the habit of the sect of
referring to themselves as the “Cathari” or “pure”), are more
descriptive. “Albigensian” is sanctioned by usage, and usage should
prevail over the preciosity of the pedant.

The un-Christian creed of the “Albigenses” began to sift into Western
Europe soon after the year 1000. It was very old, for it represented
one of the few fundamentally different ways of looking at life,
and it is probably indestructible as long as the world endures.
Its central idea is that the universe is dual and was created by
two Gods, or if you will, two principles, of about equal strength,
one Good and one Evil. The attempt to reconcile this idea with
Christianity is as old as Manes who lived in Mesopotamia in the third
century and founded the heretical sect of the Manicheans. Back of
Manes, again, at the very beginning of recorded history, we find the
Persians with a dualist religion which they attributed to a shadowy
prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. To-day three striking examples of
its survival come to mind. First, Dualism, with its scorn for matter
as inherently evil, is not far from Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science.
Second, in 1909, Paul Elmer More, one of the foremost of American
scholars and critics, who would rank among the great critics of all
times did he but possess the gift of vivid phrase, published a book,
“Studies in Dualism,” which bore on its title page the following
quotation from another modern worthy, Sir Leslie Stephen:—

“Manicheanism may be disavowed in words. It cannot be exiled from the
actual belief of mankind.”[12]

Third, in 1917, under the influence of the war, H. G. Wells (whom I
hesitate whether to characterize as a sort of prose Shelley, “beating
in the void his luminous wings in vain,” or as an æolian harp upon
which almost any passing wind of doctrine can play) thus sets forth
the thoughts of his imaginary Englishman mourning for the death of
his soldier son:—

“His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the
Gnostics and the Manicheans which saw the God of the World as
altogether evil. For a while his soul sank down into the uncongenial
darknesses of these creeds of despair....

“Is the whole scheme of Nature evil? Is life in its essence
cruel?”[13]

I hasten to add that the Manicheans, following the little-known
Gnostics, made matter the evil principle in Nature, as opposed to
spirit, the principle of good.

We have seen that it had come originally from the East. Manes
himself, away back in the third century, had been a Mesopotamian,
and in the fourth century his disciples seem to have been widely
distributed from Persia to the Atlantic. They were hated. “Manicheans
and Mathematicians (i.e., sorcerers) were alone excepted from the
general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.”[14] They
reappear, under the name of Paulicians, in the East Roman Empire,
during the tenth century, and thence passed into Bulgaria. Later,
in Western Europe, they were often known as Bulgars, “Bougres,”
or “Buggers.” From Bulgaria they spread westward into what is now
Bosnia, and from Bosnia westward again into Northern Italy. By the
middle of the eleventh century they were numerous and influential
throughout Lombardy and especially in Milan.

Lea suggests that without the impulse these people gave to extreme
asceticism, and especially their contempt for marriage, Pope Gregory
VII would not have been able to get his decrees forbidding the
marriage of priests obeyed in Northern Italy.

“Vernon Lee”[15] gives ... “a very curious anecdote, unearthed by
the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his
extremely suggestive book on mediæval heresies. A certain priest of
Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the
marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him
before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a
saint. The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his
death; and in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his
intercession, it became necessary to proceed to his beatification.
The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when,
in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it
was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a
_Catharus_, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan,
the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming
of Christ. It was quite probable that he had spat upon the crucifix
as a symbol of the devil’s triumph; it was quite possible that he
had said masses to Satan as the true creator of all matter. Be this
as it may, that priest’s half-canonized bones were publicly burnt
and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows that the
Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and foul,
had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when
we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a
revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk
of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic
rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base
according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such
views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of
the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism
of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, should
have found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of the
early Middle Ages. In those stern and ferocious yet tender-hearted
and most questioning times, there must have been something logically
satisfying, and satisfying also to the harrowed sympathies, in the
conviction, if not in the dogma, that the soul of man had not been
made by the maker of the foul and cruel world of matter; and that the
suffering of all good men’s hearts corresponded with the suffering,
the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of the Spirit. And
what a light it must have shed, completely solving all terrible
questions, upon the story of Christ’s martyrdom, so constantly
uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediæval men!”

The same author noting what seems to be the intentionally hopeless,
repulsive, and horrible nature of twelfth century (or, as she
puts it, pre-Franciscan) Italian sculpture, goes on to argue from
this that such “Nightmare pessimism had honeycombed the twelfth
century Italian mind.” How uncertain was the popular distinction
between orthodox and heretical asceticism is attested by many
humorous-pathetic stories like that of the priest of Milan. What the
distinction actually was may well be considered later in connection
with the Dominican order.

The man of European stock cannot but wonder why any Christian
people, especially the volatile Provençals, could accept so savage a
creed. Perhaps people ready to “... jump the life to come” might be
attracted by the moral latitude allowed the Albigensian “Believers”
during life, and would, meanwhile, banish the thought of death, as so
many moderns do, or else hope to be “consoled” even at the last gasp.
But this is guesswork. What is certain is that the sect prospered.

We have seen that the Middle Ages, although weaker than we in the
observation of Nature, had a stronger faith in logic, and were,
therefore, bolder in the application of formally reasoned, logical,
ideas of life. Accordingly, those of them who were possessed of the
dualistic idea proceeded to all sorts of perfectly logical extremes
in showing their hatred and contempt for matter.

Thus their fully initiated members, or “Perfect,” were sworn never
to eat meat, eggs, milk, cheese or anything which was the result of
sexual procreation. Fish was permitted because they thought that fish
did not reproduce themselves by the coming together of the male and
female! To eat any sort of food which came from a warm-blooded animal
might be murder, for they believed in the transmigration of souls,
and therefore such an animal might be the dwelling-place of a human
soul. This, again, was perfectly logical; to be born again, after
death, in another body was, according to this theology, a proper and
necessary punishment for sin. All sexual acts which might possibly
produce offspring were forbidden to the “Perfect”; they must purify
themselves by fasts and elaborate ceremonies if they so much as
touched a woman by accident. The propagation of human beings, with
their sinful, material bodies, was clearly the worst of crimes. Hence
the “Perfect” would sometimes tell a pregnant woman that she had a
devil within her. Marriage was a perpetual state of sin; it was worse
than adultery and fornication because the married felt no shame,
and were, therefore, more likely to persist in cohabitation. It was
even whispered that, just as sexual intercourse out of marriage was
better than intercourse between married people because the married
felt no shame, so, too, any unnatural form of intercourse from which
children could not be conceived was better than natural cohabitation.
Finally, the horrible and perfectly logical climax to all this was
that suicide was the deed above all others most pleasing to God.

It was one of the charges against the sect that their professed
hatred for life and its pleasures was accompanied by promiscuous
sexual orgies. Nor is there anything improbable in such accusations:
they have been true of occasional heretical bodies from the earliest
Christian times to Rasputin and certain contemporary Russian sects.
Nevertheless, there is no evidence to prove that such sexual orgies
were ever regularly practised or officially encouraged by the sect.
The weight of testimony would rather seem to prove their extreme
asceticism, out of which would naturally come occasional excesses of
self-indulgence on the part of the “weaker brethren.”

Naturally, with such a _régime_ as that laid down for them, the
Albigensian “Perfect” were few. The sect made up its numbers by
including also “Believers,” who were admitted on their mere promise
to renounce the Catholic faith and to receive the Albigensian
“Consolamentum” or initiation of the “Perfect,” at least in the
hour of death, as many of the early Christians used to receive
baptism. The lives of the “Believers” were as unrestrained as those
of the “Perfect” were strict. Except to “venerate” or do homage to
the “Perfect” according to certain prescribed forms and ceremonies
whenever they met, their religion seems to have laid upon them no
prescribed duties whatsoever. They were allowed to marry and to eat
meat. To be sure they could not be finally saved without undergoing
the “Consolamentum,” and, when this was once received, the jaws of
the system closed upon them with a ferocity so extraordinary that
we shudder at it as we shudder at the lurid horrors imagined by
Poe. But this ugly possibility weighed light in comparison with the
easy absence of any code of morals for everyday living. Clearly,
Albigensianism aimed to meet all tastes.

If we ask why such a life as that of the Albigensian “Perfect” ever
attracted anyone, we must go back one step further and ask why
asceticism, deprivation for its own sake, has always had such power
over mankind. It is one of the unanswerable mysteries of the human
soul why men have so often felt that their God, or Gods, would be
pleased at seeing the worshipper voluntarily submit to deprivation,
discomfort and pain. It has been argued that limitation in pleasure
is necessary for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being and
that asceticism (itself a word derived from the training of the Greek
athletes) merely sets one free for undivided effort. But this does
not meet the case. For the fact is that there is always in man the
tendency to condemn pleasure for its own sake, as evil in itself, as
if there was something holy in the mere state of being deprived or
uncomfortable. And this curious state of mind is as strong to-day as
it ever was, witness the extraordinary savageness of the campaign
waged by what an Englishman would call the “Dissenting” religious
bodies in America to-day against any pleasure or amusement that
strikes them as “sinful.” Finally, it is also the fact that many who
would not dream of denying themselves a certain amount of physical
satisfaction of different sorts will applaud ascetics. Accordingly,
the Albigensian system addressed itself to a fundamental instinct of
human nature.

Finally, it must be remembered that the Albigenses claimed to be
purifying, not destroying, Christianity. Just so, the Humanitarians
of to-day reduce Christianity to “Social Service” and throw over
supernatural teaching altogether. In most cases the Albigensian
system had certain outward likenesses to the Catholic. Their
distinction between “Perfect” and “Believers” was somewhat like
the Catholic distinction between clergy and laity, or that between
monastic people and people “living in the world.” The form of their
promise to renounce “Satan” (i.e., the Catholic Church), by which one
became an Albigensian believer, was a little like baptism, and their
“Consolamentum” was like Communion and Extreme Unction combined. They
claimed to be true followers of Christ, they particularly reverenced
the Lord’s Prayer, and they even went through a form of Lord’s
Supper. The fasts of the “Perfect,” except when prolonged into the
“Endura,” were not altogether unlike the Catholic fasts. As to the
points in which they differed from the Church, they made the usual
heretical claim of following “purer” traditions. Certain modern
scholars see reason for believing that they possessed apocryphal
writings dating from the apostolic or post-apostolic age.[16] In
their propaganda they laid stress upon the negative side, that
is, of their opposition to the “corruptions” of Catholicism, and
thus secured for themselves the support of much of the prevailing
dissatisfaction with the Church.

Why their practice of fasting themselves to death, in what they
called the “Endura,” did not drive away converts is the hardest
question to answer concerning them. That the “Perfect” voluntarily
practised it was bad enough. What was worse was their treatment of
believers who had received the “Consolamentum” when thought to be
on death-beds and had then been so unlucky as to begin to get well.
The “Perfect” had probably learned by experience that “Believers”
who had been “consoled” on their death-bed and had then recovered,
were not likely to follow the extraordinarily strict rules for the
“Perfect” as all “consoled” persons were bound to do. For them, the
relapse of a “consoled person” was the greatest conceivable horror.
Therefore, when a “consoled” sick person showed signs of recovery the
“Perfect” forbade the family to give the patient food, and, if the
family showed signs of weakening, they stationed themselves by the
bedside or took away the sufferer to some place of safety where they
might starve him or her to death in peace!

How such amiable folk ever led away much people after them is a
riddle. And yet, despite the appalling features of their system,
during the eleventh century Manicheanism is found sprouting up
here and there throughout Western Europe. In the second half of
the eleventh century we find it powerful in Northern Italy, and
especially in Milan, but it seems not to have had any deep root north
or west of the Alps before 1100. We hear of Manicheans at Toulouse
in 1018, at Orleans in 1022, at Cambrai and Liège in 1025, and at
Châlons in 1045. By the middle of the century they had penetrated
north into the Germanies as far as the city of Goslar. Nowhere do we
hear of their appearance without hearing also of their persecution.

It is one of man’s deepest instincts to defend that which he holds
sacred, and to the man possessed of a religion, nothing is so sacred
as his gods. What can be more natural than to wish to punish offences
against the gods? Limborch has a long account of “Persecution among
the Pagans.” For us it will be enough to remember that Athens itself
put Socrates to death on the charge of teaching men not to believe in
the gods of the city. And this in spite of the fact that Bacon truly
says, “... the religion of the heathens consisted rather in rites and
ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what
kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their
church were the poets.”[17]

Roman tolerance was born of the necessities of ruling over many
races, none of whom except the Jews had an exclusive, “Jealous” God.
Almost all the other people of the Empire were willing to accept
the gods of strangers as differing from their own merely in name.
Naturally, when one fanciful story about a god or goddess was as good
as another, the educated man cared little about the whole body of
myths. As an administrator, this same educated man was easily able
to be “tolerant” to all religions because he cared little or nothing
for his own, and was, in reality, indifferent and therefore not
“tolerant” at all in the strict sense of the word. St. Paul’s Gallio,
so much maligned by fools but so worthily celebrated by Kipling,
is a fine specimen of the type. Such a man was devoted solely to
the public interest. His feeling would not be as clear cut as our
national patriotisms: “Rome” was almost the whole civilized world, so
that the chance of her perishing was unthinkable. Nevertheless, she
could still be an object of affection; her government represented the
definite benefit of order. Devotion to her was not vague emotionalism
like that of our internationalists of to-day. After a fashion she
could be worshipped.

On the other hand when any religion or religious practice seemed
to threaten the government upon which order reposed, the Roman
magistrate struck at once. The rediscovered Roman law, remember, was
to be a great force actively informing the twelfth century.

In adopting Christianity, Europe exchanged a religion in which one
god, or one story about a god, was about as good as another, for a
religion which claimed a definite, historical founder who had left
behind him a corporate teaching body, the Church. To such a body, the
out-and-out pagan or disbeliever is an open and possibly generous
enemy. Whereas he who proclaims himself a fellow Christian, but
meanwhile falsifies the Church’s doctrine by twisting and altering it
to suit himself, is a traitor, a snake in the grass compared to whom
the heathen is an angel of light.

Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the
heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to
maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential,
of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. She
must, therefore, contend especially against the heretic, the enemy
from within, who would disfigure the faith by which she lives; and
she has done so, from the “false teachers” and “heretics” whom St.
Paul so often urged his flock to avoid, down to the poor creatures
who would reduce her Saviour to the stature of a “social uplifter”
or the walking delegate of a labor union. To keep the faith is a
perpetual warfare.

Make what you will of the body empowered to interpret and define
Christian doctrine and of the means of defending that doctrine when
defined: the necessities of some sort of definition and authority
will remain as long as the Christian name endures.

Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction
against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a
learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide
his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees
denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “...
Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they
may learn not to blaspheme.”[18] Later, he would find Christian
Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting
laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws
went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose
possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would
find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the
last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors,
including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be
Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the
Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences,
and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early
doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a
matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force.
Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among
them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had
gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon
heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark
Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare,
our imagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin,
Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that
by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith
have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19] Even in those sleepy
days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the
refutation of heresy.

But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more
concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the
intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action
against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized
charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was
even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage
to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make
it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly
be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of
human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple,
would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and
distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had
not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the
Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein
defined) he cannot be saved?

Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as
it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open
denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and
ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day.
But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He
acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the
Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make
himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the
devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did
once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s
“Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that
we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; in
the modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the
effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all
material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly
devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and
woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing
for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to
take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack
the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical
basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture
indeed.

But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in
Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and
ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first
discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a
council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was
such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was
feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of
the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king
had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among
them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him
so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were
taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they
were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they
refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they
went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in
the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they
repented, although too late to be rescued.

The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the
king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the
queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this
feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or
recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the
constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their
punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner
of the punishment we shall in a moment return.

We hear of the execution of heretics here and there throughout
Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time
on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was
vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush
the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern
lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them,
as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear
of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned.

If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic,
there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the
same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion,
as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white
woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities.
Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued
opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the
civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law,
methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went
on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere
of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the
fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he
repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went
so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for
the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire
approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote
Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of
it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience....
You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of
some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear
of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or
unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest
against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine
of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described
to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses,
sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their
plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ...
a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate even in words ... the
framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a
horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total
destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous
instances ... Savonarola is one in point ... that the judges often
appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead.
The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the
court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the
flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain
could have existed, but it did exist.”[20]

It is possible to go even further than the passage quoted above. For,
if the culprit had died, it was thought worth while to dig up his
corpse and at least burn that. Certainly, then, it would seem as if
there was something almost sacramental about burning the heretic.

Study of the discussion of witch-burning in the “Golden Bough”
suggests the idea that heretics were burned, as witches were, because
it was believed that fire was the one adequate means of purifying
the community from the pollution which they had brought upon it. If
this is so, then heretic- and witch-burning is connected with the
most primitive superstitions, not only long before Christianity, but
before the possibility of any systematized religion.

On the other hand, burning alive conformed after a grisly fashion to
the letter of an old saying that “the Church abhors bloodshed.”

Cardinal Newman has left us an interesting passage combining extreme
hatred for the heretic, or rather for the heresiarch (i.e., the
active preacher of heresy and corrupter of the faithful), with the
typical modern sensitiveness to the sight of physical pain:

“Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs I had said: the latter should
meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter; and so far
as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as
if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity.
It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable
toward himself. I cannot deny that this is a very fierce passage; but
Arius was banished, not burned; and it is only fair to myself to say
that neither at this nor at any other time of my life, not even when
I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a Puritan’s ears, and I
think the sight of a Spanish auto-da-fé would have been the death of
me.”[21]

It would be a study in itself to work up the evidence as to the
toughness of the mediæval mind with respect to disagreeable ideas
and to the actual infliction of pain. To-day, in America, we have
our lynchings, and we have the ugly stories of torture inflicted
in revolutionary Russia. But, on the other hand, we have a crew of
drivellers against capital punishment, and many people can hardly
bear the idea of hell. As Zarathustra puts it, of the God of the
Christians:—

“When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh
and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his
favourites.”

“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful,
more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old
grandmother.”

“There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on
account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he
suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22]

Whereas in the Middle Ages—

“The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing
instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much
as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23]

With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover
(like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he
cheerfully risked being roasted eternally.

As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between
mediæval and modern as follows:—

“Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from
which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s
nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the
papers say about the execution of those condemned to death; they
reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point
of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man.
What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of
old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet
parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed
the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke
the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked
off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach
as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado,
roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with
impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan.
These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they
found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were
full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24]

Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval
man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves
were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the
Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for
centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the
time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part,
although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are
only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of
every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if
possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy
were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.

With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout
considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain
such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected
there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse,
and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began
to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard
to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people
of Albi prevented the bishop and a neighbouring abbot from
imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126
we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious
anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his
contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on
Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to
have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In
1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared
the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to
get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the
second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated
the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities
to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the
Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under
Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all
who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third
General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more.

The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another
shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in
practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries
travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and
the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly
stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy
enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property
rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate.

The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier
in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of
escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it.
To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial
tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of
recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist,
a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines
of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an
Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a
Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentrics
found in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more
fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order.
Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose
ground.

Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman
in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture
of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people
without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and
Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence
of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still
it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside
of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean
or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a
priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came
South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one
important occasion.

The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash
of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea
tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage
... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to
confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think
so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’
replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for
itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites,
whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and
your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own
neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your
master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his
cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration
and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25] One has
a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of
Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels.

Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist
meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi,
after preaching to a throng which packed the cathedral, he called
upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But
like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,”
St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip.
After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing
precisely as if he had never come.

In 1165, at Lombers near Albi, we find Catholic priests publicly
debating against representative “Albigenses” in the presence of
Pons, Archbishop of Narbonne, and sundry bishops, besides the most
powerful nobles of the region, Constance, sister of King Louis VII of
France and wife of Count Raymond V of Toulouse, Viscount Trencavel
of Beziers, and others. When the verdict went against the heretics,
no action whatsoever seems to have been taken against them: it was
a mere tournament of words, “a matter of public interest” as we
should say. Two years later the heretics openly held a council at
St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The president came all the way
from Constantinople to attend, delegates from Lombardy were present,
“bishops” were elected for various vacant sees, and a committee
was appointed to settle a disputed boundary between the “dioceses”
of Toulouse and Carcassonne. Clearly we have here to do with an
organized religious body, emphatically a “going concern,” acting
fearlessly in the open.

With the year 1178 we get the first suggestion of vigorous direct
action against the heresy. Count Raymond V of Toulouse wrote to his
brother-in-law, Louis VII of France, deploring the progress of heresy
and the abandonment of orthodox religion throughout his lands, and
connecting this condition with an alarming increase of brigandage and
public disorder. The King of France had just made peace (or rather
truce) with Henry II of England, so that the long struggle between
the French Monarchy and the Angevin house was at rest for the time
being and the two kings were free to combine against heresy. The
other great chronic political controversy, between the Papacy and the
“Holy Roman” Empire was also inactive, Pope Alexander III having got
the better of Frederic Barbarossa and his anti-Pope. Accordingly,
the Pope was free to spur on the kings to action. At first it was
proposed that Louis and Henry march into Toulouse with a joint army.
But, finally, it was decided merely to send to Toulouse a mission of
high clerical dignitaries with power to act. Lea suggests that the
enthusiasm of the kings had cooled off during the long time spent in
preliminary discussion. Mother Drane holds that the Pope preferred
peaceful measures.

When the mission reached Toulouse they were insulted in the streets.
Nevertheless, they went on to draw up a long list of heretics,
and finally determined to make an example of a rich old man named
Peter Mauran who seems to have been one of the first citizens of
Toulouse. They proceeded against him under the canon promulgated by
the Council of Tours, which prescribed imprisonment for convicted
heretics and confiscation of their property. After much palaver and
wordy shuffling by the accused he was adjudged a heretic. To save
his property he recanted and offered to submit to such penance as
might be imposed. Accordingly, “stripped to the waist, with the
Bishop of Toulouse and the Abbot of St. Sernin busily scourging him
on either side, he was led through an immense crowd to the high altar
of the Cathedral ... (and) ... ordered to undertake a three years’
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to be daily scourged through the streets
of Toulouse until his departure, to make restitution of all Church
lands occupied by him and of all money acquired by usury, and to
pay to the Count five hundred pounds of silver in redemption of his
forfeited property.”[26]

The results of these measures were only temporary. After his return
from Palestine, Mauran was three times elected chief magistrate of
the city. In the same year in which he had first been tried, the
Third Lateran Council cursed the heretics of Languedoc, together
with those who favoured them, and included as heretics the marauding
bands of wandering mercenaries who, when out of employment, drifted
about as brigands. Further, the Council took the unprecedented step
of declaring a Crusade against all these enemies of the Church and of
proclaiming a two years’ indulgence to Crusaders. So that in 1181,
Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux and Cardinal, was able to raise a military
force with which he invaded the Beziers district and took the castle
of Lavaur, capturing in it many prominent heretics. But two of the
captured Albigensian “bishops,” upon recanting, were promptly given
Catholic benefices in Toulouse, and, all told, Henry of Clairvaux’s
little crusade was no more than a flash in the pan.

The Lateran Council’s curse upon bandits, lumping them with
heretics, raises the question of how closely the anarchical side of
Albigensianism may have been connected with public disorder. The
twelfth century men were great bandit-slayers. Probably there were
more bandits to be slain because there was more wealth worth robbing
in Western Christendom than formerly. The mercenary soldier, a man
without a country, hired by the princes of the time for their big
or little wars, was not far from the bandit, even when in campaign.
In England the name of King John’s mercenaries was hated and feared
for generations. In his times of unemployment, when he was drifting
about the country he tended to become the bandit pure and simple.
Always he was unbound by social and conventional restraints and ties,
wanting especially reverence for the Church, which was usually the
chief protection for the property of that greatest and richest of
mediæval corporations. We are told that one of Richard Cœur de Lion’s
mercenaries, quite wantonly it would seem, once ... “broke off an
arm of a statue in the Church of Our Lady at Chateauroux, whereupon
the figure bled as if it were alive; and John (afterwards King John)
picked up the severed arm and carried it off as a holy relic.”[27]
But we are not told that the fellow himself was in the least abashed
by the miracle, or that he was punished for his sacrilege. However,
in twelfth-century Northern and Central France, when banditry became
annoying, the bandits by no means had it all their own way. Their
career was often short and ended by steel or rope. The community went
for them mercilessly, much as men did in our own Wild West.

In Languedoc (as we have seen) with its wealth, its Jews, and its
nearness to the Moslem, reverence for the Church was less. Further,
it may well be that the nobles were more dependent upon mercenaries
inasmuch as their vassals were less warlike. We shall find the
unhappy Raymond VII refusing to dismiss his hired soldiers, no
matter under what pressure. Finally, some heretics denied the moral
right of all private property whatsoever; most of them attacked the
Church for the great wealth which it possessed, and practically all
would refuse to take oaths, and denied the moral force of them when
taken, although the feudal oath of allegiance from the vassal to his
lord was the chief bond of civil society. In silent witness to the
difference these things made, we find many of the southern churches,
especially the country churches, were fortified. Whereas in the
North, in spite of all the continual quarrelling between priest and
noble, the church building nearly always depended for its protection
on its sanctity alone.

The churches of Languedoc were not fortified for nothing. Speaking of
the bandits, Lea remarks that the chroniclers, who were themselves
mostly Churchmen, “... insist that their blows ... fell heavier
on church and monastery than on the castle of the seigneur or the
cottage of the peasant.” Naturally, since they would get little
plunder from the cottage and many hard knocks from the castle. “...
They ridiculed the priests as singers, and it was one of their
savage sports to beat them to death while mockingly begging their
intercession, ... ‘Sing for us, you singer, sing for us’; and the
culmination of their ... sacrilege was ... their casting out and
trampling on the holy wafers whose precious pyxes they eagerly
seized.”[28]

Exactly how much connection Albigensianism had with disorder we
cannot say. On the face of it, such teaching tended rather to
non-resistance. But in an age so direct, so extreme in brutality
as well as in tenderness (as for brutality in speech a leading
Albigensian argument against transubstantiation was that it involved
the excretion of the body of Christ into latrines), in such an age,
I say, it is improbable that the heretics greatly disapproved of
anyone who attacked their enemies, the Churchmen. Even assuming that
the godless mercenary-turned-bandit was not, strictly speaking, a
heretic at all, he was certainly favoured by the atmosphere of heresy.

As the twelfth century neared its close Albigensianism must have
seemed “the coming thing” in Languedoc. Although we hear of none of
the greatest nobles of the region as having been “hereticated,” yet
many individuals among their immediate families had been, especially
among the women. In general, the heretics were enthusiastic and the
Catholics uncertain and troubled. The Orthodox were still able (as in
the affair of Mauran) to win “test cases,” but they must have felt
that their hold was slipping.

From the point of view of those resolute to suppress heresy, the only
real gain of the whole twelfth century was that both the canon and
the civil laws on the subject had become more defined. Even as late
as the middle of the century, we find St. Bernard calling the burning
of heretics “excessive cruelty,” and favouring imprisonment as a
maximum punishment.

The heresy made its only appearance in England in 1166. Henry II, the
very man whom we have seen so angry against Becket as to threaten to
turn Mohammedan, seems to have felt free to take a line of his own.
He had them stripped to the waist, flogged, branded on the forehead,
and turned adrift, strictly forbidding everyone to give them any aid
and comfort whatsoever. This was effective enough in its way, as they
must have soon died from hunger and exposure, but the point is that
there seems to have been no recognized procedure to be followed.

This want had been partly met, in the last two decades of the
century, by three laws.

In 1184, at the Diet of Verona, the “Holy Roman” Emperor, Frederic
Barbarossa, and the short-lived Pope Lucius III, had conferred on
heresy. Although in disagreement about many important matters, they
seem to have agreed perfectly about the treatment of heretics.
They published a joint decree. The Pope on his side directed that
the bishops, who had always had jurisdiction in matters of heresy,
should make, or cause to be made, an inquiry, or “inquisition,” into
the possible existence of heresy in every parish where the presence
of heretics was even suspected. Even those whose manner of living
differed from that of the ordinary Catholic were to be questioned
as to their faith. The accused were to be tried in the episcopal
court and such as should be convicted (if they refused to “repent”
and acknowledge their errors) were to be handed over to the secular
authorities “in order that they may receive the punishment they
deserve (animadversio debita).” This last formula was vague, perhaps
intentionally so. All secular magistrates were to take an oath before
the bishop that they would enforce the laws against heresy, and those
who refused to act after having been duly called upon to do so were
to be excommunicated. Furthermore, all Catholics were forbidden to do
business with any city which might sustain a pro-heretical magistrate
in failure to act.

The Emperor, on his side, was not behindhand. He decreed that any
magistrate excommunicated for refusal or neglect to proceed against
heretics should lose his office and be debarred from accepting
another. All those convicted, or to be convicted, of heresy were
put under the imperial ban, which meant banishment, confiscation
of goods, destruction of their houses, public infamy, debarment
from office, &c. There is no explicit mention of the death
penalty. “Animadversio” had meant death in ancient times, and the
twelfth-century lawyer was apt to be both a great pedant and a great
imperialist. Nevertheless, the formula had become vaguer.

The other two enactments are those of secular princes, acting alone.

Count Raymond V of Toulouse, he whom we have seen appealing to his
suzerain Louis VII of France against heresy, at some time during his
long reign of forty-six years (from 1148 to 1194) decreed not only
banishment but also death by fire for heretics. Probably this was
done in connection with Henry of Clairvaux’s mission which condemned
Mauran, or with the short “Crusade” of 1181. What action, if any, was
taken under it we do not know. In 1209 we shall find the municipality
of Toulouse writing to Pope Innocent III to the effect that “many”
heretics had been burnt under it. But we must remember that the
letter was written when the city was threatened by Montfort and his
Crusaders, and its magistrates were correspondingly anxious to make a
case.

The third of the three laws against heretics was enacted by King
Pedro II of Aragon, who later got himself killed in his attempt to
protect the protector of heretics, Raymond VI of Toulouse! In 1197
Pedro banished the Waldenses and other heretics from his lands as
public enemies to himself and his realm, and announced that if any
of them were found when the months of grace had expired, their goods
were to be confiscated and themselves burned. Of course, this was
only a threat, and in all human probability no one stayed to risk the
stake. The significant thing is that the threat is made against the
Waldenses as the heretics par excellence.

But, although it was a gain to have the legal machinery for punishing
heretics, still the gain did not amount to much if there was no
organized force capable of putting the machinery in motion. Except
for the banishment of Mauran and the little Crusade which took Lavaur
in 1181, no real action against the heretics of Languedoc had been
taken. In 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier and
condemned heresy in the strongest terms, but his thunders died away
without an echo. No progress whatsoever had been made against heresy
in Languedoc when, in 1198, Innocent III became Pope.

Why did Rome wait so long before moving in the Albigensian matter?
The Curia must surely have known, for decades past, that things were
steadily going from bad to worse in Languedoc. It has been suggested
that all the moral forces and diplomatic skill that the Papacy could
muster had been needed to make head against the redoubtable emperors,
Barbarossa and his son, Henry VI. But this, at most, can be only half
the answer. In the first place, the Curia had been and was entirely
competent to carry on several major controversies at the same time,
with the sure touch of a skilful juggler keeping three or four balls
going at once. In the second place, even in the last fifty years,
crowded as they had been, still there had been intervals of peace
between Papacy and Empire. One such interval had been seven years
long, and still the Papacy had made no move in Languedoc. Probably
the answer is that none of the popes, not even Alexander III, and
still less his short-lived successors, had possessed the tremendous
energy and courage of the newly-elected Pope.


FOOTNOTES:

[5] “Rome Revisited,” in “The Meaning of History,” by Frederic
Harrison. Publishers: The Macmillan Co., New York, 1902.

[6] “Some Types of Cities in Temperate Europe,” by H. J. Fleure,
in the “Geographical Review,” N.Y., December, 1920, which compares
cities like Arles, Nismes and Toulouse on the one hand, and the
north-French cities on the other. The author mars an able discussion
of the subject by imagining a strong “Frankish” influence in the
north—derived no doubt from the tiny mongrel war band of Clovis,
some 8,000 strong, including Thuringians and Bretons, by which that
leader raised himself to be consul, by imperial commission, over a
Romanized Gaul of millions! The point is that military, civil and
ecclesiastical authority were alike integrally Roman in the high
imperial time. In Northern France, during the Dark Ages, secular
civil government seems to have disappeared. Therefore, the Roman
military officers who had turned themselves into feudal lords, and
the bishops who continued to take their orders from Rome, obtained
greater relative importance.

[7] “Europe and the Faith,” by Hilaire Belloc. Paulist Press, N.Y.,
1920.

[8] “Politics,” Heinrich Von Treitschke, trans. Publ. Macmillan 1916.
Vol. I, chap. vii, pp. 245, 246.

[9] “Aucassin and Nicolette.” Passage translated by Henry Adams, in
“Mont St. Michel and Chartres.” Pub. Houghton Mifflin, New York,
1913. Chapter xii, page 233.

[10] “The Old Road,” by H. Belloc. Published by Constable and Co.,
London, 1911. Page 30.

[11] “History of the Inquisition,” by Philip Limborch, Professor of
Divinity among the Remonstrants; Chandler’s translation, London,
1731. Reference page 44, vol. i.

[12] “Shelburne Essays,” Sixth Series, by Paul Elmer More. Published
by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1909.

[13] “Mr. Britling sees it Through,” by H. G. Wells. Published by
Macmillan, New York, 1917.

[14] “Italy and her Invaders,” by Thomas Hodgkin. Published by the
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892. Vol. i, chapter III, p. 203.

[15] “Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” by “Vernon Lee.” Published by
John Lane, New York. 1909. Pp. 47-49.

[16] See: Fragments of an “Ancient (Egyptian?) Gospel,” used by
“The Cathars of Albi,” by F. P. Bodham and F. C. Conybeare, in the
_Hibbert Journal_ of July, 1913.

[17] “Essays,” by Francis Bacon: “Of Unity in Religion.”

[18] I Timothy, chapter i, verse 20.

[19] “The Mediæval Mind,” by Henry Osborn Taylor, _supra_
“Carolingian Scholars,” in vol. i, chapter x, p. 217.

[20] “On Anything,” H. Belloc; Dutton, New York, 1910, p. 72, _et
seq._

[21] “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” by John Henry Newman, chap. i.

[22] “Thus spake ‘Zarathustra,’” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. publ.
Macmillan, New York, 1914, chap. lxvi, p. 318.

[23] “Mont St. Michel and Chartres,” _supra_, chap. xi, p. 218.

[24] “Là-bas,” by Joris Karl Huysmans. Published Plon-Nourrit Paris,
1913. Pp. 362-3, author’s trans.

[25] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 71.

[26] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 122.

[27] “John Lackland,” by Kate Norgate. Macmillan, N.Y., 1902, p. 21.

[28] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, pp.
125-6.




CHAPTER III.

THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE CRUSADE.


The religious and political manœuvres leading up to the Albigensian
Crusade extend over the space of ten years and divide naturally into
three stages, the first of six years and the second and third of two
years each.

The first stage (1198-1204) begins with the accession of Innocent III
to the Papacy, followed by his prompt dispatch of legates to work
against the Albigensian heresy. It ends with the recognition of the
failure of the means first used and determination to intensify them.

The second stage (1204-1206) is marked by the investiture of the
papal legates in Languedoc with extraordinary powers over the local
clergy. Its first year, 1204, contains a political event of the
highest importance: the conquest of the Angevin lands of Normandy,
Maine, Anjou and Touraine, by the King of France, Philip Augustus.
The period ends with the recognition of the insufficiency of even the
extraordinary powers granted to the legates.

The third stage (1206-1208) opens with the arrival of St. Dominic,
the adoption of apostolic poverty by the legates, and the setting
on foot by them of a regular campaign of preaching and debate. This
method yielding only slight results: the period closes with the
murder of de Castelnau and the mobilization of the crusading army.

Lothario Conti, Innocent III, is one of the great figures of history.
Few men, whether Churchmen or lay statesmen, have exerted a wider or
more far-reaching influence. Learning and executive ability, energy
and persistence, breadth of view, and, above all, the sense of a
great purpose, combined with extraordinary fortune to make him great.
We are here concerned with but one of his acts, the launching of the
Albigensian Crusade, by which he preserved the moral unity of Europe
so that it remained unbroken until the sixteenth century.

He had been born about 1160. His family were nobles of the Campagna,
whose castles of Anagni and Segni dominated the “Appian Way,” the
main Roman road between Rome and Naples. They early chose to make
a priest of him. Accordingly he studied first at Rome, then at the
Universities of Bologna where was the great law school, and finally
at the University of Paris, the centre of theological study, the
“queen science” of the Middle Ages. Paris he especially loved, like
so many before and after him, and in the years of his power we
shall see him make great play with the “French” (that is the North
French, as we would say), those unequalled weapons ready to the
hand of a thirteenth century pope. In 1190, when he was only 30,
his uncle, Pope Clement III, made him cardinal—an example of favour
promoting ability faster than it would rise by itself and thereby
giving to the able man room for his powers, quite the reverse of the
conventional use of favour to bolster up incompetence. Celestine
III’s election forced the newly-made cardinal into retirement, for
Celestine was of the Orsini family, hereditary enemies to Innocent’s
mother’s people, the Scotti. In his retirement he wrote, first on
“Despising the World” and the “Miseries of Mankind,” and second on
mystic theological symbolism, with such rhetoric and such a jungle of
quotations that his withdrawal from the administrative work of the
Papal Curia rather increased his fame than lessened it, by giving
him opportunity to exercise his pen on these mediæval stock themes.
On the very day of Celestine’s death he was elected Pope while still
only in deacon’s orders. Within two months after his consecration,
already he had two agents in Languedoc to take action against the
heretics there.

Certainly the Pope was not interfering in Languedoc because he
had nothing better to do. It is true that the Empire was not
threatening or even in a position to threaten. That huge, ill-knit
mass, stretching from the Rhône to the Oder, from Holstein to the
Sicilies, and including both Lille and Vienna, was taking one of
its periodical sudden plunges from glittering dreams of world power
into civil war and blank anarchy. When Innocent was elected, the
terrible Emperor Henry VI was barely three months dead and already
his work was in ruins and the Italian cities were busily driving out
his German officials whom he had put to rule them. It was not that
they had a scrap of anything approaching national Italian feeling;
the modern reader needs to have it repeated again and again that the
twelfth century had not even the idea of nationality except for the
glimmering of it in France. They acted because they disliked Germans
as such, and because they preferred to pay municipal salaries and
perquisites to someone born and bred among themselves. Like all popes
since Hildebrand, Innocent welcomed this sort of thing and aided and
abetted them in it. A well-organized Empire which included Italy
would have been in a position to put pressure upon popes. In his
letters to the cities Innocent even speaks sometimes of “The Interest
of all Italy,” but that great phrase died away without contemporary
echo.

In Rome itself the imperial prefect swore homage to the Pope without
even a protest. The municipality of Rome was a different matter.
Even in the tenth century, long before the Papacy had set itself up
against the Empire, the turbulent nobles of the Eternal City had
several times driven out popes in fear and trembling. The twelfth
century communal movement made matters worse from the papal point
of view. Even a pope like Innocent could be insulted in the streets
by the Roman mob, so that he feared for his life and quitted the
place, to return only after nearly a year. From his consecration
until the year 1208, when again he brought the citizens to terms by
temporarily leaving town, he had on his hands the most explosive sort
of political situation in his own city.

Meanwhile his agents (two monks, Rainier and Guy by name) arrived in
Languedoc, accredited by papal letters to the “Prelates, Princes,
Nobles and People” of Southern France, to begin the papal effort
against the Albigenses. At this time there was no idea of using
force on a large scale. There was already a precedent in Henry of
Clairvaux’s little expedition which had taken Lavaur in 1181. But it
seems to have been assumed that this sort of thing was unnecessary,
perhaps that it was impossible. At any rate, it was not tried.
Rainier and Guy were merely expected to persuade the religious and
secular authorities to banish heretics and confiscate their property,
the usual laws of the time against heresy. The two commissioners
were empowered to compel obedience by interdict, and to reward those
who should assist them by granting the customary “indulgences”
usually enjoyed by pilgrims to Rome or Compostella.

It should perhaps be explained that interdicts are sentences laid
upon localities, and in a place so sentenced there can be no public
worship, no bell may ring and no Church service be held. Sometimes
marriages cannot be celebrated, even in private, nor extreme unction
be given to the sick. In mediæval times they were powerful weapons
but at the same time dangerous ones, because they accustomed people
to living almost completely shut off from the public practise of
religion.

Six months later, the powers given to Rainier were enlarged so that
he might reform the Church in the infected regions and restore
ecclesiastical discipline. In July, 1199, he was formally designated
Papal “Legate,” to be obeyed and respected as if he were the Pope in
person. Thus early in the business it was necessary to “reform the
lives” of the local clergy clear up to archbishops, as even these
last could not be counted upon to lead outwardly pious lives, much
less to take action against heresy in defiance of the public opinion
of their flocks. But although he had already seen the weakness of the
local clergy as instruments against heresy, nevertheless the Pope
continued to act on the assumption that the local secular authorities
were up to their work in the matter, if only enough clerical pressure
of the proper sort could be put upon them.

It seems as if Innocent and his advisers ought to have known enough
of the political situation in Languedoc and the universal failure
to enforce heretical legislation there to see that this would not
do. And yet anyone who has been connected with the central offices
of a large corporation, or the general headquarters of a modern
army of millions, knows how hard it is, with the best will in the
world, to get information on conditions in the field. In this case
we may assume it was at first believed at Rome that local action, or
at least local secular action, against heresy would be sufficient.
Or, per contra, we may assume that such local action was never
confidently relied upon, but that it was thought best to try all
other means to the utmost before beginning religious war against an
infected member of Christendom itself. At any rate, as in all her
important decisions, Papal Rome moved slowly.

Moreover, Innocent, over and above his legal training, had a fine
sense of fairness and, Italian gentleman that he was, a vast deal of
tact. In his dealings with the sporadic cases of heresy that sprang
up here and there, weed fashion, outside Languedoc, he followed the
papal precedent of curbing and moderating the sometimes excessive
zeal of the lower clergy.

In 1199 we find him gentle towards a group of Lorrainers in the
diocese of Metz who had come under suspicion for reading translations
of the Scriptures and for murmuring against their parish priests.
He reproved them indeed for not preferring charges through regular
channels to their bishop against the priests complained of. He warns
them that the profundity of certain dogmas makes them difficult of
comprehension by the laity. Nevertheless he assures them that the
desire to understand the Scriptures is worthy, in itself, of praise
rather than blame, and makes haste to take upon himself the conduct
of the case, apparently because he fears that their bishop may be too
strict.

In the same year we find him protecting the “humiliati,” of Verona,
a brotherhood who had bound themselves to voluntary poverty. An
archpriest of their city had included them in the excommunication
pronounced against the Manicheans, Waldensians and Arnoldists (the
followers of Arnold of Brescia). Indeed, to judge from bits of heresy
trials which have comedown to us, it seems as if mere eccentricity of
life was reason enough for suspicion of heresy.

In appeals to Rome, whenever it appeared that the charge of heresy
had not been completely proved we find the Pope anxious to give
the accused the benefit of every doubt. In the district of Nevers
he twice interfered in this way in the case of priests, and twice
in favour of the burghers of La-Charité-sur-Loire, although there,
unfortunately, his leniency bore no fruit, so that he finally felt
himself forced to proceed against them.

Even in the full heat of the Albigensian Crusade, we still find him
favouring an accused canon of Bar-sur-Aube, an incident which can
only receive its full value by being told in connection with the very
different things then going on in Languedoc.

But, however careful to go lightly in doubtful cases, Innocent was
very different toward proved and defiant heretics. Luchaire would
have us believe that when the great Pope calls the heretics a
scourge, a pestilence, filth, an ulcer infecting society, a savage
beast, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a fox that destroys the Lord’s
vine, a villainous inn-keeper who poisons his guests by selling
them adulterated wines, when he seems to believe in their secret
sexual orgies, he is only repeating a set of stock phrases and
that he was in no way animated by “fanaticism,” or by any especial
hatred towards heresy. The learned Frenchman goes so far as to
suggest that Innocent “proceeded rigorously against heresy ...
more because of the necessities of his policy than because of the
ardour of his faith.”[29] Nevertheless, such assertions are without
a scrap of definite proof, as far as Luchaire’s published work is
concerned. Moreover, he admits that Innocent, along with almost all
his contemporaries, felt “repulsion” for the heretics. Finally,
the American of to-day will be apt to say sadly that a French
anti-clerical cannot even know what real fanaticism is, since, in
political action, France has not for centuries even “seen the animal”
in its strength.

Certainly Innocent appealed not only to the Scriptures but also to
human reason against the heretics. Thus he makes great play with the
logical impossibility of the Manichean idea of two contradictory
gods. That is characteristic not only of the man but of the time in
which he lived, with its great scholastics, a time that believed
in logic as devoutly as our own time believes in “science.” Most
certainly he recognized that occasions for scandal given by the
clergy were at the bottom of much of the trouble. He keeps insisting
that the sacraments in the hands of a priest of evil life do not lose
their virtue any more than medicines in the hands of a doctor who
might, personally, be far from well himself. Above all, he worked
to remove the causes of scandal by improving the conduct of the
clergy. But this is merely to say that anger did not blind him to
facts (he had the fits of anger usually found in dominant natures).
Certainly he was no vulgar ranter, but from this it by no means
follows that his faith was not ardent and his feeling against heresy
correspondingly keen.

In the year of his accession we find Innocent already corresponding
with Raymond VI of Toulouse. The Count was then 41 years old, having
three years before succeeded his father, Count Raymond V, whom we
have seen (in the last chapter) appealing for help to put down
heresy. The Counts of Toulouse were the most powerful princes of the
South. As Dukes of Narbonne they were the first lay peers of France.
They held the Marquisate of Provence, they were Counts of Vivarais,
Venaissin, St. Gilles, and Rodez, and lords of the Albigeois,
Gevaudan, Velai, Rouergue, and Agenois, besides being Suzerain to the
Counts of Foix and Comminges. Raymond VI was married to Princess Joan
of England, daughter of Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine,
and sister to Richard Cœur de Lion and King John. The Count himself
was no heretic, although certain hasty expressions which he had
thrown out in favour of the heretics were treasured against him by
zealous Catholics. However, according to the custom of Languedoc, his
orthodoxy was anything but belligerent. He was accustomed to nominate
Jews and heretics to public office, and altogether he and his wealthy
court thought more of enjoying themselves with poetry and the society
of women than of anything else in the world. He was not warlike, and
trying events were to prove him lacking in courage, self command, and
staunchness of purpose. He was equally innocent of wisdom or cunning
in policy. He does not seem to have been base but merely weak and
easy going. If not in great place or troubled times such men may do
well enough.

In his first encounter with the great Pope he appears not as a
favourer of heretics but as an oppressor of monks. As such he had
already been excommunicated by Pope Celestine III. Innocent sent his
legates to offer him absolution if he would give satisfaction to the
abbot in question, that of St. Gilles; and on his promise to do so,
wrote to suggest that he do penance in order to show his good will.
Before a twelvemonth was out the Abbot of St. Gilles was complaining
that he had in no wise mended his ways, so Innocent wrote again to
his legate directing that the Count be held to his promises. It was
not a hopeful beginning.

