The mass burning (pictured) of Cathars at their stronghold of Montségur in 1244 finally broke the back of the Cathar faith.
The Inquisition introduced by Pope Gregory IX in 1231 was designed to fight all heresy wherever it occurred in Catholic Europe, but its first target was the unorthodox brand practised and preached by the Cathars.
Pope Gregory IX (pictured) appointed the Dominican friars as chief investigators of heresy.
The danger the Cathars presented to the established Church lay in their vast numbers, the support of high-ranking nobles, like Raymond VI of Toulouse and his son, Raymond VII, the spread of Cathar territory in southwest France and northeast Spain and the resilience that enabled them to survive, with beliefs stubbornly intact, the 20 gruelling years of the Albigensian Crusade. However, the sequel to the Treaty of Paris, which brought the Crusade to an official close in 1229, was even more punitive and lasted even longer. Ultimately, the fight against heresy was to outdo most other conflicts of medieval times in the cruelty and terror that was used to achieve its ends.
As far as the medieval Church was concerned, extreme measures were justified when heresy placed Christianity in mortal danger. The foundations of society itself were at stake, for the freethinking heretic, who rejected the ‘one true Church’ and chose his own beliefs and practices, was a fundamental threat to the faithful. The Church, after all, was the bedrock on which their peace of mind rested, and its teachings were central to their certainties. Rob them of that, and mayhem would follow.
The freethinking heretic, who rejected the ‘one true Church’ and chose his own beliefs and practices, was a fundamental threat to the faithful.
Gregory IX established the Papal Inquisition in 1231, although unlike the Dominicans he appointed, he did not personally approve the use of torture as a tool of investigation.
Over the next quarter of a century, the sieges of towns and castles and the massacres of their inhabitants continued, but it was not the mixture as before. It was infinitely worse. Pope Gregory’s Inquisition gave an extra edge to atrocity as inquisitors exploited the wide-ranging powers he allowed them. Even their job description, inquisitor hereticae pravitatis (inquisitor of heretical depravity), was a terrifying term with its overtones of madness and the link that superstition made with demons, devils and their evil.
The Cathars were fully aware that no quarter would be given once the Dominicans got down to work, and when the Inquisition was set up in Languedoc in the Spring of 1233 thousands of them fled to safer places such as Caudiès de Fenouillèdes or Montségur, both of them on the French side of the Pyrenees. Montségur was remarkable for its fortress, sited high among the snow-capped mountain peaks. It was easy to feel safe in such remote refuges, but not everyone was able to elude the Inquisition or seek safety elsewhere.
Pope Gregory’s Inquisition gave an extra edge to atrocity as inquisitors exploited the wide-ranging powers he allowed them.
Inevitably, a climate of dread and suspicion began to pervade Toulouse and other cities of Languedoc where anyone, Cathar or not, could be betrayed to the Inquisition and so incur its terrible penalties. Loyalty to the Church and its teachings was supposed to be the prime motive for leading inquisitors to heretics. But there were other agendas at work. Piety was all too often outmatched by a range of personal reasons, such as the chance to pay off old scores, get rid of an inconvenient rival or otherwise satisfy the warped imaginations of mischief-makers and misanthropes.
The Dominicans, members of the Order of Friars Preachers, who were to be the pope’s chief inquisitors were a special type of monk, purposely trained by their Spanish founder Dominic de Guzman to mirror the asceticism, poverty and piety of the Cathar Perfects. De Guzman, who was canonized as St Dominic only 13 years after his death in 1221, perceived that the Perfects’ humble, self-denying way of life was the key to the devotion they earned among the Cathars. The Dominicans, he decided, must match the Perfects for piety and self-sacrifice if they were going to succeed in saving Cathar souls for Rome. They had to live in the world, not within the confines of the monastery, and like the Cathar Perfects, communicate directly with the people and eschew all luxury, and the self-indulgence too eagerly embraced by too many churchmen.
Unfortunately, Dominic did not take sufficient account of the self-righteousness inherent in the strictly puritan way of life, nor of the way it produced a sense of moral superiority that ran counter to the self-effacement he tried to instil in his followers. In addition, extremes have always bred extremists, and fanatics who would today be classed as psychopaths were drawn to the Order of Friars Preachers by the chance the Inquisition offered to use barbarity disguised as righteous zeal. The pope may or may not have recognized them for what they were. But just the same, he welcomed them to the ranks of his inquisitors and dispatched them to France and elsewhere in Europe where many Dominicans became notorious for conduct that was horrific even by the brutal standards of the time. It was no wonder that, ultimately, the Dominicans became widely known as ‘The Black Friars’.
