God's War: A New History of the Crusades

area of preaching was restricted, chiefly to northern France. The count of Auvergne and the archbishop of Bordeaux also gathered an army in western France which launched a brief foray into the Agenais and Quercy in May 1209, terrorizing the Lot valley before tamely withdrawing. How far this incursion was motivated by frontier rivalry rather than enthusiasm to destroy heresy must remain obscure, although a number of heretics were tried and burnt. A similar raid into the Rouergue by the bishop of Le Puy seemed more concerned with profits from tribute than imposing religious orthodoxy.⁵²

The main army raised in 1208–9 depended heavily on secular networks of lay and ecclesiastical lordship and financial inducement. The clerical tenth authorized by the pope was concentrated on the provinces where the crusaders came from, notably the archdiocese of Sens, while a voluntary lay subsidy was proposed for those living on the lands of the crusader nobles.⁵³ Raising troops was left to the lay leaders. The future leader, Simon of Montfort, was recruited by Odo of Burgundy, with ‘substantial gifts’ with more to follow when Simon agreed.⁵⁴ The lay commanders’ underwriting of the enterprise invited division, especially as it transpired during the 1209 campaign that the immensely grand duke of Burgundy and parvenu opportunist count of Nevers detested each other to such an extent that it was daily expected that either might resort to murder.⁵⁵ Disunity on crusade was perhaps normative. However, the Albigensian campaigns proved especially vulnerable to squabbles among its short-stay generals.

The search for an acceptable lay leader foundered on Philip II’s repeated refusal to countenance his own or his son’s involvement, especially once he learnt of an anti-French alliance early in 1209 between John of England and his nephew Otto IV of Germany, both of whom held overlordship claims to different parts of Languedoc. However, Philip, still mired in marital problems that had aroused the censure of the pope, needed to maintain some association with the crusade to safeguard his interests. At an assembly at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on 1 May 1209, in the presence of Arnaud Aimery, Odo of Burgundy and the counts of Nevers and St Pol, Philip reiterated his inability to campaign in person, although he promised a royal contingent. By emphasizing that the French crusaders undertook the campaign with their king’s approval, Philip implicitly reserved the right to intervene. Any rearrangement of Languedoc’s tenurial structure would require royal approval, offering the French king further opportunities to assert his suzerainty throughout his kingdom.

The absence of an uncontested lay leader left the nominal command to Arnaud Aimery, who appeared wholly unabashed by the task. The main expedition mustered at Lyons on 24 June 1209 and set out down the Rhene at the beginning of July. By this time the whole strategic context of the expedition had been thrown into confusion from which it never properly emerged. The expected target, Raymond of Toulouse, suddenly became an ally, no doubt to the relief of those of his vassals and close relatives who were marching with the crusaders. After trying desperately to shore up his diplomatic position and failing to persuade his nephew, young Raymond Roger Trencavel viscount of Albi, Beziers and Carcassonne to make common cause against the invaders, Raymond VI opened negotiations with the pope. Innocent was disinclined to cancel the crusade even if Raymond submitted and equally unwilling to compromise the work of his legate Arnaud Aimery. Nevertheless, he despatched two new legates to impose conditions for Raymond’s submission and readmittance into the church. At St Gilles on 18 June, Raymond accepted a long list of grievances against him, agreed to surrender certain lands, and was scourged by the legate Milo before being paraded half-naked before the coffin of the murdered Peter of Castelnau. On 22 June, Raymond took the cross, aligning himself with the invaders while securing the church’s protection from them. From St Gilles, Raymond hurried north to meet the advancing crusaders at Valence.⁵⁶

Cheated of their expected victim, the crusaders turned their attention to the Trencavel lands, incontestably riddled with heretics, even though the young and engaging viscount himself was recognized as orthodox. This made little difference. The crusade needed an enemy; Raymond of Toulouse short-sightedly promoted an opportunity to destroy a troublesome vassal while escaping attack himself. Viscount Raymond Roger’s attempt to deflect his fate by submitting to Arnold Aimery was brushed aside; the legate’s Christian lexicon seemed to lack charitable forgiveness. Advancing from Montpellier, the crusaders entered Trencavel territory on 21 July. Raymond Roger fell back before them, leaving Beziers at their mercy. On 22 July, the crusaders began to dig in outside the walls of Beziers. The bishop of Beziers attempted to persuade the citizens to hand over or abandon the heretics in the city, of whose names he claimed to have a list. His overtures were rejected. The inhabitants believed their defences and food supplies would withstand assault. Reinforcements were expected. There were probably at most only 700 heretics in a population of 8–9,000. Beziers saw the besiegers in political and military, not Christian, terms; their city and their independence were being attacked. This, they reckoned, accurately as it turned out, the sacrifice of a few eccentric neighbours was unlikely to alter. However, the offer made by the bishop formed a crucial element in Catholic apologetics for what followed. The Christians of Beziers had placed themselves beyond the pale of humanity by consciously rejecting the bishop’s terms and choosing to harbour and sustain heretics. In the words of the legates’ subsequent report to the pope, their blood was on their own heads.⁵⁷