For six years, with frequently changing personnel, the papal legation
in Languedoc kept on trying to realize its original programme. It was
a thankless job. William VIII, Lord of Montpellier, whose family was
by tradition strongly Catholic, asked for the appointment of a legate
to help him root out heresy from his lands. Unfortunately he was not
a personage of first-rate importance, and his action was a mere flash
in the pan, as none of his fellow nobles followed suit. Lea claims
that even William himself had a special interest in showing zeal
because he was trying to get the Pope to legitimatize the children of
a second wife whom he had married without being legally separated (by
annulment no doubt) from his first.

In 1200 we hear of a Cardinal “John of St. Paul” (meaning probably
that his titular church was the basilica of St. Paul without the
walls at Rome) taking part in the Albigensian mission, but of him
we hear no more. Two years later it appears that Rainier fell sick
and was accordingly relieved from duty as legate. What became of his
companion Guy we are not told; he seems to have sunk in the waters of
oblivion without a splash or even a bubble.

Rainier was replaced by two Cistercian monks from the Cistercian
abbey of Font Froide, near Narbonne. One of the two Cistercians
was named Raoul. The other, the soul of the mission, was Peter de
Castelnau, that famous name of Castelnau whose arms are still seen in
the hall of the knights at Versailles, a name that the Germans will
long have reason to remember, since in the desperate first week of
September, 1914, it was a Castelnau who fended them off at the Grand
Couronné de Nancy, and thus made possible the victory of the Marne.
De Castelnau, with an energy and decision that may well remind us
of the soldier Castelnau of our own generation, made straight for
Toulouse itself. There he harangued the inhabitants, demanding that
their magistrates should swear to keep the Catholic faith and expel
heretics, in return for a papal confirmation of the liberties of the
city (which were set down, no doubt, in a charter much like the old
English charters preserved by Bishop Stubbs). The Toulousains rose to
the bait, took the oaths and then failed to move. The legates talked
in a high tone about angry princes and kings coming upon the city to
pillage and destroy, and effected thereby some show of reform, but
no sooner were their backs turned than the heretical preachers began
their midnight meetings as before.

Incidentally, it is interesting to note that, in a place like
Toulouse in the year 1203, the utmost daring of the heretics was to
hold their preaching services at midnight. It looks as if, in the
large centres, there was still a strong feeling that heresy, after
all, was not “the thing.” It was still under a certain amount of
social ban. The feeling even of these non-persecuting communities
must have looked a little askance at it.

Having obtained from the “consuls” of Toulouse a promise, however
hollow, of obedient persecution, the legates turned their attention
to Count Raymond. They invited the Archbishop of Narbonne, the
Primate of Languedoc, to join with them in demanding from the Count
not only banishment of heretics and confiscation of their goods but
also the dismissal of the mercenary troops who, as we have seen, were
near-brigands on active service and brigands pure and simple at all
other times. The Archbishop refused. Accustomed throughout a long
life full of ease and riches to see heresy all about him, he had
probably long forgotten to be shocked at it. As to the “brigands,”
he probably made allowances, as the legates did not, for the fact
that mercenaries were the only troops possible to an overlord like
the Count of Toulouse whose feudal vassals were almost certain to be
either unwarlike or disobedient—if not both at once. Knowing his man
and Languedoc in general as he did, he must have thought it useless
and silly for the legates even to make the attempt. Very likely he
was alarmed at such activity shown by papal legates in his territory
and afraid lest his own position might be threatened and his own
sloth and unworthiness be thrown in his teeth or denounced to the
Pope by this meddlesome pair of Cistercians from his own province,
who might better have stayed at home in their abbey. He refused to
go with them and would hardly even lend them a horse for their trip.
The bishop of Beziers, who had been asked to be of the party, also
refused, so the legates proceeded alone. As for Raymond, we have
already seen him readier to promise than to perform in the case of
the monks of St. Gilles. Now he would not even promise.

Even de Castelnau despaired. He wrote to the Pope telling of his
failure, and asking to be relieved from duty as legate in order
to return to his abbey. Innocent held him to his work, reminding
him that heaven would reward him not according to his success, but
according to his labours.

However, it was probably de Castelnau’s letter which persuaded the
Pope to broaden the scope of the mission. He now took the radical
step of depriving the Languedocian bishops of jurisdiction in cases
of heresy and conferred it on his legates. On top of this, he went
even further and empowered the legates to remove any of the clergy
from their benefices should they seem unworthy to hold them, and
denied to the condemned the right of appeal to Rome and of delay in
executing the sentence.

From the standpoint of the canon law this was revolutionary; the
grant of these wide powers to the legates marks the second stage
in the preliminaries of the Crusade. Gradually, the seriousness of
the situation was being understood in Rome. Only the clear belief
that the higher clergy of Languedoc must be drastically purged
of evil-livers, and of those who were slothful and lukewarm in
prosecuting heresy, before anything else could be accomplished would
justify such measures.

That there was need of strong measures was proved by the continued
activity of the heretics. After the Count of Toulouse, the Count
of Foix was the greatest noble of Languedoc. In this same year his
sister Esclairmonde was “hereticated,” and in the great crowd present
at the ceremony only the Count himself failed to “venerate” the
“Perfect” according to the prescribed heretical form. His wife was
already a “Cathar,” and another of his sisters was a Waldensian. So
things went in the “midi.”

At the same time that the powers of the legates were increased,
Innocent empowered them to offer Philip Augustus and his son Louis
complete remission of sins, as if for a crusade to Palestine, if they
would move against the Albigenses of Languedoc. The indulgence was to
be extended to all nobles who might aid in suppressing heresy; and
all who were under excommunication for crimes of violence, nobles
or villains, were to be absolved on joining the expedition. At the
same time, the Pope himself wrote direct to Philip, promising him not
only full indulgences, as for a crusade against the Moslem, but also
the territories of such nobles as might obstruct the pious work of
suppressing heresy.

The time was altogether unfavourable for the King of France to grant
such a request, for he was otherwise engaged. About the middle
of the twelfth century, as a result of two great marriages, the
Plantagenet Counts of Anjou (in addition to their hereditary lands
of Anjou, Maine and Touraine) had become kings of England and Dukes
of Normandy, suzerains of Brittany, and Dukes of Aquitaine, which
included Poitou, Guienne, Gascony, and Auvergne. Naturally, as
masters of this great sweep of territory so much greater in extent
than the little royal domain which alone was directly ruled by the
kings of France, the Angevins were almost continually at war with
the French kings to whom they theoretically owed homage for their
Continental possessions. Besides their vast lands, the Plantagenets
possessed high personal energy and complete ruthlessness; their line
was supposed to descend from a devil, and from their behaviour it
seemed fairly probable. Further, the Norman system of administration
and (as we should say) “civil service” which they directed and
applied throughout their territory, was the best of its kind in Latin
Christendom, at least outside of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily
which was also Norman-ruled. On the surface of things, the “kings
of Paris” seemed hopelessly overmatched. On the other hand, the
Angevin dominions could have no possible feeling of attachment to one
another. They were held together only from above. Whereas behind the
kings of France were dim, vast, memories of the Roman unity; as yet
mere “ideas,” to be sure, but in France ideas have power.

It is with a sure instinct that Michelet has contrasted the fashion
of the great seals of the Plantagenets with those of the Capets. The
demon race of Anjou are seen fully armed, mounted, and charging,
while the kings of France have no need of war horse, armour, or
weapons, but are sitting enthroned, holding the orb and sceptre,
full of the calm consciousness of power admitted and acknowledged.
I repeat once more that the time had almost nothing of our idea of
nationalities; nevertheless, as we have seen in the first chapter,
its currents were setting strongly in favour of the central
kingships, and especially in favour of the kings of France. Even in
the matter of the Albigensian crusade, we shall see the Capets, and
with them the national unity, profiting quite as much as the Church
from the conclusion of the struggle.

Now, in 1204, there reigned at Paris a great man, Philip, whose
surname Augustus of itself recalled Rome. His character was a
little detached and remote, bent altogether upon making real the
great shadowy power that was lawfully his by virtue of his office.
Like his father and grandfather, he was a friend to merchants and
wayfaring men, a mighty slayer of bandits, and a protector of the new
Municipal Communes. Like all his ancestors, he allied himself with
the Church. Like some of his ancestors, and like a true Frenchman, he
might quarrel bitterly with the Pope, when there was a petticoat in
the business, but in spite of his dabbling in bigamy on the modern
American plan, in the matter of his second marriage he remained the
“eldest son of the Church” and the staunchest champion of the Papacy
in Europe, and in his alliance with the Church he received quite as
much as he gave.

Ever since John’s accession to the Plantagenet lands in 1199, the
long struggle between the Angevins and the French Crown had gone on
in haphazard raids and skirmishes, interrupted by fitful truces which
settled nothing. From February to September, 1200, France had been
under a Papal interdict for Philip’s repudiation of his wife followed
by a second marriage, after a questionable annulment of the first
marriage by the French bishops. Even though the interdict had been
imperfectly enforced, still it had sufficiently weakened his general
position to make him willing to conclude a truce with John, and to
promise the Pope that he would mend his ways. The interdict once
lifted, the intriguing and skirmishing had begun again, going more
and more in Philip’s favour. In the fall of 1203 major operations had
begun. After a successful six months’ siege of Chateau Gailliard,
ending in March, 1204, Philip had won all Normandy and deprived John
of the entire continental Plantagenet inheritance except Gascony,
Guienne, and part of Poitou. With so much freshly conquered land to
be administered and so many new vassals to be handled, it was no time
to ask the King of France to take on the heavy task of intervening
against heresy in Languedoc, or even to weaken himself by allowing
any of the forces of his kingdom to do so. He refused to move.

There remained the chance of accomplishing something through reform
of the personnel of the southern Church by a drastic use of the
extraordinary powers granted to the papal legates. These were now
three in number, the newcomer being Arnaut Amalric, abbot of Citeaux,
and therefore head of the powerful Cistercian order, to which both
Raoul and de Castelnau belonged. With the addition of Arnaut (whose
surname of Amalric recalls the old family of Amal chieftains among
the Goths), the legates attempted to use their power of deposing
bishops to its full extent. They proclaimed the deposition of
Berenger II, primate of Languedoc! Berenger broke boldly with the
legates and refused to quit his archbishopric of Narbonne. He
protested violently to the Pope, representing that only his great age
and “infirmities” prevented him from pleading his cause in person at
Rome, so that his case dragged on.

Meanwhile, the Bishop of Beziers, besides refusing to go with the
legates to Count Raymond, had gone even further in disobedience to
them than his ecclesiastical lord of Narbonne. When asked to demand
of the “consuls” of his city that they abjure heresy and engage to
expel heretics, he at first refused point blank and encouraged the
magistrates not to do so. Under pressure he finally promised to
excommunicate them, but failed to do so. Accordingly, the legates
suspended him, and ordered him to appear in his own defence at Rome.
Shortly afterwards he was assassinated by some treachery “among his
own people”—why, our authorities do not state.

Perhaps he had been particularly slow to prosecute heresy inasmuch as
his neighbour, the Bishop of Carcassonne, had gotten himself driven
out for merely threatening to do so. The municipality of Carcassonne
had even forbidden anyone to have relations with the unhappy cleric,
on pain of a heavy fine.

In the same year that saw the assassination of the Bishop of Beziers,
the legates deposed the Bishop of Toulouse for “simony,” that is
selling appointments to Church offices within his control. He was a
turbulent, feudal, sort of person, who had spent his time in making
war on his vassals, and had mortgaged the properties of his see right
and left to enable him to do so. On account of his resistance it was
not until the next year that a successor could be elected.

While the see of Toulouse was still vacant, de Castelnau again went
boldly to Raymond and frightened him into taking an oath to dismiss
his bandit-mercenaries and personally to prosecute heretics. As in
the case of the monks of St. Gilles, he took no steps towards keeping
his word.

Hardly was Raymond’s oath sworn when the consuls of Toulouse passed
a law forbidding an accusation of heresy to be begun after the
death of the accused unless they had been “hereticated” on their
death-bed—some bones of heretics having been dug up and removed
from consecrated earth. And what was worse, this action of the
municipality was supposed to have been due to Raymond’s influence
as overlord. At any rate, he seems to have consented to it, and
certainly made no move to prevent it.

Altogether, the year 1205 had been as depressing as its predecessors.
A second appeal to Philip Augustus, in February, had brought no
result.

In 1206 the discouragement of the legates again came to a head as
it had done two years before. The one bright spot was that the
cathedral chapter of Toulouse had finally elected, as their bishop,
Fulk of Marseilles. After winning fame as a troubadour, he had
entered the Cistercian order and been chosen an abbot. Fulk had all
the enthusiasm typical of converts. He had transferred the passion
that had set him writing love songs into his new task of smiting the
heretic. Indeed, he was to be one of the foremost in the Crusade.
Nevertheless, his election was not enough in itself to keep the
legates in good heart, for in general their task was as ungrateful as
ever.

Towards midsummer, the three legates with their retinues, together
with a number of bishops from neighbouring sees, assembled in council
at Castelnau (named for the family of the legate Pierre de Castelnau)
near Montpellier. Not only the gentle Raoul, but even the stern
and unbending Arnaut Amalric, and de Castelnau with his fearless,
fiery spirit, were ready to despair. They talked of resigning their
mission. It seems that they had even agreed to do so, when a new
impulse and an altogether different plan of campaign was given them
by a newcomer.

This newcomer was a Spaniard, Diego (or Didacus), Bishop of Osma in
the Upper Douro valley in Castille. He had been much employed in
diplomatic business by his king, and was now returning from Rome
whither he had been refused permission from the Pope to go as a
missionary to the savage heathen Tartars of the Ukraine steppes.

At the head of Bishop Diego’s suite was his sub-prior, Domingo de
Guzman, later to be known as St. Dominic, the founder of the Order
of Preachers which bears his name, then a young man in the middle
thirties, slender, fair-haired, dressed in the white habit and
surplice worn by Augustinian canons regular. He was a gentleman
born and bred who had taken his university course at Palencia, had
been made canon and then sub-prior at Osma, and was Bishop Diego’s
constant companion. Three years before, while accompanying his patron
on one of the latter’s diplomatic trips, he had passed through
Toulouse. Being lodged in the house of a heretic, he had sat up
all night with the man, until by dint of prayer, exhortation, and
argument he persuaded him to turn from the error of his ways. Now he
was admitted, with Diego, into the council chamber of the legates.

No one else who comes directly into our story has set in motion
such a force as did St. Dominic. He and St. Francis more than any
men since the conversion of the Roman Empire, were to give to the
Catholic Church new power over men’s thoughts and affections. Perhaps
he would loom larger in our sight were he not so often considered
together with St. Francis. It is true that his personality has not
the same extraordinary poetry, simplicity and charm as that of the
“Poverello” of Assisi. But in his consuming zeal for the faith he
was Francis’s equal, while in organizing ability and statesmanlike
adaptation of means to ends, he was by far Francis’s superior. He was
an extraordinary man.

For the time being, he was merely the chief of Bishop Diego’s suite,
and there is no evidence that he even spoke in the council. It was
Diego who advised the legates to put all their energy into preaching,
and (that their pomp and retinue might no longer be contrasted with
the simplicity and self-denying asceticism of the heretical chiefs)
he further suggested that the legates rid themselves of guards,
servants, horses, and even of shoes and sandals. They were to go
forth barefoot, in perfect apostolic poverty, having neither purse
nor scrip like the original twelve.

Luchaire thinks[30] it improbable that a mere passing bishop, on
his own responsibility, would have presumed to urge upon men in the
official position of the legates so startling a departure; and that,
had he done so, his counsel would almost certainly not have been
accepted. He therefore infers that Diego was acting under orders
from Innocent. As there is no mention in any of the chroniclers
of direction from Innocent at this time, the idea remains mere
inference, although probable enough.

From whatever source it came, the new and radical proposition was not
easily accepted by the legates. Perhaps they feared ridicule, perhaps
insults and bodily harm if they went about unprotected. At any rate
they balked, suggested that they would follow if someone set the
example, and ended by imitating Diego when he himself put in practice
what he had just preached.

With this decision begins the third and last stage of the
preliminaries of the Crusade. The preaching apostolate was destined
to be continued while the Crusade itself was going on, and was to
grow into the great Dominican order. The idea of voluntary poverty in
the service of others was to electrify Christendom and remain as a
permanent force in the world.

Promptly, the new plan of action once decided on, the legates, Diego,
and Dominic, went at it vigorously. Arnaut, who had to return to
Citeaux to preside at the approaching chapter general of his Order,
departed thither on foot. Meanwhile de Castelnau and Raoul, with the
two Spaniards and the other clergy attached to the legation, divided
themselves by threes and fours and went here and there throughout
the country. Barefoot, begging their bread and carrying with them
only staff and breviary, they preached and debated publicly against
the heretical “Perfect.” We hear of these formal “theological
tournaments,” as it were, lasting a week at Servian near Beziers,
for a fortnight at Beziers itself, at Carcassonne for eight days.
Certainly there was no lack of energy.

Unfortunately, the effort produced no commensurate result. Peter de
Vaux-Cernay says that at Servian the people were so moved by the
debate that they would have expelled the heretics had it not been
for the opposition of the local lord, and that they escorted the
missionaries in triumph along the road when they left the town. But
at Beziers there was so much hostile feeling among the inhabitants
that Diego and Raoul advised de Castelnau to flee for his life.
Evidently it was not altogether without reason that the legates had
hesitated to dismiss their armed guards. At Carcassonne we hear of a
miracle but no conversions. In the neighbourhood Dominic vehemently
reproved certain peasants, possibly Catharists, who were reaping on
St. John’s Day. One of them, in reply, threatened the saint, when
suddenly he and his companions found the sheaves which they held in
their hands red, as with blood. At Verfeil, where St. Bernard had
been jeered at sixty years before, the debate is said to have gone
completely in favour of the Catholics, without impressing the people
in any way. Clearly, although the new tactics had made a certain
impression, especially upon the lower classes, there was to be no
rapid progress.

In November the Pope formally prescribed the novel methods already
adopted. The legates were to choose men of “proved virtue,” who
were to go about “dressed humbly and taking for model the poverty of
Christ” to make conversions. The new departure was to be tested to
the uttermost.

The effort was continued in the same way in 1207. At his chapter
general, Arnaut Amalric had recruited many of his Cistercians,
including twelve abbots, and these reinforcements gave a new impetus
to the work of debate and of preaching. The conferences seem to grow
more formal and to take place on a greater scale, attracting more
general attention. We hear especially of two, one at Montreal and one
at Pamiers.

At Montreal the debate lasted a fortnight, and here, according to
Peter de Vaux-Cernay, the miracle placed by Dominican tradition
at Fanjeaux really occurred. St. Dominic drew up a summary of his
arguments, as did the heretics, and the two memoranda were submitted
to the four judges of the debate, two knights and two burghers. The
judges, in executive session, despaired of coming to an agreement and
decided to try a form of ordeal. Accordingly, they ceremonially threw
both manuscripts into the fire. Whereupon the heretical manuscript
promptly blazed up, and St. Dominic’s, three times thrown in, was
three times cast out unharmed by the flames. The judges agreed to say
nothing of the matter and, miracle or no miracle, failed to give a
decision.

The last of the public debates took place at Pamiers, in the
territory and under the patronage of Raymond Roger, Count of Foix.
Faithful to his usual policy of “Good Lord, good Devil” the Count
entertained the disputants of both parties in turn, and offered
his great hall for the debate. On the Catholic side, the Bishop of
Osma was seconded by Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, and by the Bishop of
Conserans. The opposition seems to have been quite as much Waldensian
as Catharist. A single judge presided. In the course of the debate,
Esclairmonde the heretical sister of the Count of Foix, broke into
the debate in favour of the Cathari, with quite the assurance of a
Roman lady of the first century or of a wealthy English or American
woman to-day. In this case, however, one of the Catholic priests
present, Stephen of Metz, replied: “Go back to your spinning, it is
not for you to make a speech in such a company,” and she seems to
have subsided, possibly choked with anger at being so addressed by
a wretched barefoot priest. At the close of the conference certain
Waldensians, among them Duran (or Durand) of Huesca, a Spanish
Waldensian prominent in the sect, were converted. Otherwise this
conference, too, seems to have had slight results. As at Montreal, no
decision was given.

Although after the Conference at Pamiers we hear no more of public
debates on a grand scale, the preaching work of the mission was
continued. Legate Raoul drops out of the story. The Bishop of Osma
returned to his diocese to die, the sooner perhaps because of the
hardships to which the old man had subjected himself, but left
Dominic to go on with the work. Arnaut Amalric was again called
away for a time by business in Northern France, leaving Pierre de
Castelnau, and (apparently) Dominic, as the dominant personalities of
the Papal mission.

During 1207, the year of the conferences of Montreal and Pamiers, the
earlier idea of putting pressure upon the secular authorities was by
no means given up. It is quite possible, as Luchaire suggests, that
men of the stamp of de Castelnau, Arnaut Amalric, and Fulk, continued
to believe all along in measures stiffer than mere persuasion. And in
this belief, if they held it, time was to show them right enough. De
Castelnau crossed the Rhône into Raymond’s “Marquisate of Provence,”
and persuaded the nobles there to associate themselves in a league
which he organized for the prevention of feuds between its members.
He further arranged to include in the objects of the league the
prosecution of heretics and then summoned Raymond himself to join the
association formed for two such worthy purposes by this good-sized
group of his vassals.

Raymond refused. Besides being utterly unwilling to prosecute heresy,
he probably felt that his prestige would suffer if he did so as a
late comer into an association of his own liegemen which he had not
himself helped to organize.

De Castelnau’s next move shows the gathering exasperation of years of
failure. He excommunicated the Count. He interdicted his lands. Not
content with that, he went boldly into his presence and denounced
him publicly, to his face. No doubt he threw in his teeth the two
promises which he had already broken, first that of 1199 to the
Pope in the matter of the monks of St. Gilles, and second that to
de Castelnau himself in 1205, two years before the denunciation
when he had sworn to dismiss his mercenary troops and to prosecute
heretics. The spectacle must have been dramatic; the monk, remember,
had especially drawn upon himself the hatred of the heretics and the
easy-going Catholics (who between them made up nearly all Languedoc),
standing up barefoot in his grey Cistercian habit and cursing to his
face the greatest lord of the south. For protection he had nothing
but such moral authority as the Church still possessed in the face
of the heresy all about. His worst enemy could not have denied de
Castelnau’s courage.

Innocent lost no time in confirming the sentence. He ordered the
Archbishops of Vienne, Embrun, Arles, and Narbonne to publish and to
enforce it. He did more; he wrote directly, and fiercely, to Raymond
himself.

The counts of the indictment as repeated to the archbishops are
interesting and inclusive. Besides the two main charges of having
employed bandit-mercenaries and refusing to prosecute heretics, Count
Raymond had refused to interrupt military operations during Lent and
on feast days and holidays, he had made fortresses out of churches,
he had persecuted abbeys, despoiled the Bishop of Carpentras,
bestowed public offices upon Jews, refused to join the league of
peace of Provence, increased tolls upon the roads and bridges, played
host to heretics, and finally (although this was never proved and
seems not to have been the fact) he had become a heretic himself.
It is particularly interesting, and in line with the Church’s
condemnation of usury and extortion generally, to see the strong line
taken in the matter of tolls.

Naturally, his vassals owed no duties of allegiance as long as
their lord remained unabsolved. Should any man give him aid and
comfort that man was, ipso facto, excommunicate himself, down to the
blacksmith who might shoe him a horse.

The Pope’s letter to Raymond himself was devastating. “Impious
folly and tyranny” were among the gentler of its phrases. It spoke
hopefully of the Count’s chances of fever, leprosy, paralysis,
demoniacal insanity, metamorphosis into a beast after the fashion of
Nebuchadnezzar. Contrasting his love of war with the angelic devotion
to peace shown by the Provençal nobles and by “the illustrious” King
Pedro of Aragon, it likened its addressee to a crow feeding on dead
bodies. Altogether, its tone left very little to be desired.

Specifically, Innocent accused the Count of retorting to de Castelnau
that a heretic, perhaps a “Catharan bishop” could easily be found
to prove the superiority of their religion over the Catholic. He
speaks, therefore, of the serious grounds for suspicion of heresy in
Raymond’s own case, but guards himself carefully against offering it
as a fact. He is to give prompt and full satisfaction and seek to be
absolved. Otherwise he will lose the county of Melgueil held by him
as a vassal of the Roman Church, and if this is not enough then other
princes will be stirred up against him and granted title to any of
his lands they may conquer.

Raymond collapsed. He signed the Provençal truce and again swore to
do everything that was demanded of him. But it was the fatal weakness
of his character that he was always willing to mortgage his future by
yielding to present threats and then fail to keep his engagements. He
could never understand that this sort of thing would be even worse
for him in the end than out and out resistance. Again he did nothing.

Meanwhile St. Dominic, having put his hand to the plough, was not the
man to turn back. He succeeded in making some converts. The penance
laid upon one of these, in order to reconcile him to the Church, has
been preserved. Its date seems to be 1207 or 1208. It prescribes
that Pons Roger of Treville “en Lauraguais” for three successive
Sundays is to strip to the waist and walk from the outskirts of his
village to the church, being beaten with rods all along the way
by a priest. He is to wear a religious (i.e., monkish) habit with
crosses sewn upon it. For the rest of his life he is to eat no meat,
eggs, or cheese. Exception is made for the great feasts of Easter,
Pentecost and Christmas, not for the comfort of the penitent but so
that he might openly show that he had broken with the Catharan law
of fasting described in the preceding chapter. Three days a week
he is to have no fish, oil or wine, unless in case of sickness. He
is to keep three Lents a year, and to live in perpetual chastity.
The obligation, to hear mass at least once a day and to show his
letter of penitence once a month to his parish priest, round out
his sentence. Should he disobey, he is ipso facto excommunicate as
a heretic and perjurer on top of that. A propos of this bristling
catalogue the good Mother Drane, comparing it with the comparative
gentleness of present-day Roman Catholic penitence, remarks that ...
(the) ... “difference ... should cover us with humiliation for the
feebleness of modern penitence, rather than send us to criticize
the severity with which the Church has ever looked on sin.”[31]
Unfortunately even in the thirteenth century few Provençals seem
to have been of the good lady’s opinion. It appears quite certain
that converts willing to tread such an heroic road for the sake of
reconciliation with the Church were few.

In another direction St. Dominic’s labours were more fruitful. He had
observed that the heretics made a practice of caring for the children
of the very poor in order to bring them up in Catharan practices and
beliefs. Accordingly he founded the famous nunnery of Prouille to
receive the girl children of poor Catholics and also female converts
from heresy who desired a secure refuge in which they might enjoy
their new faith. The place filled a real need and prospered from the
first.

However, in spite of the fame that Prouille was to have in the
future, its foundation had little immediate effect upon the
situation. Converts by preaching were few, as we have seen. The
people cared no more for sermons than for rotten apples, remarks the
“Chanson de la Crusade.” For the third time discouragement fell upon
the papal mission to Languedoc.

There is a bit of evidence tending to prove that, in St. Dominic, the
discouragement of his fellow missioners was translated into anger. To
his congregation at Prouille he is said to have told of his years of
preaching, prayer and tears, in their behalf, then to have quoted
a Spanish proverb: “Use the stick where a blessing will not serve!”
“So,” said he calling up before them visions of war and massacre,
“force shall prevail where sweetness has failed.”

If this sermon of St. Dominic’s was, in fact, preached towards
the end of the year 1207, it coincided in time with a new and
particularly solemn and pressing series of letters addressed by
Innocent not only to Philip Augustus but also to that king’s chief
vassals the Duke of Burgundy and the Counts of Bar, Dreux, Nevers,
Champagne, and Blois. The Pope recalled to the “French” princes
(i.e., North-French as we should say) the nine years already spent
in the hopeless effort to convert the southern heretics by means of
gentleness. Now, said he, the miseries of war must bring them to
truth. Those who took the Cross were to receive full and complete
remission of their sins as if their crusading had been to Palestine
itself. As the lands of heretics were to be their lawful prey, so
their own lands and families were under special protection of the
Pope. No creditors could collect interest from a Crusader during
his absence, and crusading clergy were authorized to mortgage
their revenues for two years in advance. Really it seems as if the
Pope could hardly have bid higher. By this time he must have been
convinced, not only that the Albigenses must be put down by force,
but also that the task was equal in importance to recovering the
Holy Land itself. Better a lion in the desert than a wild cat in
the bed chamber, as Scott makes Saladin remark to Richard Cœur de
Lion. Innocent would almost certainly have maintained that the
Saracenic lion was a fair fighter, whereas the teeth and claws of the
Albigensian wild-cat bore poison.

We hear of no reply to Innocent’s three former appeals, but in this
case Philip answered briefly by a letter written in the King’s name
by the Bishop of Paris. Whether any of his great vassals answered is
not known, but if their decisions were essentially different from
that of their overlord then they were certainly of no effect. The
King’s answer was typical of the colder side of his character, for
besides his ceaseless energy, his boldness where only boldness would
serve him, and his gift for intrigue, he possessed a prudence that
never ran unnecessary risks but made sure to get as many chances as
possible on his side before he would move. As we say, he was a great
“politician.” Three years before by taking Normandy he had cleared
the mouth of the Seine, the only real navigable river in France, in
the middle basin of which river the centre of his power lay. For
the first time since the coming of the Danish invasion nearly three
centuries before, northern Gaul held the keys of her own door so
that her commerce could come and go at her own will. He had done
more. He had settled himself in the rich lower valley of the shallow
Loire and pushed back John almost to the Dordogne. Now, when he
received Innocent’s letter, the campaigning season of 1207 had passed
without incident thanks to a two years’ truce patched up in the
previous autumn (of 1206), which had still about another year to run.
Nevertheless the King of France knew that John had not given up the
struggle but was making great efforts to raise money for the hiring
of mercenaries and the bribing of possible allies. The Archbishop
of York had just gone into exile in protest against unprecedented
taxation of the English clergy for these pious objects. Also, it was
common talk throughout Europe that John was refusing to recognize
Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, in spite of strong
pressure from Innocent to do so. A complete break had not yet come,
but relations between the King of England and the Pope were getting
more and more strained.

Under these conditions Philip Augustus’s answer to Innocent’s
invitation to go crusading in Languedoc was, in form, a half consent
to do so, hedged about with such conditions as to make it, in fact,
a refusal. He reminded the Pope of his war with John. His resources
were not large enough for him to levy two armies at a time. Let
Innocent first make a firm truce between John and himself for two
years and, second, decree an assessment upon the French clergy and
nobles. Then, according to Luchaire’s account of the letter, Philip
Augustus would himself undertake the Crusade, reserving the right to
withdraw his troops in case John broke the truce. According to Lea,
he promised, in case the truce were arranged, only to permit his
barons to undertake the Crusade and to aid them with fifty livres a
day for a year. In either case he knew very well that Innocent could
get him no truce with John. Since the King of England was already
braving possible excommunication for himself and interdict for his
kingdom, the Pope had no hold on him whatsoever. With a craftiness
worthy of his far-off Roman namesake Augustus, the King of France had
knowingly proposed conditions impossible to fulfil.

In those times of slow communication we do not know exactly how
long it took important despatches to pass between Rome and Paris.
Innocent’s letter is dated November 17, 1207, but perhaps even before
it was received, and certainly before King Philip’s disappointing
answer to it could have been delivered, a crime was committed that
put the whole game in the Pope’s hands. On January 15, 1208, de
Castelnau the legate was murdered by a retainer of Count Raymond.

Of the crime there are different versions. In Hallam’s ill-informed
Victorian day it could be maintained that Raymond was responsible
in no way whatsoever. There is a story that the legate got into a
hot religious argument with a gentleman of the count’s retinue who
ended by drawing his dagger and killing him. The version of the
Catholic chroniclers is substantially as follows: Raymond had called
the legates to a conference at St. Gilles in order to arrange the
conditions on which he might give satisfaction to the Church and
thereby obtain the lifting of the excommunication in force upon
himself and the interdict upon his lands. Very likely he was informed
of the new call to a Crusade and was correspondingly frightened. As
before, he was willing to promise anything, but de Castelnau and the
Bishop of Conserans who was present understood him thoroughly by this
time, and refused to give absolution until he should at least begin
to fulfil his easily given pledges. Lea speaks of “demands greater
than Raymond was willing to concede.” In all probability de Castelnau
carried things with a high hand. Already we have seen him forced to
escape by night from Carcassonne, and already he had cursed Raymond
to his face. The tree of faith, he was accustomed to say, would never
spring up in Languedoc until its roots had been watered with the
blood of a martyr. Now, when the discussion was about to be broken
off, Raymond is said to have uttered threats, more or less vague.
In fear for the legates, the abbot and burghers of St. Gilles gave
the legates an escort as far as the western bank of the Rhône, where
they passed the night at an inn already partly occupied by some of
Raymond’s people. In the morning, after saying mass, the Churchmen
set out to cross the river, de Castelnau being mounted (according to
William of Tudela) “on his ambling mule,” which would seem to show
that in his case at least the practice of barefoot apostolic poverty
had not lasted long, when a “sergeant” (i.e., a heavy armed, mounted,
soldier not of noble blood) in the service of the Count, coming
treacherously and from behind, mortally wounded him, with his lance.
“May God forgive thee even as I forgive thee!” said the dying man.

Accounts of Raymond’s behaviour after the crime differ as widely as
those of the crime itself. The version quoted by Lea claims that the
Count, “... greatly concerned at an event so deplorable, ... would
have taken summary vengeance of the murderer but for his escape
and hiding with friends at Beaucaire.” According to the Catholic
chronicler Peter de Vaux-Cernay Raymond showed himself throughout
his domain with the murderer at his side, making an intimate of
him and covering him with praise and with gifts. This was the
version published far and wide by Innocent, although with his usual
lawyer-like exactitude he adds that in so doing he is merely echoing
the reports sent to him, which makes it appear as if, perhaps, he did
not altogether believe those accounts. Finally, it is worth noting
that, unlike Becket, the martyred de Castelnau was not canonized
nor did his tomb at St. Gilles become a centre of pilgrimage and of
miracles.

Whatever the details of the affair may have been, the crime made
Innocent master of the situation. As with Becket, so it was with de
Castelnau: the dead Churchman was too much for the layman who had
successfully resisted him living. The Pope lost little time. Within
three months of the murder, the unrivalled papal heavy artillery of
curses was put into action so vigorously as almost to surpass itself.
Flaming circular letters went to every bishop in Raymond’s lands,
recounting the crime and the strong presumption of the Count’s
complicity therewith, directing that the murderer be excommunicated,
that Raymond be re-excommunicated, and that the interdict upon
Raymond’s lands be enlarged so as to cover any place that either he
or the murderer might curse and pollute with their presence. This
masterpiece of malediction was to be solemnly published with bell,
book, and candle, in all churches and republished, until further
notice, every Sunday and feast day. Raymond’s person was outlawed,
his land titles were voided, saving only the rights of the king as
suzerain thereto; any Catholic who was able might kill him and seize
upon anything that was his. His vassals were loosed from their oaths
of liege-homage to him and his allies loosed from their oaths of
alliance. Before he could even seek reconciliation by penitence he
must first banish the heretics from his dominions. “No pity for these
criminals who, not content to corrupt souls by abetting heresy, kill
bodies also.”

At the same time, letters went to the French bishops and archbishops,
to Philip Augustus, and to his chief vassals. The prelates were
directed to help the legates make peace between Capet and Angevin,
and to stir up clergy and laity to the Crusade. Philip was
congratulated on his great increase in power, his affection for
the Holy See, and the hatred which he had often shown for heresy.
Now, so it was represented, his office compelled him to punish the
murderers of the papal legate. He had once crusaded to Palestine. Now
he ought again to serve the Church, more and more imperilled as she
was by the heretics who were worse than Saracens (an epoch-making
phrase). It was his duty to drive out Raymond, to take the land from
the heretics, and to give it to good Catholics who would faithfully
serve the Lord, “_under Philip’s happy suzerainty_.” Probably
Innocent wished Philip to read between the pious lines the thought
that vassals directly planted upon new lands by the King would be
far more his creatures than those who held them by a long chain of
inheritance. As usual with Innocent, the letter is a masterpiece of
its kind.

Meanwhile, Arnaut Amalric made haste to call a chapter general of the
whole Cistercian order. That the murdered de Castelnau himself had
been a Cistercian was an additional reason for his own order to see
to it that their dead brother should not be forgotten and that the
cause for which he had given his life should not be allowed to fail
for want of champions. Their chapter-general, when assembled, voted
unanimously to direct the whole energies of the order into preaching
the Crusade, and forthwith throughout Christendom their monks set
themselves to stir up the people.

In all this, Arnaut Amalric surpassed himself. The “Chanson de la
Crusade” makes him say, in words that echo a fierce (sometimes
grotesque) rhetoric he may well have used: “Cry the indulgences
throughout all the earth, even to Constantinople. Let him that will
not crusade never more drink wine, never more, evening or morning,
eat from a table decked with a table cloth (!), may he never more
wear cloth of flax or of linen, and at his death let him be buried
like a dog.”

Innocent’s letters and the Cistercian’s hardly less passionate
sermons had their effect. Enthusiasm rose. It was like the ominous
cracking and groaning that sometimes follow the explosion of a heavy
blasting charge at the base of a mountain, threatening a landslide,
perhaps greater and more uncontrollable than those who set the train
foresaw.

Still, Philip Augustus stood out. He wrote to Innocent a letter
full of decorous grief for de Castelnau, in which he recited also
his own complaints against Raymond. Although the Toulousain held
one of the greatest baronies of the kingdom, he had lent no aid to
his suzerain in the great struggle with John. Nay more, when Philip
had taken Falaise he had found Toulousain soldiers among John’s
garrison there. Nevertheless, the King of France refused to throw
himself whole-heartedly into the Crusade. He repeated, once more,
that Innocent must give him the means of raising the money for the
expedition and must see to it that John remained quiet. He even
read the Pope a lesson in law by insisting that Raymond could not
legally be deprived of his lands and honours (the two words were
almost synonymous to a mediæval) unless he had first been convicted
of heresy, which was not the case. Whether or not he was actually
displeased at the idea of the Crusade, is by no means certain.
It would seem that he might well count on better service from
North-French barons established in Languedoc than from its hereditary
lords, accustomed as these last were to the independence of Paris. We
find him attempting at least to limit the size of the crusading army.
In his authorization to Eudes Duke of Burgundy and Hervé Count of
Nevers to take the Cross, he stipulates that, between them, they must
take no more than five hundred knights.

Significantly enough, this letter is erased from the royal register.
Events were to make the King wish to destroy any evidence which might
put him in the position of having hindered the Crusade.

Nevertheless, he persisted in refusing to join personally in the
proposed expedition. Innocent did all that was possible to persuade
him. After asking him, in a letter dated October 9, 1208, to assist
the legates in persuading his subjects to take the Cross, the Pope
wrote again, on February 9, 1209, asking him to designate a commander
whom all were to obey, and so avoid the danger of faction in the
crusading higher command. The King of France preferred that the
entire responsibility for the undertaking should rest with the Pope.

Little the French nobles and their followers cared for the cold
caution of their King. Frenchmen had been and were to be foremost
in every Crusade from Godfroy de Bouillon to Philip’s grandson, St.
Louis. It is the peculiar and permanent gift of that people, not only
to phrase ideas in clear and definite terms, but to act upon the
ideas thus formulated with an intensity and passion that perpetually
amazes those who do not know them. Finally, it is their glory to make
of the ideas which they define so clearly, and upon which they act so
intensely, the instruments of a vast and solid accomplishment. They
are an astonishing nation.

Now they began to swarm like bees. Seeing Languedoc hostile to
the creed that inspired and held together all their society,
they prepared to move upon her as their descendants, singing the
“Marseillaise” and shouting for “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,”
went out against the kings of Europe. In the Crusades, as in those
later Crusades of the Republic and the Empire, the inspiration was
a transcendental formula, from its nature, therefore, incapable of
proof, but with enormous power to stir and to persuade. Moreover,
that formula, the creed, was the visible architect of a new and
fruitful world. The crusading times must have felt themselves above
the Dark Ages as the French Republicans despised the innumerable
petty restrictions that made of the old régime a stifling thing.
So they made ready to come out, as we or our descendants may see
Frenchmen come out, to do battle for a creed and thereby to change
the world.

Of course there were other and lesser motives. Instead of having to
make the long and dangerous trip to Palestine, a mere forty days’
term of service in Languedoc was enough to qualify a man for the
crusading indulgences. The price of a salved conscience had fallen.
Further, the enemy to be combated was probably known to be divided
against himself, and certainly known to be rich and unwarlike
compared with those who were preparing the invasion. Jealousy of
the refined and wealthy South no doubt spurred many a Crusader.
Finally, there was the chance, not only of fine plunder, but also of
permanent possession at the expense of the heretic. No doubt certain
Crusaders felt that they were using the Church more than the Church
was using them, just as certain of our large employers of labour use
a base religious fanaticism (which in other respects they despise) to
deprive the workman of his beer.

Raymond was frightened, and no wonder. He felt the ground cracking
and stirring under his feet. Weak and infirm of purpose as he was,
at least he had wit enough not to stand still under the menace that
threatened him. His first move seems to have been to consult with
his nephew and vassal, Raymond Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Beziers
and Carcassonne, with a view to a common plan of action. In this
he was unsuccessful. One account has the nephew for resistance and
his uncle for submission, and another account has these positions
reversed. At any rate they could not agree as to what should be done
and parted on bad terms. The Count of Toulouse next made for the
court of his overlord the King of France. Philip received him kindly
and courteously but would promise nothing. Some authorities say he
advised Raymond to yield, and others that he forbade Raymond to
appeal to the Emperor Otto who was unfriendly to Philip.

Otto, it should be explained, had for ten years been gradually
losing in a haphazard civil war for the imperial crown. Innocent had
supported him, in return for a grant of increased privileges for the
Church. Nevertheless the other candidate, Philip of Hohenstaufen,
Duke of Suabia, a younger brother of the redoubtable Henry VI, with
the prestige of his line and the traditional German dislike of Papal
interference to help him, had been gradually getting the upper
hand. Otto was nephew to John of England, his mother had been the
Plantagenet Princess Matilda, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor. It is
not surprising, therefore, that he was in close touch with John, and
correspondingly hostile, in diplomacy at least, to Philip Augustus,
John’s mortal enemy. Philip Augustus had even gone so far as to get
into relations with Otto’s rival Philip of Suabia. While neither the
two Philips nor Otto and John had ever actively aided one another
with more than diplomatic and moral support, still the diplomatic
alignment counted for something. In June, 1208, Otto’s rival, Philip
of Suabia, had been murdered. Otto’s position was accordingly
strengthened, particularly as he had had nothing to do with the
crime, which had been committed for private motives.

At the time of Raymond’s visit to Philip Augustus, Otto had just
become sole Emperor, so that the King of France was particularly
anxious that Raymond should not attach himself to the powerful German
nephew of John Plantagenet his greatest enemy. As often happened
in feudal law, Raymond had more than one overlord. For the greater
part of his lands he owed allegiance to the King of France. For
the Marquisate of Provence, which lay east of the Rhône, and for
the county of Vivarais to the west of that river, he was the “man”
of the Emperor. Philip’s interest in him was so much greater than
Otto’s that Raymond would have done well to leave the German alone.
Unfortunately he could never take a broad view. With his usual knack
for doing exactly the thing that would hurt him the most in the
long run, he went straight from Philip to Otto. The Emperor had not
his own house in order, therefore he could give no help, and any
dealings with him were sure to weaken Raymond’s position with Philip.

One last resource remained to the Toulousain, to throw himself on the
mercy of the legates and the Pope. While he had been running after
Philip Augustus and Otto, his agents had been dealing with the papal
curia, under instructions to raise the question of the personality
of Arnaut Amalric. Should another legate, less hard and pitiless, be
sent, then Raymond authorized them to promise complete submission.
While Raymond’s ambassadors were framing these promises (no doubt
in the full-blown oratory characteristic of the meridional to this
day), laying the blame for what had occurred upon Arnaut Amalric,
and showering rich presents upon all who might be useful to them,
Raymond himself was giving away the game by throwing himself on the
mercy of the man he professed to be unwilling to deal with on any
terms. Hearing that Arnaut Amalric was holding a council at Aubinas,
he knelt at Arnaut’s feet, and begged for mercy and pardon. As might
have been expected, he gained nothing, the abbot coldly referred him
to Rome. The effect of the fruitless humiliation was only to strain
still further his relations with his nephew, and to lower still
further, if possible, Churchmen’s opinion of his crooked dealings
with them.

Innocent determined to play with the wretched count. Excommunicate
as he was, the fact that his agents had been received at Rome and
their complaints against Arnaut listened to at all may prove that the
Pope and his advisers had already considered such a plan. Certainly
Raymond’s repeated shuffling with the Church had been enough to wipe
out any further claim to consideration for him. His abject fear was
now to be used to put him into the power of Rome, so as to lessen
his ability to resist the coming Crusade, should he determine to do
so. As for renouncing the Crusade, whatever Raymond might do, that
was probably not considered for a moment. After ten years of failure
Rome was at last convinced that nothing could be done with heresy in
Languedoc except by terrifying that country. Further, now that the
crusading army was actually mobilizing, the Church could not call off
the expedition even if she so desired.

Accordingly, the curia fell in with Raymond’s request for new
legates. Without removing Arnaut Amalric, the Pope gave him two
new colleagues—Milo, a notary of the Lateran, and Theodisius, a
Genoese canon—who were to arrange the conditions of the Count’s
reconciliation with the Church. Raymond was overjoyed, and there
are indications that Arnaut Amalric and his colleague the bishop of
Conserans were correspondingly depressed, or at least puzzled at the
apparent success of the Toulousain ambassadors at Rome, with their
fluent tongues and their showers of presents.

Innocent made haste to reassure his earlier legates. Milo was
directed to obey Arnaut Amalric implicitly. The new appointments
were a mere ruse. The Pope quoted Scripture in defence of the use
of craft, and explained that, while seeming for a time to favour
Raymond, the lesser defenders of heresy could be the more easily
crushed by the Crusade. Raymond himself, should he make no move to
support his vassals, was at first to be left alone. Then, when those
who might have rallied round him had been disposed of, he could
be easily dealt with in his turn—that is, “should he persist in
his evil ways,” Innocent added for form’s sake. What had appeared
as a diplomatic victory for Raymond was only a move to make his
destruction more certain.

Through the spring and early summer of 1209 the pious comedy was
played. Raymond again solemnly swore (he must have known the formulas
by heart, he had sworn to them so often) to consider as heretics
those designated as such by the clergy, and to turn them over to
the Crusaders, together with their abettors and goods; to dismiss
his bandit-mercenaries, and never hire such troops again; to remove
such Jews as he had appointed to public offices; to restore the
Church properties he had stolen; to police the roads; to abolish his
excessive toll-rates, and keep the “Truce of God” on feast and fast
days. All this was familiar ground. What was new was the oath taken
by the “consuls” representing the municipalities of Avignon, Nimes
and St. Gilles, no longer to recognize him as their overlord should
he fail to satisfy the Church. More serious still was Raymond’s
delivery of seven of his strongest castles into Milo’s custody, thus
giving the Church party the whip hand in a military sense when the
crusading army should arrive. Only when this had been done did Milo
and Theodisius proceed with the ceremony of formal reconciliation.