St Dominic, founder of the Dominican Order, is shown here performing self-flagellation. The practice, also called ‘mortification of the flesh’, was eventually outlawed by the Catholic Church in the 14th century.
Madame Boursier, an elderly Cathar lady and native of Toulouse was on her deathbed when Dominican inquisitors arrived at her home a few doors down from the city’s cathedral on 5 August 1234. She was about to endure a shocking fate.
The Cathars of Toulouse had kept quiet about their beliefs, hoping to avoid persecution, and till now, the dying and delirious old lady had been one of these secret credentes (believers). Until, that is, she was betrayed to the Dominicans by one of her own servants. One of the Dominican monks, Guillaume Pelhisson, was an official inquisitor, another, Raymond du Fauga, Bishop of Toulouse was a man with an overdeveloped taste for cruelty and guile. When the two Dominicans entered Madame Boursier’s house and climbed the stairs to her room, her family became terrified: they had long been under suspicion of heresy and believed that now, they had reached the end of the line. This was certainly so for Madame Boursier.
One member of the family, hoping to warn the old lady of her dangerous visitors, whispered to her that the ‘Lord Bishop’ had arrived. But Madame Boursier was too far advanced in her delirium. She imagined that the Cathar Perfect, Guilhabert de Castres was at her bedside. Raymond du Fauga let her go on believing it and pretended to be the Perfect as he encouraged her to be true to her Cathar beliefs for, as he told her: ‘The fear of death should not make you confess anything other than that which you hold firmly and with your whole heart.’ To the horror of her relatives, the poor old lady condemned herself out of her own mouth and the Bishop, having made certain of his victim, declared his true identity and pronounced the death sentence, effective immediately.
In a scene rarely matched for sheer malevolence, even in the annals of the Inquisition, the helpless old woman was tied to her bed, carried downstairs and along the street outside to a field that lay beyond the city limits. There, a bonfire had already been lit, and in front of a large and curious crowd, Madame Boursier and her bed were flung into the flames. Barely conscious, the old lady may have been too far gone to be aware of what was happening to her, nor to ever have known how her own servant had been tempted to accept the payment offered by the Inquisition to anyone who denounced a heretic.
Strewn on the floor in front of this Dominican monk are some of the instruments of torture used by members of his Order to root out heretics.
Pope Gregory IX is shown in this 14th century manuscript receiving lists of accused heretics from the inquisitor kneeling before him.
The papal inquisition did not care about motives. Its inquisitors were trained to net all the victims who were betrayed to them and at the same time close any loopholes that might enable them to escape the ‘justice’ they were supposed to dispense. First in was an inquisitor who arrived in a town, consulted the local clergy and then called on all males over the age of 14 and all females over the age of 12 to declare their loyalty to the orthodox Catholic faith. Needless to say, those who refused were instantly classed as sinners and, most likely, heretics. The inquisitor gave them one week to think over their position, confess their wrongdoings and denounce themselves.
After that, those who still refused to cooperate were summoned to appear before the Inquisition and its frightening, insistent interrogators. They presented themselves, knowing full well that no one was safe, not the dying, like Madame Boursier, nor the sick, nor the lunatics whose ravings were accepted as solid evidence.
Where the late Pope Innocent III had used the gentle, diplomatic approach, sending Cistercian monks among the Cathars to debate their beliefs and hopefully convert them, Gregory IX was much more proactive. He preferred to manipulate the situation and exploit baser human instincts in order to gain the results he wanted. Inevitably, where Innocent failed, Gregory succeeded. To achieve his ends, he gave preference to Dominicans who were adept at terrorizing witnesses and so confusing them that they soon reached a state where they could barely think straight.
Piety was all too often outmatched by a range of personal reasons, such as the chance to pay off old scores.
Did they know of any heretics? Had they seen them, how often, where and when? Who was with them? Who visited them? Had they seen anyone treat a Cathar with reverence or revered him themselves? Did they know of any bequest made to heretics and, if so, how much was it worth and who drew up the deed? Faced with this persistent pressure, designed to trip them up or make them contradict themselves, most people would say anything, not matter what, to escape the barrage of quick-fire questioning. Loyalty, love, friendship, decency and honesty were all abandoned as victims, sensing danger, made desperate bids at self-defence. The ‘accused’ as they were called in the manuals of the Inquisition, were not allowed to know whether or not they were themselves suspected of heresy. Fear-filled imagination drove them to divulge scores of names and so provide the Inquisition with yet more suspects.
Cathar heretics are abused and beaten as they march to a fiery death in this 19th-century colour lithograph.
