God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Louis VII of France and Henry of Marcy, abbot of CIteaux for help. Although this may have had as much to do with Raymond’s problems with the Trencavels, in whose lands the heretics prospered most, as with his dislike of heresy, it shows there was no inevitable anti-crusading alliance of Languedoc nobility with heresy. After all, Raymond’s father had gone on the Second Crusade and his grandfather Raymond IV had been one of the heroes of the First.²⁴ In response to Raymond V’s appeal, a combined force of soldiers and preachers arrived to conduct inquiries at Toulouse, exposing and punishing a few local heretics. Abbot Henry excommunicated two prominent Cathars, including Bernard Raymond, Cathar bishop of Toulouse. In 1179, Canon XXVII of the Third Lateran anathematized heretics and, significantly, those protecting or conversing with them and called for military action, which would earn participants two years’ remission of sins and church protection equivalent to that for Jerusalem crusaders.²⁵ In pursuance of this canon, in 1181, Henry of Marcy, now a cardinal, led an army into Languedoc and besieged Lavaur. Local discretion prevailed. Lavaur submitted. The two Cathar leaders Henry had encountered in 1178 publicly converted and were rewarded with canonries in Toulouse.²⁶ The expedition went home. In contrast with 1209, there was no thought given to replacing the local ecclesiastical or secular authorities in the pursuit of heresy, merely providing assistance and a slightly menacing incentive to act.

While the activity of 1178–81 led nowhere, church policy towards heresy was clarified in Lucius II’s decree Ad abolendam (1184), which provided for convicted heretics to be handed over to the secular authorities for punishment, unspecified.²⁷ Yet in Languedoc, Catharism became, by the early years of the thirteenth century, so rooted ‘that it could not easily be dug out’,²⁸ a process assisted by limp ecclesiastical control and absentee bishops. Until the accession of Innocent III in 1198, the main Catholic vigour in the area seemed to have been reserved for the patronage of Cistercian monasteries. The new pope adopted a typically active if cerebral approach. As early as April 1198,²⁹ Innocent despatched his confessor to investigate and followed this with a series of legatine missions, in 1198, 1200–1201 and 1203–4. The pope’s alarm seems to have grown as he became aware of the ineffectiveness of his legates’ preaching and disputations, the full extent of the crisis in Languedoc and the strength of Catharism not just in southern France and Italy but throughout the Balkans as well. He began a radical overhaul of the Languedoc episcopacy and urged his legates to a more aggressive stance. In 1204, when adding Abbot Arnaud Aimery of Citeaux to his fellow Cistercians Master Ralph of Frontfroide and Peter of Castelnau, Innocent offered Holy Land indulgences to those who ‘laboured faithfully against the heretics’.³⁰ In tune with his crusading policies elsewhere, Innocent was moving towards a military solution. This was encouraged by the stalling of his latest legatine mission, apparently through the indifference or obstruction, as the legates saw it, of the secular rulers such as Raymond VI of Toulouse (1194–1222). A fresh approach in 1206–7 adopted by new recruits to the preaching campaign, the Spanish Bishop Diego of Osma and his canon Dominic Guzman, achieved little.³¹ They travelled as if in mirror image of perfecti, in simple clothes, walking barefoot along the footpaths and byways to a series of disputations with Cathar leaders. Although this later bore fruit in the creation of Dominic’s Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, immediately it produced no tangible reversal of the heretic tide. Still less did it deal with the problem of the Cathars’ powerful protectors.

Local solutions, as envisaged in 1179 or even by Innocent III himself as late as 1204, had not worked. Unlike Peter II of Aragon, who took measures against heretics in his realm, the count of Toulouse appeared unwilling or unable to act in the church’s interests. This problem was compounded by the poor relations that developed between Raymond and the legates, one of whom, the brusque Peter of Castelnau, made himself extremely unpopular with local opinion.³² To force the issue, the legates excommunicated Count Raymond in 1207 and 1208, draconian action that merely served to expose their impotence. If Raymond refused or was unable to take measures against the heretics, some external force would be required to compel or replace him. In 1205 and 1207 the pope attempted to interest Philip II of France in intervening. On the second occasion, in a letter of 17 November 1207, Holy Land indulgences were offered. Implicit was the pope’s recognition that the enemies of such a campaign stood to be disinherited and their lands confiscated. Not even this incentive could attract Philip, who argued that he was busy enough defending himself from his enemies John of England and Otto IV of Germany, awkwardly one of Innocent’s proteges. The pope’s own strategy was still hedged with qualifications: ‘we want you to bear in mind’, he told the French king, ‘the needs of the Holy Land, so that no aid is prevented from reaching her’. However, Innocent’s attitude towards the Cathars and their supporters was ominously clear: ‘wounds that do not respond to the healing of poultices must be lanced with a blade’.³³ Almost immediately, the pope was presented with a perfect casus belli. On the morning of 14 January, the legate Peter of Castelnau was assassinated on the west bank of the Rhone north of Arles, ten miles from the abbey of St Gilles, by a servant of the man with whom the legate had held a fierce row the previous day, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse.³⁴