On June 18, 1209, the humiliating ceremony of his public penance
took place at St. Gilles, on its bluff over the Rhône delta. The
town was the seat of Raymond’s remote ancestors, from which they had
gradually extended their power through four centuries. Its great
romanesque church had been built by his grandfather. A great throng
filled the square before the church, crowding, no doubt, upon the
broad flight of steps that rises to the façade with its wealth of
sculpture and its three round-arched bays. Before the central door,
the excommunicate Count swore upon relics of Christ, and of various
saints, to obey the Pope and the legates in everything. Milo then put
his stole about the penitent’s neck, and using it like a halter, drew
him along, naked to the waist, and stooping forward so that he might
the better be beaten with rods as he walked the whole length of the
church. Before the high altar he was absolved. Then came a hitch in
the proceedings. It had been planned that he should leave the church
by the door through which he had come, but the crowd had packed the
whole place so densely that their humiliated lord with his shoulders
all bloody had to be gotten out by way of the crypt; past the tomb
of de Castelnau which stood there—an unexpected change of plan which
added still another touch of drama to the vivid scene.

Readers of English history will be reminded of the similar penance
of Henry II for the murder of Becket. Two differences, however,
should be noted. De Castelnau (unlike Thomas of Canterbury) was never
canonized, and Raymond’s penance (unlike Henry’s) did not improve
his political position in the least. Within six days, before his
lacerated shoulders had ceased to smart, the crusading army marched
south from its mobilization point at Lyons. Raymond was to learn
that, like Ulysses in the Cyclops’ cave, he had obtained only the
privilege of being eaten last.

Before closing the account of the preliminaries of the Crusade and
taking up the Crusade itself, a word should be given to a short lived
but significant movement which came about in consequence of the
Papal mission. At the conference of Pamiers, a Spanish Waldensian
leader, Durand of Huesca, was converted to orthodoxy. It seems that
he and his immediate personal followers had, all along, considered
Waldensianism as an instrument for re-invigorating the Church rather
than for opposing her. Their strength seems to have been on both
sides of the Eastern Pyrenees, although we hear of their founding a
school at Milan. As the limits of what was and what was not heresy
were rapidly becoming more defined, their middle position became
untenable. They had finally been excommunicated and their school at
Milan torn down by the archbishop there. Now Durand went to Rome and
asked sanction of the Pope himself for the foundation of a community
of “Poor Catholics” (so called in contrast to the “Poor men of
Lyons” as the Waldensians called themselves). The members of the new
community were to be bound by strict vows of abstinence, chastity,
and especially of poverty. They were forbidden to possess anything
more than bare necessities, and were to beg their bread from day
to day. Their clothing was to be of the coarsest stuff, with shoes
of a special design so that they might be distinguished from the
Waldenses. The principal change from their former life was that they
promised no longer to attack the clergy as the Waldensians did, but
to preach against heresy instead. Innocent saw at once the value
of the proposed community, and in December 1208, accepted Durand’s
oath binding himself and his followers. Already, in 1209 there
were communities of “Poor Catholics” in Aragon, Narbonne, Beziers,
Uzès, Carcassonne, and Nimes. At this time, they must have quite
overshadowed the little band of preachers, as yet loosely organized
and bound by no rule, who had grouped themselves around St. Dominic.
But unfortunately for the “Poor Catholics” they were permanently
suspected as converted heretics. In those crusading days, it needed
no prophet or son of a prophet to predict that such a body would
survive with difficulty, if at all. That Innocent authorized it is
proof of his desire to spread the peaceful propaganda of Catholicism
by every possible means.

Meanwhile, events were moving swiftly. As has been said, the Church
had not the slightest intention of giving up the Crusade because
of Raymond’s submission. He had violated too many oaths. Besides,
they probably could not have persuaded the Crusaders to disperse, at
least without causing bitter disappointment, and very serious loss of
prestige to the Church among her own champions. Not more than a week
after Raymond’s humiliating penance at St. Gilles, the crusading army
moved southward from Lyons.


FOOTNOTES:

[29] “Innocent III, La Croisade des Albigeois,” by Achille Luchaire.
Published Hachette, Paris, 1911. Ch. ii, p. 47.

[30] Innocent III, “La Croisade des Albigeois,” Luchaire, p. 91.

[31] “Life of St. Dominic,” p. 40.




CHAPTER IV.

THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE—THE EARLY WAR.


The Albigensian Crusade lasted for twenty years, from the original
mobilization and march of the crusading army to the treaty which
finally ended hostilities. Naturally, for the greater part of this
long period there was no heavy fighting, the resources of the
opponents could not have supported any such continuous performance;
indeed throughout considerable intervals there seems to have been no
actual fighting at all. Nevertheless, for twenty years there were
hostile forces in being and a state of war existed.

The chief single episode of these twenty years is the astonishing
battle of Muret. It will be best, therefore, to consider separately,
first the earlier stages of the war, and second the campaign of Muret
and the subsequent events which that action made possible.

The early war falls naturally into two periods of unequal length.
The first, of only two months, comprises the original crusading
march with its overwhelming numbers, and the capture of Beziers
and Carcassonne. It ends with the appointment of Simon de Montfort
to govern the conquered territories, and the return of the great
majority of Crusaders to their homes. The second period lasts for
four years. Throughout this time de Montfort commands the Crusade,
maintains a government in Languedoc, and extends his power. This he
does, in spite of his slender resources, by virtue of high personal
ability. The period ends with the military intervention of King Pedro
of Aragon against the Crusade, and the general expectation that de
Montfort, with his greatly inferior forces, would be annihilated
forthwith.

All warfare, it is axiomatic, is merely a means to a political end.
One group attempts to impose its will upon another which asserts a
contrary will of its own and resists.

We have seen in the first chapter that the Middle Ages were
politically decentralized to a high degree, but that, on the other
hand, they had a strong sense of moral unity. Christendom was one
big family. Mediæval warfare was conditioned by these two political
factors. On account of decentralization in all its forms, the central
governments had only a slight power to compel the entire body of
their nominal subjects to move, irrespective of the individual wills
of those subjects with regard to the particular matter in dispute;
slight, that is, compared with the power of modern governments. On
account both of decentralization and also of the moral unity of
Christendom, wars between Christian men in the Middle Ages seldom
involved any great point of principle. There could be no opposition
between different and mutually exclusive types of civilization, as
between the French and German types to-day. Usually the dispute
concerned merely the opposing claims of two parties to ownership
of, and therefore feudal administration over, a patch of land.
Accordingly campaigns were apt to be short and inconclusive, and
warfare in general somewhat of an adventurous sport. It is true that
in the thirteenth century, a time still simple, war had not yet
taken on the unreality of aim and the elaborate trappings which are
the mark of the later Middle Ages. Already, however, it had become
something of a “gentleman’s game,” as were the dynastic wars of the
eighteenth century. Naturally, therefore, when a vital principle was
involved (as in the Crusade which we are about to study), operations
were always tending to relapse into the haphazard fashion fostered by
the contemporary idea of war as an affair in which nothing of great
moment to society as a whole was at stake.

As far as the technique of operations is concerned, the important
features are mail-clad cavalry and permanent fortification.
Axiomatically, infantry is worth more than cavalry in combats between
disciplined bodies of troops, but less than cavalry in raids and in
defence against raids, as in our own Indian wars, and in the Boer
War. Thus, in late Roman times and the Dark Ages, cavalry gradually
became preponderant over infantry, throughout the greater part
of Europe. The Franks who ended by setting up their chieftain as
successor to the Western Emperors, were an exception. It was not
until the great Viking harry of the ninth century, in which our
tradition almost went under, that the defenders of “Francia” began to
rely mainly upon cavalry. That arm alone was fast enough to overtake
the pirates whose first act on landing was to steal horses for
themselves. And it was in the repulse of the Viking, as we have seen,
that mediæval society crystallized.

Fortified points, as well as cavalry, take on additional importance
when the resources of one’s opponent seldom permit him to sit
down before them and maintain a blockade and regular siege for
a long time. A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the
“impregnability” of fortification before the discovery of gunpowder.
Any man acquainted with military things knows that, even irrespective
of blockade, any fortress must fall before besiegers in sufficient
numbers and possessed of armament and engineering skill equal to the
defenders, unless the defence can receive relief from outside. Thus
Philip Augustus took Chateau Gaillard, the strongest fortress of its
time, not by blockade but by regular siege.

On the other hand, it has been truly observed that mediæval
commanders of Philip’s type, and with his resources, were rare. The
value of fortification is that it gains time, and few men of the
Middle Ages had their troops well enough in hand to hold them long
at the monotonous drudgery of siege work—even if they had resources
sufficient to keep their force continuously in being at all. The
well-provisioned fortress could usually count on starving out its
besiegers before being starved out itself. Accordingly, if one party
to a quarrel felt himself to be weaker than his enemy, he was apt to
shut himself up promptly behind walls.

Furthermore, fortifications played a large part in mediæval warfare
because a fortress covering only a small area could resist a regular
siege as well as one of great extent. The importance of comparatively
small fortified points, that is of castles, sprang from the lack of
missile weapons capable of battering down stone walls. Obviously, as
the power, accuracy, and effective range of missile weapons increase,
the circumference of the first-class fortress must correspondingly
increase if it is to escape being overwhelmed by the converging fire
of the greater number of engines which the concentric position of the
besiegers enables them to bring to bear upon it. Conversely, when
the problem (as in the Middle Ages) is of close-in defence only, the
area to be defended matters little with reference to the siege work
involved. Whereas, on the other hand, the expense of construction
mounts as the circumference to be fortified increases. The resources
of the besiegers were sapping or battering the base of the walls; or
escalade from behind the cover of movable towers which could be set
up out of range, and then rolled up so as to let down drawbridges on
a level with the battlements.

Finally, the mediæval was no fool. I have made this point in my
first chapter; nevertheless, I repeat it here. We have seen that the
importance of cavalry and of fortification, especially of castles
(i.e., small highly-fortified points) resulted not from folly, but
from the conditions of the time. Social and political conditions,
again, were unfavorable to regular discipline, but no more so than in
our own American Revolution. Less so, in fact. It is true that there
was no regular study of war as an art. Nevertheless, our modern staff
colleges could not easily improve on the decisions of many mediæval
commanders. Even the lack of maps on which modern staff work is built
up did not necessarily blind the eye of the commander operating in
familiar or partially friendly country.

The men of the Middle Ages sometimes show the power of sizing up the
strategic essentials of a large theatre of war which they had never
seen, and had never even seen mapped. For instance, take the case of
Philip Augustus’s advice to his son with regard to the campaign of
1216 in England, that is that the Prince should first of all seize
the castle of Dover which commanded the English terminus to the
shortest possible sea route between England and France.

In the present instance, the mobilization point and the line of march
were intelligently chosen. It was clearly out of the question to
cross the “Massif Central,” the mountains of Auvergne, since armies
are compelled to seek the lines of geographical least resistance, and
must avoid, whenever possible, thinly peopled districts which cannot
keep them in food and shelter. The choice which faced the leaders of
the Crusade was whether to outflank the mountainous country by the
west or by the east.

It is only a guess, but I think that the decision to march by the
easterly route was mainly for political reasons. To march by the west
would have brought the crusading army close to territory still held
by John of England. That monarch was still firmly planted on both
sides of the lower Garonne, and had even held on to parts of Poitou
well to the north of that river. The much widowed Raymond of Toulouse
had married John’s sister Joan, who had since died. John had broken
with the Pope over the candidacy of Stephen Langton, later of Magna
Charta fame, for the archbishopric of Canterbury; and when Innocent
had replied by interdicting all England, John had been able to compel
most of the English clergy from enforcing the sentence. Since the
Crusade was obviously directed against Raymond, John might move.
It would be well, therefore, for the Crusaders not to give him an
opportunity of falling upon their flanks or rear while marching south
on the westward route.

Furthermore, there were geographical points to be considered.
Crusaders from Germany and the Slavonic lands east of the Adriatic
could more easily reach Lyons than, say, Limoges. Of course, most of
the Crusaders would be “French,” that is North French, but German and
Slavonic contingents were expected and did, in fact, turn up. East
of the mountains, the expedition would be in closer touch with Rome,
which might prove important in those days of slow couriers. Finally
Lyons, being a large town, would be more suitable for a mobilization
point than any smaller city further west, for cities draw armies like
magnets since only in cities is there enough surplus food and shelter
for large bodies of men. Lyons was, therefore, wisely chosen as the
concentration point, and the Rhône Valley as the line of march.

The main force which assembled at Lyons was extremely large. The
“Chanson de la Croisade” says twenty thousand knights and men-at-arms
plus two hundred thousand “villeins” on foot. Until recently it has
been fashionable for historians to disbelieve mediæval high numbers,
but fashions change. At any rate, a huge army assembled.

The weakness of the great force was that only forty days’ service
sufficed to fulfil the crusading vow. Hence the Crusade, if
prolonged, was bound to suffer (like so many American armies from
Washington’s to the Civil War) from the plague of short enlistments.

Besides the papal legates Arnaut Amalric and Milo, there were with
the army the Archbishops of Reims, Sens, and Rouen, the Bishops of
Autun, Clermont, Nevers, Bayeux, Lisieux, and Chartres, the Duke of
Burgundy, and the Counts of Nevers and St. Pol.

Just how the higher command was organized we do not know. Arnaut
Amalric seems to have been the strongest personality.

Inconspicuous, no doubt, among the lesser nobles was a Baron of the
Isle of France, also Earl of Leicester in England, Simon de Montfort
by name. Possibly people pointed him out as the only man in the
Fourth Crusade five years before to refuse to march against Zara,
so that when the Venetians persuaded the other Crusaders to pay for
their passage to the East by taking this Christian city he had left
the expedition and gone home. It seems quite clear, however, that at
the beginning he was of little authority in the Crusade.

In the last week of June the Crusaders moved south from Lyons,
keeping, apparently, to the east bank of the river where the main
Roman road ran.

In their march down the valley of the Rhône, with its glare and
white dust, they were met at Valence by Raymond of Toulouse himself.
Without hesitation, virtually on the morrow of his humiliating
penance at St. Gilles, with the welts of the monkish lash unhealed
on his back, this man, against whom the Crusade was principally
directed, himself took the Cross and joined the army which had
mustered to destroy him. Following out Innocent’s plan of “divide et
impera” (divide and conquer) he was permitted to join the army, which
continued on its march. Of course the Crusade was, officially, aimed
at the heretics of the south, and Raymond, with all his shiftiness,
was no heretic. Protestant historians have blamed the Churchmen in
charge of the policy of the Crusade for duplicity in this matter.
Of course, Raymond’s submission was accepted merely because it was
temporarily convenient for them not to have him for an open enemy,
although it was intended in the long run to ruin him altogether.
Still I confess that I cannot see that severe condemnation is
justified. He had played fast and loose too often.

Where the army crossed the Rhône we are not told; possibly at Orange
or Avignon, but more probably from Tarascon to Beaucaire, where the
main Roman crossing had been. Once across the Rhône, it took up again
the old road by Nismes into Spain which so many armies had followed
since Hannibal. At Montpellier, Raymond Roger Trencavel, Viscount
of Beziers and Carcassonne, and nephew to Raymond of Toulouse, came
to meet the chiefs of the Crusade, as his uncle had already come to
them at Valence, to make his peace. He was refused a hearing. It was
necessary that the great army should not disband without striking
terror into the heretical south and giving some, at least, of its
feudal lordships into the hands of proved and zealous Catholics.
Otherwise the effort involved in organizing the expedition would have
been wasted. Accordingly, for Raymond Roger to plead his own personal
orthodoxy and claim that only irresponsible subordinates had favoured
heresy, was not to the point. The “Chanson” says that Raymond of
Toulouse, with his usual shortsighted cunning, suggested an attack on
his nephew, with whom he had recently quarrelled. It would have been
so like the wretched Count of Toulouse to have done so, that we may
accept the story.

Raymond Roger hurried back from Montpellier to his own lands. Why
the Crusaders, after once having had him in their power, let him go
in peace to organize resistance against them is not clear. Perhaps
he had come in under some sort of guarantee like the modern flag of
truce, and was therefore protected by the highly developed military
courtesy of the day, which had grown up around the idea of knighthood.

At any rate, he was allowed to go, and made haste to put his two
chief towns, Beziers and Carcassonne, in a state of defence,
following the usual custom for the weaker party in a mediæval
conflict, i.e., to stand on the defensive behind walls. The Crusaders
sat down before Beziers on the 20th or 21st of July. They had
started from Lyons between the 24th and 30th of June, and had marched
close to 230 miles, making an average march of between 10 and 8¾
miles a day, a very creditable showing, and one which deserves to be
called to the attention of despisers of things mediæval. No doubt it
was desired to waste as little as possible of the short forty-day
enlistment before coming to grips with the heretics and their noble
patrons.

Before Beziers they were joined by two detachments, one from the
neighbourhood of Agen and the other from Auvergne. Each detachment
had won certain successes of its own on its way. The Agenais had held
to ransom two towns in the Aveyron Valley, Caussade and St. Antonin,
and were looked upon with some disfavour (mingled perhaps with envy)
by the other Crusaders, for having compounded with wickedness for a
money payment. One of the commanders of the Auvergnats bore the great
name of Turenne. His detachment had captured a strong castle and
burned the heretics found therein, the first but not the last time
that we shall hear of burning in connection with the Crusade.

Incidentally, the military aspect of this concentration deserves a
word. Lyons and Agen are 225 miles apart as the crow flies, with the
mountainous country of Auvergne between. Anyone with the slightest
military experience knows how hard it is to synchronize the movements
of distant columns so that they may meet at a common centre, even
with accurate maps and with all modern means of communication. In
this case, maps, telephone, telegraph, and all means of mechanical
rapid transit were lacking. Probably an advance concentration point
in the neighbourhood of Beziers was selected before any of the
columns commenced its march, and during the march communication was
kept up by an inter-weaving system of mounted couriers. The risk
of the comparatively weak centre and right columns being cut off
before they could join was practically nil because of the submission
of the Count of Toulouse, and because the entire countryside was
terror-stricken by fear of the Crusaders. Even so, the accurate
concentration of the three columns on Beziers was a feat of
considerable military skill.

Beziers, like most Mediterranean towns, had been an organized city
throughout the time of recorded history and before. Under mediæval
conditions it was easy to defend, being built on a hill. Heresy was
particularly strong there; we have seen in the last chapter how de
Castelnau, in 1205, had had to leave the place because of the fury
stirred up against his person and his defence of the faith. There
is even some reason for believing that the great majority of the
citizens were heretical, which was by no means the case in places
like Toulouse, where the utmost that the heretics dared do was to
hold their services at midnight. If there were only a few Catholics
within the walls, it is not surprising that the city refused to
surrender. Its bishop was with the Crusaders, and was allowed to
propose that the town should capitulate and hand over its heretics
for punishment in return for guarantees on the part of the Crusaders
for the persons and property of the Catholic citizens. This most fair
and liberal offer, from the crusading point of view, was rejected.
The besieged preferred to run the chances of war, probably not
because of any great solidarity between the heretical and Catholic
citizens (as certain modern Protestant historians do vainly talk),
but no doubt because the Catholics were few in numbers, and did not
control the decisions taken by the defence.

Having refused to treat, the inhabitants made a sortie across the
bridge over their river, killed a Crusader and threw his body into
the stream. The sortie was repulsed, and thereupon, according to
the account generally received, the camp followers of the Crusade
succeeded in rushing the defences. This surprising success was
achieved without orders, by divine inspiration as the legates piously
put it, while the chiefs of the Crusade were deliberating as to their
next step. Those in search of secular explanations may well suppose
that the assailants entered on the heels of the inhabitants driven
back in the repulse of the sortie before the gate could be closed,
or that defective dispositions of the defence had left some point
unguarded, or, finally, that a local panic among the men told off to
guard a particular tower or bit of wall had permitted the success of
the attack.

After the storming of the walls there took place in the crooked,
steeply sloping streets of the town, the massacre for which Beziers
and the Albigensian Crusade itself are principally remembered.
Priest and layman, woman and child seem to have suffered equally. Of
a great crowd which had taken sanctuary in the church of St. Mary
Magdalene, not one survived. With the sword came fire. Since, as
we have seen, the camp followers, probably mixed with the peasant
infantry, had been the first to enter, the knights began to drive
them out by force, for fear that they themselves would get no loot.
In their anger at this, the “villeins” set fire to the town, which
burned fiercely. The cathedral of St. Nazaire got so hot that the
stone vaulting cracked and fell in.

One admiring Cistercian contemporary makes Arnaut Amalric answer the
question as to whether the Catholic citizens should be spared with
the famous “Kill them all, for God will know His own,” for fear that
many heretics might escape by feigning orthodoxy. Certain modern
Catholic writers maintain that the lay chieftains of the Crusade had
determined beforehand upon a massacre, as a military measure, to
terrify the country. It would seem as if no such decision could have
been made by the lay nobles if the legates had opposed. Still the
point is not worth labouring, inasmuch as it has over and over again
on these occasions proved impossible to restrain armies much more
regularly and firmly disciplined than the Crusaders. The definite
reasons for doubting the completeness of the massacre are that the
church of St. Mary Magdalene, where the slaughter was heaviest, is so
small that not a third of the seven thousand supposed to have been
killed in it could possibly have packed into the place, and further,
that the corporate life of the town was so quickly reconstituted that
it was soon able to resist the Crusaders again.

At all events the impression caused by the massacre was tremendous.
As many as a hundred castles, some say, were abandoned by their
garrisons who fled to the mountains. The turbulent city of Narbonne
made haste to put itself on record by executing some heretics, by
contributing generously to the expenses of the Crusade, and by
allowing certain of its castles to be garrisoned by Crusaders as
pledges of good faith.

The next objective of the Crusade was the strong hill-fortress city
of Carcassonne. Thither Raymond Roger Trencavel had gone, leaving
Beziers before its investment. The massacre had strengthened his
determination to resist, and he had gone so far as to destroy all
mills near Carcassonne so as to hinder the provisioning of the
Crusaders should the expected siege be prolonged. The “soldiers of
Christ” appeared before the place on or about July 24, 1209, having
left Beziers the morning of the 22nd, the day after the massacre, and
covered the intervening distance of over fifty miles in forty-eight
hours, assuming that they went through Narbonne along the line of the
Roman road and the modern railway—another good piece of marching.

Carcassonne was a much tougher nut to crack than Beziers. The steep
escarpements of its hill were crowned by the remarkable circuit of
late Roman walls and towers which we see to-day. Only the château,
the outer town wall, the gates in the main wall, and a few large
towers easily distinguishable from the older work have been added
since 1209. The customary first assault to feel out the defence was
repulsed with loss, although the defenders also suffered. Another
attack carried the slightly fortified suburbs on the lower slopes of
the hill crowned by the city proper. This success was followed by a
pause of some weeks, during which siege engines of different sorts
were constructed.

Meanwhile diplomacy was active. King Peter of Aragon intervened
in the hope of making peace between the Crusaders and his vassal,
Trencavel. He was a picturesque person, a great lover of tournaments
and of women, what we should call to-day a sportsman; also a great
fighter against the Moslem. In language and culture Aragon was
then closer to Languedoc than Languedoc to Northern France. Peter,
himself a troubadour and a generous patron of troubadours, held the
Roussillon in his own right, and claimed from many of the southern
nobles a homage difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the
homage they owed to the far-off king “of Paris.” Like the other
southern leaders, who sooner or later opposed the Crusade, he was no
heretic. On the contrary, he delighted to be known as “the Catholic,”
and had in person done homage to the Pope for his kingdom, as
recently as 1204, and received in return the title of “First Standard
Bearer of the Church.” His ferocious legislation against heretics
in general has been noted in the last chapter. On the other hand,
Spanish religious enthusiasm, in the early Middle Ages, was generally
directed far more towards belabouring the infidel than towards
discussing doctrine. Politically, King Peter necessarily disliked
any extension of North French influence in the south, and could
not sit still and see his kinsman and vassal Trencavel destroyed
merely because he had not been active enough in putting down heresy.
Finally, he was now brother-in-law to Raymond of Toulouse, whose
fifth and last wife was his sister. While there was no question at
this time of his resisting the Crusade by arms, he made haste to
offer his services as peacemaker.

Accordingly Pedro appeared at the crusading camp followed by a
handsome suite, and made straight for Raymond’s tent. It was soon
arranged that the Aragonese should enter the town to treat with
Trencavel. The Crusaders’ terms were hard. The young viscount would
be permitted to leave accompanied by twelve knights, but the town
must surrender unconditionally. Therefore, although a prolonged
drouth was causing the besieged in their hill city to suffer from
want of water, terms were refused; and King Peter, whose dignity
seems to have been ruffled, went off in a rage against the crusading
leaders.

Another assault was delivered, but was repulsed with the aid of
boiling oil and melted lead. To console them for their failure, the
Crusaders could boast of an act of personal gallantry on the part
of de Montfort, who went back into the ditch after the repulse and
rescued a severely wounded Crusader.

Meanwhile time was working against the besieged through disease,
aggravated by the want of water. They had expected a bread shortage
in the crusading camp, the mills having been destroyed far and wide,
but the expectation was not realized, on account of aid given by
certain nearby castles whose owners were friendly to the Crusades.
Calling the legates sorcerers, and the Crusaders “devils in human
form who could live without food,” failed to help matters, so that at
last the besieged surrendered, and were allowed to leave the town in
peace, abandoning all their goods. Trencavel was held a prisoner.

The legates apologized by letter to the Pope for the comparative
mildness shown in not burning the place and massacring its people, as
at Beziers. The nobles, they said, could not control their troops in
the matter; which may well indicate that there had been a shortage of
food, so that the rank and file saw severe privations staring them in
the face if any more destruction was indulged in. As far as Trencavel
was concerned, from the crusading point of view, the aftermath of the
siege left nothing to be desired. The young viscount promptly died in
his prison. Dysentery was officially given as the cause of death, but
some suspected poison.

The month of August was now well along. Having accomplished the
prescribed forty days and won the crusading indulgences, the great
body of the army were preparing to return home gorged with spiritual
graces and not altogether lacking in temporal booty. The great force
was about to melt away (as Washington’s militia so often melted
away). But before the crusaders could return to their homes, they
had first to provide for the continuance of the campaign against
heresy. Someone must be set up in the viscounty of Beziers and
Carcassonne, left vacant by the death of Trencavel. Furthermore,
several other towns, including Albi and Pamiers, together with a
number of castles, had surrendered without fighting. These places
had been garrisoned, and the garrisons needed a central command.
The Duke of Burgundy, the Counts of Nevers, and of St. Pol, to whom
in turn the fief was offered, refused on the pretext that they had
lands enough already; but really, says the “Chanson de la Croisade,”
because they felt that they would dishonour themselves should they
accept the spoils of such a conquest. Perhaps the corpses of Beziers
were already beginning to stink in their nostrils, as they have stunk
in the nostrils of so many historians to this day. Furthermore,
dishonoured or not, the new viscount would be in an exposed position,
alone—a northerner, confronted by Raymond of Toulouse and Peter of
Aragon, with only the Church to back him. The Church had the feeble
Christians of Palestine to support; it had taken five years to launch
the Albigensian Crusade, and might take as long to organize another.
Altogether, there is nothing improbable in the story that only after
considerable pressure from the legates and much prayer on his own
part did de Montfort, the fourth candidate, finally accept the office.

With the acceptance by de Montfort of the viscounty of Beziers
and Carcassonne, and with the prompt disbandment of the original
crusading army, the first period of the Crusade comes to an end.
It had lasted little over the forty days required to win the
indulgences, and had been marked by the overwhelming superiority
in numbers of the crusading forces in the field. Throughout the
second period this superiority no longer exists, and for nine years
the military strength of the Crusade is found principally in the
qualities of its leader.

Simon de Montfort was one of those extraordinary men who deflect the
course of history. He was descended from Rollo the Norman, and took
his name from a small domain which he held in the Ile-de-France,
on the road from Dreux to Paris. Physically, he was blond, tall,
broad-shouldered, distinguished in appearance, and full of activity.
Naturally enough his character has been both praised and blamed
to the _n_th power. Peter de Vaux-Cernay praises his eloquence,
affability, faithfulness in friendship, his rigid chastity, and
rare modesty. Sismondi, in a famous passage, says of him: “an able
warrior, austere in his personal habits, fanatical in religion,
inflexible, cruel and treacherous, he combined all qualities
calculated to win the approval of a monk.” The important thing is
that de Montfort was, above all, a soldier, and a soldier of a type
not uncommon in French history, from the First Crusade to the wars
of the French Revolution, in that he was consumed with a sense
of the sacredness of his cause. As in so many determined men of
strict sexual morality, in him fairness was all but swallowed up in
fanaticism.

Such men are ill understood by men of English culture. It is a
commonplace, for example, that no character approaching the type is
to be found in the long gallery of Shakespearean portraits.

Meanwhile, although the student may smile at the fanatic, he will
do well to remember the greatness of the work done in the world by
fanatics ... those curious creatures. Directly, by keeping alive
crusading activity in Languedoc, de Montfort preserved the moral
unity of Christendom. That unity, rescued from the grave peril which
threatened it in the beginning of the thirteenth century, endured
until destroyed by the great sixteenth century centrifugal movement,
which is only just beginning to subside. Indirectly, he broke down
the Provençal culture, and established the French monarchy upon the
Mediterranean, thus establishing the permanent unity of the French
nation. But from de Montfort, as from all men, the future was hid.

Geographically, his position was strong. Of the two centres of his
power, Beziers and Carcassonne, Beziers preserved his communication
with the east, and, when war broke out, would help to cut off
Toulouse from the Rhône valley. Carcassonne was the capital strategic
point of the whole theatre of war, commanding as it did the main
Narbonne-Toulouse road from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. All
considerable west-bound traffic headed for Toulouse coming from as
far north as Belfort or Dijon would naturally pass under the walls
of Carcassonne. To do otherwise meant either a vast circuit by
Limoges or a struggle with the mountains of Auvergne. Similarly,
the main route to Toulouse from the south was, and is, around the
Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees, north to Narbonne and west by
Carcassonne. A man starting from as far west as Saragossa, or in
winter from far to the west of that point, would normally travel
thus. An alternative route existed by way of the Cerdagne: once over
that pass a road led north-east to Perpignan, and north-west by the
Puymorens to Foix and Pamiers. Its grades were steep, but traffic
could use it well enough at most seasons of the year. De Montfort’s
garrison at Pamiers, one of the strongholds occupied during the panic
caused by the great crusading army, threatened the Cerdagne route.
Should he gain Foix, he could close it almost altogether. From Albi,
the fourth of his main strongholds, he could threaten Toulouse from
the north-east, and, perhaps, operate in the Agen and the Cahors
districts.

Nevertheless, as he considered his position, he had military and
political difficulties enough to appal a weaker man. His military
resources were small. The crusading army had scattered to their
homes, leaving him with a mere remnant of about four thousand
five-hundred effectives, mostly Burgundians and Germans. The
crusading leaders had sworn to come and help him at need, but none
knew better than he how slight was the chance of their willingness
or even of their power to do so. Indeed, one is forced to believe
that so hard-headed a zealot asked for the promise more to keep
their goodwill by emphasizing his humility and comparative weakness
than for any other reason. He could count only upon such crusaders
as might chance to come from time to time for a forty days’ tour of
duty, and, permanently, upon those whom he was able to pay or to
attach to himself by gifts of lands and castles. Moreover, he knew
that many of his new southern vassals were bitterly hostile to him,
and he himself had alienated moderate opinion by sailing very close
to the wind of dishonour in accepting this new viscounty, won by
massacre, and made vacant for him (as many believed and whispered) by
poison.

Of the forces in opposition, Raymond of Toulouse alone, with all
his weakness of will and his recent humiliation at St. Gilles, was
far stronger in material resources than de Montfort. King Pedro of
Aragon had been angered against the Crusaders at Carcassonne, all
the more because their temporary numbers made it impossible for him
to oppose them, and Pedro had much credit at Rome. He persisted in
refusing to accept de Montfort’s homage as Viscount of Carcassonne.
John of England who held Gascony, Guienne, and parts of Poitou was,
like Pedro of Aragon, brother-in-law and friend of Raymond. John had
broken with the Pope for reasons of his own, and was, nevertheless,
flourishing like the green bay tree. Otto of Brunswick who had
crushed all opposition throughout Germany and most of Italy, and was
about to be crowned emperor by Pope Innocent, was John’s favourite
nephew. For the present, Otto was strongly pro-papal, but as emperor
he would be strong enough to make trouble even for such a pope as
Innocent, should he so desire. Altogether, there was ample material
for the building up of alliances against the Crusade, and possibly
against the Papacy itself.

Against all this de Montfort had chiefly his own stout heart and
resourceful brain. His cause was bound up with that of legate
Arnaut Amalric, who was prepared to go to any lengths. Innocent
would be a tower of strength, provided only King Peter of Aragon did
not get at him, and Arnaut Amalric ought to be able to manage the
Pope. Finally, Philip Augustus not only stood with the Pope on most
political matters but also, as King of France, would be delighted to
see “Frenchmen” (that is North Frenchmen) established in southern
lordships. While Philip was cautious and would always rather wait for
fruit to fall in his lap than risk a fall by climbing the tree after
it, still he might move if he saw his way absolutely clear, and he
and Innocent were a redoubtable pair.

De Montfort made haste to put himself right with Rome, while
insisting, at the same time, on his need for aid. He wrote promptly
to Innocent announcing his election, and his purpose of rooting out
heresy altogether. He owed allegiance, he said, only to God and
the Pope. He promised payment of local Church tithes held up by
the heretics, and a hearth-tax throughout his lands for the direct
benefit of the Holy See. On the other hand, he somewhat illogically
emphasized his need of money, offering to the Pope with one hand
while begging from him with the other. Even his men-at-arms, he said,
were demanding double pay, and without heavy Church subsidies he
could not long maintain himself in Languedoc.

Innocent confirmed Montfort’s acts and titles, and enlarged upon
the crushing successes in fulsome letters to Otto of Brunswick
whom the Pope himself had just crowned Emperor. But, with a bad
situation in Palestine on his hands, his definite financial support
of the Albigensian Crusade left something to be desired. The most
fruitful of his measures was to empower de Montfort to confiscate
all valuables which heretics had deposited for safe keeping with
Churchmen throughout Languedoc.

Meanwhile, the Church’s activities were not confined to the Crusade.
St. Dominic with his little band of followers continued going up
and down Languedoc preaching. Early in September the future saint
met de Montfort, and a warm friendship sprang up between them. At
the same time Durand of Huesca and his “poor Catholics” were also
active. Innocent had to write and reassure the Languedocian bishops,
scandalized because Durand and his followers had clung to certain
outward marks of their former Waldensianism; at the same time warning
the poor Catholics to cooperate with the regular clergy and not
try to act independently of them. The Pope understood clearly that
orthodox propaganda must be carried on more strongly than ever, if
possible, in the existing state of war.

Meanwhile, far from the jealousies and violence of Languedoc, Francis
of Assisi was putting on his brown habit to mark himself the joyous
bridegroom of poverty.

During the martial summer of 1209, diplomacy had been silent. Now
she came out of cover and became active once more; indeed, for the
next four years the struggle is as much diplomatic as military. On
the one hand the fair-spoken, shifty, and unstable Count Raymond
and behind him (and more formidable) the chivalric sportsman King
Peter of Aragon sought to check, or at least to limit, the Crusade.
On the other, the legates, de Montfort, and the newly-imported,
irreconcilable, Languedocian clergy, all completely absorbed (as the
Pope was not) by the struggle, were out for the destruction of the
house of Toulouse.

To persuade the Pope was, of course, the object of both sides.
Innocent was determined to destroy heresy. In that he never
wavered. It was with reference to the implications of the job of
heresy-smashing that there was room for difference of opinion,
especially with regard to Count Raymond. Could a prince, himself
Catholic, be lawfully deposed for failing to suppress heresy? To the
men of the early thirteenth century it was by no means a foregone
conclusion that he could. We have seen even the zealous crusading
nobles shrinking from the “dishonour” of taking up the bloody titles
left vacant by the the death of Trencavel. Innocent was no more a
vulgar zealot than were these reluctant nobles. He had the high
sense of fairness often bred in upright natures by the study of
law, plus the exercise of power. Accordingly, his conscience was
troubled, and there were many who worked to keep it so. But, troubled
or not, the great Pope having set his hand to the plough was not
one to turn back. And, even should he desire to do so, the slowness
of communication was such as to make it almost impossible for him
effectually to control his agents.

Exactly how long it took for a despatch to pass between, say, St.
Gilles and Rome is not clear. By land, the distance was over six
hundred miles. By sea it was somewhat shorter, but a sea trip
involved waiting for a ship to start and might mean delay because of
storms or head-winds during the passage.

The first move in the complex diplomatic game was made by the
legates. Raymond of Toulouse had left the crusading army after the
capture of Carcassonne. Outwardly he kept on friendly terms with de
Montfort, and talked of marrying his son to de Montfort’s daughter.
But presently the legates demanded from the municipality of Toulouse
the surrender of a number of citizens accused of heresy, and at the
same time de Montfort wrote to Raymond threatening to attack in case
the demand was not met. The municipality protested vehemently that
theirs was a Catholic town, which had proved its orthodoxy by burning
heretics as long ago as the time of Count Raymond V and was still
doing so. They refused to surrender their accused fellow-citizens,
whereupon the legates promptly called a council at Avignon on
September 6, at which they re-excommunicated Raymond and laid his
lands under interdict. Municipality and Count severally appealed to
the Pope against this sentence. The legates, on their side, told
Raymond that the toilsome journey would profit him nothing. But when
he had made his will and departed in spite of them, they showed
uneasiness. Vehemently they insisted, in letters to Rome, that the
slippery count had failed to keep his former promises and would
be equally ready to make and break new ones. In particular, they
urged that the castles handed over by him as security for his good
behaviour were now forfeited because of his slackness in repressing
heresy, and that, for the same reason, the citizens of Avignon,
Nismes, and St. Gilles owed no more homage to Raymond but only to the
Church. Should the seven castles be restored to him, he would again
be in a position to resist. Finally, they urged that it would have
been better never to have undertaken the Crusade than to abandon it
with its work half-accomplished.

The foreboding of the legates was in some part justified. The Pope
pronounced himself satisfied with the Toulousains, and directed the
lifting of the interdict laid upon them. With Raymond, Innocent’s
play was more subtle. Outwardly he received him graciously and gave
him costly presents, a mantle, a ring, and a horse. The Count had
something of a case. He had surrendered the seven castles and agreed
to forfeit the three towns merely as guarantees for the execution
of the agreement made at St. Gilles the previous June. Some of the
clauses of this agreement he had already fulfilled; he produced a
list of churches whose former wrongs at his hands he had redressed.
Further, he urged that although never convicted of heresy and legate
murder, he had nevertheless submitted to heavy penance as if guilty,
and had been reconciled in due form. Innocent, therefore, gave
judgment that the castles and towns were not yet forfeit, “inasmuch
as it is not seemly that the Church should enrich itself with the
spoils of another.” Three months after receipt of the Pope’s letter
the legates were to hold a council to determine Raymond’s guilt.
There, if no one formally presented himself as his accuser, he was
to be admitted to canonical purgation; after which he was to be
publicly declared a good Catholic, and was to receive back the seven
castles. If he were accused, a hearing was to be held but no decision
taken. The record of the proceedings was to be forwarded to Rome,
where judgment would be pronounced. Because of Raymond’s personal
objections to Arnaut Amalric, a new papal agent, Theodisius by name,
without the title of legate, was appointed to arrange the details of
the Count’s reconciliation. The Crusaders were not to touch Raymond’s
lands. In appearance, the Pope seemed to come out strongly for
moderation.

Raymond’s diplomatic victory, however, was far more apparent than
real. Innocent secretly placed Theodisius altogether under the orders
of Arnaut Amalric, stating dryly that the new agent was to be merely
the bait by which Raymond was to be caught on the hook of Arnaut’s
sagacity. Meanwhile the seven castles, although not yet declared
forfeited, were to be held.

With regard to the reconciliation of Toulouse, Innocent had empowered
the legates to take guarantees and precautions. Accordingly Arnaut
Amalric set himself to humiliate the city, with the able but guarded
assistance of its bishop, the zealous Fulk. The ex-troubadour bishop
was fast increasing his influence. He had organized the more orthodox
Toulousains into a powerful brotherhood, in order to work against
heresy and usury. Finally, after much backing and filling, the city
contributed heavily in money to the Crusade and gave hostages to de
Montfort for future good behaviour.

Before the campaigning season of 1210 opened, de Montfort’s military
position had taken a turn for the worse. He and his remaining
crusaders were far too few to garrison effectively the multitude of
towns and castles which had submitted. Beziers, Carcassonne, Pamiers,
and it seems Albi were still held, but a number of smaller places,
such as Castres north of Carcassonne, and Lombez south-west of
Toulouse, together with many castles, returned openly to Catharism.
Furthermore, Raymond Roger Count of Foix broke with the crusaders.
This worthy and his family have already been touched upon in the last
chapter. As soon as the huge, terror-inspiring army of Crusaders was
disbanded, he returned to his normal policy of favouring heresy.
He was especially anxious to recover possession of his second best
stronghold of Pamiers; but a conference, arranged and presided over
by his suzerain Peter of Aragon, failed to come to any agreement with
the Crusaders.

During the year de Montfort took several castles in his new Viscounty
of Carcassonne, such as Bram about ten miles west of Carcassonne
itself on the road to Castelnaudary (where he put out the eyes of
a hundred of the garrison, leaving their commander one eye so that
he might act as their guide), Alairac to the south of Capendu about
ten miles east of Carcassonne overlooking the road to Narbonne,
and Puivert in the mountains west of Quillan. However, he had
force enough for two major operations, the capture of the strong
castles of Minerve (a hill fortress about seventeen miles north-west
of Narbonne, which looked down upon that city and threatened
communications between his two main bases of Beziers and Carcassonne)
and Termes in the south-east.

The first operation was not the act of the Crusaders alone, but was
accomplished with the aid of Narbonese militia. Mediæval cities were
normally willing to attack nearby strong castles which too often
served as bases for brigandage against their trade. In attacking
these eagles’ nests in the mountains of Languedoc, the chief task of
the besieger was to cut off the garrison from access to the brooks
or springs in the canyons below the ramparts. If this could be done,
then the besieged were compelled to depend upon cisterns and could
not long hold out. In this case, after a lively siege of about a
month, supplies and especially water in the castle ran short, so
that its garrison offered to surrender on terms. Its lord and the
Catholics within the walls were offered their lives. On strict orders
from Rome to fit such cases, even the heretical believers and Perfect
were to be spared, should they recant. The army murmured. The “very
Catholic” Robert Mauvoisin, de Montfort’s first lieutenant, expressed
the general disgust at accepting such forced conversions of wretches
whom they had taken up arms expressly to kill. “Calm yourself,” said
Arnaut Amalric, “the converts will be few.” In fact, only three out
of a hundred “Perfect” abjured. The rest did not even need to be
forced into the fire prepared for them, but cast themselves in. The
resistance had served to prove a certain solidarity between heretics
and Languedocian Catholics.

The siege of Termes lasted into November, and was finally decided by
want of water in the place.

Artillerymen should remember the name of Archdeacon William, de
Montfort’s chief of artillery (i.e., master of the catapults) during
the siege. This Parisian priest, a veteran of crusades against the
Moslem, was so fascinated with his machines that he afterwards
refused the fat bishopric of Beziers, “loving better to follow the
wars and handle the artillery”!

At St. Gilles, in September, was held the council to arrange for
the reconciliation of the Count of Toulouse. In a single interview
with Theodisius, Arnaut Amalric had fully convinced him that either
Raymond or the Languedocian Church must inevitably be destroyed.
How the Count was to be rebuffed in the face of Innocent’s positive
instructions to the contrary was a puzzle. After anxious thought,
a single phrase of the Pope’s was seen to offer means of escaping
his general tenor. Raymond, as we have seen, had fulfilled some
but not all of the conditions demanded of him. In particular he
had neither dismissed his mercenaries nor expelled heretics, both
groups being essential for his support. By the phrase in question,
Innocent had informed the legates that he himself had directed
Raymond to fulfil completely the conditions already demanded and to
do so before the council should meet. At the council, therefore, he
was told that, being false to his oath in these minor points, his
testimony in his own behalf on the two chief points of his personal
orthodoxy and his share in the murder of de Castelnau was worthless.
At this disappointment he burst into tears, which was interpreted
by Theodisius to the assembly as a proof, not of contrition, but of
innate despicableness. The wretched nobleman, saying that his whole
county would not satisfy the legates, broke off negotiations and rode
sadly away. Whereupon the legates promptly set themselves to write to
Innocent in such wise that the Pope might believe that the culprit
had not wished to clear himself.

When the news came to Rome, Innocent clearly had his suspicions;
inasmuch as he wrote to Philip Augustus saying that he did not know
whether or not Raymond had failed through his own fault in proving
his innocence. At the same time, now that the Count’s failure to
suppress heresy had been made the key-point, it is hard to see how
the Pope could fail to sustain the council. He therefore wrote
severely to Raymond, reproaching him for breaking faith inasmuch as
he continued to tolerate the heretics. On the whole, Arnaut Amalric
had carried his point, and made haste to press his advantage in
subsequent conferences.

Meanwhile, during the year the general position of the Papacy in
European politics had changed for the worse. Otto of Brunswick, once
crowned emperor, had rapidly become anti-papal. Indeed, he had been
so aggressive and successful in Italy that he might soon be in a
position to menace the Pope. Innocent had therefore excommunicated
him and had raised against him numerous German nobles who feared from
the new emperor a policy of centralization and regular taxes such as
marked the government of his near kinsmen the Plantagenets. But,
despite Pope and German rebels, Otto continued successful. In England
John was at the height of his prosperity. With an excommunicated
emperor and an excommunicated King of England on the Pope’s hands, a
better man than the Count of Toulouse might have turned the European
scale.

The same papal courier who had brought the Pope’s letter of reproach
to Raymond, also brought instructions to him, to the Counts of Foix
and Comminges, and to Gaston, Viscount of Bearn, demanding aid for
de Montfort and threatening to hold them favourers of heresy in case
they failed to give it. These letters resulted in the holding of
three councils in quick succession, at Narbonne in December, 1210,
continuing into January 1211, at Montpellier later in January, and at
Arles in February.

At Narbonne there were present not only the legates, de Montfort and
Raymond, but also Count Raymond Roger of Foix, and his suzerain the
King of Aragon. Here Arnaut Amalric changed his tone and enlarged
on the material wealth which would accrue to the Count of Toulouse
should he participate in suppressing heresy—the houses and lands of
the convicted would be his according to the law and custom of the
time, and also a fourth or even a third of the captured castles whose
owners had favoured heresy. Still Raymond refused. At the instance of
King Pedro, the council next took up the case of the Count of Foix,
who was anxious to recover his second best stronghold at Pamiers and
others of his castles from garrisons which held them for de Montfort.
After Raymond Roger, that inveterate favorer of heresy, had refused
an offer of the return of everything that had been taken from him
except Pamiers, on condition that he swear to obey the Church and
cease resisting de Montfort, the King of Aragon went over the head of
his vassal, promised to garrison Foix with his own troops and turn
the place over to the Crusaders should its owner turn against them.