The ‘accused’ as they were called in the manuals of the Inquisition, were not allowed to know whether or not they were themselves suspected of heresy.
The burning of dead ‘heretics’ and other excesses committed by inquisitors provoked widespread disgust, and this soon led to serious revolts and even murder. In 1235, two years after the Inquisition first arrived in Languedoc, three inquisitors died after they were hurled down a well some 30 metres (100ft) deep. Another, Arnold Catalan, whose sphere of operations was at Albi, was set upon by an infuriated mob after he condemned and burnt two heretics and did the same to several corpses he had exhumed.
In his history of the Inquisition in Toulouse between 1230 and 1238, Graham Pelhisson, a Dominican who was himself an inquisitor, described what happened next:
The people of Albi sought to throw him into the River Tarn but at the insistence of some among them, released him, beaten, his clothing torn to shreds, his face bloody…
The burning of dead ‘heretics’ and other excesses committed by inquisitors provoked widespread disgust, and this soon led to serious revolts and even murder.
The victims of the sadistic Konrad von Marburg, the Pope’s inquisitor in Germany, soon learned that it was a waste of their final breaths to ask him for mercy.
This, though, was not an isolated incident for as Pelhisson continued:
The chief men of the region, together with the greater nobles and the burghers and others, protected and hid the heretics. They beat, wounded and killed those who pursued them…many wicked things were done in the land to the Church and to faithful persons.
Another victim of this violent backlash was Konrad von Marburg. In 1227, the year he was elected pope, Gregory IX engaged von Marburg to wipe out heresy in his native Germany. Konrad was already an infamous sadist at the time, but as a reign of terror, his work in Germany outdid everything he had previously ‘achieved’ and inevitably led to his murder in 1233.
Before he was appointed a papal inquisitor, Konrad von Marburg had acted as advisor and confessor to Elisabeth, the widow of Prince Ludwig IV of Thuringia, who died of plague in 1227. Before long, Konrad held the unfortunate Elisabeth in thrall. He replaced her favourite ladies-in-waiting with two termagants and punished her for lapses by slapping her on the face or hitting her with a rod. It was an exceptionally harsh regime which, combined with the ascetic lifestyle she led after her husband’s death, damaged her sufficiently to kill her at the age of 24. She was afterwards canonized as St Elisabeth and became for many an icon of misused womanhood.
There was more than a hint of what Elisabeth had gone through at the hands of the brutal Konrad in his later conduct as the pope’s inquisitor in the German districts of Hesse and Thuringia. A rumour that he was in the area could create panic. According to some reports, panic changed to hysteria if he appeared in person, riding through a town or village accompanied by his grim-faced assistant, a man called Dorso, and a character named John, who had only one eye and one hand.
There was good reason for this terror. Konrad saw heretics everywhere and those he did not see, he fancied were hiding from him in castles, churches and even in monasteries and nunneries. Actual guilt or proof of guilt became superfluous because Konrad would accept almost any accusation as fact and judged suspects guilty of heresy unless they could prove they were innocent. This was easier said than done, for Konrad employed mobs whose task it was to find heretics, terrify confessions out of them and burn them at the stake if they refused to recant. Victims had one chance to avoid this fate: they could denounce more ‘heretics’, not from any real knowledge, but by deliberately falsifying evidence. Hundreds, maybe thousands, Cathars and Catholics alike, were accused of heresy, and, in their turn, offered the chance to live if they would agree to incriminate others. If they refused, Konrad was not one to hang around waiting for them to make up their minds. Many of his ‘heretics’ were burnt at the stake on the same day they were charged.
Konrad did not confine himself to snaring minnows for the Inquisition. He aimed for the top, implicating priests, aristocrats and other high-ranking notables in sins and shortcomings that qualified them for punishment. One of his victims was the Provost of Goslar, Heinrich Minnike, another was Heinrich II, Count of Sayn, who was found guilty of participating in‘satanic orgies’. Minnike burnt at the stake, but the Count fought back and was exonerated by the bishops of Mainz. They refused to reverse their verdict as Konrad demanded.
Needless to say, Konrad made enemies wherever he went and after he left Mainz to return to Marburg, the inevitable happened. On 30 July 1233 while on the road, Konrad was waylaid by knights who murdered both him and his assistant Dorso. It was suspected, but never proved, that the assassins were in the pay of Heinrich II.
The widowed Queen Elisabeth of Thuringia, who was canonized as St. Elisabeth in 1235, visits a hostel for the poor which she founded.
