elicited an apology from Pope John Paul II. The Fourth Crusade, the subsequent failure of the victorious Latins to build firm bridges between the Latin and Greek communities and the exploitation of the catastrophe by the Orthodox church to buttress its sense of unique righteousness confirmed and deepened the still unresolved and perhaps irrevocable estrangement of Greek and Roman Christendom. At least Innocent III was right about that.
The Expansion of Crusading
18
The Albigensian Crusades 1209–29
On 24 June 1213, in a field outside the walls of Castelnaudary, between Toulouse and Carcassonne, Amaury of Montfort was knighted by Bishop Manasses of Orleans. Amaury’s father, Simon of Montfort, commanded the forces summoned by the pope in 1208–9 to extirpate heresy in Languedoc and dispossess its adherents, promoters and protectors. He now insisted the reluctant bishop ‘appoint his son a knight of Christ and personally hand him the belt of knighthood’. In a very public show, Amaury was presented by both his parents:
they approached the altar and offered him to the Lord, requesting the Bishop to appoint him a knight in the service of Christ. The bishops of Orleans and Auxerre, bowing before the altar, put the belt of knighthood round the youth and with great devotion led the
‘A novel and unprecedented form of induction into knighthood’, some said.1
The Castelnaudary ceremony distilled many of the elements that distinguished the twenty years’ war sponsored by the church and fought between the Dordogne, Mediterranean and Pyrenees. It represented, in a ceremony previously uncommon so far south in France, the rededication of the Montfort clan to Pope Innocent III’s vision of holy violence by creating almost a fresh category of knight, dedicated to Christ’s war yet without the religious vows of the military orders. It signalled an alien cultural imposition, witnessed by two northern French bishops and an army almost exclusively containing warriors, like the Montforts themselves, from north of the Midi, conquerors who brought their own churchmen, laws, hierarchy and military self-sufficiency. Simon claimed, by right of conquest and ecclesiastical sanction, to be ruler of large swathes of Languedoc. At Castelnaudary, Simon demonstrated that his dynasty had come to stay, a message underpinned by memories of the startling military victory Simon had won on those same fields two years earlier against the forces of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, whose lands and titles Simon was seeking to appropriate. The knighting emphasized the sanction of orthodox religion in the exercise of political authority, a crude identification of church and secular power that disconcerted the bishop of Orle ans. Castelnaudary showed how Simon specifically identified his and his family’s mission as holy. The primacy of the anti-heretical message that had inspired Innocent III to call for a crusade in 1208–9 was increasingly drowned out by the secular implications of Simon’s conquests: the political reorganization of Languedoc. The Castelnaudary rite consecrated a new religious cause, that of Montfort authority.
18. Languedoc, France and the Albigensian Crusade
The knighting of Amaury formed part of the campaign of conquest and destruction that had begun as a crusade to crush the Cathars and their protectors in 1209.2 The fighting lasted until the Treaty of Paris in 1229 confirmed the annexation of Languedoc by the French crown. With Simon of Montfort’s holy war ending in violent death outside the walls of Toulouse in 1218 and Amaury’s subsequent failure to make good his father’s claims, the Montfort rights and ambitions were adopted by their overlord, the king of France, in 1224, on political as much as religious grounds, heresy surviving better than did the counts of Toulouse or the viscounts of Beziers and Carcassonne. The sweeping away of the
Church-approved violence against heretics could claim a tradition reaching back to Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century and found renewed justification from twelfth- and early thirteenth-century canon lawyers. The novelty of the Albigensian crusades lay in the church’s recruitment of an international force rather than rely on local secular Christian rulers to combat heresy, and the application to the campaigns of the privileges of Holy Land penitential warfare. It also exposed a ready acceptance by churchmen of allowing lay powers to kill heretics more or less at will, an eagerness reined in by the calmer procedures of the Inquisition after the wars ended. The exploitation of these wars by Simon of Montfort and the Capetians did not pass unnoticed by Innocent III and his successors. Yet, to dismiss the Albigensian crusades simply as ideologically corrupt or cynically manipulative is to adopt the position of the pacifist heretic Peter Garcias of Toulouse, who was reported in 1247 as fulminating against the crusades because ‘God desired no justice which would condemn anyone to death’. ‘All preachers of the Cross are murderers; and the cross which preachers give is nothing than a bit of cloth on the shoulder’.4 Many Catholics disagreed. It is also clear that adherents of heresy were equally willing to take the physical fight to their attackers.
The Albigensian crusades violently altered the political destinies of Languedoc, its social structures as well as religious and cultural orientation. They have been accused of the wilful destruction of a uniquely vibrant and tolerant culture. However, given the wealth of the region, its weak political and ecclesiastical authorities, its ties with neighbouring rulers of church and state, and its strategic importance at the hub of a circle uniting north Italy, the Ebro valley, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, it is in every way unlikely that the fate of early thirteenth-century Languedoc would have been ignored by its distant and not so distant overlords, the kings of France, England and Aragon and the emperor. Their involvement was anticipated rather than created by the pope’s concern with the enfeebled state of the Languedoc church and the threat, as he saw it, to its survival and to that of the whole Catholic church from a particularly robust and attractive heresy.
THE CATHARS
Near the heart of the Christian religion sits the problem of suffering, traditionally interpreted as a consequence of sin, of the fall of man as described in the Book of Genesis and, therefore, of the existence of evil. Both the Creation stories and experience of the material world suggested to Christians that evil existed in terrestrial matter, the city of Man, in contrast to paradise, the city of God. Much of the reform initiated within the western Catholic church from the eleventh century had been directed precisely at mitigating some of the implications of this by developing explanations, mechanisms, sacraments and devotional practices through which the consequences of inevitable sin could be alleviated, its penalties satisfied or purged and heaven attained. The penitential strand in crusade ideology and its plenary indulgence formed part of this process, as did the Fourth Lateran Council’s acceptance of individual oral confession and transubstantiation in 1215 and the thirteenth-century elaboration of a coherent doctrine of purgatory and a Treasury of Merits endowed by God to save souls.
While going some way to assuage the anxieties of the faithful, this concentration on the redemptive sufferings of Christ exposed a central conundrum of belief. Christ the Son could save from sin the world created by God the Father. If the material world was sinful, it was still by definition the creation of an eternal, omnipotent and presumably loving God. Some devout and godly people found (and find) the orthodox Christian explanations for this problem of evil opaque, evasive and unconvincing. This was not a new phenomenon in the twelfth century, but the