Pedro’s anxiety was natural. The Count of Foix was one of his most
important northern vassals. The road running from the north-west over
the Puymorens to the pass of the Cerdagne went by way of Pamiers,
Foix, and the upper Ariege. The Cerdagne was the one broad and easy
inland pass across the Eastern Pyrenees. By the Cerdagne also ran the
shortest line of communication between the centre of Pedro’s power
in the kingdom of Aragon on the one hand, and his outlying personal
domains, i.e., the Roussillon and the lands of his northern vassals,
on the other. Obviously, since the chances of an open break with the
Crusade must have been ever present with him, he had no mind to see
the north-western approach to so important a pass in de Montfort’s
hands.

The Pope had been pressing the Aragonese to come out strongly for
the Crusade. When at last Pedro obeyed he did so with a Spanish
thoroughness, accepting de Montfort’s long refused homage for Beziers
and Carcassonne, offering to marry his son Jaime, the heir of Aragon,
with de Montfort’s daughter, and even handing over the young prince
into de Montfort’s power as a sort of hostage. Probably the King,
like Count Raymond two years before, thought that the best way of
keeping the Crusade within bounds was to go along with it. That it
was his real intention to continue playing a double game he presently
proved by marrying his sister to the often widowed Count of Toulouse.

At Montpellier and Arles the same parties in interest, minus the
Court of Foix, were present. For Raymond the conditions offered were
hard: razing of his castles, unlimiting billeting rights throughout
his lands for crusading soldiers, and, for himself, pilgrimage to
the Holy Land “as long as the legates shall wish to prolong his
penitence.” King Pedro took the matter calmly, remarking merely that
the conditions needed amendment at the hand of the Pope himself.
Count Raymond again broke off negotiations, and rallied his vassals
to him by publishing far and wide the harsh conditions offered.
This time the legates re-excommunicated him. Gradually, in spite of
himself he was being forced into a position of open hostility.

Innocent sustained Arnaut Amalric and in April confirmed the renewed
excommunication of Raymond. Still the latter failed to break
completely with the Crusade.

Perhaps it was the Pope’s stronger line that had bettered recruiting
for the Crusade in 1211 as compared with 1210. At any rate, as
the campaigning season of that year came round, de Montfort found
himself in a position to act with considerable vigor. The hitherto
impregnable castle of Cabaret capitulated to him without waiting
to be attacked, putting him at last in complete possession of his
viscounty. He moved first to besiege Lavaur. Its capture would
improve his communications with his northern base at Albi, and
correspondingly threaten communications between Toulouse and Castres.
He besieged it with his usual energy, and on their side the besieged
resisted desperately, under the leadership of the lady of the place,
an elderly “Perfect” of scandalous life, so said the orthodox. Early
in the siege, Raymond visited de Montfort in camp, although he had
previously sent some of his knights to help garrison the place.
Accordingly he was upbraided for double dealing by certain northern
barons, temporarily crusading, who were his near kinsmen. Soon
afterwards, he had words with Bishop Fulk, who defied him and marched
off to the siege of Lavaur with many of his Toulousain Catholic
brotherhood at his back. Nevertheless, all this time, the Count
allowed supplies to be sent to the Crusaders from Toulouse. Even
when a body of German Crusaders, marching to take part in the siege,
without proper precautions for security, was successfully ambushed
and cut to pieces by the Count of Foix, who thereby broke the oath
which King Pedro had sworn in his name, still Raymond held aloof. At
last, the place was taken by assault, and the capture celebrated with
the usual wholesale hangings, beheadings and burnings.

The notorious elderly chatelaine had the distinction of being thrown
into a well which was then filled up with stones. She was pregnant
as a result of incest, so she is reported to have said herself, with
her brother and her own son. St. Dominic was present at the siege
and with the other clergy sang the “Veni Creator” during the final
assault, but what part, if any, he took in the genial goings on which
followed the capture is not recorded.

Having consolidated his positions towards the north by the capture of
Lavaur, de Montfort made the bold decision to attack Toulouse itself.

A first-class city was nearly always too hard a nut for any
mediæval army to crack. In this case there were grounds for
expecting dissension within the walls, inasmuch as a bastard brother
of Raymond’s had recently deserted to de Montfort, and Bishop
Fulk’s Toulousain brotherhood had shown zeal at Lavaur. Therefore
de Montfort’s permanent forces, amply reinforced with temporary
Crusaders, moved against Toulouse with high hopes.

Nevertheless, the siege failed, constituting the first serious
military check to the Crusade. The practically independent mediæval
commune bred an intense local patriotism of which to-day our large
nations have only the shadow. The citizens resisted as one man,
Catholic confraternity and all. Fulk himself had not returned to his
episcopal seat after the siege of Lavaur, having quarrelled with
Raymond. Even Raymond, who with his vassal the Count of Comminges was
in the place, now, when driven to the wall, showed a flash of spirit.
By an irony typically mediæval, the favourer and patron of heretics
was ardently engaged in building the new nave of the Cathedral, and
forced the workmen to stick to their task in spite of stray missiles,
for the building was near the walls. Such was the spirit and energy
of the besieged that they not only kept their gates open for sorties
but opened new sally ports by knocking breaches in their own walls.
From the beginning, there must have been little chance of success if
no factions arose within the place. De Montfort stuck to it for three
weeks and then, seeing that the besieged held firm, raised the siege.

During this siege, a ceremony of some political importance was
gone through. In full sight of the besieged, the Bishop of Cahors
renounced allegiance to Raymond and did homage to de Montfort in the
name of his city and its neighbourhood. On the charter attesting this
act, last on the list of nobles and clergy stands the signature of
“Brother Dominic, Preacher.”

The next move of the Crusaders was to ravage the county of Foix. No
doubt their thorough devastation of the country round Toulouse had
strengthened Raymond politically, by angering the Toulousains. At any
rate, the Count now felt himself strong enough to take the offensive,
and undertook to besiege Castelnaudary.

De Montfort, from his base at Carcassonne, was just in time to
throw himself into the threatened castle. Apparently many Crusaders
had gone home, as their aggravating custom was, for the force
which he was able immediately to concentrate was far inferior in
numbers to Raymond’s troops. Nevertheless the Crusaders were so
superior in morale that the Toulousain could not extend his lines
so as to blockade the place, but instead spent his time in heavily
entrenching his own camp. The Count of Foix, that specialist in
laying ambuscades, prepared to trap a reinforcement of Crusaders
marching from Lavaur. The reinforcement discovered the ambush too
late to refuse battle. They had just time to deploy and charge in
the hope of cutting their way through. Hard pressed by numbers,
their case was desperate when de Montfort, by a brilliant sortie,
created a diversion and enabled them to gain the castle. Even after
other bodies of Crusaders from Castres and Cahors had come in, the
Toulousains still outnumbered the Crusaders, and matters seemed to
be at a standstill. About this time word came that certain castles
had gone over to Raymond on the strength of a rumour, spread by the
Count of Foix, that de Montfort had been captured, flayed alive and
finally hanged. To break the deadlock, the crusading leader decided
to go himself to Narbonne and Beziers for reinforcements; whereupon
Raymond, on learning that his redoubtable enemy was no longer in his
front, mustered up courage to destroy his cherished entrenchments and
retire.

On the whole, the third year of the Crusade had been successful,
despite the check at Toulouse. Peter of Aragon had not been there to
hinder, having gone off to southern Spain to fight the Moors. The
European situation had changed little. Emperor Otto had conquered
more Italian territory. Toward the end of the year, southern Germany
had definitely declared against him, but the rebels were still the
weaker party. John of England was still none the worse for being
excommunicated to his face by a papal legate. Whether or not Otto
and John aided Raymond, is not clear. One of John’s biographers says
that it was their aid which enabled him to hold Toulouse against de
Montfort, but no reference to John and Otto’s interference at this
time appears in the historians of the Crusade itself.

1212 saw de Montfort growing still stronger. His theatre of
operations was now to the north-west of Toulouse, where he took La
Penne d’Agen and Moissac. At Moissac appeared the first signs of
active disunion in any of Raymond’s cities. The inhabitants attacked
the garrison which was composed of mercenaries and of Toulousain
militia, and delivered the place to de Montfort. On the Garonne,
Castelsarrasin, Verdun, Muret, and St. Gaudens opened their gates,
while Raymond, now practically reduced to Toulouse itself and
Montauban, attempted no counter-stroke. De Montfort, on his side,
made no attack upon Toulouse.

Naturally, after so much success, the morale of the Crusaders rose
higher and higher. In their enthusiasm they saw miracles, and they
fought, massacred, and burned with a touching joy. De Montfort
himself was the first to seek danger or hardship. After entering
Muret with his knights, he found his infantry unable to ford the
flooded Garonne after the horsemen. Mediæval infantry were accustomed
to being despised, being recruited from men of low social class and
considered of little military value, as we have seen in the opening
paragraphs of this chapter. Furthermore, an attack from Toulouse was
feared. Nevertheless de Montfort insisted upon recrossing the river
to share the dangers and hardships of the “poor in Christ.” His wife,
the Countess Alice, was hardly inferior to him in spirit and energy.

His successes were achieved in spite of many difficulties. He was
often short of men, many of the Crusaders having to be brought up
with a round turn by the legates for trying to make off before
serving even their forty-day tour of duty. Money, too, was lacking.
Once the commander could not even buy bread for himself, and had to
go for a walk at meal times so that his poverty would not be noticed.

De Montfort was statesman as well as soldier. In December 1212, he
called together at Pamiers the “three estates,” nobles, clergy,
and townsmen, of his new dominions for a sort of constitutional
convention. This convention discussed the whole body of North French
law, known as the “custom of Paris,” for Languedoc, and ended by
voting for its adoption. To the townsmen, the régime stood for order
and the suppression of brigandage, a feat which the Counts of
Toulouse had never achieved. To the clergy, the “custom of Paris”
meant increased privileges and immunities. Of the nobles, most
were by this time already committed to de Montfort. All parties
concerned had the chance to “save face” by accepting the opportunity
to vote freely in favour of the proposed changes. For de Montfort,
the parvenu, the convention was a triumph. Clearly the Crusade was
turning into a permanent government of Languedoc by the “French.”

With so much success, de Montfort had received but one check during
the year. A temporary coolness had sprung up between him and Arnaut
Amalric. The redoubtable Cistercian, having been elected Archbishop
of Narbonne, wished to be Duke of that city as well. The title was
hereditary in Raymond’s family, but by this time he was no longer
worth considering in Languedocian politics; the sole contest for the
office was between Arnaut Amalric and de Montfort. Angry at being
opposed, Arnaut Amalric went off to join Pedro of Aragon and fought
under him through the summer of 1212 against the Moors in Spain.
Had the energetic legate remained in Languedoc, de Montfort’s great
successes of the year might have been even greater. However, the
estrangement between the two leaders of the Albigensian Crusade was
only temporary. From de Montfort’s point of view, the serious thing
about the Spanish campaign was its complete success and the increased
prestige of King Pedro which resulted therefrom. Far to the south,
at “Las Navas de Toulosa,” about the time that La Penne d’Agen fell
to de Montfort, King Pedro helped to break the last great army of
the African Moslems that Spain was ever to see. For the Albigensian
Crusade to have its chief opponent known as one of the foremost
champions of Christendom in Europe was an ominous thing.

All the time the Pope, the mainspring of the enterprise now rapidly
outgrowing his original design, had kept clearly in his mind the
religious purpose of the Crusade as opposed to its later political
development. During the year he had again protected Durand of Huesca,
writing letters in behalf of his following of converted heretics
turned Catholic missioners to the bishops of France and Italy. By
such action Innocent obstinately refused to go over to the extreme
party that was for making an end of mildness and mercy even to the
repentant sinner. Furthermore, outside Languedoc, in the previous
year in the case of a canon of Bar-sur-Aube who feared for his life
because of his heretical reputation in his own neighbourhood, he had
insisted that the accused be protected from mob violence. The great
Pope was a great lawyer and a great gentleman.

Clearly Innocent was not the man to approve lightly of the
transformation of the Crusade into a general deposition of the
southern nobles, and their replacement by “Frenchmen.” Accordingly,
the winter of 1212-13 and the following spring saw the diplomatic
crisis of the Crusade. For some months past, the legates had been
asking from Rome a sentence of deposition against Raymond and, for
de Montfort, a confirmation in all the titles of the deposed. When
that news reached Paris, Philip Augustus undertook to read the Pope
a lesson in law to the effect that only the suzerain of a fief could
dispose of it in case of confiscation. Innocent felt obliged to
reply defensively, assuring the king that the legates had strict
orders to safeguard the “honor and interests of the realm of France.”
Meanwhile, Peter of Aragon, back from his Andalusian triumph over
the Mohammedan, displayed great activity; went himself to Toulouse;
took the place formally under his protection; and sent an embassy to
Rome to plead the cause of the southern lord against de Montfort.
Towards the end of 1212 the first fruits of the Aragonese diplomacy
appeared in the shape of letters from Innocent to Arnaut Amalric and
his co-legate the Bishop of Uzes, and other letters to the Bishop of
Riez and Theodisius, whom Innocent over two years before had charged
with the reconciliation of the Count of Toulouse. The Pope flatly
refused to substitute de Montfort for Raymond, blamed the legates for
even proposing to disregard the rights of Raymond’s innocent heir,
and disavowed altogether the acts of the councils of St. Gilles,
Narbonne, and Montpellier. Finally, he gave strict orders to the
Bishop of Riez and Theodisius to arrange for Raymond’s reconciliation
forthwith; to lay aside their lukewarmness and sloth, and to write
the whole truth and nothing but the truth to Rome henceforward!

Still the Pope felt that he had not done enough. Towards the middle
of January, therefore, he began to send out a whole series of letters
to Languedoc. Already there had been a good deal of correspondence
with de Montfort complaining of the scanty returns of the three
deniers hearth tax. Now, on January 15th, 1213, Innocent again
reproves the chief of the Crusade, this time for non-observance of
his duties as vassal to Pedro of Aragon for his Viscounty of Beziers
and Carcassonne. On the same day, another papal letter left Rome
addressed to Arnaut Amalric directing him bluntly to cease preaching
the Crusade and to come to an understanding with Pedro and with the
“counts, barons, and other prudent persons whose assistance shall
appear to be needed,” for the pacification of Languedoc in the
interest of the Christians of Spain and Palestine threatened by the
Moslem. Not content even with this, two more papal bulls, dated the
17th and 18th, repeated the orders to the legates and de Montfort to
make an end of the Albigensian Crusade altogether. They repeated the
imposing list of charges brought by Pedro and the Toulousains to the
effect that Comminges and Bearn, vassal lands of Pedro’s, had been
attacked by de Montfort at the very moment when their suzerain was
fighting the battles of Christianity at Las Navas. The Pope therefore
ordered the crusading leader to restore the lands he had taken from
the vassals of Aragon. The charges against Arnaut Amalric, to wit
that he had practised “usurpation” in directing the Crusade against
Raymond’s lands, were also paraded over the papal signature and
seal. Pedro had guaranteed, so Innocent wrote, that Raymond would
do penance by crusading in Spain or Syria. The heir of Toulouse was
to be the ward of Aragon during his minority, and was to be brought
up by him as a good Catholic. These propositions were to be debated
at a sort of constituent assembly of Languedoc, in which not only
the higher clergy and the nobles but also the city “consuls” and
the “bailiffs,” that is the mayors of villages, were to sit. This
assembly was to report its findings to Rome, where the Pope would
render the final decision.

While going so far in support of the Aragonese policy, Innocent
nevertheless made two important reservations. In the first place, he
did not take the decisive step of recalling Arnaut Amalric. Although
the redoubtable Cistercian’s policy was disavowed, he was still given
the job of calling the congress and of bringing the new papal policy
into force by taking “suitable measures.” Secondly, the ancient and
good tradition of caution in papal diplomacy was followed in that
care was taken to state repeatedly that Pedro’s accusations against
Arnaut Amalric and de Montfort were, after all, only charges not
yet proved. Rome knew very well by long and no doubt often bitter
experience how impossible it was to get full and accurate knowledge
of affairs at a distance. The slow and fitful communications of the
time made infinitely difficult the decisions and operations of a
centralized system like the Papacy.

However, it was rare even then that agents on the spot were able
so completely to oppose the will of their distant master. Even as
the formidable January letters were being written by the scribes of
the Lateran, the Council (called in obedience to the Pope’s orders
of the previous autumn to proceed with Raymond’s reconciliation)
was meeting on the “dark and bloody ground” of Lavaur prepared to
go clean counter to the spirit of its instructions. It consisted
only of the papal legates and agents, and about twenty Gascon and
Languedocian bishops. Raymond feared to put himself in de Montfort’s
power by coming. Therefore, in the absence of the accused, and in the
teeth of the Pope’s express wish, the Council proceeded to declare
that his testimony in his own behalf would have been worthless in any
case. Since his return from Rome where, so the Council solemnly held,
the Pope had treated him much better than he deserved, he had failed
to restore Church property formerly stolen by him, had persecuted
bishops and abbots and had not shown the slightest sign of dismissing
his bandit-mercenaries or of banishing heretics. Since he had sworn
to do all these things, the Council formally held that the oath of
such a hardened perjurer was worthless and should not be received,
even should he offer to give it. Raymond’s counter proposition, made
for him by one of his notaries, that Theodisius and the Bishop of
Riez should cause the oath to be administered to him at Toulouse
or at some other place not held by de Montfort’s troops, was not
even discussed. The decision of the Council, so the commissioners
reported to the Pope, forbade its being considered. They ended their
written report by turning Innocent’s own phrase against him and
solemnly stating that “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” of
the matter was contained therein.

Raymond thus disposed of, King Pedro next addressed the Council.
He wished to discuss, he said, the restoration of the fiefs of the
three Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and of the Viscount of Bearn. Arnaut
Amalric demanded written proposals under the royal seal. King Pedro
thereupon asked for an armistice while the documents were being drawn
up, during which time the Crusaders “were not to do evil” to their
opponents. “I will not cease from doing evil,” replied de Montfort,
“but for a week I will abstain from doing good, for it is not doing
evil to pursue the enemies of Christ. I consider that, on the
contrary, a good work.”

As far as promises went, the Aragonese proposals were fulsome enough.
All four accused nobles were prepared to give full satisfaction
to the Church, and asked only the restoration of their lands. If
restoration was refused in Raymond’s case, then at least a guarantee
was asked as to the legitimate rights of his son who was to be
brought up a good Catholic under the guardianship of King Pedro.
Meanwhile, Raymond himself would do penance by crusading in the Holy
Land or Spain. For the four nobles, the King of Aragon said he had
come to ask mercy rather than justice; more especially as the Crusade
in Spain made it more necessary than ever that Christians should not
fall out among themselves.

The Council may or may not have known that this programme had already
been proposed by Pedro to the Pope. Neither the Council nor Pedro
could possibly know that the Pope had already accepted it. In any
case it was clear enough that, in case of its acceptance, its value
would depend entirely on the King’s willingness to enforce its terms
upon the four nobles, with whom he had already shown his sympathy.
Besides, every cleric sitting at Lavaur was steeped in the bitterness
of a long, fierce, and still doubtful struggle. Therefore, they
refused the Aragonese proposals. The Pope, so they truly told the
King, had expressly reserved to himself the final decision in the
matter of Raymond’s reconciliation with the Church. Therefore, since
the excommunicated count refused to appear before them and take
the preliminary steps, they were powerless; and in actual fact the
papal commissioners might not have been safer in going to Toulouse
than Raymond would have been, even with King Pedro beside him, in
venturing to Lavaur. As for the other three nobles, Bernard of
Comminges was believed to have stirred up the Toulousains to oppose
the Crusaders in arms. Raymond Roger of Foix, they reminded the King,
was a notorious patron of heretics and despoiler of churches, and
had failed to keep even the recent convention agreed to in his name
by Pedro himself. Gaston of Bearn had protected the assassins of
Castelnau, persecuted the Church, and fiercely opposed the Crusade.
He maintained bandit-mercenaries who had violated the Cathedral of
Oloron, defiled the consecrated Host and parodied the mass. Even so,
should Foix, Comminges, and Bearn come for absolution and submit
all would be forgiven them. The Council took pains to preface their
refusal to treat on the Aragonese terms with a paragraph full of
personal compliments and courtesies to the King. Nevertheless, they
ended with a warning, reminding him of the honours he had received
from the Pope, of the oaths he had taken to suppress heresy, and the
suspicion which must fall upon him if he continued taking the part
of excommunicated persons accused of so grave a crime. If he was not
satisfied with their answer (which was quite likely inasmuch as they
refused him everything he asked) the Council would lay the whole
matter before the Pope.

Remained the task of persuading the Pope to sustain the Council,
as he was by no means eager to do. Accordingly, advice was rained
upon him from every corner of Languedoc. From Lavaur the Council
itself despatched letters by the hands of agents of Arnaut Amalric
and Count Simon. The letters reminded Innocent that he himself had
proclaimed the Crusade and afterwards entrusted de Montfort with
its command. The crimes of the Count of Toulouse were paraded. Had
he not asked help of the excommunicated Emperor Otto, and not only
asked but received it (in some measure) from the notorious Savary de
Mauleon, who commanded in Aquitaine for the excommunicate King John
of England? Had he not committed the abominable crime of insulting
all Christendom by sending an embassy to ask aid from the Sultan of
Morocco? Should the enemies of religion, by their appeal to Pedro,
succeed in “thwarting” the Pope, so that the axe might not be laid to
the evil tree of Toulouse; then indeed Christianity in Languedoc was
ruined. Another symphony on the same theme was furnished by a second
regional council, composed of the higher clergy of eastern Languedoc
and the valley of the lower Rhône country, which met at Orange
under the presidency of the Archbishop of Arles. Orange rivalled
Lavaur in its violent words against the “Toulousain tyrant.” Solos
were contributed by the Archbishops of Aix and Bordeaux, and by the
Bishops of Bazas, Périgueux, and Beziers. The tone of these prelates
varied somewhat, from His Grace of Aix (the immediate neighbourhood
of his cathedral city had as yet seen no fighting and he was
comparatively moderate in consequence), to the Lord Bishop of Beziers
who called Toulouse “a nest of vipers” which must be utterly crushed.
But through all variations of tone, the same motif was heard: Tolosa
delenda est. The house of Toulouse must be destroyed.

At Rome, the diplomatic struggle must have been bitter. It was not
a light thing to ask Innocent publicly to eat his words, and to act
on the assumption that the Aragonese version of matters was a mere
tissue of lies. On the other hand, I repeat, any central authority
in the Middle Ages was far more at the mercy of its agents on the
spot than is the case to-day with rapid transit and the telegraph.
For the Pope to sustain the Aragonese and disavow Arnaut Amalric and
his supporters would have been to go clean counter to the expressed
opinion of practically every important Churchman north of the
Pyrenees within a radius of 200 miles of Toulouse. Nevertheless, the
issue was so evenly balanced that for five months, while the agents
of Aragon and of the Crusade continued to set out their respective
positions, no decision was reached.

While the whole future of the Crusade thus hung in suspense, Paris
seemed for the first time ready to move. Philip Augustus hoped to
round off his successes against the Plantagenet by taking from him
England as well. But before a French army could cross the Channel,
the fullest possible diplomatic assistance from the Papacy was
desired. Therefore, in March 1213, the King of France called a
general assembly of his barons to decide what force should follow
his son, Prince Louis, crusading to Languedoc. To work up sentiment,
the zealous Bishop Fulk of Toulouse and Guy de Vaux-Cernay, Bishop
of Carcassonne, journeyed to Paris, the latter having appointed the
future St. Dominic to administer his diocese in his absence. To
oppose them, came the Bishop of Barcelona, as Pedro’s ambassador,
armed with Innocent’s January letters putting an end to the Crusade
and disavowing the legates! Here was a pretty complication. Philip
Augustus knew how to be shifty himself on occasion, but even he must
have been puzzled as to the true state of affairs in Rome. However,
it was decided that a large force should move south under Prince
Louis. Only Innocent’s own command received about a month later, that
Philip should take up the Pope’s quarrel with John by sending the
young Louis to invade England, prevented the French Monarchy, then
and there, from taking its part in the Albigensian Crusade.

At last, in Rome, the die was cast. About June 1, Innocent wrote in
his usual vigorous tone to Pedro, Simon, Arnaut Amalric, and Fulk of
Toulouse. The Pope had found, he said, that the ambassadors of the
southern lords had lied to him. He, therefore, disavowed his January
letters, withdrew his protection from the citizens of Toulouse and
from the Lords of Foix and Bearn; until such time as Fulk might
absolve the Toulousains, and Arnaut Amalric the three nobles, after
due and complete submission in all cases. Pedro was reminded of
the favours he had received from Innocent, and blamed for having
shown so little wisdom and piety as to have protected heretics and
favourers of heresy, more dangerous than the heretics themselves. He
was ordered not to attack de Montfort and, finally, was warned that
strong measures would be taken against him, darling of the Church
though he was, should he disobey. The extraordinary spirit of the
great mediæval Popes, their enormous sense of power and their bold
determination to use it to the uttermost, vibrates in the letter.
With the Emperor and the King of England both excommunicated and
defying the Church, Innocent nevertheless threatens to move against
the foremost champion of Christendom against the Mohammedan! As
before, he made one reservation. He granted the Aragonese request
for an additional new legate, and notified King Pedro that he was
sending the Cardinal Robert de Courcon to act in that capacity. But
this concession was but a drop in the bucket. The new papal policy
left the Aragonese practically no choice between war and abandoning
Languedoc to de Montfort.

Before the Pope’s decision was known, the first Standard Bearer of
the Church had chosen war. Without breaking openly with the Pope,
he decided that it was worth risking much to save Raymond, who had
himself married one of Pedro’s sisters and had married the heir of
Toulouse to another. It is characteristic of the man and of the
time that, even while he was ordering a general mobilization of his
forces against the Crusade, he was at the same time obtaining from
Innocent the renewal of a papal bull of the year 1095 which provided
that no interdict could be laid on the dominions of his house except
by the Pope in person, thus blunting the spiritual sword in the
hands of the redoubtable Arnaut Amalric. Meanwhile he formally took
Toulouse, Foix, and Bearn under his protection and began to bestir
himself mightily to raise troops, calling upon his lieges to pawn
their possessions and follow him to the rescue of his brother-in-law
whom clerics and “Frenchmen” were seeking to despoil. Conformably
to the immemorial traditions of Europe, Catalonia was already,
as it still is, inclined to be anti-clerical over against devout
Aragon. Accordingly, although the Aragonese held aloof and showed
little spirit for the war, the Catalans swarmed out briskly so that
by springtime Pedro had a large force equipped, as the “Chanson”
expressly says, not only with pack transport but also with wheeled
transport as well, and ready to march.

All these preparations were pushed on through the late winter and
early spring. Towards the end of spring, when mobilization was
complete, there seems to have been a pause. The anti-crusading
party in Languedoc were anxiously waiting for Pedro, as an extant
troubadour poem vividly shows, but the Aragonese delayed. No doubt
before he moved, he preferred to know how he stood with Innocent, who
was so long in coming to a decision. Should the Pope’s verdict be
favourable to the King, then he would certainly not have to use as
much force, perhaps he might not have to move at all. On the other
hand, should Aragonese diplomacy lose at Rome, then Pedro must win
some substantial military success quickly, so as to present Innocent
with an accomplished fact as a basis on which to treat. At last
came two abbots; charged by de Montfort and the legates to show the
King the papal letter of June 1, in which Innocent came out flatly
against Aragon. The King answered the two abbots by promising to
obey the Pope. De Montfort sent a knight, Lambert de Thury by name
(to whom he had entrusted the castle of Puivert about fifteen miles
from Quillan on the road to Foix), with a letter in which he told
Pedro, “without any of the ordinary salutations,” that the Aragonese
must withdraw his protection from the Languedocian nobles, “on pain
of being proceeded against like all other enemies of the Church.”
To which Pedro returned no answer, except to threaten the life of
the messenger, and crossed the Pyrenees with the greater part of his
large force, leaving the rear echelon to follow as fast as it could
and proclaiming that he was acting under orders from the Pope in
taking up arms against the Crusade.

Pedro’s intervention promised to be decisive. For four years, in the
face of heavy odds, Count Simon had snatched success out of the jaws
of hostile circumstance. But now the odds were so overwhelming that
only one result seemed possible. In the summer of 1213 any man (no
matter what he desired in the matter) estimating the chances of the
future would have told you that de Montfort and his little band of
Crusaders would be wiped out.




CHAPTER V.

THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE.

MURET AND ITS SEQUEL.


We have seen that everyone, except perhaps de Montfort himself,
expected to see the Crusade annihilated. The event proved them wrong.
It is fair, therefore, to speak of the rest of the war and the final
surrender of the house of Toulouse as the sequel to the amazing
action of Muret. For although that final surrender was postponed
sixteen years, without Muret there would have been no surrender at
all.

Besides its immense result, the campaign of 1213 culminating in the
battle of Muret, is interesting as one of the very few conflicts
between men of European stock in which a small force has broken and
destroyed a force many times larger than itself. That the men of the
time realized both the importance and the extraordinary nature of the
action is proved by the abundance of record concerning it. Despite
this fact, no student of mediæval war will be surprised to learn that
the reconstruction of the battle itself remains difficult. It is
strange, however, that the evidence as to Pedro’s line of march is
almost altogether lacking.

It seems fairly certain that the Aragonese concentrated at Lerida.
They could not have marched by the great coast road of the Romans,
from Barcelona via Perpignan (a town of Pedro’s) to Narbonne, and
then west by Carcassonne on Toulouse, inasmuch as de Montfort
strongly held the Carcassonne country. Therefore, to march by this,
the natural low-grade route of peace-time, would have exposed the
King to the probability of having to fight before his junction with
his Languedocian allies. Eliminating the main coast road, there
remain two possibilities, the Somport and the Cerdagne, and between
them there seems to be no direct evidence whatsoever. To move by
Huesca, Jaca, the Somport, and so into friendly Bearn by Oloron,
would have put it out of de Montfort’s power to harass the march.
A phrase in Vaissete, repeated by Luchaire, to the effect that the
king “entered Gascony” appears to tell in favour of the Somport
hypothesis. So does the fact that the Aragonese entered Toulouse
before moving on Muret. Had he moved by the Cerdagne, Muret would
have been directly on his line of march to Toulouse. Nevertheless,
the probabilities seem to tell in favour of the Cerdagne. In the
first place, Belloc states that the Somport was disused (except
locally we may imagine) after “... the new civilization of the Middle
Ages had set in with the twelfth century....” The southern side of
the Somport, which the army would have had to mount, is excessively
steep. Moreover, the bulk of Pedro’s army, as we have already seen,
was not Aragonese but anti-clerical Catalan. For the Catalans, the
Cerdagne was by far the shortest line into Languedoc.

To move by the Somport would have compelled them to an enormous
detour, and, as matters stood, speed was all-important. Their
commander could not long keep up any shred of pretence that he had
the Pope’s approval of his actions, and must therefore make haste.
The choice of Lerida as the point of concentration tells in favour of
the Cerdagne. Had the Aragonese intended to move by the Somport, a
concentration at Huesca or even at Jaca would have been more natural.
Moreover, there is no great difficulty in assuming the Cerdagne
route, by the upper Segre to Puigcerda, the Puymorens Pass, and the
upper Ariege on Foix. The whole of the upper Tet basin and also the
head waters of the Aude were in Roussillon, which was Aragonese land.
It would have been virtually impossible for de Montfort, even were
he warned in time, to march from the Middle Aude country through
hostile territory by Axat, Mont-Louis, and Saillagouse to cut in on
the right of the Aragonese column. The forces in being, and friendly
to Pedro, in Languedoc put such a move out of all reason. Further on,
when Aragon had joined Foix, de Montfort had a garrison at Pamiers,
which might harass the flank of their column moving northward.
Still, Pamiers could have been avoided by going from Foix west on
St. Girons and the upper Garonne valley, and, in any event, Aragon
and Foix were in great force, and marching to the large and friendly
city of Toulouse, so that, granted any kind of reasonable care for
security on the march, there was little to fear from the Pamiers
garrison. It would seem, therefore, as if the weight of probability,
slight as it is, tells in favour of Pedro’s having marched by the
Cerdagne.

Whatever his line of march, the Aragonese effected a junction with
his allies, and together they sat down before Muret on September 10.
The place was held for de Montfort by a garrison of thirty knights
and seven hundred poorly armed infantry. The Languedocian barons were
in high spirits. A small garrison of de Montfort’s in Pujols, eight
and three-quarter miles east-south-east of Toulouse, had been cut
off and massacred. The militia infantry of the commune of Toulouse
were available for the attack on Muret, for the garrison of that town
threatened Toulouse closely on the south-west as Lavaur did on the
north-east. The choice of objective was wise, inasmuch as it made
the militia available, as well as for the main reason: that is the
importance of disengaging Toulouse (the Languedocian base) from the
nearest Montfortist garrison.

By contrast with the vagueness of our knowledge of Pedro’s movements,
those of de Montfort are known in detail. The crusading leader lay
at Fanjeaux with a small force including thirty knights. Then as
now, the early summer saw the high-water mark of the French energy,
and by September the greater part of the forty-day Crusaders of that
year had turned homeward. Although we know (from the interception
of a private letter of Pedro’s) that de Montfort had some sort of
intelligence service at work, nevertheless, his information seems
to have been defective, so that he was surprised by Pedro’s move,
perhaps because of its speed. When word came that the Aragonese was
in Languedoc in arms, de Montfort at once sent his wife, the Countess
Alice, to overtake certain temporary Crusaders who had just started
homeward and, if possible, persuade them to return. The energetic
countess made such haste that she gathered up at Carcassonne several
hundred of the departing Crusaders, including the Viscount of Corbeil
and that William des Barres who had commanded a “battle” (i.e.,
unit) under Cœur de Lion in the Third Crusade, including the bloody
repulse of Saladin at Arsouf twenty-two years before. Even when
these reinforcements had come in, de Montfort’s mobile force was
small. He had about two hundred and sixty knights, and six hundred
“sergeants,” that is cavalrymen heavily armed like knights but not
of noble blood. King Pedro and the southern lords were known to be
in great force. Most mediæval commanders, when gravely inferior in
numbers, were accustomed to decline battle from behind walls, but
Simon was an extraordinary man, and, moreover, he was driven by
political necessity. Only the terror of his name made it possible for
his small forces to hold down his thousands of unwilling southern
subjects. To lose a strong place like the Castle of Muret might prove
fatal to his prestige and be the signal for a general insurrection.
Furthermore, he had not only boundless faith in his cause, but also
a hearty contempt for the King of Aragon as an opponent. He knew
that the Aragonese and the Languedocians were not accustomed to
acting together, and would therefore have difficulty in deploying for
action, especially if suddenly attacked. He therefore decided to take
the field.

His decision made, on September 9 (as Pedro and the southern lords
were marching on Muret, but before news of the move had come in)
de Montfort moved west from Fanjeaux on Saverdun, making a slight
detour to the Cistercian Abbey of Boulbonne, near Mazeres. There
he dedicated his sword, laying it for a time on the altar while he
prayed. When the sacristan of the abbey asked him in wonder why with
his handful of men he was attacking so famous a chieftain as the
Aragonese, Count Simon drew from his pouch an intercepted letter from
Pedro to a mistress of his, the wife of a Languedocian baron, in
which the King had written that it was for her sweet sake that he was
fighting to drive out the “French.” “I do not fear this king,” said
de Montfort, “who opposes the work of God for the sake of a harlot.”
Already he was expecting an attack on Muret, the most exposed of his
garrisons. During the hot afternoon, couriers, who had ridden that
day upwards of twenty miles from Muret, brought word that the place
was attacked. The little crusading army pushed on, reaching Saverdun
at nightfall. Here a council of war was held, at which de Montfort
was for pushing on that night to Muret, which was ill provisioned,
but yielded to the opinion of the clergy with him, who urged that
the men and horses were fatigued from marching some 35 miles in
forty-eight hours, on top of the 17 miles that de Corbeil and des
Barres had already done from Carcassonne to Fanjeaux.

No less than seven bishops, Fulk of Toulouse, Arnold of Nismes,
Bernard of Beziers, Raymond of Agde and Peter of Comminges (together
with the future St. Dominic) were present, an imposing array with
which it was doubtless hoped to impress King Pedro. On the morning
of Wednesday the eleventh, de Montfort confessed, and made his will,
directing that it be sent to Rome for confirmation in case of his
death. Mass was said, and the Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges
were again formally excommunicated, together with the Toulousains
and all who might oppose the Crusade. Significantly, the King of
Aragon was not mentioned by name, and to him Bishop Fulk despatched
a mounted courier asking safe conduct for the clergy who were with
de Montfort in order that peace might be made. Having crossed the
Ariege at Saverdun, the little army moved north up the left bank of
that river. About ten miles on their way, at Hauterive, the courier
sent to Pedro returned with the refusal of all that Bishop Fulk had
asked. Along the twelve miles between Hauterive and Muret, the march
was delayed by marshy country which had been made more difficult
by recent rains. Fierce Languedocian summer showers drenched the
advancing column, one being so severe as to drive many men to shelter
in a little wayside church which their leader had entered to pray.
When the shower had passed the advance was resumed, and towards
evening the massive red brick ramparts of Muret came in sight. No
enemy had been seen during the day, but now, in full view of the
enemy so that their own numbers could be closely estimated, the
Crusaders crossed the bridge over the Garonne and entered the place
unopposed. The lack of opposition surprised de Montfort, Antony says.

Under mediæval conditions, Muret was naturally strong. The general
shape of the town is a right triangle with a short base. The Garonne
flows north-east along the perpendicular of the triangle; the winding
Louge flows in a general direction east along the hypotenuse and
falls into the Garonne at the apex of the triangle where the castle
then stood. Adjoining the castle was the old town or “bourg.” The new
town or “ville” occupied the space between the “bourg” and the base
of the triangle. The road from Toulouse crossed the Louge on a bridge
and entered the “ville” by the Toulouse Gate which was pierced in the
wall of the northern hypotenuse side near the north-west corner. The
Sales Gate opened through the wall of the base near the right angle.
On the eastern side, a roadway ran along the Garonne bank under the
wall from the south corner of the town past the bridge over the
Garonne to the bridge of St. Sernin, which crossed the mouth of the
Louge under the walls of the castle, at the apex of the triangle. At
the right angle, i.e., the south corner of the town, an outwork or
chatelet protected the Sales Gate and the entrance leading to the
road along the Garonne bank. The defences of the castle were strong,
those of the “bourg” less so, and those of the “ville” were weak.

The Garonne at Muret is unfordable, about a hundred and fifty yards
wide, and flows rapidly between steep banks averaging over thirty
feet high and nearly forty feet just below the mouth of the Louge.
The Louge is a good sized brook between fifteen and twenty-five
feet across; fordable in all seasons, except just at its mouth,
but a first-class military obstacle because of the height and
steepness of its banks, nearly forty feet, as we have seen, at its
mouth, and over fifteen just above the town. Half a mile up, its
banks are low and gentle and it is no obstacle at all. From a point
about three-quarters of a mile west of the town a low ridge runs a
little east of north. This ridge (called near the town “the Hill of
Perramon”) is not over fifty feet high and of a very easy slope.
Between it and the Garonne the ground is quite flat. About a mile
north of the town lies a slight marshy depression called in the local
dialect “Les Pesquies,” i.e., the fish-pond or fishery, and from this
patch of swamp a tiny rivulet runs east to the Garonne, between banks
all of ten feet high and fully thirty degrees in slope at the top—an
obstacle impossible for charging cavalry.

Pedro, Raymond, Foix and Comminges had made camp on the hill of
Perramon. Under cover of the fire of six mangonnels (i.e. catapults)
they had promptly attacked the walls in the neighbourhood of the
Toulouse Gate, forced the defences of the “ville” and driven the
garrison of thirty knights and seven hundred poorly armed infantry
into the bourg and the castle. The assault seems to have been the
work of the Toulousain militia infantry, the knights and Catalans
disdaining siege work. No sooner was the “ville” occupied than word
came of de Montfort’s approach. Thereupon Pedro, in high glee,
ordered a retirement outside the walls, reckoning that if the
Crusaders would only enter the place they would be caught in a trap.
The place could then be besieged on all sides and the war finished at
one blow. Hence the unopposed entry which surprised de Montfort.

The allies spent the early hours of the evening in consultation.
Raymond proposed to entrench the camp so as to secure it against a
cavalry charge, and give to the defenders the opportunity to shoot
at the Crusaders without fear of being ridden down. Such tactics had
at least enabled the Toulousain to bring off his army safely from
the unsuccessful siege of Castelnaudary two years before. To the
sporting instincts of Pedro, however, this seemed mere cowardice, and
he not only rejected it but allowed one of his barons bitterly to
taunt Raymond for having made the suggestion. The idea was dropped.
Raymond was so completely in Pedro’s power that we do not even hear
of his resenting the insult offered him. Two monks now appeared, sent
by Bishop Fulk of Toulouse to treat either with the Aragonese, or
with his own Toulousain flock. The Toulousains promised an answer and
detained the monks. This matter disposed of, Pedro began a night of
revelry. Many of the barons of Languedoc, who were completely in his
power, had put their wives and daughters at his disposition, and he
debauched himself so strenuously that at mass, in the morning (so his
own son writes), he was so exhausted that he could scarcely stand for
the reading of the gospel.

Even had he thought of the military position seriously, the King
had no reason to hurry matters. All his own troops had not yet
joined, and in all probability he knew of the shortage of provisions
in Muret, which must soon sap the strength of his opponents. That
de Montfort would lead his little band to the attack never entered
Pedro’s head.

De Montfort, on the other hand, saw clearly that he himself must
attack. The same political necessity that had drawn him to Muret made
a quick success desirable; the shortage of food in the town made
it imperative. He had had four years in which to estimate Pedro,
and must have felt reasonably certain that the sportsman king would
conduct operations haphazard. His own great inferiority in numbers
might be neutralized if he could effect a partial surprise. Possibly
he had this in mind when, on the morning of the 11th, he ordered
that the Toulouse Gate, which had been forced on the previous day,
should be neither closed nor barricaded. The enemy might be tempted
to attack it again and be thereby prevented from giving their whole
attention to the proposed countermove. Possibly it was the bishops
who wished to show that they did not consider diplomatic relations
broken off. The ruse, if ruse it was, succeeded. The savage Count
of Foix and certain Catalans charged mounted into the town by the
open gate, but were driven out by the Crusaders, under Count Simon
himself. He had seven hundred infantry, and even mediocre infantry
(provided they kept their heads at all) had the advantage of mounted
men cooped in the narrow and winding streets of a mediæval town.
The unsuccessful attack served the further purpose, of forcing the
consent of the clergy to the rash plan, as they considered it, of a
sortie. Bishop Fulk, nothing daunted when the Toulousains sent back
his two monks with the message they could do nothing with King Pedro,
had intended to go barefoot at the head of the clergy present, to beg
peace in the very camp of the besiegers.

Now de Montfort, heated with directing the repulse of Foix and the
Catalans, strode into the priory and demanded permission to sally
out and fight. Meanwhile the southerners, in preparation for a new
attack, began a heavy fire of all sorts of projectiles. When missiles
began to fall upon the priory roof over their heads, the clergy
abandoned all idea of negotiating and gave Count Simon leave to
attack.

This permission granted, the crusading leader, who was on foot, made
for the castle where he had left his horse. On his way he entered
St. Sernin, where the Bishop of Usez was saying mass, and prostrated
himself before the altar. As he rose, the supporting strap of one of
his chainmail leg-pieces broke, but, quite neglecting the evil omen,
he merely had it replaced and continued on his way. His horse had
been brought out to him on the high castle terrace, but, as he tried
to mount, two more discouraging portents took place. First the saddle
girth broke. He calmly had it repaired and again put his foot in the
stirrup. Just as he swung into the saddle, the horse jerked up his
head and struck him on the forehead so that, for a moment, he was
stunned. Some Toulousains, posted in observation north of the Louge,
raised a mocking yell to which he defiantly shouted back, “You mock
me now, but I trust in the Lord and I hope right well to cry after
you this day as far as the gates of Toulouse.”

We may fairly assume that the Toulousains were out of easy
bowshot—say a hundred and fifty yards off. Their gestures could
therefore be seen and their mocking cries heard, whereas Count
Simon’s exact words could not come to them clearly: had they been
understood they might have jeopardized his intended surprise.

Mounted at last, Count Simon rode down to the Ville and formed his
nine hundred horsemen on the spacious market-place, the “mercadar”
making three squadrons or “battles” each, we may safely assume,
of about three hundred, i.e., one hundred knights and two hundred
sergeants. The first displayed all the banners of the host, so as
to concentrate the enemies’ attention upon it. It was commanded by
William d’Encontre, accompanied by de Montfort’s half brother, the
veteran William des Barres. The second was under Bouchard de Marly
and included a handful of knights who had sworn an oath to kill King
Pedro. De Montfort himself commanded the third. When formed, he
addressed them and explained the proposed manœuvre, stressing the
need to file out by a gate not closely observed by the enemy, so
that, while deploying, their horses should not be exposed to missile
weapons: the men themselves would have nothing to fear thanks to
their chainmail armor with its quilted lining. His orders were to
charge and fight as a unit and on no account to break ranks in order
to attempt some individual feat of arms.

Finally, before moving out, they were solemnly blessed by the
bishops. Early that morning mass had been said, and all the soldiers
who had not previously done so had made their confessions and
received the Host. Fulk, in his mitre and vestments, held out a
fragment of the true cross for each man, in turn, to dismount and
kiss it.

This ceremony, of course, dragged so that the enthusiasm of the
troops began to suffer until Bishop Peter of Comminges, with a more
practical spirit than his brother of Toulouse, cut matters short by
gently taking the relic into his own hands and held it up in sight of
all present, promising to those who should fall the glory of martyrs
and the remission of purgatory. Afterwards, when the little column
had moved off, the clergy made for the church, and throughout the
engagement continued to implore the throne of grace in behalf of the
Christian arms with such fervor that “... they might be said to have
howled rather than prayed.”

It is impossible to establish the numbers of the force which the
Crusaders were about to attack. Pedro had mobilized a thousand
knights, all of whom had not yet come in, but the number of his
“sergeants” we do know. There are no figures as to the men brought by
the Languedocian nobles, although we do know that two years before at
Castlenaudary, their forces had heavily outnumbered de Montfort at a
time when Pedro was not in the field. The calculations of different
authorities vary widely. In cavalry alone, the Crusaders were
certainly outnumbered at least four to one.

The southern infantry strength, including both feudal infantry and
communal militia, has been estimated at forty thousand. No figures
seem to exist for the Toulousain militia, but they were undoubtedly
in considerable force. On the other hand, the morale of the allies
was below the superb morale of the Crusaders; and there was friction
between Languedocians and Spaniards, as we have seen.