In 1230 Pope Gregory IX ordered his chaplain and confessor, St Raymond of Peñaforte, to compile a collection of ecclesiastical laws and rulings. He is seen here being handed the collection, known as the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX.
The killing of the pope’s man, whatever the circumstances, was usually treated as a great scandal, virtually an insult to the pontiff himself. The death of Konrad of Marburg, however, drew a guileful response from Pope Gregory IX. He could not have been unaware of Konrad’s barbarous doings and yet he wrote to the archbishops of Cologne and Trier in terms that subtly shifted the blame onto them.
‘We marvel’ the pope told the two archbishops ‘that you allowed legal proceedings of this unprecedented nature to continue for so long among you without acquainting us of what was happening. It is our wish,’ Gregory continued disingenuously ‘that such things should no longer be tolerated and we declare these proceedings null and void. We cannot permit such misery as you have described.’
Reigns of terror, as conducted by the likes of Konrad of Marburg or Robert le Bougre, were inevitable when the weapons provided by the pope for his inquisitors to use included those that most terrified the medieval mind. Excommunication and interdict, for example, meant exclusion from the Church and its sacraments. More worldly punishments, such as imprisonment, dispossession, exile and even torture were also used to bring people to heel and make them cooperate with the Inquisition. Refusal was, of course, considered tantamount to heresy and incurred the same punishments.
The killing of the pope’s man, whatever the circumstances, was usually treated as a great scandal, virtually an insult to the pontiff himself.
Two Dominican brothers, Peter Seila and William Arnald, who were commissioned as inquisitors by the pope in 1233, deployed virtually the full range of papal penalties in Languedoc, the chief target of the Inquisition. One of their methods involved speed, with arrest, trial, conviction and penalty following each other in quick succession. This was how the most eminent Cathar Perfect in Toulouse, Vigoros de Bacone, came to be burnt at the stake before his friends and supporters were able to organize a defence for him. Seila and Arnald went on to exhume the bodies of alleged Cathars and burn them. They imprisoned scores of people, Cathars or Catholics, they seemed not to care, and bullied the authorities in Toulouse into providing them with armed soldiers to help in the work of arresting, detaining, trying and executing ‘heretics’.
Eventually, after more than two years, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse had had enough. Raymond had been forced to accept the Inquisition, and this far, he had cooperated, if reluctantly, with Seila and Arnald. His reasons were simple: he could not afford another war like the one that had all but ruined him in 1229. But once Seila and Arnald went too far, Raymond felt impelled to report them to the pope.
An inquisitor makes an accusation in this painting by the French artist Jean Paul Laurens (1838–1921).
He complained that the two Inquisitors were ‘noxious’ and appeared ‘to be toiling to lead men into error rather than towards the truth’. Raymond had the backing of Queen Blanche, the mother of the French king, Louis IX, who told Pope Gregory that his inquisitors had breached the bounds of decency.
The Count and the Queen were fortunate to catch the pope at a difficult moment. Gregory was embroiled with Frederick II, King of Germany and Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, a secular-minded ruler whose aim in life was to spread his own power throughout Italy at the expense of papal influence. According to the pope, Frederick was ‘the beast that surges up from the sea laden with blasphemous names…his gaping mouth offending the Holy Name…hurling his lance at the tabernacle of God and His Saints in heaven’. With such a formidable foe confronting him, Gregory had to win allies wherever he could. He was even willing to enlist heretic Languedoc on his side. It was known that Frederick had designs on Provence, in southeastern France and Raymond, seizing his chance, offered to aid the pope in thwarting him. Raymond’s price, however, was the withdrawal of Seila, Arnald and the apparatus of the Inquisition from Toulouse and Languedoc.
This 15th-century manuscript depicts the Great Schism of 1378 to 1415, when there were rival popes based in Rome and at Avignon in France, prompted by the death of Gregory IX.
Queen Blanche of Castile who protested against the excesses of the Inquisition, was the wife of King Louis VIII of France and the mother and regent of King Louis IX. Famous for her clemency, she is shown in the lower part of the picture releasing unjustly imprisoned serfs.
Pope Gregory declined to go that far, but he did attempt to rein in his inquisitors and pressure them to be more lenient. Gregory even travelled to Languedoc, in an effort to soothe the outrage caused by his overzealous inquisitors. Encouraged by these concessions, Raymond prepared to adopt a harder line with Seila and Arnald. He was almost pre-empted when the inquisitors ordered the arrest of several courtiers in his personal entourage who had Cathar sympathies. But Raymond succeeded in getting them away, beyond the reach of the Inquisition. At his behest, the soldiers detailed to arrest the courtiers escorted them out of Toulouse to the safety of the surrounding countryside. Seila and Arnald were infuriated and tried to get their revenge by turning on several consuls serving in the government of Toulouse. They failed to get far, though, for they soon found themselves unceremoniously dumped out of the city. Other Dominicans, together with the Archbishop of Toulouse, were assaulted by a furious mob who threw stones at them as they fled all the way back to Carcassonne. Once there, the Dominicans excommunicated their attackers and put Toulouse under interdict.