Even so, Catholic reports on the sack of Beziers were keen to emphasize that the attack was not led by the nobles and knights but by the servientes, sergeants, and the unarmed mass of camp- followers, a reversal of social norms suggesting literary uneasiness with events. Whoever began the attack, it seems most of the army joined in to make it quick, ruthless and devastating. The legates laconically recorded ‘our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age’.⁵⁸ The citizens appear to have panicked and put up little resistance. In a later, possibly apocryphal, anecdote, when asked by priests how they could distinguish whom to kill, Abbot Arnaud Aimery, worried lest heretics escaped by pretending to be Catholics, ordered, ‘Kill them. The Lord knows who are his own.’⁵⁹ Even the crowds who sheltered in the main churches were not spared. The legates estimated that 20,000 died in the carnage and called it a miracle.⁶⁰ The true figure was almost certainly far less. The massacre may have been premeditated. Rumours suggested that discussions at the papal Curia in 1208 had authorized the destruction of any who resisted the crusade. The Navarrese cleric William of Tudela (d. c.1213), who composed a Provencal verse account of the early stages of the Albigensian crusades, noted that the crusade leaders decided to make examples of the inhabitants of any town taken by storm pour encourager les autres. ‘They would then find no one daring to resist them, so great would be the terror produced… that is why the inhabitants of Beziers were massacred; they were all killed, it was the worst they could do to them.’⁶¹

In that respect, the massacre at Beziers initially worked. Narbonne immediately sent in its unconditional submission and the army met no resistance as it advanced towards Carcassonne, as the countryside, towns, villages and castles were evacuated by terrified locals. In the longer term, however, the sack of Beziers hardened Languedoc opposition to the invasion across religious divisions. Thereafter adherence or opposition to the crusaders was determined largely by secular considerations. The chief religious element in the campaigns of the following two decades found expression in periodic military atrocities and regular mass execution, usually by burning, of captured heretics. However, despite the gaudy rhetoric of holy war and Simon of Montfort’s carefully constructed reputation as a warrior of Christ, between his appointment as crusade leader in 1209 and death in 1218, Cathars were hardly his main target. Most of the places where Cathars are known to have lived he left untouched, and at only a small minority of the castles and towns Montfort captured was the presence of heretics recorded.⁶² As Beziers demonstrated, strategy rested on realpolitik, not religion.

Beziers set the tone for what developed into one of the nastiest of medieval wars, partly because of the high stakes of dispossession and conquest, partly because of the collapse of social order and erosion of the rule of civil law in a region that became a perpetual war zone. The religious gloss wore thin. In May 1213, Innocent III admitted that ‘their protectors and defenders… are more dangerous than the heretics themselves’.⁶³ Little trust existed between opponents as surrender terms were breached. Guerilla warfare and local exploitation of the absence of settled political authority spread violence far beyond the paths of the main campaigns. The presence of mercenaries, a staple of Languedoc warfare for decades, ensured that many engagements ended with the slaughter of defeated troops, despised as paid soldiers. Stubborn garrisons received little mercy. Massacres became regular events, from most of the inhabitants of the modest castrum of Les Touelles near Albi (January 1212) to the 5,000 civilians despatched at Marmande on the Garonne in the Agenais in June 1219 by the army of Prince Louis of France after the town had surrendered.⁶⁴ Captured heretics went to the flames. The first was burnt without trial on Simon of Montfort’s orders at Castres in August 1209.⁶⁵ Thereafter, the holocaust flickered intensely rather than raged across the province. At Minerve in July 1210, Abbot Arnold Aimery tried to scupper a negotiated surrender, so keen was he to make sure the heretics burnt; at least 140 of them did. Over 300 perfecti were burnt at Lavaur in May 1211 and at least sixty at Les Casses a few days later, places, the great historian of the Inquisition H. C. Lea memorably remarked, whose