The reconstruction of a mediæval battle is a matter of the greatest
difficulty, as every scholar knows who has attempted such a task.

Even when (as in the present case) half a dozen contemporary accounts
are at hand, nothing approaching a technical description of the
action is to be found in them. Occasionally, as in the chronicle of
Jaime of Aragon, which enumerates the different errors committed
by the troops under his father, we get a flash of true military
appreciation, but never more than a flash. Irrelevant but picturesque
incidents, such as the series of mishaps suffered by de Montfort in
mounting, are dwelt upon, while the fundamental points of an action
are left vague.

The historian is therefore compelled to test his authorities by
minute study of the terrain, by an examination of local tradition,
and by all he has of common sense combined with military judgment.

With respect to this matter of military judgment yet one more
difficulty appears, i.e., our complete ignorance of mediæval minor
tactics. In most other respects, our ignorance is qualified. We know
that our European ancestors of seven and eight hundred years ago
could and did move large armies from France to Palestine, both by
land and overseas. Therefore we are compelled to credit them with a
considerable degree of discipline and an effective commissariat and
intelligence service; to deny such obvious conclusions is merely
to make a fool of oneself. We are well informed concerning their
fortifications and siege work, which played so important a part in
their wars. But as to the details of their tactical formations and
especially as to the regularity of those formations we know nothing
at all. Hence it is possible for highly educated veteran soldiers of
to-day to argue that there was, for instance, no generally understood
and practised method of passing from column to line and back again!

Accordingly it is not surprising to find that scholars disagree
fundamentally over the Battle of Muret, and that no full
reconstruction seems possible.

Nevertheless, after comparing all the evidence now available, an
accurate outline of the action can be fixed. This I shall now attempt.

The Crusaders went out by the Sales Gate. The evidence seems to
show that they traversed the chatelet or outwork, and left the
fortifications by the eastern gate through which they had entered
the town. They then followed the road between the eastern wall and
the river, marching all the time with the least possible noise as to
avoid attracting attention. Evidently the first part of the movement
(i.e., the passage through the outwork) was a feint at retreat
deliberately shown to the enemy in order to mislead him, and the
second (the march along the river bank) a concealed move, in order
to obtain the effect of surprise. The column followed the route by
which they had come until the bridge over the Garonne was reached.
Then, instead of turning to the right and crossing it, they went
straight ahead, passed under the walls of the castle, and (still
unobserved by the enemy) crossed the St. Sernin bridge at the mouth
of the Louge. As soon as the first squadron had crossed, it deployed
to the left and charged down upon those of the enemy (i.e., part of
the Toulousain militia reinforced by certain Catalan knights, under
the Count of Foix) who had that morning unsuccessfully attacked the
Toulouse Gate. William d’Encontre and William des Barres surprised
them completely, and scattered them in a few moments, “like dust
before a gale.”

The technical phases of this part of the action seem never to
have been considered by historians. Inasmuch are they are of some
interest in themselves, and furthermore, shed light upon the flagrant
indiscipline in the southern army, they are worth a moment’s
consideration.

The known elements of the problem are these: first the undisputed
facts that the surprise was complete and that the successful charge
was made only by some three hundred horsemen; second, the weight of
evidence in favour of the route just described as that of the sortie.

The time element involved remains to be computed. The full distance
from the Sales Gate, past the town, over the bridge, and up the
abrupt ramp leading to the plain, is nearly 700 yards. From the
numerous mediæval gates extant, together with the extant brick
remains of the northern abutment of the bridge in question, we may
be certain that the formation was a column of twos. We may be almost
equally certain that the gait was a walk, for (in the first place) it
would have been nearly impossible to trot up the final steep ramp,
(secondly) silence was desired, and (thirdly) to trot through such a
long narrow space would have exposed the cavalry to the risk of a
serious snarl in case a single horse fell or behaved badly—_in which
case the whole operation would have been compromised_. Assuming the
gait to have been a walk, we are entitled to reduce the distance
occupied by each horse to three yards, leaving a bare one foot
between nose and crupper. The length of the entire column must
therefore have been at least 450 × 3 = 1,350 yards, nearly double
the distance to be traversed, and the length of each squadron must
have been 450 yards. Before falling out to eat and drink, we may be
sure that the Toulousains and Catalans must have retreated at least
150 yards north of the Toulouse Gate in order that so large a target
as they would present might be out of long bowshot. Therefore the
head of the crusading column would come into full sight practically
as soon as it topped the ramp and gained the plain, and historians
who assume that the deployment could have been made out of sight of
the Toulousains and Catalans have simply never troubled to walk over
the battlefield. Assuming a walking gait to be four miles per hour,
i.e., 117 yards per minute, the rear of the first crusading squadron
would be in the plain almost exactly four minutes after the van had
come in sight of the enemy in front of the Toulouse Gate. The greater
part of the 600 yards separating the Crusaders from the enemy would
almost certainly be covered at a trot of say eight miles an hour,
before breaking into a gallop for the final shock. Two minutes, plus
the time necessary for deployment, must therefore be added to the
original four. In all, nearly ten minutes must have elapsed between
the first observation of the Crusaders by Foix’s command and the
delivery of the crusading charge.

Inasmuch as Foix’s men far outnumbered the first crusading squadron,
the fact that they were unable (when their seven minutes’ grace was
up) to make even a few moments effective resistance shows their
discipline to have been wretched. We know that they had committed the
imprudence of falling out to eat and drink, that most of the Catalan
knights had put off their armour, and that no proper measures of
security had been taken. Nevertheless, it seems that the Crusaders
should at least have been delayed a few moments. Not one of Foix’s
Catalan knights was killed!

Meanwhile, the main body of the besiegers was getting to horse,
crying “Aragon,” “Foix,” or “Comminges,” according to their
allegiance. The Spaniards formed, but the formation was ragged. In
part this may have been due to haste, although they must have had
over twenty minutes in which to get in line, assuming a minimum of
ten minutes from the disclosure of the operation to the deployment
of the second crusading squadron, and an additional minimum of
ten minutes for the second squadron to catch up with the first
and for the two together to do the mile which separated them from
Pedro’s people. In part it certainly resulted from the folly and
indiscipline of the Spanish knights; every important man among
them (so Pedro’s son King Jaime tells us) wanted to fight his own
battle with the enemy, making strict alignment and combined action
impossible. Furthermore, as we learn from other chronicles, Pedro
himself exercised no effective command, but yielded to his chivalric
enthusiasm by exchanging armour with one of his knights and posting
himself in the front ranks—a piece of generous but unmilitary folly
surprising in a soldier of his considerable experience since it lost
him all control over his forces in reserve. The Aragonese were facing
south astride the Seysses road about a mile out from Muret, with the
Pesquies marsh covering their left.

Having broken Foix’s command, the first crusading squadron had to
wheel half right in order to strike Pedro. By spurring hard, the
second, with a straighter course to follow, was able to catch up, and
both together went at the Aragonese, sweeping before them some of
Foix’s routed horsemen. Count Simon’s orders on no account to engage
in individual jousting but to charge boot to boot were so well obeyed
that the shock was simultaneous all along their line. It was so
violent that the Crusaders plunged into the horsemen opposed to them
“like a stone dropped into the water.” Pedro’s people stood firm and
closed round them, hiding them from the third “battle,” and the melée
swayed back and forth with a din “as of countless axemen hewing down
a forest.”

De Montfort, with the idea of charging in on Pedro’s left, worked
rapidly north and east around the marsh until he found himself
blocked by Pesquies ravine, which the chroniclers describe as a
“fossatum” (i.e., a ditch or trench). Cut in the steep banks of
this obstacle was a narrow path, blocked at the farther end by a
strong Aragonese combat patrol or covering detachment. Such covering
detachments were familiar enough, as we learn from the “Siete
Partidas” of Alfonzo the Wise of Castile, written about 1260, in
which they are called alas or citaras. If it be objected that Pedro
was in no mood to think of such details as posting this detachment,
we may fairly imagine some grizzled knight of Aragon who knew enough
to take on the job by himself with his own immediate followers.

To go from line to column and try to force the narrow path in the
face of opposition was a bad business, but de Montfort had no choice.
Time was passing, he had the marsh on his left and the ravine
stretching away on his right. At the head of his men he crossed the
ravine and set his horse to scramble up the farther bank. In this
unfavourable position, as he struggled to protect himself from the
blows he could not yet hope to return, he broke his left stirrup
leather—the third time one part or another of his equipment had
played him false that day. With great dexterity he kept his seat and,
reaching the summit of the bank, unhorsed the nearest enemy with a
blow of the fist to the jaw—the Spaniard must have been wearing not a
closed pot-helm but an open-faced steel cap. This man seems to have
been the detachment commander, for when his followers saw him fall
they broke up and fled on the instant. Their flight exposed to Count
Simon the left flank of the Aragonese main body. He got his three
hundred across, deployed them, and charged.

All this time the first two crusading squadrons had been fighting
hard. Although their close formation and the fury of their charge had
carried them deep into the ranks of their enemies, still these last
had not broken, but closed in around them. Strict order and alignment
had gone and the fighting was man to man. The knight who had taken
the part of Pedro could not equal his master’s prowess, and Pedro
himself forgot caution, and cried out: “I am the King.” Whereupon
those who had sworn to have his life closed around him and killed
him, despite his valor and his skill in arms.

Whether the King fell before or after de Montfort’s charge is
uncertain—those who killed him were with the second crusading
squadron. In either case his fall and the flank charge decided the
day, and a general rout ensued. The 500 knights of his household,
unsupported by the rest of the leaderless mass of horsemen, fell
almost to a man around his body. The southerners paid a bitter price
for Pedro’s chivalrous folly in jamming himself into the fighting
and thereby giving up all attempt to direct operations. Raymond and
the Count of Comminges seem never to have been engaged at all. We
hear of them only as fleeing from the field. Count Simon, on the
other hand, was as wise in victory as he had been furious in attack.
While directing or, more probably, permitting the pursuit of the
fugitives by his first two squadrons, he kept the third squadron
(his own immediate command) well under control, and followed the
pursuit at a distance so as to intervene in case of a rally. After a
short pursuit, as soon as he judged that the fleeing enemy horsemen
were incapable of renewing the battle and were making for Toulouse,
he recalled the pursuers, and at the head of his three squadrons
returned towards Muret.

Meanwhile the Toulousain communal militia had altogether misconceived
the result of the cavalry action. Only a part of these troops had
taken part in Foix’s unsuccessful attack and subsequent rout at the
hands of the first crusading squadron; and of that part only those
north of the Louge had actually endured the crusading charge and the
rout. Those between the Louge and the Garonne had merely retreated,
hastily enough, no doubt, in order to conform to the flight of those
north of the brook. By far the greater part of them, therefore, were
quite fresh. At first they barricaded themselves in their camp,
fearing they would be attacked. But townsmen in mediæval warfare were
apt to suffer from rashness; one of many examples is the behaviour of
the Londoners at Lewes in 1264. It has been supposed that dust may
have hidden the cavalry flight from the Toulousains, or there may
have been clumps of trees to block their view. Knowing de Montfort to
be heavily outnumbered, they believed a rumour of his defeat, sallied
out from their camp and beset the town from all sides.

In Muret, Count Simon’s victory was already known by messenger.
Bishop Fulk, therefore, sent to tell his obstreperous flock of this,
and offered them mercy, but they would not believe, and wounded his
parlementaire. Startled at the sight of the Crusaders, returning
victorious, and about to fall upon the rear of their extended
formation, they broke up in a panic and were slaughtered far and
wide. Some made for the camp and were killed there, others ran for
the boats which had brought up their siege material and were now
anchored about a mile north of the town.

A few of these last escaped so, but most were butchered on the high
banks by de Montfort’s people.

In 1875 a flood of the Garonne undercut and brought down much of the
bank, revealing an immense mass of their bones opposite Saubens,
and about 700 yards upstream from that village. Other skeletons are
scattered about to the north of this spot; to this day they are
turned up sometimes by the spade and the plough.

Such are the true elements of the Battle of Muret.

The total losses of the vanquished were enormous, while the victors
lost only one knight and, at most, eight “sergeants”—a fully-armed
man in a position to defend himself was already in 1213 so completely
protected by his chainmail armor. Infantry normally accounted for
most mediæval battle casualties, and, of course, the dismounted and
wounded knights of the losing side could be massacred if the victors
so chose, as they emphatically did on this occasion.

On the other hand, de Montfort shed tears over Pedro’s dead
body—“like a second David over a second Saul.” The King had never
been excommunicated, accordingly his corpse was allowed burial in
consecrated ground at the hands of the Hospitallers, who asked
permission so to do.

Muret wiped out Aragon as a factor in Languedocian politics. Raymond,
with his son, later Count Raymond VII, fled the country and made
for the court of England. Apparently, one of his last acts was the
capture of his bastard brother Baldwin, who had gone over to de
Montfort, and was now surprised and taken prisoner. Raymond promptly
had him hanged. There was even a story that the Count of Foix himself
tied the noose. A few months earlier King John had done homage
to the Pope, and was now preparing, with Otto, to seek a military
decision against Philip Augustus, whose vassals he was corrupting
with might and main. He received Raymond kindly, and presented him
with 10,000 marks, but could give no other assistance until he had
settled accounts with the King of France. Raymond swore him homage,
and seems to have stayed in England for some months. Meanwhile
de Montfort triumphantly crossed the Rhône and mastered much of
Raymond’s “Marquisate of Provence” to the east of that river. Merely
to keep his hand in, he indulged in a small war in the county of
Foix. With Pedro dead, there was no one capable of taking the field
against the Crusade.

There were, however, three limitations to de Montfort’s success. The
first was military; his force was so small that he could not think
of doing anything against the city of Toulouse itself. The citizens
felt so safe that they began by offering only sixty of their number
as hostages to Bishop Fulk, instead of the two hundred which he
demanded, and when he accepted the offer of sixty they refused to
furnish any at all. De Montfort made a military demonstration up to
the walls, but when the gates were kept closed against him he did
not even attack. The second limitation was political, the Pope was
by no means prepared to set up an altogether new secular authority
in Languedoc, and was now determined to bring peace to that unhappy
country. The third was also political; the cities which had given him
a certain welcome as the maintainer of public order, now that order
was restored were restive at the continued presence of “Frenchmen,”
whom they heartily disliked.

The appointment of Cardinal Peter of Benevento as legate had been
the one concession made to Pedro in Innocent’s harsh letter of the
previous June which had pushed the unfortunate king into war. On
the arrival of the new legate it became ironically evident that if
the hot-headed Aragonese had been less hasty, he might have won
the game in peace and security. For Cardinal Peter, unlike all his
predecessors, began by following out the Pope’s policy and not
that of the party of violence. He held an audience at Narbonne, at
which the Counts of Foix and Comminges and a host of the smaller
dispossessed nobles were allowed to abuse de Montfort. Innocent had
given the cardinal-legate his orders in three bulls, dated January
20, 22, and 25, 1214. The first denied de Montfort’s claim to the
Viscounty of Nismes, pending an inquiry. The second permitted the
Count of Comminges and Viscount Gaston of Bearn, guilty as they
were, to be reconciled with the Church on their due and complete
submission. The third prescribed that the city of Toulouse should
also be reconciled, upon full submission, and should then be put
once more under the papal protection. De Montfort’s right to govern
the lands he had conquered was recognized, but only as “provisional
administrator” pending the decision of the Œcumenical Council, which
was to meet at the Lateran in 1215. Moreover, Innocent wrote to Count
Simon on January 22, commanding him to obey the legate and especially
to surrender the young King of Aragon, whom the crusading leader had
received as his ward at the Council of Narbonne three years before.
Should de Montfort refuse on some pretext, then, wrote Innocent in
his usual high tone, the legate was to carry out verbal orders which
had been given him—a threat all the more menacing from its vagueness!
In much the same terms the clergy of Languedoc were assured that the
Holy See proposed to show no pity to any who refused to obey the new
legate. The Pope was determined to call a halt, and Cardinal Peter
entered fully into the spirit of the orders given him.

All the guilty parties surrendered unconditionally. Raymond made act
of submission in April, turned over all his remaining dominions to
the legate and even included a promise to exile himself anywhere the
Pope might designate. On returning from England, he and his son lived
for some time in Toulouse, with their wives, as private persons.
Peace now seemed assured.

Thus checked, the indomitable de Montfort had another string to his
bow. As before he had played off the Languedocian clergy against the
Pope, so now he used the papal nuncio at the Court of France. This
man, Robert de Courcon by name, had been vigorously preaching the
Albigensian Crusade. While Peter of Benevento was temporarily absent
escorting Pedro’s son to Aragon and organizing the regency there, de
Courcon might fairly claim to be the principal representative of the
Pope in France. With the usual independence of mediæval agents at a
distance from their master, the nuncio at Paris proceeded to go clean
counter to that master’s wishes. In June he had a conference with de
Montfort at the latter’s camp, and in July he confirmed the leader of
the Crusade by a solemn charter in the possession of all the lands in
the Albigeois, the Agenais, Rouergue, and Quercy, already conquered
or to be conquered from heretics and favourers of heretics!

The Crusaders whom de Courcon had persuaded to take the field began
operations on their way south by capturing the castle of Maurillac
in Auvergne. Here for the first time we hear of the burning of
Waldensians, that is of heretics not obviously enemies to society.
After the fall of the place, seven of them refused to recant before
de Courcon and were accordingly burned ... “with immense rejoicings
by the soldiers of Christ.” The event is significant, and we shall
return to it.

The reinforcements thus brought in enabled de Montfort triumphantly
to promenade the Agenais, Rouergue, Quercy, and even the Perigord.
So great was his prestige that, in July, he married his son Amaury
to the heiress of Dauphiné. Meanwhile Philip Augustus broke Otto and
John of England on the decisive field of Bouvines so thoroughly,
that neither of them was afterwards a factor in the affairs of
Continental Europe. No wonder de Courcon, the papal nuncio at Paris,
was emboldened. For the first time the French monarchy was free to
take up the Albigensian business. On December 7 a courier from Rheims
arrived with letters from de Courcon calling a council of nobles and
high ecclesiastics of Languedoc to meet in Montpellier on January 8.
De Montfort’s party had decided to renew the sentence of deposition
passed upon Raymond by the Council of Lavaur, this time by a more
imposing body. Cardinal Peter of Benevento, on returning from Spain,
had to content himself with taking the presidency of this assembly
which was determined to go against the entire spirit of his actions.

The Council of Montpellier throws into high relief the sharp cleavage
of opinion in Languedoc. Montpellier was the most Catholic of the
southern cities. As has been seen in the last chapter, its lord had
been the first in the region to take official action against heresy.
The orthodoxy of the place had never been questioned. Nevertheless,
the popular feeling there was so bitter that de Montfort could not
even come within the walls to attend the meetings of the Council
for fear of being mobbed. He was forced to stay at the House of the
Templars, outside the walls, and there confer with those who came to
him. One day he did enter the town with his two sons and an escort
of a few knights, in answer to a special invitation from Cardinal
Peter. Whereupon the citizens moved at once, quietly armed themselves
and manned the gate by which he had entered and the street by which
he was expected to pass. Some even entered the Church of St. Mary
in which the Council sat. Count Simon, whose worst enemy had never
called him coward, was glad enough to be smuggled away through back
streets.

On the other hand, the Council itself was Montfortist to a man.
After legislating copiously on the reform of the clergy, the local
abuses in laying tolls, repression of heretics and those who should
favour them, &c., it decided unanimously to depose Raymond and set
de Montfort in his stead. Cardinal Peter, however, on the plea
that his instructions gave him no power to do so, refused to obey
the Council and hand over the parts of Raymond’s lands, especially
Toulouse and Montauban, which had surrendered to him as Innocent’s
representative and not to de Montfort. The decision, he truly said,
had been expressly reserved for the coming Lateran Council. Whereat
the Montpellier assembly promptly sent off the Archbishop of Embrun
to Rome to ask the Pope to recognize de Montfort as lord and even as
king (“dominum et monarchum”) over the lands of the heretics!

The castle of Foix and the citadel of Toulouse known as the “Château
Narbonaise” had received papal garrisons, the latter under the
command of Bishop Fulk. The dispossessed knights, known as “faidits,”
were given the privilege of moving freely about the country on
condition of going unarmed, with but one spur (!), mounted on
palfreys but not on war horses, and avoiding fortified places. Rome
showed no signs of relaxing her grip, but was unmistakably beginning
to show mercy and, above all, was refusing to support de Montfort in
the more ambitious of his designs.

With matters in this state, a new turn was given to the situation.
In April, 1215, Prince Louis, the heir of France, afterwards Louis
VIII, set out for Languedoc. If de Montfort seriously intended to
make himself a king, he must have feared the activities of the French
monarchy. In the slight correspondence between them, Paris had made
it quite clear that Count Simon was distinctly a vassal and agent of
the Capets. But it seems more probable that Simon preferred to govern
his unwilling southern subjects with the aid of the crown of France
and not in opposition to it. In any case, he went clear to Vienne
to meet Louis, who had mobilized his forces at the muster ground
of 1209 at Lyons, and welcomed the prince with every appearance of
joy. With Cardinal Peter it was very different. As representative of
Rome he had nothing to hope from Louis, inasmuch as all opposition
had ceased; and much to fear, as the prince might follow his father
Philip’s policy of vigorously asserting the independence of lay
authority in its own sphere by seizing on places like Toulouse and
Foix, which were governed by papal troops, and by disposing of them
in the name of the French crown.

However, it was soon seen that Louis by no means possessed his
father’s force of character and penetrating intellect. The young
prince had pleasing manners and personal courage, but was of a mild
nature, not physically robust, and in no way fitted to set the river
on fire. He promenaded Languedoc between de Montfort and Cardinal
Peter, visiting in his forty days St. Gilles, Montpellier, Beziers,
Narbonne, Carcassonne, Fanjeaux and Toulouse, and then went home
without having exchanged a blow or a high word with anyone.

But when he reported to his father, in the presence of the peers of
France, many of whom were Raymond’s kinsmen, as to de Montfort’s high
hand in the south, Philip Augustus broke up the Council and withdrew
to his private apartments saying, “I hope that before long Count de
Montfort and his brother Guy will die at their work, because their
quarrel is not just.”

Prince Louis’ peaceful pilgrimage produced two important results,
the destruction of the walls of Toulouse and Narbonne, and de
Montfort’s installation as “commendatory” lord of Toulouse and Foix.
It was the prestige of being accompanied by the heir of France which
directly enabled Count Simon to bring about the demolition of the
defences of the two strongest cities of Languedoc. In the case of
Narbonne, we do not know the reasons for the order, although it seems
reasonable to suppose that public opinion in the place, as in the
other neighbouring cities, was so bitter against the “French” that it
seemed wise to make it defenceless. Arnaut Amalric, now Archbishop
of Narbonne and claimant (in competition with de Montfort) to its
dukedom, protested but without effect. The Narbonese, as well as
the Toulousains, were forced to pull down their own walls, or (more
probably) to make breaches in them, for thorough demolition was
almost impossible to a time possessed of no means of destruction
except fire and human muscle.

Further, Prince Louis’ support of de Montfort contributed largely
to de Montfort’s assumption of temporary authority over Toulouse
and Foix, because it increased the crusading leader’s influence
with Cardinal Peter and thus helped to bring the new legate over
to the party of violence. Another influence, working to the same
end, was the considerable success of the Archbishop of Embrun, who
had been sent to Rome by the Council of Montpellier. He returned
with a papal bull crammed with praise of Count Simon, expressing
the hope that he would not weary in well-doing, and authorizing him
to hold, provisionally, the lands sequestrated by Cardinal Peter.
Since a mediæval “commendatory” enjoyed the revenue of the lands
he administered, the worst of de Montfort’s difficulties, his lack
of money, was over for the time being. Although he had no definite
possession of all he sought, still his prospects were of the best.

During the year Count Simon suffered but one check when, on July 2,
Innocent decided against him and in favour of Arnaut Amalric for the
Dukedom of Narbonne and announced his decision in a letter full of
severe rebuke. But what was that, compared with so many successes?

On November 11, the Lateran Council met. It was an impressive
assembly, including seventy-one patriarchs and metropolitans, four
hundred abbots and bishops, and a huge number of delegates holding
proxies for bishops who were unable to come. The Patriarch of
Jerusalem was there, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, as the
Greek Orthodox Church (for the first and last time since the ninth
century) was in full communion with Rome, owing to the occupation of
Constantinople by the short-lived “Latin Empire” which the iniquitous
fourth Crusade had planted there. According to the well-known laws
which govern human assemblies, this august body was impotent for
effective deliberation, and at the mercy of the manipulation of its
leaders, because of its great size. In general, its function was
not so much to make decisions but merely to register decisions made
before it had convened. In its three sessions, on November 11, 20 and
30, the Council passed all the decrees submitted to it, no less than
seventy in number, which had been resolved upon, as we should say, in
committee. Indeed, in every matter but the Albigensian, Pope Innocent
seems to have been in complete control.

On the three stock subjects of faith, Church organization, and
discipline, the Council affirmed transubstantiation, settled the
order of precedence of the Patriarchs in the order Constantinople,
Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, required sacramental confession once
a year, and followed the usual mediæval practice of legislating
interminably against the irregularities of the clergy. Those in
orders were forbidden to act as surgeons, since operations cause the
shedding of blood. Trial by combat was forbidden. Trial by ordeal
was virtually abolished by forbidding any religious ceremonies in
connection with such trials, thus depriving them of all reason for
being, since they depended on religious sanction for their whole
moral force. Decrees were passed against “incontinence, drunkenness,
hunting, attendance at farces and stage plays,” on the part of the
clergy. Other decrees regularized the procedure and penalties against
heretics and their protectors, as we shall see in more detail in
the next chapter. In the political field, the Council confirmed the
election of Frederic II, son of Henry VI, as Holy Roman Emperor, and
attempted to decide the future of Languedoc.

Every principal actor in the Albigensian drama was present, except
de Montfort who was represented by his brother Guy. Arnaut Amalric,
Archbishop and Duke of Narbonne, Fulk and Guy, bishops, respectively,
of Toulouse and Carcassonne, and Theodisius now Bishop of Agde,
represented the Languedocian clergy. Over against them on the lay
side were the two Raymonds, the Count of Comminges, Count Raymond
Roger of Foix, the boldest and most energetic of them all, and a
minor noble, Bermond of Anduze, a son-in-law of Raymond’s, who
pretended to have rights over the Toulousain inheritance.

Two hearings of the matter in dispute have been reported to us. The
scene of the first was the court of the Lateran Palace, presumably
either of classic style, or showing the slim circular pillars,
delicate round arches and varicoloured stone inlay work of the
Cosmati school. Innocent presided, and with him were all the curia.
Raymond Roger of Foix, the centre of all eyes with his handsome
person and ruddy face, spoke first. He denied his own guilt and that
of Raymond of Toulouse. They had only defended themselves, he said,
against brigands come to rob them under a pretence of crusading. The
younger Raymond, so he maintained, had never even been accused of any
crime. He himself, upon Innocent’s express request, had handed over
the Castle of Foix, with its mighty ramparts, to Cardinal Peter. If
the place, now held by de Montfort, was not given back, then no faith
was to be put in solemn treaties. Fulk of Toulouse replied fiercely,
recalling Raymond Roger’s crimes, his persecution of the Church
and his protection of heresy, the Crusaders he had mutilated and
massacred. Raymond Roger replied more fiercely still. A Toulousain
knight sprang up, shouting that if they had known that so much
fuss would be made over mutilated Crusaders, then even more would
have lacked eyes and noses; at which those listening groaned and
murmured as a shocked audience will. The Count of Foix then attacked
Bishop Fulk. Not content with the lying songs and bitter satires he
had written as a troubadour, the Bishop of Toulouse, he said, had
caused more than five thousand deaths, including children, behaving
himself more like Antichrist than like a Roman legate. Innocent
mildly answered that Raymond Roger had stated his own case well, but
had “a little” understated the Church’s case against him. Last, a
representative spoke for the heir of Beziers and Carcassonne, son to
that Trencavel who had died in prison in 1209, claiming that as the
father had been assassinated by de Montfort and the Crusaders, the
Pope, to “save his own honour,” must return the viscounty to the son.
“Justice shall be done,” replied Innocent and retired to his private
apartments.

The scene now changed to Innocent’s garden, no doubt some sort of
formal garden with clipped plants, for the sure Italian taste changes
little. The Pope knew that the great majority of the Council was
dead against him with regard to Languedoc. Raymond Roger’s violence
had certainly not been calculated to attract wavering churchmen, if
any still wavered. But to Innocent that violence showed clearly as
the fruit of great wrongs inflicted in the name of the Church over
which he ruled, the Church which he passionately desired to have
prevail as the arbiter of right and the doer of justice. His sense
of his own personal honour, too, was as keen as any in that knightly
age. Therefore he was troubled and sought to put his trouble from
him among the growing things. Thither the Languedocian bishops, and
others of their opinion, pursued him. If Simon had the land, they
were saved, they said. If Raymond were returned to power, they and
the Church in Languedoc were ruined. At first Innocent resisted,
reminding them of the injustice of taking his lands from a Catholic
noble like Raymond, and saying that while de Montfort might keep
the lands taken from heretics, at least the rights of the widow and
orphan must be preserved. But they pressed upon him indignantly,
first Fulk speaking, then Theodisius, then the Archbishop of Auch,
insisting that such a settlement would give de Montfort nothing,
since the Pope held all three counts for Catholics; whereas de
Montfort deserved much. They themselves had preached against Raymond
as wicked and detestable, to restore him would be to disavow them
altogether. Everything must be given outright to de Montfort. Indeed,
they dared to say, it was impossible to take from him that which he
possessed, for they would be there to defend him. Still Innocent
held out. He reproached them with their cruelty, their refusal to
compromise, the savage sermons in which they had so far exceeded his
will. A few supported him, among them the Abbot of Beaulieu, who was
present as Ambassador from John of England, and (for a wonder) Arnaut
Amalric. That fierce old man had forced the Pope’s hand more than
once in de Montfort’s interest. Now, full of his quarrel with his
former friend, he told Innocent to take no one’s counsel but to go
his own way. Nevertheless, the voices raised in support of the Pope’s
opinion were so few that, at last, Innocent consented that Raymond
should be deposed and Simon be Count of Toulouse. The Council so
voted in a decree and went home, having legislated in the name of a
united Christian Europe, at the apex of the Church’s power.

Although beaten on the main point of Raymond’s deposition, Innocent
nevertheless continued to do what he could to limit de Montfort’s
triumph. It was said that he told Raymond that something would soon
be done for him. The younger Raymond, a high spirited and attractive
young man of eighteen, was entertained as the Pope’s guest in Rome
for some time after the Council adjourned. Even the terms of the
immediate settlement, which were published in a papal decree on
December 15, were by no means a blanket endorsement of de Montfort’s
ambitions. Raymond was assumed to have been found guilty of heresy
and of despoiling the Church. All that part of the Toulousain fief
held by the Crusaders was made over to de Montfort with the title
of Count of Toulouse. And yet, with the usual papal policy of
reservations, it was stipulated that the new settlement was not to
override the rights of any Catholic man or woman; which might well
have been made a ground, had Innocent lived, for Raymond’s return.

Besides this general reservation, there were four lesser specific
ones. De Montfort was to hold his dignities on condition of swearing
homage to his proper overlord, the King of France. Thus, if the
crusading leader had ever seriously hoped to make himself an
independent sovereign, the hope was denied him. Raymond’s wife was to
retain the lands of her dowry. Raymond himself, although condemned
to exile, was to have an annuity of 400 marks a year payable from
the revenues of his former possessions. Most important of all,
the younger Raymond was confirmed in possession of so much of the
Toulousain fief as was not in the hands of the Crusaders, that is to
say Nismes, Beaucaire, and the “Marquisate of Provence” to the east
of the Rhône. Finally, a papal letter of December 21 put in question
the legitimacy of the measures taken by de Montfort against Raymond
Roger of Foix, directing the Bishop of Nismes and the Archdeacon
of Conflans to take over the Castle of Foix and hold an inquest to
decide whether the place should be returned to its original owner,
which was later actually done.

Innocent’s letter reopening the matter of Foix was the great Pope’s
last recorded act in Languedoc. Six months later, too soon for him
to hear of the anti-French reaction there, he lay dead in Perugia,
in the full vigour of middle age, for he was not yet fifty-seven. He
had lived only for his passion to make the papacy and (through the
papacy) the Church, supreme; and he had raised the See of Peter to a
height of unquestioned power which it had never before, and has never
since, attained.

Shortly after the young Raymond’s departure from Rome, the two
Raymonds reappeared in the unconquered part of their diminished
holdings. There they found the people, especially the townsmen, so
hot against the “French” that it seemed possible to continue the
struggle. Beaucaire, Avignon, Tarascon, declared for their former
lords, and Marseilles showed sympathy with his cause. The elder
Raymond went off to Spain in the hope of recruiting reinforcements
there. In Beaucaire the castle was held by a garrison of de
Montfort’s, put there no doubt during his operation east of the Rhône
after Muret. The citizens now rose and besieged this garrison, and de
Montfort accordingly moved to relieve it.

On the way to Beaucaire, Count Simon appeared before Narbonne, and
there the quarrel between him and his old ally Arnaut Amalric came
to a head. The walls ordered to be destroyed the previous year must
have been patched up after a fashion, for Arnaut ordered the gates
shut against de Montfort. The time, I repeat, controlled no agents
of demolition except fire and human muscle. Still, the new defences
were weak, for the Crusaders promptly broke in and, having entered,
threatened Arnaut Amalric himself with violence for opposing them.
The redoubtable old man excommunicated de Montfort, publishing the
sentence twice over, and interdicted all the churches of the city as
long as the excommunicated leader of the Crusade should remain in
the place. Whereupon the Christian warriors stoned the archbishop’s
palace and the champion of Catholicism joked about the anathema laid
upon him, and even showed himself at mass as usual!

After this exchange of compliments at Narbonne, de Montfort moved
on Beaucaire, where the inhabitants had declared for Raymond, and
besieged the place. The situation was complicated, as the citizens
were at the same time besieging the garrison of “Crusaders” in the
castle on its bluff over the Rhône. Repeated assaults by de Montfort
failed for want of a sufficient number of catapults and other siege
machinery. Meanwhile, in the castle, the woodwork of the roofs and
hoardings (i.e., wooden galleries projecting outward from the tops
of walls and towers so as to command their base) was badly damaged
by the catapults of the men of Beaucaire. Nevertheless, the castle
garrison held out stoutly, catching the battering ram with a noose
of rope which prevented the heavy ram from being drawn back to gain
momentum for its blow and keeping the sappers from the base of the
walls by lowering burning bundles of tow and sulphur by means of
chains from the battlements. Presently word came that Toulouse was
about to declare for Raymond. Whereat de Montfort, in a fury, raised
the siege of Beaucaire, abandoning his siege machinery and much of
his equipment in his haste to meet the new danger.

In angry haste he concentrated all the force he could move from
the Razes country on the upper Aude, the Carcassonne district,
the Lauraguais region between Toulouse and Carcassonne, and the
Toulousain district itself. Then, his concentration made, he
promptly appeared before the town more like an enemy than like
a rightful lord returning to his own. Now Toulouse, like most
important thirteenth-century towns, was a “free city,” a practically
independent little republic, whose elected magistrates were
accustomed to sit in conference with their nominal feudal lord and
follow his lead by their own consent rather than be commanded
by him. Accordingly, they asked de Montfort to enter peaceably,
unarmoured, and mounted on a palfrey. He replied fiercely that
message after message had told him of their conspiracies and treasons
against him, and that he would put off neither his hauberk of mail
nor his helmet of Pavian steel until he had taken hostages of the
flower of the city.

After more high words, the magistrates were inclined to yield, and
prepared to confer with de Montfort outside the walls, but were
restrained from putting themselves in his power by public opinion,
which began to run high. About this time a number of squires, young
gentlemen, and pages from de Montfort’s army, entered the town and
began to break in and pillage. This was too much. A typical mediæval
riot started. Men of all ages and classes, and even women, seized
whatever was handy that might serve as a weapon. Barricades of
furniture, stakes, and barrels sprang up before every house, and
piles of stones and beams appeared on the balconies ready to be
thrown down on the heads of the “French.” Battle was joined to the
cry of “Montfort” on one side, “Toulouse! Beaucaire! Avignon!” on the
other, and matters became so hot that de Montfort’s people, forced to
give way under the rain of missiles from the houses, could scarcely
make good their retreat over more barricades thrown up to cut them
off. Seeing that the place could not be held, Count Simon ordered
it to be set on fire in several places. The “French” had become
scattered, and the energy of the Toulousains put them in danger of
being crushed, so that they had to concentrate and cut their way
through in deep columns. By nightfall only the citadel, the “Chateau
Narbonaise,” was still in de Montfort’s hands. He himself was “full
of rage and anxiety” at the heavy losses his troops had suffered.

On the following day, however, Bishop Fulk persuaded the Toulousains
to submit, and give not only hostages but also a huge ransom of
30,000 marks. De Montfort accepted the hostages and the ransom, and
then pillaged the place once more, “destroyed” its fortifications
(after he had officially demolished them in the previous year),
filled up the ditches and disarmed the inhabitants. The uneasy peace
lasted through the rest of the year.

The new Pope, Honorius III, was of a mild nature, so that even had
he wished, he would hardly have been able to struggle against the
extreme party in Languedoc. Instead, the new legate whom he sent
there—a Cardinal Bertrand of San Giovanni e Paolo—was more bitter
than any of his immediate predecessors.

Now that the party of violence had nothing to fear from Rome, the
Crusade was again preached, so that new Crusaders appeared in
Languedoc in the spring, and with them a small royal force sent by
Philip Augustus. With these reinforcements de Montfort was operating
east of the Rhône when, for the second time, word came that Toulouse
had declared against him. This time it was not a matter of suspicion
and secret conspiracies. The citizens had joyfully welcomed back
the two Raymonds and massacred all Frenchmen who failed to gain the
shelter of the Château Narbonaise. The counts of Foix and Comminges
and many nobles had rallied once more to fight the “French.” De
Montfort’s wife, the Countess Alice, and one of his sons were in the
Château Narbonaise, which held out, although seriously threatened
by the Toulousains. Messengers were sent to tell Count Simon that
he must make haste to relieve the garrison. This he did, and in the
month of September began the third siege of the capital of Languedoc.

The trace of the walls of Toulouse in 1217-1218 is known throughout
most of their length. On the south they left the river at the corner
of the present Rue des Renforts, and extended in a fairly regular
curve until they struck the line of the present inner boulevards
just east of St. Etienne. They then followed, roughly, the Boulevard
Lazare Carnot and the Rue Dutemps, divided the capitol and its
grounds, and met the river in the neighbourhood of the Place St.
Pierre—a circumference of about a mile and three-quarters.

The bits of their foundation which still exist are built in small
square stones, with occasional binding courses of brick, in the
manner of the later Empire and the Dark Ages. Throughout most of its
length the wall is flanked by round towers at the regulation Roman
intervals of about seventy yards.

The fortress known as the Château Narbonaise stood near the
intersection of the present “Allée St. Michel” with the Rue des
Renforts. It was rectangular in plan, of no great extent, with a
tower at each corner. Instead of forming a part of the city walls,
it stood outside them, commanding them the more easily through being
considerably higher. The Porte St. Michel, through which ran the
road to Narbonne, pierced the city wall just opposite the castle’s
north-western corner, so that the castle dominated it completely.

Within the place the intense local patriotism of the mediæval commune
was again blazing high. Everyone worked fiercely, digging ditches
and setting up palisades and wooden towers to fill the gaps made in
the walls by the recent “demolitions.” Even at night the work was
continued by torchlight.

The first party of Crusaders to arrive was commanded by Guy de
Montfort, Count Simon’s brother. Dismounting, and cutting off part
of the shafts of their lances to make them more manageable in street
fighting, the “French” men-at-arms attacked the place. An entrance
was forced, but, as in the previous year, the assailants could not
maintain themselves in the streets of the town, finding themselves
always confronted by new barricades and exposed to a hail of missiles
from the houses. Guy and his men ended by taking refuge in the
Château.

The Toulousains had fought so savagely that when Count Simon himself
appeared and proposed another general assault, Guy and those who had
seen the new spirit of the citizens finally persuaded him not to
do so. The crusading leader, with all the scorn of a knight of the
Middle Ages for townsmen in arms, at first made no preparations for
a regular siege, but merely completed his concentration and terraced
the walls of the Château Narbonaise with emplacements for catapults
to fire upon the works which the Toulousains had thrown up to
confront it. But despite this heavy “artillery support,” the attack
which he delivered was repulsed with loss, and Guy was wounded.
Clearly a regular siege was necessary, and Count Simon called a
council of war and resigned himself in sombre anger to listen to the
advice of his barons and clergy as to how such an operation might be
made good.

Throughout the true Middle Ages it was extremely difficult—in
fact, almost impossible—to contain, that is to hold continuous
lines all around, one of the first-class cities of the time. The
sudden, spontaneous expansion of Christendom, reflected especially
in the size of those cities, had been accompanied by no adequate
corresponding increase of public powers, and by no system of banking
and floating credit. Therefore, it was almost impossible to raise and
maintain an army of sufficient size for such an undertaking. Very few
mediæval commanders would risk attacking, let alone laying regular
siege to, a first-class city. In this case the circumference of the
defences to be attacked was over 1,600 yards on the right or east
bank alone plus a bridgehead on the left or west bank. In the council
of war Bishop Fulk pointed out that it would be useless to blockade
the city proper if the bridgehead were not blockaded also. The double
task was accordingly undertaken.

Having contained the bridgehead, de Montfort’s main task was to make
it as difficult as possible for the city proper, on the right bank,
to communicate with the open country. Even if he could not make good
his blockade, he might be able to annoy the citizens so much that
they would end by surrendering.

Throughout the siege both sides continued to receive reinforcements.
The Count of Foix, together with certain Aragonese and Catalans,
joined the besieged, so that it was possible to make an active
defence with continual sorties. De Montfort’s reinforcements seem to
have come in more slowly, and to have consisted mainly of mercenary
troops. At first de Montfort himself took station on the left bank
opposite the bridgehead, so as to hinder communication between the
town and the friendly country to the south-west. Shortly after the
arrival of Foix and the Spaniards, he was forced to return to the
right bank by a vigorous sortie, against the Chateau Narbonaise, and
the entrenched camp of the Crusaders which was growing up around it
to the south of the town. Throughout the late autumn continual sharp
skirmishing went on south of the town in the space between the walls
and the entrenchments of the camp. During the winter the Crusaders
attempted a surprise attack at dawn, and broke into the city, but
were repulsed with nothing gained. With the spring both sides were
reinforced. De Montfort was forced to withdraw the lines of his
entrenched camp some distance further from the town, abandoning many
of the shelters he had constructed. The besieged thereupon began
attacking the Château Narbonaise, when a high flood of the Garonne
not only cramped their operation but hindered their communications
with their bridgehead so that Count Simon was able, by long and
obstinate fighting, to win the bridgehead altogether. Further, with
the reinforcements which kept coming in, he was able to extend his
entrenched lines from the Château Narbonaise (which stood on the
river bank above the town) to a point opposite the great church of
St. Sernin. But he could not close the space between St. Sernin and
the river bank below the town or prevent the movement of boats on
the lower river. Further, while the morale of the besieged was as
high as ever, and their defences were always being made stronger,
in de Montfort’s camp the strain was beginning to tell. The legate
taunted him to madness with his failure to get a decision. Money
to pay the numerous mercenaries was running short. In vain Pope
Honorius alternately threatened and pleaded with the Kings of France
and of Aragon, the Count of Foix, the younger Raymond, the citizens
of Toulouse, Avignon, Marseilles, and anyone else who occurred to
him. Clearly, either matters must be brought to a head, or the siege
raised.

De Montfort was not the man to admit himself beaten. He determined
on a decisive assault by means of a large “cat,” a movable wooden
gallery with a steep roof covered with raw hides to prevent fire.
Under such cover the defences might be approached and sapped. At
the first attempt the “cat” was injured by stones from catapults.
Strengthened, it was moved forward a second time, “moving with jerky
little steps,” as an eye witness reports. Without waiting for it to
reach their lines, the besieged began a general sortie. De Montfort
himself was at mass when this news was brought to him. “I will not
go,” he said, “until I have seen my Saviour.” Not until after the
elevation of the Host did he take command. Then he concentrated his
men and had driven the Toulousains back to their walls, when a stone
from a catapult worked by women struck him on the head. He fell and
died in a few minutes, his face all bloody and black where the helm
had been driven in upon it. A few days after a final attack was made
and repulsed, upon which the siege was raised.

Despite de Montfort’s apparent failure his work was decisive. The
eight years during which he had maintained himself in Languedoc had
not only seen many “Frenchmen” assigned to lands there, they had also
seen the moral and political prestige of the southern nobles damaged
beyond repair. Toulouse had definitely lost any chance she may have
had of rallying the south about her to make head against Paris.
Languedoc with her wealth, her culture, and her indifference to the
moral unity of Europe, was destined to go under. The great tolerant
southern houses were to be swallowed up by the “most Christian” kings
of France, who represented the new, vague, but enormous idea of the
nation. De Montfort, dead and apparently beaten, had changed the
course of history.

The next six years of the Crusade (1218-1224) saw only small wars.
They are marked by a single brief and inconclusive campaign,
commanded by Louis of France.

The permanent effect of de Montfort’s work did not at first appear.
His son Amaury could not fill his place. Philip Augustus promptly
permitted Prince Louis to lead another crusading army, with Cardinal
Bertrand, the new papal legate, at his side. At Marmande a massacre
was achieved fit to rejoice the heart of any mediæval Crusader, but
Toulouse successfully resisted another siege, and the army returned
home having accomplished nothing. In fact the desultory fighting
which went on after its departure ran somewhat in favour of Raymond.
Amaury’s strength was mainly in his possession of Carcassonne, on
account of its great natural and artificial strength under the
conditions of the time, together with its powerful strategic position
commanding the highway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
But Simon’s son had so little of the ability of his father that he
could not prevent Raymond from winning back, bit by bit, much of his
old domain. In 1220 Raymond retook Lavaur and slaughtered every man
in it except a handful who escaped by swimming down the Agout. The
Crusaders had no monopoly of massacre.

Meanwhile Pope Honorius tried every means at his command to push
matters, but without success. A new legate, Conrad of Porto by name,
set up a military order patterned after the Templars and Hospitallers
under the name of “Knights of the Faith of Jesus Christ,” but the new
foundation achieved little. In the following year Honorius published
a sentence of excommunication and exhereditation against the entire
Toulousain House, and raised enough money to set on foot another
expedition under Prince Louis. But the Prince turned his army against
La Rochelle and took that city from Henry III of England, so that the
net result of the Pope’s effort to settle Languedocian affairs was
just nothing.