THE CRUSADE

The murder of Peter of Castelnau failed to elevate the victim to sanctity, even the pope admitting to the absence of customary martyr’s miracles.³⁵ Otherwise it matched the more famous death of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170 in propaganda value and easily outstripped the Canterbury martyrdom in direct political consequences. News of the assassination was taken to Rome by Peter’s fellow legate, Abbot Arnaud Aimery, who convinced Innocent of Count Raymond’s complicity. The count was excommunicated, and, on 10 March 1208, Innocent III delivered a fulminating call to arms. The culprit was unequivocally identified as the ‘changeable, crafty, slippery and inconsistent’ Raymond. Full Holy Land indulgences were promised the ‘knights of Christ’. Innocent’s language avoided compromise. ‘According to the judgement of truth we must not be afraid of those who kill the body’, so ‘the strong recruits of Christian knighthood’ must attempt ‘in whatever ways God has revealed to you to wipe out the treachery of heresy and its followers by attacking the heretics with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, that much more confidently than you would attack the Saracens because they are worse than them’. Even if he repented, Raymond’s penalty should be the confiscation of his and his followers’ lands. ‘Catholic inhabitants must be put in their place.’³⁶ Combining religious conquest with political annexation complicated this new papal holy war. By legitimizing land grabbing, Innocent invited exploitation by acquisitive adventurers he proved characteristically powerless to restrain.

The new crusade was regarded as an extension of the previous legatine missions, recognized by the appointment of Arnaud Aimery as chief propagandist and recruiting agent. The theoretical justification rested on subtly different bases than the Holy Land crusades even if the rhetoric evoked similar images and the privileges tapped identical spiritual aspirations. Greater emphasis was placed on the crusade being a just as well as holy war, a slant made easier by the material crimes of heresy and murder. In his bulls of 10 March 1208, Innocent set out the juridical argument for violence against the heretics as a form of defence both spiritual and material: ‘the perverters of our souls have become also the destroyers of our flesh’. Raymond VI was an excommunicate and a murderer. In a manner impossible when tackling Islam, the Cathars were portrayed as ‘rebels’ against Christ and His church, their heresy ‘treachery’, in that legalistic sense ‘worse than Saracens’. These are categories of just war, increasingly familiar to contemporary canon lawyers and, as Innocent hinted, more amenable to explanation than the transcendent demands of holy war. Revenge was common to both – vengeance for the death of legate Peter but more fundamentally vengeance for the insult to Christ. The full panoply of vow, cross, plenary indulgence and temporal privileges were deployed, a logical extension of twelfth-century precedents, such as Canon XXVII of the Third Lateran Council, as well as patristic theory derived from Augustine of Hippo. The crusade was being applied to a just war to restore the order of Christendom.

As such the Albigensian crusade displayed familiar features to emphasize Innocent III’s conception of the universal embrace of holy war. The plenary indulgence and cross, absent in 1179, were prominent. Crusade temporal privileges were insisted upon and the crusade leaders attempted to impose sumptuary rules on their followers.³⁷ A Burgundian benefactor to the Cluniac monks in 1209 was recorded as joining the Albigensian campaign for the traditional reason of ‘the remission of my and my parents’ sins’. In a charter in favour of the abbey of Cluny, Odo III duke of Burgundy, the grandest of the 1209 recruits, is described as ‘crucesignatus contra hereticos Albigenses’.³⁸ Sympathetic contemporary chroniclers refer to the crusaders generically as peregrini, pilgrims, although the object of any penitential pilgrimage is hard, if not impossible, to identify. During the fighting at the sieges of Lavaur in 1211 and Moissac in 1212, the crusader army clergy sang the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, which became the crusaders’ anthem.³⁹ The crusades’ opponents were ‘enemies of Christ’ to the recruited as well as the