Pope Gregory even travelled to Languedoc, in an effort to soothe the outrage caused by his overzealous inquisitors.
They soon returned under Gregory’s orders. However, the pope had to be careful not to punish Raymond too harshly because he needed the Count as an ally in the struggle with Emperor Frederick. For this reason, the pope lifted the interdict on Toulouse and appointed a watchdog to rein in the Dominicans and their taste for brutality.
Stephen of St Thibéry was a Franciscan friar from an order known for its gentleness and diplomacy, but he was a disastrous choice. Far from holding back the Dominicans, as Pope Gregory expected, Stephen outdid them in his zeal to expunge the Cathars and their heresy by the most retributive means at his disposal. The ruthless questioning began again, and the dead were exhumed once more and burnt along with the living. Suspected ‘heretics’ were bullied into confessions and, to save themselves, betrayed others.
The pressure they exerted was so great that it cracked two of the most prominent Cathar Perfects in Toulouse, Raymond Gros and Guillaume de Soler, who informed on scores of other Cathars and betrayed details about their families, their friends and their activities. Needless to say, Gros and de Soler became marked men and the Inquisition had to organize protection to save them from the fury of Cathars and others who had once trusted them implicitly.
The two traitors were safe enough, for any move against them would have identified their attackers as Cathars and heretics. Instead, the Cathars became cunning and hid behind a screen of deception. Some Perfects shed their simple robes for the less easily identifiable clothes worn by ordinary people. Perfects had been vegetarians, but now they ate meat and made sure they were seen doing it in public.
Perfects had been vegetarians, but now they ate meat and made sure they were seen doing it in public.
Probably the most drastic change in their habits involved the separation between male and female Perfects who, traditionally, were supposed to keep strictly apart. Now they went out in pairs so that anyone who saw them, including the Dominicans, would assume that they were married couples. The best defence was of course, to leave the towns altogether and there were numerous Cathar Perfects sheltering in the safety of Montségur, but they did not neglect their followers. Perfects would slip back into town in disguise, their pastoral visits known only to a very few local Cathars. Their business done, they left the same way, in strict secrecy.
Peter of Verona, a Dominican monk, was killed by Cathar assassins on 6 April 1252 while travelling on the road to Milan, Italy. He is pictured here miraculously writing Credo in Unum Deum (I believe in one God) on the ground in his own blood in the seconds before death.
Known to Catholics as the ‘stronghold of Satan’, the Cathar town of Lavaur near Toulouse was assaulted and pillaged by the Albigensian crusaders on 3 May 1211. The population was massacred.
The Inquisition was well aware that something clandestine was going on in Languedoc, but was generally unable to catch the perpetrators. Inquisitors were, needless to say, thoroughly detested. To protect themselves and their entourage of clerks and scribes at Albi and Carcassonne, they had to borrow armed guards from the French in order to function. Sometimes, the inquisitors were locked out and were unable to enter some towns, like Toulouse, but there was always the surrounding countryside to be raked over, potential heretics to interrogate and punishments and penances to be handed out.
As time went on, the level of hatred increased until, in 1240, it provided an opportunity for Raymond Roger IV de Trencavel, the son of the tragic Raymond Roger III who had died mysteriously at Carcassonne in 1209, to intervene. Now aged 35, Raymond Roger IV had been living in exile for 30 years but had not given up hope of winning back his lost inheritance. He assembled an army of exiles in Aragon, northeast Spain, and marched them across the Pyrenees Mountains into Languedoc. He enjoyed some small initial success, liberating Limoux, Alet and Montréal from the French. But serious business began when Raymond Roger laid siege to Carcassonne where he was welcomed into the suburbs of Bourg and Castellar. From there, in fewer than five weeks, he launched eight assaults on Carcassonne proper. This, though, was where his run of success came to an abrupt end.
The French reacted swiftly, sending an army into Languedoc and chasing Raymond Roger IV out of Carcassonne and all the way to nearby Montréal. Now the besieger was besieged as the French surrounded the town. The fighting, however, was so fierce and so costly that both sides opted for a truce. Afterwards, Roger Raymond was forced back into exile in Aragon.