Early in 1222, four years after his father’s death, Amaury de
Montfort recognized his position as hopeless and offered all that he
possessed or claimed in Languedoc to Philip Augustus. This brought
on a year full of diplomacy. Amaury urged Honorius to support his
action, and the Pope did so, pointing out the deplorable state of
religion in Languedoc, where heresy was openly preached and seemed
ineradicable. Philip refused, the obstinate caution of the Capets
strong in him. Even the offer of a twentieth of the entire income
of the Church in France together with all manner of indulgences did
not tempt him. Next Amaury made his offer to Thibaut, the powerful
Count of Champagne, but again King Philip blocked matters by refusing
to exempt Thibaut from service to the Crown in case of a break with
Henry of England. In August Raymond died. His son, succeeding him
under the title of Raymond VII, promptly wrote to Philip Augustus to
ask his suzerain’s help towards the removal of the Pope’s sentence
of excommunication and exhereditation against himself. In December,
Amaury repeated his offer to the King, and again the King refused.

The confused and indecisive negotiations of 1222 had at least the
result of convincing both the new legate and the King of France that
Languedoc must be stabilized, and that promptly. The legate saw that
heresy was again on the increase, favoured by the confusion born of
the long war. The King felt himself near his end—he was suffering
from continual fevers—and he feared that after his own death Louis,
with his amiable character and weak health, would find himself drawn
into the Languedocian business by the clergy and would die too of
the fatigue of it, so that the kingdom would be left in the hands
of a woman, Louis’ wife, and of an infant, who was to be St. Louis.
Accordingly, when the legate called a council at Sens for the purpose
of reconciling Amaury and Raymond VII, Philip asked and obtained
a change of meeting place to Paris in order that he himself might
be present. He was in the provinces, down with another attack of
fever, but felt so deeply the need of a definite settlement that he
risked the fatigues of the journey, and died on the way. True to his
policy of supporting the de Montforts, but cautiously and without
identifying himself with their cause, in his will he left Amaury
thirty thousand livres.

Within a few months after Philip’s death, the first of the events his
wisdom had foreseen actually came about. Amaury’s financial position
had become so bad that in January 1224 he patched up a provisional
treaty with Toulouse and Foix, used most of Philip’s legacy to pay
off his garrisons, and definitely evacuated Languedoc. The Archbishop
of Bourges, together with the Bishops of Langres and Chartres, asked
Louis to grant him the reversion of the office of Constable of
France, and, with this understanding, for the third time he offered
his Languedocian possessions and claims to the French Crown. In
February the offer was accepted.

With the acceptance of Amaury’s offer by the French Crown begins the
last or monarchical phase of the Crusade, which lasts three years
(1224-1227). In it the small war continues—varied by a single major
operation, a second campaign under Louis VIII, the amiable son of the
wise and crafty Philip Augustus, which operation fails. Despite this
military failure, the war ends in a political decision against the
House of Toulouse.

The citizens of Narbonne (royalist like all townsmen because of the
internal peace and order the Crown stood for) were promptly assured
by a letter from the King that he would lead a Crusade which should
march three weeks after Easter. In dealing with the Pope, Louis
made conditions. Rome was to give him one of his own prelates (the
Archbishop of Bourges) for legate instead of the Italian Cardinal
Bertrand of Porto, indulgences were to be the same as for a Crusade
to Palestine, any of his vassals who might refuse service were to be
excommunicated, and Roman diplomacy was to do its utmost to assure
him peace with all other possible foreign enemies. Finally, the
Church was to give him twenty thousand livres of Paris per year out
of its revenues during the Crusade, which was to begin and end when
Louis chose. It was a formidable list, but the Church could hardly
find any conditions too hard.

At this point matters were held up by another of the innumerable
shifts of purpose in the Roman Curia. Henry III of England was
Raymond’s kinsman. Moreover, Bordeaux and all the lands still left
to the Plantagenet in Aquitaine would be dangerously isolated should
the county of Toulouse become French Crown land. Accordingly, English
influence at Rome was exerted in Raymond’s favour. The young Count
of Toulouse himself caused his own ambassadors to promise full
obedience to the See of Peter, and through them made exceedingly
handsome “presents” to all who might possibly have influence with the
Pope. These tactics succeeded so well that Honorius wrote favourably
to Raymond, promising to send a new legate (Cardinal Romano of St.
Angelo) to arrange matters; and wrote to Louis saying that the
Emperor Frederic II’s proposed Crusade was so important that no other
crusading indulgences could be issued for the present. The papal
letter to the King went on to say that if Louis would but keep on
threatening Raymond, the Count must end by giving in. The veteran
Arnaut Amalric was directed to lead the local bishops in pressing
Raymond VII to make no reservations in his offer of submission to
the Church. The legate formally withdrew the Albigensian crusading
indulgences and warranted Raymond VII as a good Catholic at a
“parliament” in Paris. Louis disgustedly washed his hands of the
whole matter, wrote to the Pope that he, Louis, had been played with
and tricked, and that Rome might do what it liked without his help
so long as his own rights as lay sovereign were not infringed. The
French force which was already on foot was used to capture some of
the Aquitanian castles still held for Henry III of England.

For a time it looked as if the peace would stand. Under the tutelage
of Arnaut Amalric, Raymond VII agreed to enforce anti-heretical
legislation as thorough as even the grim old Cistercian could
desire. With the Count of Foix and the Bishop of Beziers to confirm
his signature, the young Count promised banishment, confiscation
of goods and physical punishment of heretics, dismissal of all
bandit mercenaries, internal peace and order, restoration of
Church privileges and an indemnity of twenty thousand marks to be
used partly for repayment of damage to ecclesiastical property in
Languedoc during the fighting, and partly (in case the Pope obtained
a formal and complete renunciation of the Montfortist claims) to
Amaury as compensation. If all this was not enough, Raymond VII
agreed to put himself entirely in the Church’s hands, reserving
only his allegiance to the King. All of which was agreed to by an
Ecclesiastical Council, which Arnaut Amalric attended, at Montpellier
in June. Amaury vainly protested, before this decision was taken,
saying that Louis was about to act and that the whole Church would be
scandalized by such compounding with the House of Toulouse. Unlike
his father, Raymond VII made some attempt to confirm promises with
deeds, for he restored the See of Agde to Theodisius. Everything
seemed to point to confirmation of the settlement by the Pope and an
end to the whole Albigensian war.

Again, as had so often happened, Rome reversed the decision of the
Languedocian Church, only this time the local clergy were for peace
and it was the Curia that was for war. Toulousain promises had too
often proved broken reeds. Heresy was again raising its head; another
public debate like those of the years just before the Crusade had
even been held, and heretical “bishoprics” were multiplying. All this
must have been well known at Rome. Moreover, not a few of the local
clergy had increased their possessions during the war and had no wish
to go back to the _status quo_. Finally, Louis sent Guy de Montfort
to oppose the settlement. From October, 1224, until after the new
year Honorius refused to move.

When at last the Pope’s decision was made it was hostile to Raymond.
Cardinal Romano of St. Angelo was again sent as legate to France to
threaten the young Count and to try to patch up a truce so that
Louis might be free to use his whole strength in Languedoc. During
this year, nothing happened. Raymond VII, who had permitted the
Dominicans to preach in Toulouse against heresy, and welcomed the
Franciscan Saint Anthony of Padua, offered a national Church council
at Bourges such unreserved submission that the council could not
bring itself to condemn him, but broke up without giving a decision.
To meet the situation, Cardinal Romano the legate ordered each
archbishop to take counsel with his suffragans and give him written
decisions to transmit to Louis and the Pope. The strictest secrecy
was to be kept in the matter of these decisions. Anyone who revealed
them was to be excommunicated on the spot. Clearly such a system
would enable Pope and King to do exactly as they pleased. Raymond
could not flatter himself that the attack would be delayed much
longer, especially as the English had decided to leave Louis free
to weaken himself by taking on the difficult job of breaking the
high spirit of a district removed by so great a distance from his
base of operations. Further, old Arnaut Amalric, who had helped play
the Toulousain game ever since becoming a Languedocian Archbishop
himself, chose this unfortunate moment to die, and to be succeeded in
the Archbishopric of Narbonne by Peter Amiel, a bitter enemy of the
young Raymond.

In January, 1226, a grand parliament of the kingdom was held in
Paris. An address from the nobles was presented to Louis asking
that he undertake the Crusade. This he accordingly did, with the
reservation that he must be free to break off the campaign when
he should so desire. Raymond’s full submission at Bourges two
months before had prejudiced many French nobles in his favour, but
nevertheless nearly all of them took the cross with their King. The
one interruption to the proceedings was the Pope’s action in ordering
those of the nobles of Aquitaine and Poitou who had changed their
allegiance from English to French to change back again. The action
of the Pope was entirely defensible on moral grounds but had been
brought about (so the chroniclers say) by liberal use of English and
Toulousain money at Rome, as any trouble between the two crowns at
this time would benefit Toulouse enormously. Louis promptly went to
work to show even greater liberality to the Curia; the Papal orders
were suspended, and the preparations for the Crusade were resumed. At
a parliament held on March 29 orders were issued to concentrate at
Bourges on May 17. Service was to be for the duration of the King’s
stay in the South, instead of for forty days as before. The ruinous
effects of short enlistments had been as much of a curse to former
Crusades to Languedoc as to Washington in the American Revolution.
Raymond VII was supported only by the Count of Foix. Comminges
had made his peace, and Louis had taken diplomatic precautions to
prevent any intervention from Spain. Everything pointed to a complete
conquest of the South, except the delicate health of the King, on
whom the whole enterprise depended, since his presence in the field
was necessary to keep the army together.

On the appointed day, the army mustered at Bourges. Louis was deaf
to the pleas of the numerous clergy who begged of him remission
of the heavy tithe laid on them. He further swelled his war-chest
by accepting money payments instead of field service from certain
nobles not keen for the expedition. Even after these exemptions had
been granted, the army was enormous for the time. There were fifty
thousand knights and mounted men-at-arms, and “innumerable” infantry
it is said. The line of operations was on Lyons, and thence down the
Rhône, as in 1209.

There was no resistance until Avignon was reached on June 10. There
the citizens refused the “French” entry and manned their walls,
although they promised not to harass the army in its march if they
were left in peace. The place was within the Holy Roman Empire, but
Cardinal Romano, the legate, urged Louis to destroy it inasmuch as it
had remained ten years excommunicate and impenitent for tolerating
Waldensianism, so the King laid siege to it. The incident shows how
easy it was to influence Louis and draw him away from the central
matter in hand, and also, very significantly, how Waldenses were now
attacked as readily as Manicheans. The siege dragged on throughout
the summer and into the autumn. Raymond of Toulouse cleverly seized
his opportunity to move up and lay waste the country from which the
besieging army must draw food and forage. Disease and a plague of
flies in the French camp made matters worse. On top of this Pierre
Mauclerc, Louis’s second cousin, quarrelled with the King and left
the army. Philip Augustus had made this man Count of Brittany by
marrying him to the heiress of that fief, and now that she was dead
he was out to marry the heiress of Flanders and was angry when Louis
thwarted him. So he went off, after serving for forty days, and
began strengthening his castles and intriguing with the disaffected
Counts of Champagne and of La Marche in Poitou, both of whom were
supposed to have an understanding with Raymond. But Louis, although
easy to persuade, was not easy to discourage. He stuck to it until,
after three months’ siege, Avignon surrendered on September 10.
The citizens had been brought very low by the long blockade. They
therefore consented to pay ransom, demolish or dismantle their
fortifications, and accept from the legate a bishop pledged to
suppress heresy.

After the long delay at Avignon the army was at last directed against
Toulouse. Almost all the Languedocian cities, including Nismes,
Narbonne, Carcassonne, Albi, Beziers, Marseilles, Castres, and
Puylaurens had already declared for Church and King. But, just as the
end seemed in sight, the hardships of the campaign forced Louis to
turn homewards, sick with dysentery. At Montpensier, in Auvergne, on
November 8, he died. Within a little over three years after Philip
Augustus’s death, his fear had been realized: the kingdom he had
given his life to build was in the hands of a woman and child.

Despite this perilous state of affairs, the ideas of centralization
and nationality had been so quickened that their growth was hardly
checked. At first, to be sure, there was confusion, during which
Raymond was able to recover some ground. Louis’ widow, the able and
pious Blanche of Castille, was busy getting her 11 year old son,
Louis IX, crowned at Rheims. Meanwhile the Counts of La Marche,
Champagne, and Brittany intrigued busily with each other and with
England, and prepared for open rebellion. Blanche’s position was
so difficult that operations on a large scale in Languedoc could
not be continued. Nevertheless the ground already won was held by
the royal troops, under the energetic Humbert of Beaujeu who had
been left in command in the theatre of war by Louis when he turned
homeward to die. As long as Humbert’s force was kept “in being” in
the South, the crusading tithes on Church property continued to flow
into the royal treasury. During Lent in the year 1227, a local Church
council at Narbonne excommunicated those who had broken their oaths
sworn to Louis and ordered stricter persecution of heretics, showing
therefore that some oaths had been broken and that persecution was
not being carried on as faithfully as it might have been. Throughout
the year the fighting swayed back and forth. Humbert de Beaujeu, with
Archbishop Peter Amiel, of Narbonne, and Bishop Fulk, of Toulouse,
at his side, took the castle of Becede, massacred the garrison and
joyously burned some heretics. Raymond VII, for his part, recovered
the town of Castel Sarrasin on the middle Garonne, but was not strong
enough to keep the royalists from laying waste the countryside clear
up to the walls of Toulouse.

Both sides were weary of war. The drain on the royal resources was
serious, especially in view of the hostile attitude of the three
northern Counts, and the Church tithes came in slowly and caused
endless friction to collect. On the other hand, Raymond saw his
position in the eyes of the world steadily going from bad to worse
as his overlord continued to make war against him in the name of the
Church. Clearly, if he could save anything at all by submission,
he had better make haste to do so. Finally, the third party to the
matter, the papacy, had also become anxious for peace in Languedoc.
In March, 1227, the mild and aged Honorius III had died and been
succeeded as Pope by Gregory IX, equally aged but far harsher than
his predecessor. In spite of his eighty years, Gregory was determined
to oppose the Emperor Frederic II, who had been growing ever more
powerful and readier to oppose the Church ever since his guardian
Innocent III had died. For a collision with Frederic, the Church must
concentrate all her strength. The Languedocian business, therefore,
was better out of the way.

With all three parties to the dispute equally determined upon a
settlement, there remained only the question of ways and means.
Raymond VII had no son and only one daughter, Jeanne. To betroth her
to one of the younger brothers of the King would assure the ultimate
reversion of the entire Toulousain heritage to the Crown. The Church
would back the Crown in obtaining a settlement favourable to the
King of France, granted that strong and systematic measures were
taken against heresy. A papal letter of March, 1228, to Cardinal
Romano the legate, shows that the proposed marriage was the heart of
the negotiations. A second letter, of October 21 in the same year,
renewing the crusading indulgences, shows that pressure upon Raymond
was necessary in order to make him accept the terms proposed. To the
same end, it seems that there was further devastation of Toulousain
territory. In December Raymond gave in, and named Count Thibaut of
Champagne as his agent with full power to negotiate in his behalf. In
January, 1229, the parties in interest, including representatives of
the municipality of Toulouse, met at Meaux and signed a preliminary
agreement. On Holy Thursday, before the great western doorways of
Notre Dame de Paris, was enacted the last scene of the long drama.
There Raymond came before the legate, bare-footed like his father
twenty years before at St. Gilles and clad only in his shirt. He then
walked the length of the church to be “reconciled” as a penitent
before the high altar. This done, he yielded himself the King’s
prisoner in the Louvre, until such time as his daughter and five of
his castles should be in royal hands, and five hundred “toises” (over
a thousand yards) of the long-suffering walls of Toulouse should be
demolished. The end had come.

The terms were hard. Raymond was to pursue heretics and their
“favorers” without reserve, even to his nearest kinsmen. The familiar
conditions of restoration of Church property, dismissal of bandit
mercenaries, and establishing public security, again appear. In
addition, the Count was to pay handsomely for ten years, “two masters
in theology, two decretalists and six masters in grammar and the
liberal arts” as members of the faculty of Toulouse University.
He made also the familiar promise to crusade to Palestine, and
engaged to do so within two years and remain in the Holy Land five
years more. He, and after him his daughter Jeanne, were to retain
Toulouse itself, Agen, Rouergue, Quercy except Cahors, and part of
the district of Albi. The duchy of Narbonne and the counties of
Velay, Gevaudan, Viviers, and Lodeve reverted at once to the Crown.
The Church took the “Marquisate of Provence” a fief of the Empire
to the east of the Rhône. Jeanne’s betrothal to Prince Alphonse, a
child of nine, was treated as a royal “grace” bestowed on Raymond,
and so was the royal amnesty to the numerous prescribed gentlemen of
Languedoc, except the heretics among them. His vassals and people
also subscribed to the conditions, and swore to acknowledge the
King as their sole lord after forty days should Raymond fail in any
particular. The glory had departed from Toulouse.

The settlement ended the struggle. The Count of Foix came in and made
his peace the following year. Raymond seems to have lived up to the
conditions, except that he kept putting off crusading to Palestine.
In 1237 the light-weight Amaury de Montfort played the fool by
calling himself Duke of Narbonne and by making attempts on the county
of Melgueil in his own name, and on Dauphiné in the name of his wife.
Gregory IX brought him up with a round turn and ordered him off to
Palestine. His ill luck held; he was taken prisoner by the Saracens
and held for three years until Gregory ransomed him, whereupon he
ended his futile life at Otranto, on his way home in 1241. In 1240,
there was a last flicker of local independence. The last of the
Trencavels scraped up some support in Spain and laid siege to his
ancestral city of Carcassonne. There was no movement in his favour
among the people, and he was unable to reduce the royal garrison, so
he ravaged the countryside before taking himself off and disappearing
from history. Seven years later Raymond VII died, in the midst of
preparing for his long-postponed crusade to Palestine. Countess
Jeanne and Prince Alphonse, who had been duly married, succeeded to
what was left of his possessions. In 1271 they died without issue and
King Philip III, St. Louis’ heir, took their lands.

Summarizing the four phases of the war, in the first the Crusaders
appear in great force in obedience to the Church and take Beziers and
Carcassonne. This phase lasts only a few months in 1209.

The second phase (1209-1212) begins with the appointment of Simon de
Montfort, nominally to govern the conquered territory and really to
root out the tolerant southern houses. Personal interests now take
their place beside religious interests. The second phase lasts for
three years. Throughout this period Simon de Montfort uses his scanty
resources with such ability that he not only maintains himself but
also extends his holdings over the greater part of the country in
dispute.

The third phase (1213-1224) begins when Simon breaks the formidable
intervention of Pedro, King of Aragon. The capital point of Toulouse
he is unable to take, or to hold it after it is adjudged to him by
the Lateran Council, and he is finally killed beneath its walls.
He is successful in that he weakens the prestige of the House of
Toulouse due to the long war waged against it in the name of religion.

After Simon de Montfort’s death, for seven years his son continues to
lose ground, and finally resigns his claims in favour of the French
Crown.

The third, or royal phase, lasts three years (1224-1227). An imminent
decision by arms, in favour of the Crown and against the House of
Toulouse, is averted by King Louis VIII’s death, and finally, in
1229, a treaty is made, providing for the eventual absorption of
Toulouse by the Crown.

The net results are: (first) the establishment of French national
unity down to our own day, with no prospect of its dissolution:
(second) the re-establishment of the moral unity of Europe,
threatened at the beginning of the thirteenth century by the
Albigensian movement; which moral unity, so re-established, endured
until the convulsion of the sixteenth century, in which the modern
world was born.




CHAPTER VI.

THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THE INQUISITION.


The political decision achieved by the Albigensian Crusade, in the
hands of the French Crown, against the House of Toulouse, permitted
the establishment of the Inquisition in Languedoc, the centre of
thirteenth century heresy. Now the subject of this book is not so
much the Inquisition itself as the forces which established it.
Therefore the military and political struggle in which the House of
Toulouse went under has been narrated at some length, as well as
the events leading up to that struggle. But it is also necessary to
our subject to note the workings of these forces when regular armed
resistance had ceased.

That resistance had not been in the name of heresy against
Catholicism, but only in defence of some measure of toleration from
the State to the heretical bodies. Tolerance was not even expressly
stated as the motive of those who resisted the Crusade, but only
implied by their conduct. The point is worth noting. Not one of the
southern lords who resisted the Crusade was himself a heretic. None
of them, except Raymond Roger of Foix, was ever proved to have so
much as taken any particular interest in heresy as a fad, an object
of curiosity. Pedro of Aragon was the Pope’s vassal and “First
Standard Bearer of the Church.” Raymond VI of Toulouse had been all
his life a Catholic, and died with all the consolations of religion,
having on the morning of his sudden death gone twice to the church
of La Daurade in Toulouse to pray. After his death the honour of
burying his remains was disputed for years between the Parish of St.
Sernin and the Knights Hospitallers of Toulouse. Those who resisted
the Crusaders fought so that they might not be compelled to suppress
the heretics among whom they lived, and especially that they might
not be deprived of power and possessions by North Frenchmen who came
to seize their lands in perpetuity as a reward for bringing about
suppression of heresy.

Nowhere else in Europe was there regular armed opposition. In Italy,
which was (after Languedoc) the stronghold of mediæval Manicheanism,
the heretics of Orvieto had caused a riot and the assassination of
a zealous Catholic magistrate in 1199-1200. In Viterbo, a few years
later, the citizens elected certain heretical magistrates, and
it needed harsh words from Innocent before they would consent to
disqualify them. But compared to the Albigensian business this was
child’s play. In Languedoc the battle was fought and won.

But in order to hold a country it is necessary not only to conquer
it, but also to organize it. After the conquest force is no longer
needed on a large scale, it still plays its part, but only in
the enforcement of decisions arrived at by some form of law. And
although force plays a greater part in the conflicts of ideas than
is theoretically admitted nowadays, nevertheless it is not the
chief instrument of those conflicts. The chief instrument is, of
course, persuasion. At the end of the Albigensian war there was no
longer organized opposition in Europe to the enforcement of judicial
decisions against heresy, and these judicial decisions were made by
the Inquisition. Meanwhile, before the fighting had ceased, there
were already in existence two powerful new bodies organized for the
use of persuasion in the cause of the Church, the Dominicans and the
Franciscans, who may be grouped as the Mendicant Orders.

From the beginning, Francis and Dominic agreed in this, that they
uncloistered the monk. Instead of withdrawing their friars from the
world, they launched them into the midst of it to strive, by precept
and example, to win souls. In particular St. Dominic enlisted his
“Friar Preachers” to preach against heresy, and St. Francis to preach
the love of God after a fashion that did away with that grimness of
early mediæval religion which had nourished the over-ascetic heresies
such as the Manichean.

It is hard not to linger over St. Francis of Assisi. A true Italian
and a child of his time, it is not surprising that he sometimes
seems to us extravagant. When we hear of him rolling naked in a rose
bush to drive away the temptations of sex, or having himself dragged
through the streets and beaten, as penance for having eaten a morsel
of chicken in Lent, we are as much puzzled as repelled. We may even
lend an ear to doctors who tell us that there is a perversion of the
lusts of the flesh called Masochism, in which the subject derives
pleasure from pain. The saint himself repented at the end of having
caused his body to suffer as he had done; “I have sinned against my
brother the ass,” he said as he lay dying. And yet, all in all, he
remains the most Christ-like of Christians. His tenderness to mankind
was all-embracing, and went out beyond man to the beasts, and even to
natural objects. To him all nature was a fascinating little sister,
to be laughed at, petted and caressed. The sun was our brother: to
him he wrote a canticle. The birds were our little brothers: to them
he preached as they clustered around him. Even the wolf, whom the
saint turned from his evil courses, was “Brother Wolf.” Death was but
“our sister, the death of the body,” and the very devils were “God’s
warders.”

This spirit was the precise opposite to that grimness in the
religious feeling of a century before. To the men of the early
twelfth century, for instance to Abelard, the claims of religion were
inexorably stern. They could no more be reconciled with any sort of
human affection, than could the unyielding round arch adjust itself
to vault the irregular compartments of nave and ambulatory. In human
feeling, as in architecture, the result was ugly distortion, and it
was precisely this distorted feeling that produced Manicheanism.
Clearly, if God was good and loving and the world utterly vile, then
God had not made the world. The Devil had made it, and was by that
act co-equal, if not for the time being, superior, in power to God
Himself. Not so, said St. Francis, the earth is the Lord’s, and it
is beautiful. Only pride, both pride of possessions and pride of
intellect, stands in the way of happiness. So he joyously married his
“Lady Poverty,” and once refused to let a hesitating novice possess
so much as a breviary. Under the busy brushes of Giotto and the other
painters of the Franciscan legend, the Holy Family, without ceasing
to be a symbol of the faith, became also the emblem of innocent and
happy domestic life.

St. Francis did not begin the humanizing of religion. The change had
already begun before the middle of the twelfth century with the cult
of the Virgin. There is a legend that once, when St. Bernard was
praying to her, and had come to the words, “Show that thou art the
mother,” Our Lady appeared to him and from her breast dropped on his
lips three drops of the milk that had nourished the Saviour. That
is already far from the atmosphere of Abelard and Heloise. Already,
in St. Bernard’s time, the north-French architects were beginning
to break up the unyielding Norman and Lombard round arches into the
pointed form, and the same period was evidently trying to resolve
the distortion of religion and human love. St. Francis enormously
enlarged and deepened the new current of religious thought. The
climax was reached after his death in the story of the Miracle of
Bolsena. Here, in 1263, a priest without faith in the Real Presence
of our Lord in the Host, saw the wafer which he himself had just
consecrated covered with drops of blood. About half a century before,
in neighbouring Orvieto, a zealous Catholic magistrate had been
murdered by the Manichees. Now the Church insisted that God gave His
very self to be the food of all men, even to the poor, the serf, and
the humble.

St. Dominic was of a different temper, and attacked the problem in a
different way. Dante calls him—

  “... the holy athlete, Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”

and praises him for wisdom, whereas he praises St. Francis for
“seraphic ardour.” Instead of being above all a poet and mystic,
like the Poverello of Assisi, St. Dominic was an organizer and
statesman. There was a strain of ecclesiastical anarchism in the
early Franciscan Order; certain “spiritual” Franciscans of the late
thirteenth and early fourteenth century rebelled against religious
authority as no Dominicans have ever done. Where the Italian saint
puts an example ahead of precept, the Spaniard put precept ahead of
example. To him the weakness of the Church was that not enough of her
clergy knew thoroughly her doctrine and were able to teach it. For
him, as for the prophet Hosea, the “... people were destroyed for
lack of knowledge.” His order was vowed to learning. Indeed, it was
a Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, who has left us the most complete
and harmonious of all human attempts to analyse the universe. Instead
of attacking in flank by destroying the mood out of which the ultra
ascetic, and in particular the Manichean heresies grew, St. Dominic
attacked heresy in front by direct argument. His “Preaching Friars”
observed strict poverty, not so much as a good in itself, as did St.
Francis, but rather in the spirit of the soldier who lightens his
pack the better to take the field. As they went to and fro, begging
their bread, they escaped the poor man’s envy which dogged the
footsteps of the wealthy bishops and the abbots of the older orders.
Thus they were equally free to debate with the philosophers in the
turbulent universities, or to set forth the Faith in words of one
syllable to simple folk.

The organizers, those carpenters and stonemasons of history, are
obscure by contrast with its artists and sculptors. Just so the
personality of St. Dominic (at least in the Protestant world) has
been overshadowed by that of St. Francis. Even the Church which they
both served canonized Francis within two years after he was dead, and
waited thirteen before canonizing Dominic.

But if the Poverello of Assisi had more poetry in him, the Spanish
gentleman had more statesmanship. The organization of the Franciscan
Order fluctuated violently and finally settled down into a copy
of the Dominican. According to the first Franciscan Rule, that of
1221, a Friar is not bound to obey his superiors when that superior
commands him to do something against the “life,” a proposition so
impossible in practice that it survived only two years. On the
other hand, down to 1240, the Head of the Franciscan Order was
undisputed Cæsar, nominating lesser officers and legislating either
without any Chapter (i.e., Assembly) or with a Chapter composed
exclusively of officers appointed by himself. This again worked so
badly that in 1240 the organization was changed so as to add elected
representatives of the Chapter General, and to make the nomination of
lesser officers a function of the Chapter General so constituted;
both of which features were typically Dominican, and had been part of
the first Constitution of that Order.

As with the constitution of their Order so with the Higher Learning.
Here too the Franciscans found themselves compelled by force of
circumstances to abandon their own founder’s distinctive teaching
and follow the lead of the Dominicans. Whereas St. Francis himself
feared and hated learning, even before his death some of the greatest
scholars in Christendom wore the Franciscan habit.

To the subjects of representative government and of learning I shall
return for a moment at the close of the chapter in the attempt to
estimate the permanent value of the thirteenth century achievement.
The point I now make is that, in both respects, St. Dominic builded
so much better (at least for his generation) than St. Francis that
the Franciscans themselves soon adopted Dominican methods. And
this was true not only in regard to learning and representative
government, but also with regard to the Inquisition.

Both of the mendicant orders were formed, as a modern would say, “for
service.” They were democratic in constitution: the Dominicans had
been so from their origin. Indeed it has been claimed with some show
of reason that it was the Dominicans who first brought representative
government from its original home near the Pyrenees into England.
They addressed themselves particularly to the poorer and the less
fortunate of mankind. Whereas the older orders of monks had retired
to the wilderness, or at least to the country, the mendicants
laboured chiefly in the fast growing towns characteristic of the
new and sudden mediæval rise out of the Dark Ages. It is always in
towns that the human struggle for life is sharpest and the results of
defeat most provocative of pity.

Although the ministrations of the friars were often very different in
kind from those of the “social worker” of to-day, inasmuch as they
were concerned first of all to bear witness to the Faith whereas the
average “social worker” is concerned chiefly with conferring material
benefits (I suspect that is why he, or she, does not accomplish
more), still social worker and mendicant friar have this essential
in common in that the purpose of both was to “do things” for the
poor. Alas! in the garden of “social service” a serpent lies in
wait for poor erring humans, and his name is Tyranny. Those who are
the objects of ministrations, being human, too often receive them
unwillingly and prefer their own ways. And those who would minister,
being equally human, when they see their good works (as they think
them) rejected by those whom they would benefit, too often seek
forcibly to compel acceptance.

Of course such people believe that they know better than the
rejectors (who are, in practice, the more independent and
self-respecting of the poor) what is good for the latter. But the
student of history shakes his head sadly, in the knowledge that the
innumerable oppressors of mankind have all believed that they could
govern people better than those whom they oppressed could govern
themselves.

The connection of St. Dominic himself with the Inquisition (using
the word loosely to cover all legal and judicial action against
heretics), although much disputed, is clear. The evidence consists
of two documents of St. Dominic’s own, and a tradition, written down
in its present form sixty-seven years after his death, which has
been accepted by all students of his life, including those who hold
that he had no connection with the Inquisition whatsoever. The first
document is a licence to a citizen in Toulouse to board a certain
converted heretic in his house until St. Dominic or the Cardinal
Legate should give orders to the contrary. The second enumerates the
provisions of the penance imposed upon another converted heretic.

Although this last has already been quoted in another chapter,
nevertheless it may be well to repeat it here. “Until the Lord Legate
(Arnaut Amalric) shall otherwise ordain” the unhappy man is to fast
forever “from flesh, eggs, cheese and all which comes from flesh
except at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas, when he shall eat some to
protest against his former errors.” He is to keep three Lents each
year, “fasting and abstaining from fish, unless from bodily infirmity
or the heat of the weather he shall be dispensed.” As make-weights,
he is to be beaten with rods upon his bare back, three Sundays
running, by his village priest; he is forever to wear a distinctive
dress marked with crosses to designate him as a former heretic, hear
mass every day “if possible” and vespers as well on festival days,
recite seventy paternosters a day and twenty in the middle of the
night. How this last provision was to be enforced unless some almost
equally unfortunate soul stayed awake to watch him is not stated.
Finally, once a month he is to show the parchment on which all this
is written to the village priest.

So much for the documents. The tradition is that the Saint secured
the release of a certain heretic who had been convicted and sentenced
to be burnt, acting on the strength of his own personal belief that
this particular culprit would eventually repent. Twenty years after,
the tradition goes on to say, the man did repent, and died in the
odour of sanctity, clad in Dominican habit.

For our purposes, the point of all three pieces of evidence is that
the power to loose implies an intimate connection with the power to
bind. The President of the United States and the Governors of States,
who have the pardoning power, are themselves the chief executive
officers of the nation and the States, and it is their sworn duty to
see that the laws are enforced. In St. Dominic’s case, the verdict is
conclusive. Virtually every reputable scholar of the present day is
agreed upon the point, including Roman Catholics writing under the
_nihil obstat_ and _imprimatur_ of Cardinals and Archbishops.

Among these last, Giraud sums up the verdict neatly: “Comparing with
all these documents the canon of the Council of Verona, renewed
in 1208 by the Council of Avignon, which orders that apostates
who, after being convicted of heresy by their Bishops or their
representatives, should obstinately persist in their errors, should
be delivered over to the secular arm, it would seem that it must
be concluded that, by virtue of the delegated authority of the
Cistercian monks, St. Dominic was to convict the heretics; and that,
in convicting them he delivered them up, indirectly but surely, to
execution, unless he suspended, by an act of clemency, the action of
that docile instrument of the Church, the secular arm. Doubtless he
did not himself pronounce the fatal sentence; but during their trial
he played the part of an expert in the matter of orthodoxy, or even
of a juror, transmitting to the court a verdict of guilty while
capable at the same time of signing a recommendation to mercy.”

It is, of course, true that the “bloody-minded Dominic,” that
favourite scarecrow of old-fashioned Protestant historians, never
existed. Not only the Bollandists and Lacordaire but also the whole
weight of modern scholarship agree on this point. Even Lea, almost
always accurate on points of fact even when he is most exasperating
in his utter lack of the realizing imagination so necessary to a
modern historian of the Middle Ages; even Lea, I say, admits that
the miracles ascribed to St. Dominic are almost all kindly ones,
and that the Saint was by no means notable among his contemporaries
for ferocity against heretics. Nor was he the “founder of the
Inquisition,” although he was a worker in it. It was the force of
circumstances and, in particular, the fact that both mendicant orders
were particularly dependent upon the Pope (and correspondingly
independent of the local clergy) that afterwards pushed forward
first the Dominicans and then the Franciscans into prominence as
Inquisitors.

The Albigensian struggle brought the Papal, as distinguished from the
Episcopal, Inquisition into being. Formerly the bishops had had sole
jurisdiction in matters of faith. Naturally, their policy against
heretics varied widely, so that, as we have seen in Chapter II, the
secular government and even the local mob often acted on their own
responsibility. Evidently the bishops were not in a position to deal
with heresy on a large scale. Attempts to hold them to their work,
such as the Imperial-Papal decree issued from Verona in 1184 (see
Chapter II), remained dead letters. In Languedoc, where both local
government and mob were unwilling to act, the local bishops did not
even try to do anything. Accordingly, as we have seen, Arnaut Amalric
and the other legates whose activities we have followed, were sent
by Innocent III to deal with the situation by virtue of authority
derived directly from himself as Pope without reference to the local
bishops—quite in the spirit in which President Cleveland sent federal
troops to quell the Chicago riots in 1894.

Besides the need for a strong hand in Languedoc—the chief cause of
the establishment of the Papal Inquisition—there was a second cause
which helped to keep alive the newly founded institution even after
military and political support of heresy in Languedoc had ceased.
This second cause was the need felt for order and regularity. We
have seen, in the first chapter, how order and right reason in all
things were the goals of the fresh, buoyant spirit of the time, and
how vast an event was the rediscovery of the Roman law, with its
enormous logic. The intellectual appetites of newly-awakened Europe
seized eagerly upon law as an object of study, at the same time that
the practical necessities of an expanding, intensely “progressive,”
society made the regular administration of law one of the chief
concerns of statesmen. To such a generation, it was intolerable that
so weighty a matter as that of variations from the faith should
be dealt with haphazard. In justice to those accused of heresy,
and to the Christian commonwealth as a whole—which our forefathers
considered much more—the serious business of judgment in such cases
deserved to be entrusted to the best qualified persons who could be
found. Here were the Dominicans, and after them the Franciscans,
learned in theology, independent of local prejudice, not apt to be
terrified by local influence, men who had given up everything so
that they might better serve the Church. Even though they shrank, as
they sometimes did, from the heavy responsibilities, fatigues, and
personal danger of acting as Inquisitors, the higher authorities of
State and Church combined to draft them into the service.

In one sense, then, it was a high desire for justice, for the
replacement of lynch law in heresy cases by a regular system of
procedure, which dictated the establishment of the Inquisition
(that is the Inquisition as a new instrument largely separate from
the older Church courts of canon law administered by the bishops).
At the same time, there are three facts which seem to show a baser
mind in those who co-operated in the gradual formation of the new
institution. The modern man is struck by the fact that the manner
of examination seems to offer insufficient guarantee against the
possibility of grave injustice to the accused; second, the use of
torture to compel confession. Finally, the modern man is appalled at
the extreme penalty by fire.

The main feature of the legal processes of the Inquisition is the
wide power of the Inquisitor. Instead of acting, as our judges do,
merely as referee between opposite sides, with a separate government
official for prosecutor, the Inquisitor was the prime mover of the
whole proceeding. Of his own motion he sought evidence and examined
witnesses and accused. In this there is some resemblance to modern
French procedure, and in a slighter degree, to the procedure in
American courts-martial which makes the judge-advocate at once
prosecutor and guarantor of the rights of the accused. The method
is derived from the Roman law. It was practised, in the times with
which we are concerned, by the “advanced” secular governments of the
day such as the Capetian and Plantagenet monarchies. Certain Italian
municipalities also seem to have made use of it. Besides being known
to contemporary secular justice, it was familiar to the educated men
of the time who were steeped in classical memories.

Under the Inquisition, matters went somewhat as follows: The
Inquisitors travelled about through the territories committed to
their charge preaching sermons against heresy, especially in places
where it was known to exist. In these sermons a “time of grace” was
promised, during which time all heretics who should come in and
confess their fault were to be admitted to mercy and reconciled with
the Church. Meanwhile, the faithful were asked to give information
as to local heretics. When the time of grace was up those accused
of heresy were arrested by armed servants of the Holy Office and
examined by the Inquisitor.

The evidence for the prosecution was usually furnished to the
accused, but in most cases the names of the witnesses who had given
it were concealed. This was a departure from the contemporary
procedure at canon law before the bishops. The argument in favour of
concealment was that it was the one way of protecting the witnesses
against reprisal by the friends of the accused in case of conviction.
Public security, it must be remembered, was not what it is to-day.
The best chance of having the indictment quashed was for the accused
to prove that the witnesses were his mortal enemies. The inquisitor
would, therefore, ask him whether he had any such, and if he had
anyone who (unknown to him of course) had testified, then the
evidence in question was stricken out and the whole case against him
received a damaging blow.

When the evidence was in and the prisoner had testified as to his
mortal enemies, then the crucial point of the examination was
reached. It was the business of the Inquisitor to satisfy himself
as to the guilt or innocence of the suspected heretic. There being
no organized jury system, the ideal way of establishing guilt was
to get the accused to confess. Confession was therefore sought by
all imaginable means, by prolonged theological discussion with
those capable of it, by efforts to entrap an unwary prisoner into
unintentional admissions, or by adjourning the inquiry in obstinate
cases so that the passage of time, sometimes even of years, in prison
might give the wretch full chance to think matters over.

The Inquisition differed from all secular justice in that it was
penitential, that is, it aimed to persuade those who had committed
certain sins to confess their fault and submit themselves to the
loving chastisement of Mother Church. The Inquisitor was in the
unique position of a judge who was always trying to turn himself into
a father-confessor.

When there was a strong presumption, but no conclusive proof, against
a prisoner who obstinately refused to confess, the Inquisitor was in
difficulties. His responsibility was even more than that of a modern
judge because only the germ of a jury system as yet existed. The
Inquisitor could, and usually did, summon experts (periti) or “good
men” (boni viri) to deliberate with him, and it was the custom for
him to follow their verdict, except when he thought it too harsh.
This rudimentary jury was made up of men learned in the civil or
canon law, usually mendicant friars. Its weakness was that it was
extremely difficult to get together qualified persons often enough
to give real consideration in each individual case. Indeed it was
physically impossible to do so when a large number of cases required
review, as would happen in the centres of heresy where the peril to
the Faith was greatest. Ignorance of the prisoners’ names lessened
their usefulness, for, as Vacandard ably puts it, “... tribunals
are to judge criminals and not crimes, just as physicians treat
sick people and not diseases in the abstract.” Therefore, to ease
the conscience of the judge in deciding doubtful cases, torture was
introduced to force confession when the evidence was not conclusive.

References to the use of torture are rare in the abundant records of
the Inquisition. Whether this is because its use was so repugnant
to the spirit of Christianity (and so unreliable a means for the
discovery of truth) that the recorders shrank from mentioning it on
paper, will never be known. Mediæval men in general were nothing
if not frank, and yet the verbal equivocations of the Inquisition
were many, as we shall see. Unfortunately, Roman precedents were
in its favour, although the Roman law forbade torture to be used
except against slaves. Roman freemen were liable to torture only in
the case of a crime against the Emperor. The men of the Middle Ages
seem to have thought of it as a substitute for the ordeal, which
was going out of fashion, as we have seen. Torture was introduced
late. Lea finds it mentioned in secular law, “... in the Veronese
code of 1228 and in the Sicilian Constitutions of Frederick II in
1231,” and thinks that “... the references to it show how sparingly
and hesitatingly it was employed.” In the Inquisition it was first
recognized by Innocent IV in 1252.

A certain amount of restriction, to which secular courts were not
liable, was placed upon the Inquisitors in their use of torture. No
torture could be used by them which would imperil the life or limb
of the victim, and this stipulation did amount to something, for the
secular judge was free to invent and use any refinement of cruelty he
could think of, and as often as he cared to. But it did not amount to
much. The Inquisition was free to tear the joints of its victims from
their sockets by means of the rack, or by the strappado. This last
was a rope-and-pulley arrangement which was attached to the wrists of
the victim. His wrists were bound behind his back, so as to dislocate
the shoulder joints by raising him to the ceiling, letting him drop
and then bringing him up with a jerk in mid-air. Fire and water were
also permitted; the feet might be scorched after smearing them with
fat; or the “water-cure” might be used until the stomach was horribly
distended and the prisoner almost strangled.

At first there was reluctance about allowing the Inquisitors
themselves to be present during torture. Priests, and the inquisitors
were all priests, incurred “irregularity” by looking on at such
scenes. But since this prohibition delayed business, it was virtually
removed by the leave granted by Pope Alexander IV in 1260, and
reaffirmed in 1262 by Pope Urban IV, for the Inquisitors to dispense
one another from irregularity incurred by witnessing torture.
Thenceforward it was the custom for the Inquisitor himself to be
present during the torture.

Another check on the use of torture, the prescription that no
prisoner should be twice tortured, was gotten around by equivocation.
A second torturing was merely called a “continuation” instead of a
“repetition” of the first. Furthermore, witnesses might be tortured
indefinitely, and it was one of the chief objects of the inquisitors
to get prisoners to denounce heretics still at large. Often mercy
would be promised, on condition of giving evidence against others.
In any case a heretic who denounced other heretics became at once a
witness to their guilt and might be tortured as many times as was
desired.

Another equivocation appears in the form in which confessions, made
under torture or not, were drawn up. “Usually,” writes Lea, “the
procedure appears to have been that the torture was continued until
the accused signified his readiness to confess, when he was unbound
and carried into another room, where his confession was made. If,
however, the confession was extracted during the torture, it was read
over subsequently to the prisoner, and he was asked whether it were
true. In any case the record was carefully made that the confession
was ‘free and spontaneous,’ without the pressure of ‘force or fear.’
In case a prisoner refused to confirm a confession made under
torture, the learned doctors of the Inquisition differed as to what
should be done with him. Some held that he should be set free, with a
certificate that nothing had been proved against him, others that he
should again be tortured until he again confessed!”

After conviction came sentence. Upon repentant heretics, erring
children conscious of their fault and welcoming the loving
chastisement of Mother Church, the inquisitor himself passed sentence
in the form of penance. In theory, there was no difference between
the penances imposed by any confessor and those of the Inquisitors,
and, in practice, the only penance peculiar to the Inquisition was
the wearing of crosses. Even imprisonment—the extreme legal penalty
for the rare heretics of the earlier Middle Ages—was a part of the
monastic penitential system. As late as the thirteenth century,
sentences of imprisonment were more common than any other form of
punishment.

When the sentence was for life the theory that such severity was no
more than a salutary measure of penance was certainly strained. If
such a prisoner broke jail, his guilt was supposed to be that of
rejecting the wholesome correction designed by the loving-kindness of
the Church to effect his spiritual well-being! However, there are so
many records of prisoners serving life sentences who were released
for good behaviour while in prison that it is possible to argue that
usually none but “hard cases” failed to have the balance of such
sentences suspended.

Obviously, the idea of punishment as a penance did not apply to
those who refused to repent. Therefore the Inquisition itself, being
an institution of the Church, could not punish such cases. But it
was the root of the whole matter that heresy was a crime not only
against the Church but against the State. It was the business of the
Inquisition merely to determine whether suspects were or were not
heretics. If, after conviction, one repented, the State originally
had nothing to say. The Inquisition, acting for the Church, would
then impose penance, as we have just seen, as upon any other
repentant sinner. With the obstinate heretic the Church could do
nothing. Therefore such prisoners were “relaxed,” that is turned
over to the secular authorities, with the formula that the justice
of God could do nothing more for them, inasmuch as they persisted in
rebellion against it, and that, therefore, only the justice of man
had power over them. In many of the later sentences the formula goes
on, in accordance with the canonical sanctions, to ask the State to
impose only such punishment as will not endanger life or limb, or
cause the shedding of blood. As a matter of law, the coercive power
was recognized as belonging only to the State.

The State, on the other hand, recognized the exclusive power of
the Church to determine what was heresy and who was heretical,
recognized the inquisitors as experts in such matters, accepted
their verdict without question, and promptly proceeded to pass and
execute sentence. It was a part of the formula of “relaxation” that
heretics should be punished “as they deserved (animadversio debita).”
This elastic phrase could be variously interpreted in accordance
with the different local laws. Always it meant confiscation of the
goods of the condemned. The Popes, from Alexander III, held that to
confiscation banishment should be added. Confiscation was part of
the penalty for treason which the Holy Roman Empire had copied word
for word out of the old Roman law. Therefore, says Pope Innocent
III, heretics deserve to have their goods confiscated even more than
traitors, inasmuch as they betray the majesty of God Himself who
is obviously greater than all earthly sovereigns. The great Pope
mentions the fact that, under the Roman law, traitors lost their
lives as well as their property, and that heresy involved treason
against God, the King of Kings, but did not follow out his premises
to their logical conclusion. Not until years after his death is there
even a hint that the Church as a whole desired the death of a sinner,
even when he was a heretic.