Montségur, the last major stronghold of the Cathars, was built at a height of 914 metres (3,000ft) near the Pyrenees mountains in the south-west of what is now France.
Perfects would slip back into town in disguise, their pastoral visits known only to a very few local Cathars.
If Roger Raymond had hoped to receive help from Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, he was disappointed. At that time, Count Raymond had to cover his own back, because he could not afford to offend Pope Gregory IX. But by 1242, times had changed. Pope Gregory died in 1241 and was succeeded by Celestine IV, who expired, probably of old age, after only 17 days. Celestine’s successor, Innocent IV, was involved in a power struggle with Gregory’s old foe, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Innocent IV felt so insecure in Rome that he eventually fled to Genoa and remained there until Frederick’s death in 1250.
The confusion this caused in Rome gave Raymond VII the opportunity he had awaited for 13 years. His nobles too were itching for a chance to get at the detested French and reclaim their own lost lands and estates. In addition, Raymond had gained support from the kings of England and Navarre and Castile and Aragon in Spain. At last, Raymond was able to make a bid to free his former territories from the grasp of the French and drive away the Dominicans, the Inquisition and their ghastly apparatus of cruelty and death.
Raymond Roger IV had been living in exile for 30 years but had not given up hope of winning back his lost inheritance.
The inquisitors, rather than military objectives, were Raymond’s first targets in the rebellion that began on 28 May 1242. Although he was not actually present to see the deed done, there was little doubt that Raymond was behind the murder of the inquisitors that took place a few days later and the destruction of their supposed ‘evidence’ against heretics in Languedoc.
News of the killings at Avignonet flashed across Languedoc, where the hard-pressed Cathars and Catholics celebrated this strike against the dreaded Inquisition. One clergyman even rang the bell of his church to mark the occasion, and the assassins were received back at Montségur as heroes. The raid at Avignonet had, however, been only a prelude to a series of military attacks on castles, the Dominicans’ houses and the palaces of bishops, all of them legitimate targets for the vengeance the Languedocois wrought against the hated French and the Inquisition they promoted. Meanwhile, towns and villages across the province seemed to be energized by Avignonet and rose up to seek revenge for the atrocities, indignities and cruelties the Inquisition had brought to once peaceful and affluent Languedoc.
But sadly, inevitably, both revolution and rejoicing were short-lived. Despite the illustrious names who had signed up to back Raymond VII – King Henry III of England, Hugh de Lusignan, whose family were prominent crusaders, Roger Bernard, Count of Foix – all of them crumbled before the forces of France. The King and de Lusignan were thrashed in battle, and the Count, though a son and nephew of Cathar Perfects, defected to the enemy and used his army to hammer Raymond VII to a defeat that would prove permanent. Raymond’s other allies in Aragon, Castile and Navarre read the runes and quietly backed out. Once again, in January 1243, Raymond and King Louis IX signed a treaty that turned back the clock to 1229, when Languedoc had come under French rule at the Treaty of Paris.
The inquisitors … were Raymond’s first targets in the rebellion … there was little doubt that Raymond was behind the murder of the inquisitors that took place a few days later and the destruction of their ‘evidence’ against heretics in Languedoc.
The mighty castle of Montségur, which was built after 1204 in preparation for the day when, inevitably, the Cathars would have to make a stand against their persecutors.
The assassins of Avignonet were never caught, but Montségur, the fortress where the plot had been conceived, remained as the last major outpost of Cathar resistance in Languedoc. Catholic clergy and inquisitors had long called Montségur the ‘Synagogue of Satan’ and as far as they were concerned, recent events had shown how fully it lived up to that name. Montségur had to be destroyed because it was not just another fortress, but a safe haven where hundreds of Cathars, Perfects and credentes alike, had sought the asylum that only the high mountains and inaccessible crags of the Pyrenees could give them.
An illumination from a Languedoc manuscript shows Montségur finally captured by troops commanded by Hugh de Arcis, seneschal (steward) to Louis IX of France.
In 1242, some 500 refugees, both Cathars and Catholics, were living inside Montségur. Of these, 200 or so were Perfects who made their homes in huts and caves around the castle. Knights, men-at-arms and their wives, mistresses and children, many of them related to the Perfects, had also moved in to take advantage of the protection offered by the fortress. There was also a continuous flow of credente pilgrims who secretly visited this symbol of the Cathar faith for spiritual guidance and then returned home as secretly as they had come.