This comparative mildness was never universal in fact and gradually
disappeared even from theory. We have noted, in the second chapter,
the curious spectacle presented by the eleventh and twelfth century,
on the one hand many of the higher clergy mindful of the Christian
tradition of mercy, and on the other the laity and lower clergy
insisting upon death for the impenitent heretic, and generally death
by fire. We have now to note the slow progress by which lynch law
became written law. Even before the Albigensian Crusade there had
been at least two instances of burning alive formally set down as
the penalty for heresy. One was the law enacted in 1194 by Count
Raymond V, of Toulouse, at the very storm centre of the trouble. The
other was the law of Pedro II, in nearby Aragon in 1197, against
the Waldenses. Under Raymond V’s law, the Toulousains later claimed
that they had “burnt many.” But even if their claim be accepted
as true (whereas it seems doubtful) at any rate the practice was
not continued. Pedro of Aragon decreed burning alive only for
those Waldensians and other heretics who should fail to leave his
dominions by a certain day, so that his reference to the stake was
hardly more than a threat intended to enforce the real penalty, that
of banishment. De Montfort himself, at the parliament he held in
Pamiers in 1212 to consolidate his position in the south, decreed
no more than banishment and confiscation as penalties for heresy.
More important than any previous law is one enacted for Lombardy in
1224 by the Emperor Frederick II, by which heretics were either to
be burnt or to have their tongues cut out, in the discretion of the
judge.

It is quite in keeping with what we know of the subject in general
that the first ecclesiastical recognition of death as the normal
legal penalty for heresy should be an indirect one. A council sitting
in Toulouse in 1229, the year of Raymond VII’s final surrender, after
remarking as usual that “due punishment” is to be inflicted upon
heretics, casually goes on to say that “... heretics, _who, through
fear of death_ or any other cause except their own free will, return
to the faith, are to be imprisoned by the bishop of the city to do
penance, that they may not corrupt others” (Vancandard). After this,
examples multiply, under the influence of Frederick II and Pope
Gregory IX. It so happens, however, that not until 1252 did any Pope
formally insist upon the death penalty for heresy throughout Latin
Christendom. This was the act of Innocent IV in the same bull “Ad
Extirpanda” which authorized torture. Thenceforward the Inquisition
was virtually complete.

The institution spread rapidly throughout Europe. England was
an exception, for curiously enough in view of the inveterate
eccentricity of the English mind, there were no heretics there
until much later. There was not even a provision for burning
heretics until, in 1401, Parliament passed the statute “de heretico
comburendo.” It is less surprising to find such regions as far off as
Scandinavia without heretics, and consequently without inquisitors.
In the mountains of Bosnia, Catharistic Manicheanism became the
State religion and persisted until the coming of the Turks, when
the heretics welcomed the newcomers and went over to Islam. Bosnia
had been a backwater in Europe ever since the Roman roads from the
Adriatic to the Danube decayed in the Dark Ages—even to-day it has
many Mohammedans.

Outside of Bosnia, there was no place in Latin Christendom that
harboured heretics where the inquisitors did not make an end of them.
The Manicheans were completely uprooted, although their extraordinary
hunger for martyrdom would have made them completely victorious if
the crude folly of to-day on the subject of “making martyrs” had
truth in it. In Languedoc they lingered until the fourteenth century.
The Waldensians were reduced so low that the confiscations of their
property were not even enough to pay the expenses of the Inquisitors,
let alone any surplus for the State. For all practical purposes they
too were wiped out.

Resistance never amounted to more than the murder of an inquisitor
here and there—which affected the activities of the institution not
at all, for new recruits filled every gap. The Inquisition thus
completed the task begun by the Albigensian Crusade of preserving the
moral unity of Europe. Seriously threatened in the early thirteenth
century, that moral unity remained unbroken until the great cataclysm
of the sixteenth.

The question posed by the Inquisition to the student is twofold.
First, was the moral unity of Europe worth preserving or no, and
second, were or were not the means by which the Inquisition helped
to preserve it worse than the disease in the long run? Naturally, if
it is decided that the end sought was of little value, then it is
probable that anyone so deciding will also disapprove of the means
used to attain it. But the contrary does not follow. It is by no
means impossible that anyone experienced in life may decide in any
given case that, although the end proposed was good, nevertheless the
means by which it was attained were evil.

On the first point, the answer is prompt. Emphatically, the mediæval
world was worth preserving. In fact, with Periclean Greece, the
Empire under the Antonines, and possibly the world of the Victorian
age, the thirteenth century marks one of the culminating points of
human history. It is true that the word “mediæval” is still popularly
used in derision. But, on the other hand, such usage is recognized
as hasty and superficial by virtually all educated men acquainted
with the period. The Middle Ages attract us by the excellence of
their arts and handicrafts, by the vividness and picturesqueness
of their life, their spontaneity of feeling, their absence of
hypocrisy, the order and clarity of their intellectual life, above
all by their freedom from serious internal strain. From our world
of alternatively drab and garish machine-made ugliness, haphazard
and inconsequent thinking, and torment of chronic industrial civil
war, we look back upon them with regret. In the literature of the
thirteenth century we see the European mind happy and creative ...
as it is to-day uncertain and near despair. We see our typical
institutions, such as representative government, sounder and more
vigorous than they are to-day. Such eager worshippers of the spirit
of our own time as H. G. Wells and Henry Adams, to name only two
at random, bear their testimony. The confession of the volatile
socialist Wells is interesting. In 1914 he casually wrote of “...
the finished and enriched normal social life of Western European
in the Middle Ages....” I have taken Wells as important merely
because (with his human sensitive-plate of a mind capable of so many
discordant impressions) he puts the thing so neatly. With such men as
Chesterton and Belloc in England and Cram in America the appreciation
of mediævalism is the very core of their thinking. It would be easy
to weary the reader with examples. The Middle Ages draw us if we but
look at them.

The weakness of the Middle Ages lay in four things. First, there was
insufficient organization of public powers and of communications,
a subject discussed elsewhere in this book. Second, there was very
little “natural science,” i.e., detailed knowledge of the properties
of the material world. Thus it was ignorance of medicine and
sanitation that brought about the great fourteenth century calamity
of pestilence, the “Black Death” which gave the mediæval system a
shock from which it never fully recovered. Third, there was cruelty,
and fourth, there was the contrast between the vast assumptions
made by the Church and the shortcomings and weaknesses of man
himself—layman and churchman alike. Both cruelty and the claims of
the Church are intimately connected with our subject.

The cruelty of the Inquisition appears most in the use of torture
and in the executions by fire. Questions as to the form of procedure
and withholding names of witnesses are subordinate. It is well
enough for a modern civilized government, strong in the perfection
of communications and of all public powers, to safeguard elaborately
those accused of crime. Mediæval conditions were in many ways like
those of frontier regions where the criminal can easily slip away.
When this is so, justice must make herself swift and terrible by
“rough and ready” methods. Otherwise she does not exist. In their
franker moments, lawyers will usually admit that nine-tenths of
the clients they defend are “as guilty as hell.” The elaborate
safeguards of our procedure are defensible only on the theory that
it is better to err by letting many culprits escape rather than by
punishing one innocent man. And this theory, in turn, is tenable only
on the assumption that no serious harm is done the community by the
escape from punishment, through the legal safeguards aforesaid, of a
considerable proportion of criminals. Where, on the other hand, the
life or death of the community is felt to be at stake, then matters
must take a different course. Perhaps as good an example as our own
time can furnish is that of military justice. Clearly it is supremely
important to keep up the discipline of an army. Accordingly, courts
martial are given wide latitude. And yet the almost unanimous opinion
of those competent to judge is that, when administered by experienced
officers, miscarriages of justice under the court-martial system are
exceedingly rare, and that, on the other hand, such a procedure as
that followed in the civil courts would be destructive of all proper
discipline; the maintenance of which, after all, is the necessary
end sought. With reference to the Inquisition, besides the temporal
welfare of the community, there is also the doctrine of exclusive
salvation to be considered, as we shall see in a moment. The wide
latitude allowed Inquisitors undoubtedly produced cases of injustice,
but probably no system permitting the “disputatious wrangling of
lawyers” (as the Inquisitorial manuals put it) could have answered
the purpose.

In accusing the Inquisition of physical cruelty in examinations and
executions, the modern world does not come into court with absolutely
clean hands. Even leaving out of account Russia and Asia does not
altogether mend matters. For instance, cruelty appears, more or less
frankly, when the white man is in contact with those he considers
lower races.

With respect to the examination of prisoners, Kipling’s fictitious
hero, the lovable Mulvaney, flogging his captured Burman with a
cleaning rod to find out the whereabouts of the bandit-friends of the
sufferer, may serve as a fictitious example of the sort of cruelty
frequently practised by civilized armies operating against savages.
The American Army in the Philippines, instead of falling back on
such primitive methods as flogging, took over the water torture from
the natives there, who in turn had learned it from the Spaniards. In
fact, it was one of the favourite tortures of the Spanish Inquisition
of late mediæval and early modern days. The officer who introduced
the “water cure” into the American Army happens to be known to the
writer, who can warrant him a most kindly man who would not hurt so
much as an insect, except in line of duty. It is a well-known fact
that the American mind is more hospitable than the British to new and
unfamiliar ideas. Even in the great modern cities, in which (by a
curious reversion) degraded, criminal, types analogous to the savage
appear, torture in the examination of prisoners is not altogether
unknown. I refer to the police “third degree.” Here the facts are not
public property, but there is good reason to believe that torture in
various forms is used in examining prisoners to force them to confess
and to name their accomplices. Into the merits and demerits of these
practices it is unnecessary to enter here. The point is merely that
the world has not yet found a way to dispense altogether with the use
of torture in the examination of prisoners.

A real difference, nevertheless, remains between the modern and
the mediæval use of torture in examinations. To-day it is furtive,
then it was an acknowledged, customary thing. And while this
difference is partly a matter of our greater security, and partly
a matter of hypocrisy born of our characteristic, almost feminine,
modern disinclination to face disagreeable facts; still it is true
that there has been a real change in the minds of men of European
stock with reference to this matter of torture. We are revolted by
cruelties which not so very long ago seem to have been taken almost
as a matter of course, so much so that, as we have seen, they
permitted even priests to be present in the torture chamber. Our
nerves are more sensitive than those of our ancestors, as Nietzsche
and Huysmans have pointed out, but that does not altogether account
for the moral change involved.

With respect to burning alive the position is somewhat similar. Here
also we have a conspicuous modern example occurring in a region
where the white man finds himself confronted with great numbers of
men of a race which he feels to be inferior to his own. I refer to
the lynching of negroes, usually those accused of rape upon a white
woman, in the Southern States. Here the combination of rape and race
feeling has produced a condition very like that found in Western
Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when heretics, instead
of negro rapists, were similarly burned by mobs. Here again, together
with striking resemblances, there are also important differences.
The practice shows no signs of becoming a formal written law. On the
contrary, there is formidable, organized protest against it, even in
the communities concerned. Whereas in the early Middle Ages only a
part of the higher clergy can be found in opposition, and even then
not in particular opposition to burning alive, but opposed in general
to any death penalty for heretics.

The striking contrast between the mediæval attitude, after burning
alive had become written law, and modern feeling on the subject,
has been discussed in the second chapter. Belloc uses the fact of
this contrast as an illustration of one of the chief difficulties of
history, that is the elusiveness of the “time spirit” of past ages,
the fact that they took for granted certain primary assumptions which
seemed to them too obvious even to be worth recording. Considering
it, he remarks upon the distortion which this unseizable spirit of
the time ... “appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it
through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time, our
own.”[32] His first illustrations of this truth are drawn from the
French Revolution, from which he proceeds to a discussion of burning
alive in the Middle Ages and early modern period, which has, in part,
been quoted elsewhere in this book.

Frazer in the “Golden Bough” has a passage reinforcing Belloc’s
contention as to the symbolic and quasi-sacramental spirit in which
burning alive was regarded. Fire was the sovereign remedy against
witchcraft. It was customary to burn objects to prevent their being
bewitched, or objects or animals which had been bewitched, so that
the contagion might not spread, or, finally, to burn the witches
themselves. Our contemporary Southern lynchings by fire should warn
us against over-subtlety. Further, it is true that burning alive had
been the Roman punishment for high treason as well as for sorcery,
and was in grisly conformity with the Church’s traditional abhorrence
of bloodshed—it shed no blood. Still it is possible that the Middle
Ages saw relationship between witchcraft and heresy, since both were
connected with ideas of intensely harmful spiritual forces—were, in
short, favourite offspring of the devil himself.

Certainly, later on, the burning of criminals became a solemn
ceremony by no means accompanied by hatred of the victim. This is
proved by the examples of those strangled before burning, like
Savonarola. It is proved even more strongly by the celebrated case of
Gilles de Rais. This case has been referred to in the second chapter,
but it is so pertinent here that it merits fuller repetition. Gilles
was a Breton nobleman and had been one of the lieutenants of Joan of
Arc, but later fell into sorcery, sexual perversion, and all sorts of
refinements of cruelty. When the Inquisition condemned him to be hung
and burned alive, on charges of worshipping demons, he suffered a
violent change of heart. Among other edifying signs of contrition, he
begged the people whose little boys he had kidnapped, then debauched,
and then tortured to death by hundreds, to pray for his soul.
Whereupon they marched in procession, vehemently praying for the
eternal salvation of this monster with his taste for extremes in both
directions of the spiritual life. After which he was duly executed.
“We are far from American lynch law here,”[33] as M. Huysmans remarks
in recounting this scene. It is possible, in the light of such case,
to believe with Belloc and Frazer that what seems to us the atrocious
cruelty involved in burning alive may have been merely incidental to
other considerations uppermost in the minds of those who ordered such
things. To himself, man is an inscrutable mystery.

Finally, we come to the question of the claims of the Church. It
is not my purpose to debate the propositions involved, but merely
to state them as they affect the moral problem of the Inquisition.
Obviously, the Church’s sole reason for being is the belief that she
has, in the Christian revelation, something of supreme and unique
value for mankind. The Athanasian creed, whether or not it is to be
taken as pronouncing the damnation of the heathen and of “heretics
in good faith,” certainly must be interpreted to mean that those
who “culpably persist” in heretical belief cannot be saved. In the
Middle Ages, Christian scholars expanded this irreducible minimum so
as to make the Church’s teaching include the damnation of both the
heathen and of all heretics, more especially as the possibility of
heresy existing without a definite renunciation of the Catholic faith
by the individual heretic hardly occurred to people in a society
universally Catholic. As we have seen, the Church was the cement of
that society. Marriage was one of her sacraments and had nothing to
do with any civil ceremony. Break the Church, therefore, and you
broke up family life. To deny her right to sanction an oath was to
destroy the all-important feudal oath of allegiance. Therefore men
accepted without hesitation the idea that to counterfeit the faith
was worse than to counterfeit earthly coin, to betray God through
heresy was viler than to betray an earthly sovereign by committing
treason. This note is sounded again and again in the grim formulas
establishing torture and the stake. Since human justice fiercely
punished the lesser crimes against men, how much the more it ought
to punish the greater crimes against God. Given the savage criminal
law of the time, given also the Athanasian creed tracing back to our
Lord saying: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and
he that believeth not shall be condemned” (St. Mark xvi), and the
logical sequence is complete.

Nevertheless, even in times of clear, logical thinking such as the
Middle Ages, men seldom act from logic alone. To act so is the
mark of the fanatic, and although the fanatic often is powerful,
still most men are not fanatics, and no society can long be ruled
by fanaticism pure and simple. After some years of study and
reflection upon the point, my own conclusion is that the Church and
the Governments of the thirteenth century were determined in their
action not only by the formal logic of the situation but also by
the peculiarly repulsive nature of the Albigensian (“Catharan,” or
Manichean) heresy, the leading heresy of the age.

Whatever might have happened, it did happen that the laws repressing
heresy were codified by the acute legal minds of the new time under
the stress of a particular heresy of a most hateful sort. Symonds
has recorded two Milanese epitaphs, dating from the mid-thirteenth
century. In one an archbishop is praised for having “... cut the
throats of the heretics (... jugulavit haereses).” In the other a
Podesta (chief executive magistrate) of the city is also praised
because “He did his duty and burned the Catharans (Catharos ut debuit
ussit).”[34] Historians seem to have failed to notice the connection
of the two sentiments. Whether or not heresy in general would
have been as rigorously stamped out had the particular Manichean,
Albigensian, or Catharan heresy never existed is mere speculation.
The striking fact is that the time that could praise an archbishop
for having cut heretical throats thought of heresy as typified by
this particular sect. Another illustration is a well-known story
of St. Thomas Aquinas. It seems that the greatest of Christian
philosophers, one day seated at dinner with St. Louis and his court,
suddenly rolled out (no doubt in a deep voice corresponding to his
massive frame), “I have a conclusive argument against the Manicheans
(Conclusum est contra Manicheos).”[35] Many students have smiled over
the feeling of the courtiers; for our purposes the point is that no
such contemporary anecdote has come down to us concerning Waldenses,
Arnaldists, or any other of the numerous heresies of the time.
Theologians taught that all heresy was sin, hence anti-heretical
legislation, and the corresponding task of enforcing it. The enormous
force of the attack upon the Albigenses came because the average
Christian, once face to face with them, decided that duty was
pleasure.

It is true that the huge engine first set in motion by anger against
this inhuman sect was soon turned against all heretics, and the fact
will surprise no one who has the remotest knowledge of practical
politics. The historian, when he plots the course of the ship of
State, is at ease in his study. But the ship herself, when that
run was made, was blown upon, this side and that, by the fiercest
passions of man, and is so to-day. Rare, indeed, are the officers
and crew that, when those gales are at their height, can hold the
vessel steady. More often her course is as viciously jagged as that
of lightning. It is not for the American, with our treatment of the
South and the negro question since the Civil War before him, to cast
a stone at the thirteenth century.

In thirteenth century Languedoc, as in nineteenth century America,
war made an end of nice distinctions. At the time of the Conference
of Pamiers, in 1207, before the Crusade had begun, Peter de
Vaux-Cernay could distinguish clearly between Waldensians and
“heretics” par excellence: that is Manicheans. In 1226, nineteen
years later, we find a Cardinal-Legate of the Holy See persuading
Louis VIII of France to attack the city of Avignon because there
were many Waldenses there, and this in spite of the fact that it was
a fief of the Empire. From the first the theory of the Church had
been that heresy itself, and not any one particular kind of heresy,
however repulsive, was the enemy. Before the Albigensian Crusade is
ended, we find that this theory is being worked out in fact.

What, then, are we to say of the statesmen and their peoples who
encouraged or permitted the adoption into law of this sweeping
theory promulgated by the Church? Clearly the men of the thirteenth
century saw no moral problem in the matter, but only the doing of
a necessary task. No other assumption can account for the success
with which the difficulties in the way of the new inquisitorial
institution were gotten over. For instance, there was the exceedingly
delicate question of the precise relation of inquisitors to the
local bishops. Had there been the slightest desire on the part of
the secular governments to hinder the Inquisition, it would have
been easy to play off one against the other, for it was a poor
mediæval ruler who could not get some of his bishops to support him
on practically any proposition. We hear of nothing of the sort. On
the contrary, the thorny point of Inquisitorial versus Episcopal
authority is triumphantly solved, in practice, without any serious
hitch whatsoever. It is the same with popular resistance. At long
intervals we sometimes hear of little riots, or even of the murder
of an inquisitor here and there. But such things are the rarest
of exceptions to the rule. This is easier to understand when we
realize that only in the few centres of heretical resistance were
inquisitorial activities of a drastic nature. Thus in Roussillon,
just over the border from Languedoc, the atmosphere changes
altogether. Here the minute research of the indefatigable M. Brutails
has brought to light only four sentences of the Inquisition.[36] All
are directed against robber barons, of the pestilential tribe whose
activities we have noted. What happened to two of these wretches is
not clear. Those whose fate is known suffered only the penalty of
having their dead bones dug up and solemnly burnt, forty years after
death in one case. The severities of the Inquisition, enormous though
they bulk on the voluminous pages of Lea, were infrequent and local
throughout thirteenth century Christendom as a whole. Furthermore,
these infrequent and local severities were normally exercised against
the “Albigensian” heretics who were deservedly detested. Not until
two hundred years later—in the fantastic and stagnant close of the
Middle Ages—do we find anything like a reign of terror. Nevertheless,
the underlying idea of the whole business is so alien from us that we
can scarcely understand it.

Even to approach understanding of such a thing, it is necessary to
speak in parables. Let us, therefore, imagine a scene among the
shades. The ghost of a thirteenth century scholastic is in converse
with other ghosts, an ancient Roman, a sage of Hindustan, a mandarin
from China, and an American citizen.

“Government is government,” say these last four, “and religion is
religion. For men to agree, in general, to live peaceably with each
other and to obey law, they need not also agree concerning divine
things, and this is proved by what we ourselves have seen and known.
If anyone offend against law let him be punished. But let him worship
any God, or no God, as pleases him, granted only that he offend
not the religious feeling and sense of decency of his neighbours,
particularly if a great majority of them be agreed upon such matters.”

To whom the scholastic: “From you of the East and of old Rome these
words mean little. No law of natural right informed your States.
When did any one of you maintain that there was a God in whose
sight all men were equal? Instead, you held to slavery and to the
deepest inequalities among men. We strove more greatly than you
because we sought to build upon eternal justice. In our eyes, it was
justice that every man should enjoy the whole fruit of his labours,
saving only a tax, as it were, paid to those who fought, judged, or
governed. And in order that such justice might prevail it was needful
that the Church be strong to lay down, precept upon clear precept,
what was every man’s duty to his neighbour.”

“The conquered Saracen, in Spain and Sicily, was but an exception,
to tolerate him did no harm. A graver exception was the Jew, for
the weakness of men made it convenient that he be permitted usuries
anathema to Christians. Nevertheless he was a race apart. But
that the sword of the gospel should lose its edge, being blunted
and chipped away by the unblessed interpretations of men calling
themselves Christians, was to us a thing intolerable. For among such
a babel of tongues we feared that men would listen to none, but would
follow their own greeds and lusts, wheresoever these last might lead,
until the strife among them ceased only from weariness.”

After he had done speaking there is a little silence. Then the
American answers and says: “It is true that men must agree, after
a fashion, as to that what is right, and it is true that this is
hard. But faith is faith and men are facts. Moreover, since we speak
of faith, there is a civic faith which seeks to bind men together
upon the earth, no matter whence they came there and whither they
shall go. But faith or no faith, men as citizens must sink or swim
together, and if they cannot agree about the things of this world,
they will certainly perish. About God they can never agree, therefore
let them differ as peaceably as they can.”

“But is it not true,” says the scholastic, “that you have failed?
For shades lately come hither out of the sunlight, say that more and
more, in the upper world, there is strife in the cities between rich
and poor. There are so many, even in your own country, who are called
free and yet own nothing.”

“That is so,” replied the American, “but a friend of mine came here
only the other day, and he said that they had not failed yet.”


FOOTNOTES:

[32] “On Anything,” Hilaire Belloc, p. 72 _et seq._

[33] Huysmans’ “Là-bas,” p. 439.

[34] “The Renaissance in Italy,” by John Addington Symonds, publ.
Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1904. Footnote to p. 129 of Vol. I of
the treatise on “The Catholic Reaction.”

[35] “Mont St. Michel and Chartres,” Adams, _supra_, p. 348.

[36] “Etude sur la Condition des Populations rurales en Roussillon.”
Pp. 297, 298.




CHAPTER VII.

EPILOGUE ON PROHIBITION.


I have deliberately left out of the imaginary discussion with
which the last chapter closes, any reference to Prohibition. Had
the scholastic pressed this point, as an instance of religious
persecution by law, the American must have been forced to treat the
Prohibition movement as an exception, a parasitic growth which has
fastened itself upon the Constitution. He would then have had trouble
in sustaining the argument. In the world of shades, or in any other
place where there is time to pare down matters to their essentials,
the determining factor of religious persecution in the Prohibition
movement must be admitted.

As has been stated in the preface, it was the shock of recognizing
this fact (through contact with Prohibition agitators during a term
of service in the New York State Assembly) which led the present
writer to study the establishment of the Inquisition as the one
comparable instance of so drastic an interference of religion with
politics. In all the long story of Christendom there is no third
instance of religious persecution so systematic or on such a scale.
The foregoing study was at first undertaken in the belief of the
writer that the mere account of the political and military struggle
leading up to the establishment of the Inquisition would, by itself,
be enough to enable the reader to see for himself the true nature
of “Prohibition.” However, during the unavoidable delays of the
last few years, this original belief has now been abandoned. As a
result of many conversations on the subject, the writer now believes
that the real forces responsible for Prohibition are sufficiently
misunderstood, especially among Protestants, as to make it desirable
to show in an epilogue the essential connection between sectarian
Protestantism and Prohibition, the true nature of Prohibition
as sectarian-Protestant, religious persecution, and finally, the
resemblance and divergencies between Prohibition and the thirteenth
century Inquisition.

When written history begins, all civilized and semi-civilized
people, and many savages besides, are found drinking some sort of
fermented liquor, wine, cider, or one of the many kinds of beer.
Back of written history, tradition has it that the practice was
from immemorial time. No people had handed down a story of an early
past when such liquor was not an integral and familiar part of each
day’s diet, usually with meals. It is true that the Greeks said that
Bacchus-Dionysus came from Asia, bringing the Vine, the youngest of
the Gods, and that some scholars have held that this indicated the
memory of a time when the primitive Greeks were wineless wretches.
The argument, however, will not hold water. For, in the first place,
even if we imagine an early time before the Greeks drank wine,
there is nothing to prove that they did not know some other sort of
fermented stuff, as the Gauls did before Rome conquered them. And,
furthermore, people in the Iliad and Odyssey drink wine but seem to
know nothing of its God; it was familiar but it was not yet holy.

Besides being everywhere, fermented liquor was everywhere used in
much the same way. It was an article of daily diet, so much so
that no meal was complete without it. At feasts and festivals it
was drunk more freely. Drunkenness was extremely rare. The Old
Testament assumes that people had to “rise up early in the morning”
and “continue until night” before wine would “inflame them,”[37] and
denounces those persistent enough to do so. It was the Greek custom
to mix their wine with water, several parts of water to one of wine.
Schliemann speaks of an inscription recording a law of one of the
Ionian cities which prescribes penalties for drinking neat wine. One
of the early Babylonian codes of law prescribes severe penalties
against the keeper of any wine shop (an Englishman would call him a
“publican,” an American a “saloon keeper”) in which a disturbance
occurs. The reader should be warned, however, that the danger of
disturbance was no doubt quite as much due at that early time to the
presence of numbers of men not known to one another, as it was to the
drinking that went on there. At all events, the Hebrew and the Greek
examples are enough to prove the attitude of the earliest historical
time toward the instances of drunkenness (apparently rare) which they
saw. No sooner had the keen Greek mind developed itself and begun
to analyse than it laid down the general principle of temperance as
one of the chief virtues. In the particular case of fermented drinks
which we are now considering, Belloc has neatly remarked that “It has
been noticed (also from immemorial time) that if a man drank too much
of any of these things he got drunk, and that if he got drunk often
his health and capacity declined.”[38] So much for the historical
background.

Given the ancient use everywhere of fermented drinks, given also
the recognition of the rare evil of habitual drunkenness, it is
instructive to note that before the sixteenth century there is (with
one exception) no record of the habitual use of distilled liquors in
Europe and the Near East, and (again with one exception) no record of
the idea of the sinfulness of drink.

First as to distilled liquors. Distillation of beverages was known
in ancient China. The earliest European navigators to visit Tahiti
found it practised by the savages there, which would indicate the
probability of its great antiquity in that stagnant, primitive
society. The word alcohol itself is of Arabic origin, like many
similar words, such as _al_embic, _al_gebra, &c. The sweet, aromatic,
liqueurs made by mediæval monks (Benedictine by the Benedictines,
Chartreuse by the Carthusians, &c.), are hardly exceptions to the
rule inasmuch as they are essentially cordials rather than beverages.
Brandy (burnt-wine, brant wine, brandevin, brandy wine) was known
in France from the fourteenth century but seems to have been drunk
chiefly as a cordial, as it still is in that country to-day. At all
events, the scanty references to it indicate that it was little used.
The one considerable exception is the use of whisky (usquebaugh,
pronounced whiskybaw) among the highland Scotch and the Irish.
With these people whisky was traditional. The ancient Irish epics
of Cuchulain and Finn are full of references to it, as the Homeric
poems of references to wine. While the debate over the date of the
Irish epics may cheerfully be left to specialists, it is certainly
clear that they long antedate the sixteenth century. Like wine, beer,
and cider among the other nations of Europe, whisky among the Irish
certainly dates from before the commencement of written history. But,
in Europe, before the sixteenth century, to Ireland and the Scotch
highlands its use was confined.

That the use of fermented liquors was sinful was an unknown idea,
quite as unknown as we have seen the use of distilled liquors to have
been. Previous to the sixteenth century, we find ascetic individuals
or select orders renouncing wine, but always, like true ascetics,
either with the idea of making their abstention a distinguishing
mark, or with that of renouncing pleasures lawful or even necessary
to the community at large for the sake of special practice in
self-control. Thus among the ancient Hebrews certain men would
dedicate themselves to be “Nazarites to the Lord,” and as such would
vow never to drink wine or to cut the hair or beard. The wine cup
was no more evil than the scissors, abstention from both was merely
the distinctive sign of a peculiar dedication. Just so, ascetic
Christians would renounce wine except in the sacrament; St. Dominic
is an instance. He was teetotal for years, although he finally gave
up the practice. Here the idea was that of complete devotion to
the service of God. Even entirely lawful and proper pleasures were
to be freely laid aside by an individual in order that all fleshy
desires, as such, might be “mortified,” and that the soul should not
risk being swerved even by a hair’s breadth (through an instant’s
delight in “creatures”) from complete and utter devotion to the
Creator. Ascetic Christians were even more apt to give up eating meat
than drinking wine. And, of course, none but the most frantically
heretical Christians ever maintained that there was anything sinful
about eating meat as such. Such renunciations were merely two among
many forms of self-imposed “discipline.” In the same spirit a devout
layman, like St. Louis, might abstain from marital intercourse
during Lent. Apart from the practice of a general asceticism, the
ancient and the mediæval worlds knew of but one great example of fear
and hatred for wine. That appalling exception was the doctrine of
Mohammed.

Within Christendom itself, however, the theological and moral
influence of Islam was slight. The only one of the various Mohammedan
innovations in morals which had even a brief and partial echo
among Christian men was the Prophet’s prohibition of images. With
regard to the point under discussion, the use of wine, Mohammed’s
teaching failed to commend itself to our ancestors. Instructed in
Christian tradition, with the marriage in Cana and with the sacrament
continually before them, the teetotaller fanaticism took no hold
upon them. The chroniclers speak of it merely as an oddity, like the
Jewish taboo against pork—which the Mohammedans also copied.

So matters stood until the great sixteenth century break with
tradition. When the convulsions of the religious wars had ceased,
Scandinavia, the Northern Germanies including Holland, and especially
England, were seen in definite opposition to what was left of the
moral unity of Europe. The break was different in degree, for
England preserved the essential catholicity of her national Church,
although well-nigh smothered under a mass of Protestant innovations,
whereas the Northern Germanies lapsed altogether. Nevertheless at
the time the break seemed final in England as well. There had been
no such sharp change of direction, no such conscious rejection of
the immediate past, since Constantine accepted the Faith. It might
even be said that the sixteenth century break was the greater of the
two, for the sixteenth century innovators despised their ancestors
as the early Christians had never despised the pagans. With the
theological debates which determined this capital change we are not
here concerned for their own sake, but only for the effect which the
acceptance of the Protestant dogmas produced upon the morals and
therefore, in the end, upon the social structure of Christendom.

The Catholic possessed and, of course, still possesses an inclusive,
reasoned, scheme of ethical teaching. This ethical scheme had been
taken over by the Church from the ancient Greeks, and especially
from Aristotle. To the Aristotelian ethic had been added (like a
superstructure which enlarges rather than disturbs the original
design of a building) the Christian theological virtues and their
attendant vices. Under this broad scheme, serious moral offences were
classified under one or another of the “seven deadly sins” of pride,
envy, anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lust.

This ethical structure, composed jointly by the Greek genius and the
Christian revelation, Protestantism has so destroyed that the average
Protestant of to-day, even when educated, cannot so much as tell what
the seven deadly sins may be. Few Protestants, if forced to think
by Socratic questions, will fail to agree as to the reality of all
seven. Nevertheless, in practice, Protestants have ceased to consider
most of them as sins at all. Let the reader who may be inclined to
doubt so sweeping a pronouncement merely take the trouble to question
a few of his friends. If he prefers to approach the matter through
general rather than particular instances, let him consider for a
moment the industrial society of to-day, together with the universal
and bitter quarrel between “capital” and “labor” which has arisen in
that society. Then let him remember that modern industrialism had its
birth in England—a country Protestant in manners and morals where the
essentially Catholic character of the national Church itself has been
so much ignored and misunderstood. Let him further remember that,
outside of England, the industrial system has taken deepest root
in the Protestant Northern Germanies and in the Protestant United
States. In spite of its material success, it has been but partially
imitated in Catholic countries from these Protestant models. After
reviewing these obvious and indisputable facts, let him recall that
for centuries not one out of a hundred Protestants, even among the
educated, has ever been clearly told that such things as avarice,
sloth, and envy are sins. Then let him deny, if he can, the ruin that
Protestantism has made in what was once the symmetric structure of
Christian morals.

In place of inclusive, reasoned, ethical principles, the Protestant
set up fragmentary taboos. On account of his rejection of Christian
tradition, he was driven to build upon the Scriptures alone. In none
of the canonical books could he find the ethical principles of the
New Testament, with their implications, built up into a coordinated
manual of ethics. Moreover, the early, formative Protestants vastly
preferred the Old Testament which showed the ancient Jews in the
taboo stage of morals, to the specifically Christian traditions of
the historic Church. Taboo is the stage in which morals are not
a matter of reasoned general principles of conduct, but consist
merely of disconnected prohibitions of specific acts. Of course,
Catholicism has its taboos, such as abstinence from meat on Fridays,
but these are marks of distinctive religious observance rather
than general rules of conduct. In his Bible, which he had stripped
naked of tradition, the Protestant found the ancient Jewish taboos
impressively codified, by contrast with the Christian principles
scattered through the New Testament. With his profession of
Christianity, his rejection of Christian tradition, and his intimate
admiration for the ancient Jews, his ethical course was clear. That
part of Catholic morals which was not capable of expression in hard
and fast taboos he would not actually disown but would gradually
allow to be forgotten. So it has been with reference to avarice and
envy, for example. Accordingly we see the great prizes of power and
social distinction awarded as the result of successful avarice in
the pursuit of wealth; envy rampant, and sloth unashamed both in the
“ca-canny” labourer who restricts his output, and in the rich who are
no longer held by custom to perform any service or duty in return for
the economic power lodged in them. On the other hand Protestantism
concentrates its moral fervour upon the element in traditional
Christian morals which can be even approximated through taboos. Hence
illicit sexual intercourse and excess in eating and drinking are
particularly condemned. As time went on, since the ill effects of
over-eating were less immediately obvious than those of drunkenness,
this last has come to stand alone with adultery and fornication as
the targets for Protestant moral attack. To-day educated Protestants
will sometimes tell you that a Christian life consists chiefly in
refraining from women other than one’s wife and from drink!

Of course this attitude is a reversal of the sound European
tradition which thought of the sins springing from an excess of
natural sensual desire as far less repellent than the mean and
despicable sins, culminating in treachery, which derive from a
perversion of man’s spiritual nature.

But Protestantism went even further than this. At its very beginning,
Luther, in his “Address to the German Nobility” (A.D. 1520), had
proposed the non-observance of “... All saints’ days, _with their
carousing_, except Sundays.” And no sooner had Protestantism reached
its most highly developed form, under Calvin, than it began an
organized warfare against popular festivals and all the decorative
side of life. The zealots who were its spear-point conceived the
idea that God could be worshipped only with the mind. To quote
Chesterton on Puritanism (the English form of Calvinism): “It is
better to worship in a barn than in a cathedral, for the specific
reason that the cathedral was beautiful. Physical beauty was a false
and sensual symbol coming in between the intellect and the object of
its intellectual worship.... Therefore it is wicked to worship by
... dancing, or drinking sacramental wines, or building beautiful
churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep.”[39]

Naturally, in the absolute divorce of beauty and holiness, it was to
be expected that beauty must be thought essentially evil. Moreover,
with such a system, it was necessary for the Puritans not only to
get rid of beauty but also to do away with amusement so that (out of
working hours) the people might have nothing to do but contemplate
their theology and seek confirmation of it in their Bibles.

Of course, so bald and repulsive a fanaticism seeking to impose its
tyranny upon Christian men could not, by itself, have made its way.
Even the anger then running throughout Europe at the scandal given
by ecclesiastical authority would have been insufficient as a cloak
for such enormities. But behind the zealots were the mercantile
class, into whose lap the adventurers were already beginning to pour
the gold of the Indies. These “economic men” saw their chance. The
masses, with their festivals and their pleasures taken from them,
would not only have more time to listen to sermons, they would also
have more time to work. For it was beginning to be the unspoken creed
of these men that the poor man, who must gain his bread in the sweat
of his brow, existed mainly that they might “get rich quick.” With
their influence, the merchants furnished the driving force behind
the fanatics. In England Protestantism was not long in developing
into Puritanism under the powerful influence of Calvin whose God, as
Wesley said, had the exact functions and attributes of the Devil.

Inspired by such a divinity, the Puritans began operations. The
theatre, dancing, card playing, &c., were abhorrent to them.
Moreover, and here is the essence of the whole matter, they
accounted it righteousness to do their best to compel other men,
indifferent or hostile to their extraordinary beliefs, to live after
their sombre fashion. To the black shame of Puritanism, with its
glorification of private judgment, it has never been content when in
power with telling its votaries to practise its own peculiar kind of
righteousness and leave others to their own consciences. In this, as
in many things, the Puritan is closer in spirit to the Mohammedan
than he is to the historic Church. Indeed the correspondencies
between Puritanism and Mohammedans, with respect to images,
ceremonies, divorce, drink, &c., deserve more study than they have
received. At its utmost, the Church has claimed jurisdiction only
over those of the household of faith. Puritanism seeks to impose its
taboos even upon the stranger within its gates.

Puritanism contains, furthermore, an essential element of hypocrisy.
To a certain extent this is due to its founder Calvin himself. For
auricular confession under secrecy, or for the general confession,
he could only substitute the activities of “... good men ... to be
chosen from the different quarters of the city whose duty was to
report evil doers to the ministers, for admonishment or exclusion
from the Supper” ...[40] meaning the sacrament. Comment on such a
smelling committee is needless.

Besides, the typical Puritan hypocrisy is derived from the prominence
of the mercantile element present in Puritanism from the first. A
wealthy man advocating Puritan taboos in order to promote asceticism
among his workmen may or may not profess Puritanism, but he very
seldom feels called upon to live up to it himself. Of course, with
the command of privacy which wealth gives, it is easy for him to
avoid open scandal.

In addition to the inveterate Puritan habit of setting members of
a congregation to spy upon one another, and second, the prominence
which Puritanism gives to economic motives as seen by the merchant
or trader, there is also a third cause making for hypocrisy among
the Puritans. That is the influence of reason (in alliance with the
dimly-felt inheritance of centuries of Catholicism) demonstrating the
insignificance of the transgressions which it is Puritanism’s great
effort to reprove, in comparison with the baser sins. Therefore,
we find many Puritans who are essentially decent people and useful
members of society, all the time slyly violating the taboos, such
as the drink taboo, to which they subscribe in words. Certainly all
societies and religions have their hypocrites, but as certainly the
hypocrisy of Puritanism excels them all.

It may be objected that it is far-fetched to assign sixteenth century
Protestantism (with its English development of Puritanism) as the
cause of twentieth century industrial strife. Why then did not the
industrial strife develop sooner, more particularly why did it not
develop in the times when the Protestant philosophy (or, if the
reader prefer, the Protestant “dogma”) was far more lucidly and more
intensely held? In any case, how can a system set up largely by
merchants and traders be held to have caused the envy and sloth which
cause and accompany our industrial strife?

The answer is that Protestantism happened to appear just at the
beginning of the modern increased command over nature which for three
hundred years has gone on opening up new lands for colonization
and at the same time has improved the technique of agriculture and
increased the quantity of the products of industry. All this has
resulted in three centuries of increasing expansion unparalleled in
history. At the beginning of this period the Protestant dogma had
been established, to the effect that a man’s private judgment in
matters of religion was superior to corporate religious authority.
Inevitably, such teaching bred loneliness in the soul. But, for the
most part, men still felt themselves to be members one of another,
because the continuous expansion had lightened the pressure of
competition between classes and individuals. Any man in the more
thickly settled regions who might be dissatisfied with his lot saw
the frontier beckoning. Expansion, as in the twelfth century, made
for a buoyant temper in the mind, but, unlike that of the twelfth
century, this temper was too contemptuous of the past (because of the
sixteenth century break with tradition and also because the expansion
was without precedent); whereas the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
felt that they were only partly reconquering the Roman order. Hence
the naive faith in “progress” as such, which culminated in the late
nineteenth century, and the equally naive illusion that physical
science of itself would somehow make for happiness.

Although the full effect of the evil has been postponed to our own
day, nevertheless the indictment against modern industrialism is
not new. Scarcely had the so-called “industrial revolution” ushered
in the superlative degree of the evil spreading outward from the
Protestant societies dominant in our world before the seamy side
of the business was shown up. In nineteenth century England (the
parent and, until yesterday, the centre of the system) industrialism
was ably attacked by such men as Dickens, Ruskin, and William
Morris. Still the protests were not effective in that, despite
them, complacency remained the typical mood of the Victorian Age.
The resulting destructive political movements and the strikes were
already drearily familiar before 1900. Protestantism, in breaking
down the corporate religious ties which made men members one of
another, had released destructive forces in human nature which
were beyond control. Incidentally, the action of these forces was
precisely contrary to the “economic” intentions present in the
mind of so many early Protestants! Before 1914 it was apparent
that matters were becoming serious, and now the strain of the
Great War has so increased the industrial friction inherent in our
society that such friction has become the chief problem confronting
civilization.

Although the pressing nature of the problem of our chronic industrial
civil war is now abundantly recognized, the nature of the problem
itself is still incorrectly diagnosed. The “industrial revolution” is
generally given as the root of the trouble, whereas the industrial
revolution merely watered the evil seed sown broadcast by the
sixteenth century moral change in Europe. So, also, the Prohibition
movement is not seen in its true bearings as a result of the
continuing activity of precisely the same spirit which brought about
the sixteenth century moral change—that is, the alliance between a
narrow religious fanaticism on the one hand and the avarice of the
merchant and “captain of industry” on the other. The adoption of the
American Prohibition amendment coincided closely in time with the
close of the Great War which has brought industrial strife to a head.
To those sufficiently instructed to know Prohibition and industrial
strife as alike children of the Protestant spirit, the coincidence is
a symbol and a warning.

To recapitulate: the sixteenth century Protestants proclaimed the
supremacy of private judgment over corporate religious authority.
Slowly but inevitably such doctrine, making religion not a corporate
but a personal thing, has weakened the ties between man and man.
Notice now, how from the resulting hedge between individuals and
classes springs the evil forest of our discontents which darkens
the Christian world to-day. In the countries where the great
landlords and the mercantile classes, working under cover of the
narrow enthusiasm of the fanatics, won their great sixteenth century
triumph (that is in England, Holland and the Northern Germanies)
that triumph resulted in the confiscation of Church property by the
State and its prompt absorption, not by the mass of the people as in
France after the Revolution, but by the aforesaid great landholders
and merchants themselves. With the increased influence due to this
addition to their wealth, they were able gradually to dispossess the
yeoman farmers and, in trade and industry, to substitute unrestricted
competition in place of the guild system; but the strain which would
otherwise have been promptly felt in the Protestant societies was
relieved, as we have seen, by the great age of expansion. When the
new discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
brought about in England the industrial revolution, that revolution
took place in a society in which the mass of the people had _already_
forgotten their old economic freedom. _Already_ they were accustomed
to see their economic life dominated by merchants and landlords (over
whom they had no check) acknowledging no definite moral authority
whatsoever. In the two hundred years since the process had begun,
it had come to seem natural that a few should control the means of
production, and that these few, the rich, should look upon poor men
mainly as instruments for their own further private enrichment. It
was because of the destructive sixteenth century moral change and
in no way because of any quality inherent in the new machines that
the discovery of these last has made so enormously for unhappiness
and strife. It is true that the machines have enormously accelerated
the long process which has already reduced the wage-earner from
the Christian liberty his ancestors enjoyed to something very like
serfdom. But the essential point to be grasped is that the machines
have _only_ accelerated the process, they did not bring it about and
they have not changed its nature.

In all this, the Prohibition movement has been an integral part.
Prohibition has its roots in the great sixteenth century victories of
fanaticism plus greed. It appeared above ground because of conditions
brought about by discoveries in physical science acting upon a
society coloured by the Protestant victories, although in themselves
these discoveries have no inherent connection with morals. It has won
a great victory in America and is attempting to invade England at the
present day, when the strain of chronic industrial war has become
acute and world-wide.

The historical connection between Protestantism and Prohibition has
been but little studied. Nevertheless its outlines are abundantly
clear. Prohibition was not among the original Protestant taboos. Even
the Puritans and, as far as is known, the Anabaptists (who together
made up the “extreme left” among the sixteenth century sects) were
not prepared to abandon Christian tradition so completely as to hold
fermented drinks to be sinful. But Protestantism par excellence,
that is Puritanism (from its original belief that worship was only
possible through the mind and never through the senses), began by
divorcing religion from beauty, and went on to a hatred of the
decorative side of life and especially of the simple pleasures of the
populace.

The Protestant societies created modern industrialism with its
masses of degraded proletarians. As discoveries in physical science
intensified the evils of industrialism in general (although they
did not create those evils), so in the particular case of drink the
commercial distillation of “hard” liquor still further magnified the
evil of intemperance. The sequence is clear in both the general and
the particular case. Even in the sixteenth century, Protestantism had
already produced proletarians and public drunkenness on so large a
scale that the first laws against drunkenness are found under Edward
VI, and under Elizabeth the first Poor Law establishing workhouses.
Until Edward and Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had abolished the
monasteries, which supplemented the guilds in what we should call
“social work,” it had not been found necessary to build workhouses
for the poor nor to jail poor men who got drunk. Certainly it is
clear that want, and drunkenness as the habitual result of want,
were on the increase. And yet hard liquor was not plentiful in
England until the very end of the seventeenth century. A few whisky
distilleries had been set up in England in Henry VIII’s time but beer
had continued to be the daily drink of Englishmen, and wine that of
English gentlemen.

It was not until 1689, when the Government abolished all restrictions
upon gin-distilling, that hard liquor became plentiful in England,
and then it became plentiful with a vengeance; the proletarianizing
process had been going on for over a hundred years. To complete the
sequence of Protestantism, proletarianism and hard liquor, came the
doctrine of the inherent sinfulness of drink. This seems to have
been first preached by the eighteenth century Methodists, who appear
as a distinct schism from the Church of England in 1740. Thirty
years later their teaching was familiar enough to be noticed in the
theatre. In a drinking song in the first act of Goldsmith’s “She
Stoops to Conquer,” first played in 1773, we find the following
lines:—

  “When methodist preachers come down,
  A-preaching that drinking is sinful,
  I’ll wager the rascals a crown
  They always preach best with a skinful....”