Montségur served these purposes for nearly 40 years, ever since 1204, when its ruling lord, Raymond de Pereille, realized that one day, the Cathars would have to make a stand against the Church that had labelled them heretics. To prepare for that day, de Pereille rebuilt the castle that overlooked the village of Montségur from its dizzying height of 914 metres (3000ft), high enough to provide a panoramic view of the woods and valleys that covered the landscape for miles around. Over the years, Montségur had sheltered dozens of Cathar Perfects on the run from persecution. Later, they returned for refuge again and again, whenever the witch-hunt was renewed. But the crisis conditions caused by the Inquisition and its excesses were a hint of something much more serious in the future – the ‘final solution’ to the Cathar question.
Just how close that solution had come was made plain in the spring of 1243 when the view from the castle revealed troop movements in the terrain far below. On the orders of Hugh de Arcis, seneschal to King Louis IX, knights, soldiers and their equipment began arriving from Aquitaine, Gascony, and other regions of France and an encampment was set up on the eastern side of Montségur.
There was also a continuous flow of credente pilgrims who secretly visited this symbol of the Cathar faith for spiritual guidance and then returned home as secretly as they had come.
One Church dignitary, Pierre Amiel, Bishop of Narbonne, pitched his elaborately ornamented tent directly beneath Montségur. The scene was soon festooned with flags carrying the fleur de lys, the symbol of France, or the Cross to emphasize the holy purpose of the enterprise.
The monument to the 221 Cathars and others who died at the stake in the ‘Field of the Burned’ at Montségur on 16 March 1244.
The thousands of men camped below provided a daunting sight, but this did not, as yet, denote that a siege was imminent: much more manpower was required before Hugh de Arcis had enough forces to surround the fortress. Even then, he could not achieve total encirclement. The perimeter of Montségur measured more than three kilometres (2 miles) and was not continuous – defiles and ravines that could provide escape routes from the castle interrupted it here and there. It was also impossible to use siege machines on the slopes of the Pyrenees that backed Montségur.
Inside the fortress, Pierre-Roger de Mirefoix’s problems were just as acute, but different. The Cathar Perfects were pacifists and totally opposed to war. Even in this dire situation, they would not fight. This left Pierre Roger with only 98 men to defend the castle. To some extent, this disadvantage was cancelled out by the principle that attackers ascending from below were always at the mercy of defenders sited above and so it proved at Montségur. The French forces made several attempts to climb the precipitous goat paths, covered in spiny gorse, that led to the summit of Montségur, but they were soon driven back down again when de Mirefoix’s men loosed on them showers of stones, crossbow quarrels and other missiles. There was, though, one way the French could get at the defenders without even leaving the ground. They fired arrows almost vertically over the walls of the castle to land among the Cathars at the top. Around a dozen defenders were felled by this means and the loss of each was a serious blow.
The thousands of men camped below provided a daunting sight, but this did not, as yet, denote that a siege was imminent.
The last of the Cathar fortresses, at Quéribus, 728 metres (2388ft) up in the Pyrenees mountains, was assaulted and captured in August 1255.
Nevertheless, Pierre-Roger de Mirefoix’s meagre force managed to keep the attackers at bay for eight months, well into winter, when icy weather and dwindling food supplies began to exact their depredations on both sides of the siege. A few days before Christmas, when snow began to blanket the French encampment, Hugh de Arcis accepted that after the long stalemate, his troops might soon become demoralized and could start to drift home. A drastic, even dramatic, move was required, but the risks would be considerable.
At the Council of Lyons in 1245, Innocent IV deposed the twice excommunicated Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, after Frederick threatened him.
De Arcis called for volunteers. The men who came forward were Gascons, experienced at living in mountain country close to the Pyrenees. Their orders were almost tantamount to a suicide bid. They were to capture a part of the fortifications known as the Roc de la Tour (Tower Rock), which was built on top of a stone column sited on the summit ridge of Montségur.
This involved, first of all, climbing the cliff that gave access to the fortification, and doing it at night while carrying heavy weapons. When darkness fell, the Gascons began to climb the Roc, feeling their way up hand over hand, foot by foot and trying not to dislodge any stones or pebbles that might betray their presence to the guards at the top. The Gascons completed the perilous climb without mishap. Surprise was total. The Cathar guards, unable to fight back swiftly enough, were killed in an instant or thrown over the cliff edge to their deaths.
The fall of the Roc de la Tour was a disaster, all the more so because its capture made it possible for the French to winch their mangonels and other siege machines to the top and start crashing heavy stone missiles directly into the fortress. A snowstorm closed in on the castle, but the attackers moved inexorably forwards, dragging their siege machines with them. As the onslaught of stones kept drumming down into the fortress, dozens were killed and injured. The French advance was unstoppable. Rumours began to circulate: Count Raymond VII was coming to the rescue and the Emperor Frederick II was sending troops to break the siege. Any hopes that were aroused came to nothing and by 2 March 1244, Pierre Roger de Mirefoix realized that the only thing he could do was surrender.