By the middle of the nineteenth century the other sectarian bodies,
the Presbyterians, the Independents or Congregationalists, and the
Baptists, had followed the Methodists in adopting the Mohammedan
fanaticism of total abstinence.

The final step of all, that of attempting to compel everyone to be
teetotal by means of Prohibition laws, was taken not in England
where total abstinence was first preached in the name of religion,
but in America. In England the sectarian “Nonconformist” has always
been in the minority and after the brief seventeenth century Puritan
supremacy the nation turned fiercely against them. In America, on
the other hand, they were in a majority from the first. Virginia
was settled by Anglicans and Maryland by Roman Catholics, but the
other English colonies were Puritan almost to a man. The colony of
Massachusetts Bay was an absolute Congregationalist theocracy from
its foundation in 1629 for over half a century.

In England, during the short Puritan ascendancy there (1649-60), the
sectaries had used the full power of the State to suppress popular
festivals and the decorative side of life. It was forbidden to keep
Christmas or Easter. At the other end of the scale, it was forbidden
to bait bears, “not because the sport gave pain to the bear but
because it gave pleasure to the spectators,” as Macaulay has it in a
famous phrase. In one of their culminating atrocities, the closing of
the theatres, the Puritans displayed their characteristic hypocrisy.
Instead of frankly avowing that theatrical performances offended
their peculiar religion they gave as reasons for closing them the
_plague and the Civil War_. But when plague and the Civil War had
ceased, did they permit the theatres to reopen? By no means. Dancing
and card playing they held to be cardinal sins. Their garments must
be sad-coloured, although in this respect but little worse than men’s
clothes to-day. Their “meeting houses,” which they substituted for
churches, were purposely made as bare as barns.

But there was one outrage which they did not attempt. They made no
attempt to forbid the fermented drinks which immemorial tradition
and the example of Our Lord himself permitted to Christian men. It
is true that they refused to drink healths, for the practice added
ceremony to feasting and they held it to be a cause of intemperance.
Beyond this they did not go. Incidentally it should be noted that
when the Puritans ruled England none but fermented drinks were
known. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were curiosities until after the
Restoration. At all events, fermented drinks were the one form of
social pleasure permitted to Englishmen under Puritan rule.

In New England, Calvinism ran riot. In Europe it had been the creed
of a minority living in the midst of nations firm in the traditions
of Christendom. Therefore, while it had been bad enough in Europe, it
had never felt itself omnipotent. In New England, on the contrary,
Calvinism had isolated communities founded especially for its
glorification, and the result was horrible. “Its records read like
those of a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and
locked up their keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing
their wives on the Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the
cart’s tail for kissing each other at all without licence from the
deacons, the whole culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism
and witch-burning....”[41] The picture could be supplemented ad
infinitum by a study of the town records of the New England Puritans.
For the elaboration of it, one of their own descendants, Brooks
Adams, has written a book, the “Emancipation of Massachusetts,” in
which they hanged, gibbeted and damned for ever, and to that book
I refer my readers who may be curious in the matter. They were
appalling people.

For the purposes of this study, the essential thing to remember
is that the eighteenth century slackening of Puritan fervour in
America was not death but sleep. Or, to use another metaphor, when
its stream appeared to be drying up, it was still running strongly
underground. Such a man as John Brown, with his savage and almost
crazy fanaticism, would have been perfectly at home in Cromwell’s
army, or with Praise-God-Barebones and his ilk.

After the Civil War, American industrialism began to expand
enormously. The “captain of industry,” the second partner to the
sixteenth century alliance against tradition, was growing into a
giant. Insufficient support in this quarter seems to have been a
contributing cause of the failure of the first American Prohibition
movement. This flourished for a time about the middle of the
nineteenth century. It was the work of pure fanaticism, and for a
time it had great success. All the New England States, plus New York,
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, and South Dakota, passed
State prohibition laws. But in a few years these laws began to be
repealed. Finally, the Maine Law alone remained on the statute books
... and continued to be so often violated in practice as to be a
laughing-stock to the whole country.

Naturally, the fanatics could not have won even their temporary
successes without the aid of other sorts of men. From the first
America had been a “hard liquor” country. Whisky and rum had been
the national drinks, and drunkenness had been common. The saloon
keeper, like most traffickers in Protestant countries, was but
little restrained by public opinion. “Business was business.” Wine
was a luxury for the rich, unknown to the populace, and beer seems
to have been almost unknown. The frontier, with its tendency toward
crudity of thought and its utter lack of social restraint, has deeply
influenced the American mind, predisposing it toward rough-hewn
solutions of any troublesome problem, thus reinforcing the dominant
Protestantism of the country, with its reliance upon taboo. As yet
the influence of Catholicism with its rounded, universal ethic was
slight. But notwithstanding all these contributing forces, a short
experience of Prohibition was quite enough for the unhappy States
which tried it.

Not until after the early years of the twentieth century did the
agitation again gather strength. In the interim, new forces had
appeared, some favourable, some opposed to the destruction of
Christian liberty. On the surface, it appeared to many that liberty
had been strengthened. Catholicism was growing, chiefly through
immigration from Ireland, Italy and the Slavic countries. Immigrants
from Germany began to brew beer, so that even the populace began
to see there was a possible rival to hard liquor. California began
to make wine. With the disappearance of the frontier, men believed
that the crudity of mind bred by frontier conditions would soon
be resolved into an appreciation of the necessary complexities
of settled civilization. So far, this idea has since been proved
mistaken, but, in itself, it was not ridiculous. Far sillier was
another contemporary notion, namely, that the increasing ease and
frequency of communication would bring about catholicity of mind and
a decline of particularism and provincialism in general.

However, these gains for the cause of Christian liberty were by no
means decisive. Although the influence of Catholicism had increased,
it was by no means dominant. To this day, no Roman Catholic could
be nominated for President by either of the two major parties. The
Roman Catholic, the most numerous of the three Catholic communions,
had not even the power which its members might otherwise have given
it, because its Italian and Slavic members counted for little in the
politics of the country as a whole. The Latins had an especially
small foothold in public life. Beer and wine were still mainly
thought of in connection with “foreign elements” in the population.
The native-born drank whisky, and used the word “rum” as a generic
term to designate both distilled and fermented liquors! Between them,
the Protestant sects accounted for an overwhelming majority of the
population, and their innate Puritanism in morals was unchanged.
Their theologies were less insisted upon; most educated Protestants
were abandoning the arduous labour of definition, and the fervour
which had formerly gone into Protestant theological discussion was
now beginning to be dissipated in vague humanitarianism. In part this
Protestant energy (formerly employed upon the theology now fading
from the human mind) was ready to be used for the enforcement of
taboo.

Chesterton’s analysis of corresponding conditions in the British
Isles is pertinent here. He remarks that “... it is a singular
fact that although extreme Protestantism is dying in elaborate and
over-refined civilization, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that
live longest and die last. Of the creed of John Knox the modern
Protestant has abandoned the civilized part and retained only the
savage part. He has given up that great and systematic philosophy of
Calvinism which had much in common with modern science and strongly
resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But he has retained
the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays.... All the awful
but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are gone. Only savage
negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on every seventh
day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and makes an evil
silence in the streets.”

“By the middle of the nineteenth century—this dim and barbaric
element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added
another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a
mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food
of civilized mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on
this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many,
but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money
is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger
when they see a cheque book. They do not whisper with unsavoury
slyness that such and such a man was ‘seen’ going into a bank....
The sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one ... it is
defended with sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply
and sharply tested ... if a Puritan tells you that he does not object
to beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him
that in prisons and workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely
regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day. The
Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call
it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer. It is a
transcendental taboo....”[42]

By the close of the century a new and increasingly powerful ally,
industrialism, was coming to the help of American Puritanism in its
opposition to traditional Christian liberty. After 1865 America began
to concentrate her energies on building factories and railroads.
For three hundred years there had been no universal religious
organization binding all men together in a common morality. In such
a society, the appearance of machine industry aggravated the evils
of unlimited competition between individuals and classes. These
evils, it should be repeated, were the direct result of the sixteenth
century moral change, that is the breakdown of universal religious
authority and the consequent weakening of moral solidarity between
men. Machine industry neither created the evils of unrestricted
competition nor essentially changed their character. But it did
aggravate them enormously because it increased the size of the
industrial unit and thereby reduced to a vanishing point the personal
contact between owners and wage earners. Owner and industrial wage
earner tended to look upon one another less and less as fellow
beings, engaged for mutual benefit in common tasks, more and more as
abstract commodities—if not as definitely hostile forces, “capital”
and “labour.” Wage earners organized themselves into unions which
were ultimately to develop great powers of economic obstruction,
but, so far, no faculty for constructive reform of industry. Owners
meanwhile cast about how they might make of “labour” a more effective
instrument for their own enrichment.

It is but fair to say that the “captains of industry” were not
altogether cold-blooded in the matter. They had conceived a horrible
affection for the new and vast forces under their control, and in
this they were imitated by their numerous admirers among people whom
a European would call middle class. Such people not only permitted
the mechanizing of life, they actively encouraged it. Consequently,
as Henry Adams put it: “The typical American man had his hand on a
lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on
keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to
become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions,
or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit
whisky or drugs, without breaking his neck.”[43] That the worship
of the new mechanical energies was ruining the nerves of wealthy and
middle-class Americans and imperilling society as a whole was an idea
only just beginning to dawn. Almost all educated people consented
to the inhuman process and called it fine names like “progress” and
“efficiency.”

Meanwhile, despite Henry Adams and his “typical American man,” the
wage earner who constituted the great majority of the industrial
communities did not take kindly to the perpetual speeding-up process.
From time to time he took refuge from his monotonous machine tending
in heavy drinking of hard liquor after a fashion unknown to the
Catholic peasant societies of Europe, and this habit of his annoyed
the captains of industry and infuriated the Puritans.

The solution adopted would have amazed our ancestors. We can
only hope that, if record is preserved, it will scandalize our
descendants. Instead of striving to restore a state of things in
which normal men might be left in peace to get their living and enjoy
the social pleasures natural to man, it seemed simpler and more
desirable to the leaders of our time to attempt to destroy the social
pleasure. As in the sixteenth century, the “business community,” to
whom the chief end of man was to make money, joined hands with the
fanatic to whom amusement was sinful.

Two other lesser factors came in, as if accidentally, and helped the
Prohibition cause.

The first of these accidents was a shift of political power in
the South. Until about 1890 the “quality,” i.e., people who had
a tradition of wealth and social ascendancy, dominated Southern
politics. “Politics” were “qualities,” so the saying went. Then
came a change; the small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers gained
control. The quality in the South are usually “Episcopalian,”
and anything but Puritanical. The “plain people” are nearly all
“hardshell” Baptists or “shoutin’” Methodists. Neither of these sects
are Calvinists like the original Puritans, but both are aggressively
Puritan in their discipline. The Baptists are the indirect
successors of the Anabaptists, the “extreme left” in the sixteenth
century religious struggle. The Methodists began as a schism from the
Church of England and, as we have seen, were the first Christians
to preach total abstinence instead of temperance in drink. As a
substitute for drink, and for the other forms of social pleasure
condemned by their discipline, they find an outlet in their orgiastic
worship. Hence the epithet “shoutin’.” Of all Christian sects,
these two are among those furthest from tradition. The proportion
of college-bred or otherwise cultivated men and women in either
denomination is small. Even their ministers are usually uneducated.
On the other hand, these preachers are industrious, zealous, and
devoted, so that they wield great influence. Naturally, with such
ministers, the mental effort required for ethical definition is not
to be found and taboo luxuriates. “Drink” to these people means
whisky in rowdy dives. In the first decade of the twentieth century
the Southern States under their new masters began to go Prohibition.

Southerners, anxious to avoid the reproach of intolerance, will
sometimes say that the desire to keep liquor from the negroes was
the chief motive for Prohibition. Liquor, they will say, inflamed
the negro’s passions and predisposed him to attempt rape upon white
women. On the other hand, the presence of negroes had nothing to
do with the situation described in the last paragraph, and such
an authority as William Garrott Brown, himself a Southerner, has
recorded his opinion that the race question had little to do with
Southern Prohibition.

The same author tells us that the pseudo-scientific propaganda
against drink was scarcely heard of during the Southern Prohibition
campaigns. According to him they were conducted, and won, “... mainly
by the devices of a methodist revival ...; by terrifying and rather
coarse emotional oratory from pulpit and platform, interspersed
with singing and praying; by parades of women and children, drilled
for the purpose; by a sort of persecution, not stopping short of
an actual boycott, of prominent citizens inclined to vote wet; ...
and finally, by fairly mobbing the polls with women and children,
singing, praying and doing everything conceivable to embarrass and
frighten every voter who appeared without a white ribbon in his
lapel.”

“It is these methods, gradually perfected in campaign after campaign,
that have won for Prohibition so many victories....”[44]

The present writer has been told by eye-witnesses of the use of
similar methods in imposing Prohibition upon the North-Western States.

The second accident which played into the hands of the
Prohibitionists was a new piece of political mechanism, the direct
primary.

The traditional American method of nominating candidates for office
was the “convention.” Conventions might be self-appointed, called
together by the force of some wave of enthusiasm. Normally they
were routine assemblies representative of the established parties
in the various political subdivisions of the country, states,
counties, cities, &c. Such an assembly would be elected by the party
voters, would formulate a “platform,” that is a declaration of party
principles and purposes, and would also nominate candidates to stand
for election on the platform. If a platform were adopted to which
any delegate could not bring himself to support, it was his moral
duty to “walk out” of the convention and separate from the party.
Consequently it was the aim of the platform makers to set forth such
principles as would retain in the party as many as possible of those
who usually voted its ticket, and at the same time attract as many
votes as possible from “independents” and voters enrolled in other
parties. In such a system minorities of “cranks” were at a discount.

The convention system was changed as one of the results of the change
in the typical American mood away from boundless self-confidence
to exaggerated self-criticism. Part of the new self-criticism was
directed against the leadership of the various political parties.
With the touching American faith in legal mechanism as a corrective
of conditions unrelated either to legal theory or practice, it was
proposed to make nominations dependent upon preliminary elections or
“direct primaries” in which the enrolled voters of the given party
might express themselves independently of the party “bosses” (at
least so it was naively hoped by those who fostered the scheme).

The failure of the direct primary to improve political conditions in
general does not concern this study. But among its various effects,
few of which its advocates had foreseen, it undoubtedly furthered
the Prohibition movement by increasing the political importance of
any organized group of “cranks,” i.e., people interested in one
particular question of public policy to the exclusion of other
matters. The Prohibitionists were an admirable example of such a
group, but other active minorities, such as the suffragettes, have
benefited enormously by the direct primary. In the first place, it
proved well nigh impossible to get the average citizen to cast his
vote in a direct primary, because in cases of contested nominations
for minor offices the aforesaid average citizen knew little and
cared less as to the whole matter. The cranks he regarded with an
amused and contemptuous tolerance. He could not believe that the new
nominating device could give power to such people. Hence the cranks
of all sorts gained influence out of proportion to their numbers, and
promptly brought that influence to bear upon candidates for office,
and especially candidates for the minor offices, such as members of
State legislatures. Under the convention system it was very hard to
put Prohibition into a party platform, for such a course would have
been immediately followed by secession on the part of many who were
accustomed to vote the party ticket. But under the direct primary,
a candidate for nomination knew that those who were cranks upon a
certain matter would support or oppose him according to his attitude
upon their pet subject without regard to his general fitness for
office as compared with his opponents. Besides its immediate effect,
the direct primary had an ultimate effect even more important in
favour of Prohibition, inasmuch as it weakened the party as an organ
of political thought. The convention had served as a forum for
deliberation and protest. Deprived of this forum, the party names
tended to become mere labels and the allegiance of the average voter
to his party tended to become weaker as the party came to mean less
and less. Accordingly, the voter became more inclined to throw over
his party from time to time, and again the cranks gained in relative
importance. Even had the direct primary accomplished the dethronement
of the “boss” (which it has not), the result would have been dearly
bought by reason of the enthronement of the crank.

Yet one more characteristic of the American contributed to the
curtailment of liberty. We have already mentioned his naive
reliance upon the imaginary power of legal enactment to overthrow
long-established custom. This fallacious belief arose somewhat as
follows:—

Patriotism (which is almost the religion of us moderns) is born of
two parents, first, attachment to people and places dear to us from
long association; second, attachment to a certain spirit which is the
sum of the thought and action of the nation as a whole.

In America, the comparative shortness of our national history and the
nomadic life of so many of our people have combined to give local
attachments a slighter hold than in Europe. On the other hand, the
national spirit is correspondingly strong. From the beginning, every
effort has been made to define, and thereby to intensify it. The
nation consciously dates itself from the Declaration of Independence
and, after that, from the adoption of the Federal Constitution. So
powerful have these formulas been that in America, more than in any
other country, it is possible to use almost interchangeably the words
“national spirit” and “national doctrine.”

It is true that the chief points of this national doctrine are that
men have certain inherent, natural rights ... predominantly the right
to “liberty,” that they are equal in those rights, and in all other
matters touching the law. Obviously this implies for instance that
no citizen or group of citizens should be empowered to compel their
fellows either to consume or to refrain from any given sort of food
or drink.

On the other hand, the reverence paid to the written law, founded
upon the Declaration and the Constitution, has resulted in
widespread error as to the nature of law itself. The majestic
formulas of the Declaration, and the governmental framework set
forth in the Constitution, changed in no way the manners and customs
of Americans. Their power was derived from the response which
they roused in the rooted instinct of men of European stock. The
underlying spirit of Christendom breathed life into them. Unhappily
the mass of Americans, cut off as they were from tradition—first
by their Protestantism and secondly by the Atlantic—instead of
recognizing the traditional source from which the strength of their
national formula was derived, mistakenly believed that strength
to be derived from the fact that these formulas had been made the
basis of American statute law. Instead of recognizing in statute
law merely the ratification of established custom resulting from
the sum of human activities, they erroneously came to believe that
human activities could be compelled to conform to statutes merely
because these statutes were proclaimed to have the force of law, and
irrespective of the fundamental laws of human nature and inexorable
human limitations which underlay those activities. “Men do not make
the laws. They do but discover them,”[45] says Vice-President Calvin
Coolidge of Massachusetts. And in so saying he indicts one of the
great failures of American thought.

Having thus considered the real forces making for Prohibition, it
remains for us merely to mention some of the more prevalent bits of
claptrap which formed the stock-in-trade of Prohibition advocates.
There were such statements as that the “wine” at the marriage in Cana
of Galilee was unfermented! When the present writer was serving a
term in the New York State Legislature, this was solemnly urged upon
him by a Prohibition lobbyist. The imaginary picture of the ancient
Jews, and of our Blessed Lord, fiddling about with benzoate of soda
or some such stuff needs no comment. There was pseudo-scientific
gibberish on the subject of “alcohol”; it was sought to show that
it was a poison. The comforting thought was at once suggested that
it must be a very slow poison, inasmuch as all our ancestors for
countless generations had daily consumed fermented liquors containing
appreciable amounts of it. The argument was on all fours with the
vegetarian claims as to meat being poison. It was also sought to
show that “alcohol” was incompatible with work; the same might have
been said of sleep. There was a crop of wild statements having to do
with the “working man,” considering him not as a fellow creature of
like passions with ourselves but as a strange monster transmogrified
by the middle-class imagination. It was alleged that “drink” caused
the creature to beat his wife even upon occasions when she deserved
nothing of the sort. It was claimed that when the “working man” was
deprived of his chief recreation (which was admitted to be “drink”)
the result would be increased prosperity and good temper in his
family circle. The slightest acquaintance with Mohammedan countries
would have been sufficient to disprove such stuff. These “working
man” fantasies are eloquent testimony to the barrier built up between
the classes of the community by centuries of Protestantism. Together
with the rest of the Prohibition claptrap, they deserve to be
recorded in triple brass in order to be the laughter, or the pity, of
generations to come.

Our generation has made a fine art of anonymity and the use of
“dummies” in finance. Therefore it is impossible at this time, and
will probably remain impossible, to expose the true sources from
which the twentieth century puritans got their propaganda fund. It is
common knowledge that many, if not most, of the large employers of
“labour” sympathized with the Puritan cause ... as in the sixteenth
century. It is believed that the Rockefellers gave enormously, and
the fact that they are the most prominent Baptist laymen in the
country, if not in the world, makes the belief seem probable.

The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has not ended the Prohibition
movement in America. So far, the task of enforcement has proved
impossible. Probably there has been some appreciable reduction in the
amount of fermented and distilled liquors consumed. Certainly the
price of liquor has increased and its quality has deteriorated. No
man can foretell the future: prophets are the jesters of posterity.
Given the extreme difficulty of repealing a constitutional amendment
(repeal would require a majority of two-thirds in the United States
Senate, and again in the Federal House of Representatives, and
after that a favourable vote in both branches of the legislature
in three-fourths of the States) it seems probable that the
Eighteenth Amendment will remain upon the statute books at least
for a considerable time. However, there is already one amendment,
the fifteenth, intended to secure the franchise to the negroes of
the South, which slumbers on the statute books. At present, the
Prohibition Amendment is a farce throughout many populous States,
and the burdened taxpayer is loaded with the salaries of enforcement
officials. The position of these enforcement officials somewhat
resembles that of the Viking pirates of the ninth century. They
have an enormous territory which they can raid almost at will, and
throughout which they can annoy the inhabitants. But they are so few
that, even with the enormous powers of movement and communication at
the disposal of a modern Government, they are unable to constrain
the activities of the millions among whom they operate. Like the
old pirates again, these officials can frequently be bribed into
harmlessness. Meanwhile, it is still possible to believe, if anyone
desires to do so, that the immemorial traditions of Christendom will
yield to a written law backed up by a handful of officials.

The spectacle is of absorbing interest to the student of history, who
personifies the memory of the race. In his more sanguine moods he
sees the gently sloping vineyards by Loire, he hears Rabelais roaring
with laughter from his deep lungs, and he looks forward to a happy
confounding of fools. Again he feels an antique paganism settle down
upon him like a grey mist, and he remembers the vengeance of the Gods
as Euripides has told it in the “Hippolytus” and, above all, in the
“Bacchæ.” For the student of history knows that the forces of our
human nature, which the ancients personified as Gods, are immortal.
Man may persecute but cannot kill them, and under his persecution
they become demons who turn and rend him, as Savonarola and the old
English Puritans found. Even St. Francis’ death-bed was darkened a
little by his memory of his own austerities. “I have sinned,” he
said, “against my brother the ass.” And what were the voluntary
sufferings of a monk or of all monks put together, as sins against
“the Gods” of life, compared with the deliberate, forcible, attempt
to teetotalize a whole nation?

As an assault upon human liberty, what was even the Inquisition
compared to the American Anti-saloon League?

In closing, let us recapitulate the points of resemblance and of
divergence between the Inquisition and the Prohibition movement. Both
were religious in their essence; the Protestant denomination made the
second, just as certainly as the thirteenth century Catholic Church
made the first. Both movements, being religious, were based upon
beliefs transcending the human reason. In the case of the Inquisition
the belief in question was the Catholic Faith; in the case of
Prohibition it is belief in the innate sinfulness of distilled and
fermented drinks. Both movements had a secular as well as their
dominant religious side. A thirteenth century man careless of The
Faith, even an infidel in personal belief, might have cordially
approved of severities against heretics, because of the social
dispeace which the presence of avowed heretics tended to cause.
The infidel emperor Frederic II, with his drastic Inquisitorial
legislation, is a case in point. Just so, it is possible for a man
to be a sincere Prohibitionist, on account of some idea of the
harmfulness of “drink” to the generality of mankind, especially
to the “workingman,” although he regards its use by himself as
beneficent. Indeed the tiny minority of Prohibitionists who believe
themselves to be well educated are usually of this sort. Finally, as
the Inquisition appears to be contrary to the spirit of Our Lord’s
teaching, so the Prohibition movement is certainly contrary to His
practice, at the marriage of Cana, at the Last Supper, and generally
throughout his life.

On the other hand, in spite of so much resemblance, there are
important differences between the Inquisitor and the Prohibitionist.
In the first place, there is a profound difference as to intellectual
integrity and candor. Catholic faith and morals were, and are,
definite. From the time when the Church emerges into the full light
of abundant historical record, in the first years of the third
century, she has regarded their definition as one of her chief
functions. Her corporate tradition declares that such was the case
from her beginning, and the documents which survive from the first
two centuries cannot, to say the very least, be made to contradict
this conclusion. Protestantism, on the other hand, was from the
first a revolt against authoritative corporate definition. From the
sixteenth century to the present time its theological and ethical
vagueness has increased until a climax, it would seem, has been
reached in the matter of Prohibition.

No clear statement of the Prohibitionist credo has ever been made
and endorsed by even a majority of those engaged in the movement. An
attempt has been made to say that “temperance” involves moderation in
the use of that which is good and total abstinence from that which
is harmful. But this attempt fails in two respects, inasmuch as it
confuses temperance with the purely secular virtue of prudence which
is nothing to a man’s salvation and therefore no possible part of the
moral teaching of any Christian body, and inasmuch as it obviously
conflicts with the corporate experience of mankind in calling the
moderate use of fermented drinks “harmful.”

The contrast here is as great as that between civilization and
barbarism itself. Certainly definition, like any other activity, can
be carried to excess, as Pope Leo XIII recognized in his Encyclical
on Scholasticism, wherein he mentions the “too great subtlety”
of certain of the mediæval doctors. But, as certainly, it is the
essential intellectual difference between civilized and barbarous man
that the barbarian willingly accepts vagueness of mind, whereas the
civilized man is continually striving to seize and formulate the laws
which govern the universe about him in so far as his reason is in any
way capable of comprehending them.

Secondly, there is another vast difference in the urgency of the
social and political considerations making for the two movements.
As we saw in the first chapter, mediæval man had built up a society
in which all men had definite functions, and in which destructive
competition between classes and individuals was reduced to a minimum.
Despite insufficient checks upon cruelty and brutality, and despite
the scantiness of its knowledge of history and of natural science,
the time had produced a general level of craftsmanship as unknown
since the sixteenth century as it was unequalled before the twelfth
(the short best period of Greece only excepted). In promoting the
happiness of mankind as a whole, mediæval society seems never to
have been equalled. Certainly the cheerfulness of the memorials
which the thirteenth century has left us is unique. And in this
society the Church was central and indispensable. To the educated
mediæval man (who, while inferior to his modern colleagues in
range of information, at the same time surpassed us in clarity and
rationality)—to the educated mediæval man, I say, it was evident
that to shatter the Church by attacking her Faith and Morals would
be to shatter his balanced society altogether, and set men preying
wolfishly upon one another. The common man, by a sort of instinct,
was equally determined upon the point. And what is more, their fear
was justified, as the last three centuries have abundantly proved,
although the age of expansion has postponed to our own day the
fulness of the evil of strife between man and man. Therefore the
men of the Middle Ages were correct in resisting attacks upon the
Church as attacks upon all they valued in civil society as well as in
religion.

The secular case for Prohibition is not nearly so strong as
the secular case for the Inquisition. It might be argued that
industrialism is central and fundamental in our society, and that
Prohibition, which is said to aim at “greater industrial efficiency,”
therefore resembles the Inquisition in being the servant of the
fundamental thing in the life of the community in which it has
arisen. But even if the truth of this idea, so far as it goes, be
conceded, still obstinate facts remain. Industrialism flourished
before Prohibition. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether
the attempt to abolish one of the chief pleasures of mankind will
result to the advantage even of the industrial system. It is at
least equally probable if the industrial labourer were to be really
deprived of his liquor that his energy would decline because of
a slackening in the zest for life characteristic of Christendom.
Certainly the history and present condition of the Prohibitionist
Mohammedans indicate energy far inferior to that of Christian
men, merry with their beer, their cider and their wine. Even if
an increasing energy on the part of the industrial labourer under
Prohibition be assumed, still there is no assurance that he will
concentrate that energy on his work. In such a case, it is at least
equally probable that he will find the dulness and monotony of
his life, already devastatingly dull and monotonous, so increased
under Prohibition that he will decide to expend a large part of his
vigour in industrial strife or in revolutionary movements. For the
ordinary modern man does not love industrialism as mediæval man
loved the world which he had made. The thirteenth century guildsman
would cheerfully fight for his guild and his customs, the modern
man sacrifices himself to the life of the factory as heavily as the
heathen Semites sacrificed men to Moloch. The Inquisition was a
measure of defence. Its fires burnt in behalf of things which the
mass of mankind saw and felt to be good. The Prohibition movement is
an act of aggression, of questionable value even for its own ugly
purpose. The one Prohibition counterpart of the twelfth century
spontaneous popular lynchings of heretics was the bar-smashing
activities of the virago Carrie Nation.

Last of all, there is, at the very least, a difference in the
degree of contradiction to the teaching and example of Our Lord (as
recorded in the Canonical Gospels), between the Inquisition and the
Prohibition movement. So as to meet possible opposition half way, let
us abandon the conclusions of the Rev. A. Vermeersch, S.J., who seems
to hold that there was no contradiction between the Inquisition on
the one hand and the doctrine and example of Our Lord on the other.
The present writer must confess that the learned Jesuit’s forceful
work is somewhat weakened by traces of a curious obliquity of mind,
as when he defines “religious liberty” as “the liberty of the true
religion!” For the sake of the arguments against the Prohibitionists,
let us rest our case upon the conclusions of Vacandard, whose book
is entrenched behind an array of “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur”
from Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority equal in impressiveness
to that displayed by Vermeersch. Vacandard calls the Inquisitorial
forms of procedure “despotic and barbarous,” and flatly says that
“severe penalties, like the stake and confiscation ... were alien to
the spirit of the Gospel.” Nevertheless, the contradiction between
Inquisitorial severity and the “spirit of the Gospel” must to some
extent be qualified. The logical conclusion is irresistible that
if (as all Christians must) we assume Our Lord’s doctrine and
example to be of inestimable value to mankind, we must admit that
any attempt to pervert that doctrine and example so as to make Our
Blessed Lord say and do as he did not is a more serious matter than
any crime recognized by law. Furthermore, this argument from reason
is, in a measure, supported by authority in the person of Our Lord
himself because of the extreme bitterness with which he denounced the
Pharisees for perverting religion.

On the other hand, the contradiction between Prohibition and the
Gospels is complete and absolute. According to the Gospels, Our Lord
spent most of his time in the society of men and women. Especially
he hallowed, by his continual use of it, the adornment of social
life by wine, so much so that his enemies called him “a gluttonous
man and a wine-bibber.”[46] We find him working a miracle so that a
wedding party, including himself, might be abundantly supplied with
wine ... as if any wedding party since the creation would have cared
whether or not they were indefinitely supplied with grape-juice. He
did even more—he made wine a part of the Sacrament—the one ceremonial
act which he prescribed. Bacchus-Dionysus also, so the pagan Greeks
taught, had made wine a sacrament of fellowship, human and divine. In
contrast with the dull and repulsive fanaticism taught in so-called
Christian Protestant churches in the United States to-day, the
traditional Christian, like the heathen worshipper of Bacchus, seeks
and has ever sought communion with his God in the drinking of wine.


FOOTNOTES:

[37] Isaiah, chap. v, verse 2.

[38] “This and That and the Other,” Hilaire Belloc, pp. 18, 19.

[39] Chesterton on Shaw, p. 43.

[40] “Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century,” by Henry
Osborn Taylor, published by Macmillan Co., New York. 1920. Chapter on
Calvin.

[41] From Chapter I of the “History of the United States,” by Cecil
Chesterton, p. 31.

[42] Chesterton on Shaw, pp. 48, 49, 50.

[43] “The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography.” “Vis Inertiæ,”
p. 445. Houghton, Mifflin Co., New York, 1918. Chapter XXX.

[44] “The New Politics, and Other Essays,” by William Garrott Brown,
publ. Houghton, Mifflin, New York. 1913. Pp. 157-158.

[45] “Have Faith in Massachusetts,” Calvin Coolidge, p. 4.

[46] St. Matthew’s Gospel, ch. xi, v. 19.




BIBLIOGRAPHY.


The subject of the Inquisition has been worked over so often that it
is doubtful whether renewed searching of the original authorities
would yield great profit. The law of diminishing returns comes in.

The sources quoted in this bibliography are unequal in value. As
interpreter of the Mediæval spirit Henry Adams comes first and after
him Taylor. For Albigensianism and St. Dominic, Guiraud is best; and
Vacandard for the mechanism and spirit of the thirteenth century
Inquisition. On mediæval warfare in general there is almost nothing
of value. Delpech is the best, supplemented by Dieulafoy as to Muret.

The one author who has gone over the whole subject, including the
entire course of the Albigensian War, is Lea, whose vast learning and
exactitude in matters of fact would have made him a great historian
had he possessed a grain of imagination or the least spark of
sympathy with the Middle Ages. In this respect Luchaire gains through
citizenship in a Catholic country, but his book ends with Innocent’s
death.

I have included a number of books used to illustrate particular
points, and also a handful of old-fashioned Protestant historians
whom the reader will value more for what their works will tell them
about themselves than about their subject. Limborch is not so bad;
his learning has evidently fought (and lost) a real battle against
his partisanship.

  “Life of St. Dominic and a Sketch of the Dominican Order.”
  Introduction by Most Rev. J. S. Alemany. P. O’Shea: New York.

  “The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography.” Houghton, Mifflin
  and Co.: New York and Boston. Riverside Press: Cambridge.

  “Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres,” Introduction by Ralph Adams,
  Cram Henry Adams. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston.
  Riverside Press: Cambridge, 1913.

  “The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma,” Henry Adams. Houghton,
  Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston. Riverside Press: Cambridge,
  1913.

  “In St. Dominic’s Country” (Preface by Rev. T. M. Schwetner, O.P.,
  S.T.L.), C. M. Antony. Longmans, Green and Co.: London and New York.

  “The Emancipation of Massachusetts,” Brooks Adams. Houghton,
  Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston, 1919.

  “La Bataille de Muret” (Pamphlet), Joseph Anglade. Edouard
  Champion: Paris, 1913. Edouard Privat: Toulouse, 1913.

  “La Conquête de la Vicomté de Carcassonne” (Pamphlet), J. Astruc.
  Published August, 1912.

  “Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa,” Dellon Aver. Etienne Roger:
  Amsterdam, 1919.

  “The New Politics and other Papers,” William Garrott Brown.
  Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston.

  “The Dominican Order and Convocation,” Ernest Barker, M.A.
  Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1913.

  “Les Dominicains dans l’Université de Paris,” Abbé Eugène Bernard.
  E. de Soye et Fils: Paris, 1883.

  “Etude sur la Condition des Populations Rurales du Roussillon au
  Moyen Age,” Jean Auguste Brutails. Alphonse Picard: Paris, 1891.

  “Etude sur l’Esclavage en Roussillon,” Jean Auguste Brutails (In
  “Nouvelle Revue Historique,” July-August, 1886).

  “George Bernard Shaw,” Gilbert K. Chesterton. John Lane and Co.:
  New York and London.

  “History of the United States,” Cecil Chesterton. George H. Doran
  and Co.: New York, 1919.

  “Les Fortifications Romaines et du Moyen Age, dans le Quartier St.
  Michel, Toulouse,” M. J. Chalande. Imprimerie et Librairie Edouard
  Privat: Toulouse, 1914, (Pamphlet).

  “Les Fortifications Romaines et du Moyen Age” (Pamphlet). Entre
  la Porte St. Michel et la Porte Montgaillard. M. J. Chalande
  (Pamphlet).

  “St. Thomas Aquinas—A Biographical Study of the Angelic Doctor,”
  Fr. Placid Conway, O.P. Longmans, Green and Co.: New York and
  London.

  “The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army,” F. L. Cheesman, M.A.
  Clarendon Press: London, 1914.

  “Life of St. Dominic,” Augusta Theodosia Drane. Burns and Oates:
  London. Benziger Bros.: New York.

  “The Spirit of the Dominican Order,” Augusta Theodosia Drane. R. J.
  Washbourne: London, 1910. Benziger Bros.: New York.

  “Dominican Biographies.” Catholic Truth Society: London, 1912.

  “Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas” (translation). 12 vols.
  Benziger Bros.: New York.

  “Life of St. Dominic and Sketch of the Dominican Order.” P. O’Shea:
  New York, 1892.

  “Les Institutions de Tauler, Religieux de l’Ordre de St.
  Dominique.” A. Tralin: Paris, 1909.

  “La Tactique au XIII Siècle,” Henri Delpech. Alphonse Picard:
  Paris, 1886.

  “La Bataille de Muret,” Marcel Dieulafoy. Imprimerie Nationale:
  Paris, 1899.

  “Le Royaume d’Arles et de Vienne (1138-1378),” Paul Fournier.
  Alphonse Picard: Paris, 1891.

  “Mystères de l’Inquisition et autres Sociétés Secrètes d’Espagne.”
  M. V. De Fereal.

  “The Making of Western Europe,” C. R. Fletcher. E. P. Dutton and
  Co.: New York, 1912.

  “Cartulaire de Notre Dame de Prouille,” Jean Guiraud (Preface by).
  2 vols.

  “St. Dominic” (translation), Jean Guiraud. R. and T. Washbourne:
  London. Benziger Bros.: New York, 1913.

  “Les Bienheureux Dominicains (1190-1577),” M. C. de Ganaz. Perrin
  et Cie: Paris, 1913.

  “Lacordaire” (translation), Count d’Haussonville. Herbert and
  Daniel: London, 1913.

  “Francis and Dominic and the Mendicant Orders,” John Herkless, D.D.
  Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1901.

  “Philip Augustus,” William Holden Hutton, Ph.D. The Macmillan
  Company: New York and London, 1896.

  “The Meaning of History and other Historical Pieces,” Frederic
  Harrison. The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1902.

  “A Century of Persecution under Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns” (from
  Contemporary Records), Rev. St. George Kiernan Hyland, D.D., Ph.D.
  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd.: London, 1920. E. P.
  Dutton and Co.: New York.

  “The Dark Ages,” W. P. Ker. Scribner’s: N.Y., 1904. Introd., pp.
  6-8.

  “Genius Loci, Notes on Places,” Vernon Lee. John Lane and Co.: New
  York.

  “Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” Vernon Lee. John Lane and Co.:
  New York.

  “A History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church,” Henry
  C. Lea, LL.D. 2 vols. Williams and Norgate: London, 1907.

  “Superstition and Force,” Henry C. Lea, LL.D. Lea, Bros, and Co.:
  Philadelphia, 1892.

  “The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies,” Henry C. Lea, LL.D.
  The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1908.

  “History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea,
  LL.D. The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1908.

  “An Historical Sketch of the Order of St. Dominic,” Father
  Lacordaire. P. O’Shea: New York, 1869.

  “Vie de Saint Dominique,” Father Lacordaire. Librairie Poussielque:
  Paris, 1912.

  “Letters to Young Men,” Father Lacordaire. London, 1903. “Cassock
  and Sword,” Charles Lenz, Ph.D.

  “Innocent III,” Achille Luchaire. La Croisade des Albigeois, Rome
  et l’Italie. Librairie Hachette, 1907.

  “Social France at the Time of Philip Augustus” (translation),
  Achille Luchaire. John Murray: London, 1912.

  “History of the Inquisition” (translation). Philip A. Limborch:
  London, 1731.

  “A History of the Holy Catholic Inquisition,” Introduction by Rev.
  Cyrus Mason. Henry Perkins: Philadelphia. Corey and Fairbank:
  Cincinnati, 1835.

  “Histoire des Maîtres Généraux de l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs,” R.
  P. Mortier. Alphonse Picard: Paris, 1909.

  “A Short History of the Crusades,” J. L. Mombert, D.D. News
  Printing Co.: New York, 1894.

  “The Bloody Tribunal,” John Marchant, Gent. Golden Key, London,
  1756.

  “John Lackland,” Kate Norgate. The Macmillan Company: New York and
  London, 1902.

  “A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages from the Fourth to
  the Fourteenth Century,” Charles Oman, M.A., F.S.A. Methuen and
  Co.: London, 1898. G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York.

  “The Dominicans,” edited by Very Rev. Father John Proctor, S.T.M.
  R. and T. Washbourne, Ltd.: London. Benziger Bros.: New York, 1909.

  “The Spirit of Romance,” Ezra Pound, M.A. J. M. Dent and Sons:
  London.

  “Scholasticism,” Joseph Rickaby, S.J. Dodge Publishing Co.: New
  York, 1908.

  “Brand of Dominic,” Rev. William H. Rule. Carlton and Phillips: New
  York, 1853.

  “History of the Inquisition,” Rev. William H. Rule. Hamilton Adams
  and Co.: London, 1874.

  “Averroes et l’Averroisme,” Ernest Renan. Calmann Lévy: Paris.

  “What is Modern Romanism?” George Franklin Seymour, D.D., LL.D.
  Young Churchman Co.: Milwaukee, 1888.

  “Mediæval Civilization” (translation), Dana Carleton Munro and
  George Clarke Sellery. Century Company: New York, 1904.

  “Renaissance in Italy,” John Addington Symonds. 7 vols. Smith,
  Elder and Co.: London, 1904.

  “Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece,” John Addington Symonds.
  3 vols. Smith, Elder and Co.: London, 1907.

  “Wine, Women and Song,” John Addington Symonds. Doubleday, Page and
  Co.: New York, 1907. G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, 1907.

  “Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional
  History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I,” William
  Stubbs, M.A. 2 vols. Clarendon Press: London, 1875.

  “Constitutional History of England—in its Origin and Development,”
  William Stubbs, M.A. Clarendon Press: London, 1875.

  “Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition,” Rafael Sabatini.
  Brentano: New York, 1913.

  “Summa Theologia of St. Thomas Aquinas” (translation). Benziger
  Bros.: New York, 1914.

  “History of the Inquisitions, including the Secret Transactions of
  those Horrific Tribunals.” J. J. Stockdale: London, 1810.

  “Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century,” Henry Osborn
  Taylor. 2 vols. The Macmillan Company: New York, 1920.

  “The Mediæval Mind,” Henry Osborn Taylor. Macmillan and Co.:
  London, 1914.

  “Ancient Ideals,” Henry Osborn Taylor. The Macmillan Company: New
  York, 1913.

  “The Empire and the Papacy,” T. F. Tout, M.A. Rivington’s: London,
  1909.

  “Life and Labours of St. Thomas of Aquin,” Archbishop Vaughan,
  O.S.B. Burns and Oates: London. Catholic Publication Society of New
  York, 1890.

  “The Inquisition: A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive
  Power of the Church” (translation), E. Vacandard. Longmans, Green
  and Co.: London and New York.

  “History of Languedoc,” Jean Joseph Vaissete. 16 vols E. Privat:
  Toulouse, 1872.

  “Bullaire du Bienheureux Pierre de Castelnau.” At Villemagne.
  Librairie M. Valat: Montpellier, 1917.

  “Dante and Aquinas: Being the Substance of the Jowett Lectures of
  1911,” Philip H. Wicksteed. J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd.: London and
  Toronto. E. P. Dutton and Co.: New York.

  “The Traditions of the European Literature,” Barrett Wendell.
  Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1920.


John Bale Sons & Danielsson, Ltd., 83-91, Great Titchfield Street,
London, W.

[Illustration: LANGUEDOC AND ADJACENT LANDS IN 1209]

[Illustration: TOWN OF MURET 1213]

[Illustration: BATTLE OF MURET, SEPT. 11, 1213

1ST PHASE: DE MONTFORT’S SORTIE AND SURPRISE OF FOIX]

[Illustration: BATTLE OF MURET, SEPT. 11, 1213

2ND PHASE: THE DECISION]

[Illustration: BATTLE OF MURET, SEPT 11, 1213

  3RD PHASE: DE MONTFORT, RETURNING FROM PURSUIT, ROUTS THE TOULOUSAN
  MILITIA INFANTRY ATTACKING THE TOWN
]

[Illustration: APPROXIMATE RESTORATION OF TOULOUSE IN 1217-1218 TO
ILLUSTRATE ITS SIEGE BY DE MONTFORT

(MODERN STREETS IN DOTTED LINES)]




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg i Added period after: Toulouse in 1217-1218 to illustrate its
         siege by De Montfort

  pg ii Changed: Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church,
          Carcassone
             to: Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church,
          Carcassonne

  pg xii Removed unnecessary ) from: Flanders in the early eighteenth
           century).

  pg 27 Changed: which has usually been called Albigenseanism
             to: which has usually been called Albigensianism

  pg 29 Changed: draining the country between the Cevennes
             to: draining the country between the Cévennes

  pg 46 Added quote after: general toleration of Valentinian, in the
          fourth century.

  pg 67 Changed: these people gave to extreme ascetism,
             to: these people gave to extreme asceticism,

  pg 60 Added period after: Plon-Nourrit Paris, 1913. Pp. 362-3,
          author’s trans

  pg 63 Changed: went against the heretics, no action whatsover
             to: went against the heretics, no action whatsoever

  pg 63 Changed: The other great chronic political controvery,
             to: The other great chronic political controversy,

  pg 83 Changed: had been “hereticated” on their deathbed
             to: had been “hereticated” on their death-bed

  pg 95 Changed: chronicler Peter de Vaux-Cernaiy Raymond
             to: chronicler Peter de Vaux-Cernay Raymond

  pg 117 Changed: account of aid given by certain near-by
              to: account of aid given by certain nearby

  pg 120 Changed: Mediterranean end of the Pyrenées
              to: Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees

  pg 129 Changed:  Pamiers, Foix, and the upper Ariège.
              to:  Pamiers, Foix, and the upper Ariege.

  pg 144 Changed: De Montford sent a knight
              to: De Montfort sent a knight

  pg 150 Changed: The Garonne flows northeast
              to: The Garonne flows north-east

  pg 153 Changed: Toulousains were out of easy bow-shot
              to: Toulousains were out of easy bowshot

  pg 156 Changed: William d’Encontre and William des Barras
              to: William d’Encontre and William des Barres

  pg 158 Changed: his chivalric enthusiasm by exchangnig
              to: his chivalric enthusiasm by exchanging

  pg 164 Changed: Courcon had persuaded to to take the field
              to: Courcon had persuaded to take the field

  pg 167 Changed comma to period after: “French” that it seemed wise
           to make it defenceless

  pg 171 Changed: swearing homage to his proper over-lord
              to: swearing homage to his proper overlord

  pg 173 Changed: After this exchange of compliments at Narbonne, de
           Montford
              to: After this exchange of compliments at Narbonne, de
           Montfort

  pg 176 Removed repeated word from:  Guy and and his men ended by

  pg 185 Changed: Louis promply went to work
              to: Louis promptly went to work

  pg 185 Removed extra period from: service from certain nobles not
           keen for the expedition..

  pg 192 Changed: North Frenchmen who came to sieze
              to: North Frenchmen who came to seize

  pg 215 Changed: come down to us concerning Waldenses, Arnaldists
              to: come down to us concerning Waldenses, Arnoldists

  pg 254 Added period after: Riverside Press: Cambridge, 1913

  pg 256 Added period after: John Lane and Co

  pg 257 Changed: “Averroes et l’Averroisme,” Ernest Renan. Calmann Levy
              to: “Averroes et l’Averroisme,” Ernest Renan. Calmann Lévy



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