Considering the savage handling of crime and punishment that typified medieval times, the terms laid down by Hugh de Arcis were not overly draconian. The murders at Avignonet and any other crimes committed in the past were forgiven and the inhabitants of Montségur were given two weeks to think over their options: either submit to interrogation by the Inquisition and recant, or refuse to do so and burn at the stake.
In the event, the Cathar Perfects in Montségur declined to cast aside their beliefs and seek forgiveness from Archbishop Amiel. Instead, they prepared for death. Whatever meagre belongings they possessed, they distributed them among their families and friends. They comforted their distraught relatives and gave themselves over to prayer.
Some Cathar credentes, who were not liable to the death penalty, were inspired to join the Perfects and burn with them. On Sunday 13 March 1244, 21 credentes, including the wife and daughter of Raymond de Pereille, requested the consolamentum, the Cathar version of the Last Rites given to Catholics, in which they were enjoined to lead a chaste, ascetic life. Those lives had only three more days to run.
The isolated Cathar fortress of Quéribus still stands today, a testament to its value as a border stronghold. Its thick stone walls were most recently restored in the period 1998 to 2002.
In the meadows below Montségur, a patch of ground surrounded by a palisade was being prepared for a bonfire of burnings, using wood chopped down from the nearby forests. Rows of stakes were set in the ground, ropes to tie the Cathars were piled up, torches to light the fires were stacked, and ladders were propped up against the palisades.
Early on the morning of 16 March, a procession of 221 men and women began to wind down the path that led from the summit of Montségur to the bottom of the slope. The Cathar leaders went barefoot, wearing nothing but their coarsely woven robes. When they reached the burning ground, they climbed the ladders and were bound together onto the stakes in pairs, back to back. The rest followed until row upon row of men and women filled the enclosure.
When they reached the burning ground, they climbed the ladders and were bound together onto the stakes in pairs, back to back.
When all was ready, Archbishop Amiel gave the signal for flaming brands to be thrown in among them. The soft murmur of praying was audible, only to be drowned out by the crackle of the fire as it climbed up the stakes and set everyone and everything alight. As the blaze grew and the human forms at its centre disappeared, the crackle turned to a roar and smoke, thick, black and choking, began to fill the valleys, dirty the meadow grass that grew between them and finally curl up into the sky.
The fall of Montségur did not see the end of the military crusade against the Cathars. There was another fortress, their last, at Quéribus, which was besieged and captured in August of 1255. But the Cathars did not need Quéribus to teach them that the back of their faith had already been broken in the burning ground at Montségur. The heart had gone out of it. Even Raymond VII who had championed the Cathars for so long and sacrificed so much for their cause deserted them and in 1249 helped the Inquisition to organize more burnings at Agen, northwest of Toulouse. Raymond died three months later, in September of the same year.
Thousands of credentes, exhausted by years of secrecy, living in the suspense and fear of discovery, had become mortally afraid of the Inquisition and its power to ruin lives, condemn and kill. They recanted to save themselves and to confirm their new devotion to the Church. In so doing they betrayed neighbours, friends and even family to the remorseless Inquisition.
A small number of captured Perfects were persuaded to renounce their beliefs, turn Catholic and provide long lists of Cathar sympathizers. They, in turn, fell into the hands of the Inquisition whose powers were increased in 1252 when Innocent IV, who had been elected pope in 1243, gave his permission for the Inquisition to use torture to get at the truth. But he made conditions. Euphemistically termed ‘putting the question’, torture, Pope Innocent instructed, must not include cutting off limbs, spilling too much blood or causing death.
Even so, the end of Catharism and the Cathars did not come quickly. Rather, its beliefs and believers were gradually ground down by well trained, zealous inquisitors backed by a bureaucracy of informers, torturers, instruction manuals, registers of suspects and, of course, the all-pervasive terror the Inquisition inspired. Thousands of Cathars disappeared into dungeons, never to be seen again or if they were, they emerged as compliant shadows of their former selves, too terrified of the stake to speak their minds. By the end of the thirteenth century, few people, if any, were willing to dispute the view of the medieval world as sanctioned by the pope and the Church. It was, in fact, left to a pair of eccentric brothers from Languedoc and a one-time murderer to sound the last trumpet for the Cathars. By the time it was all over and the Cathars were history, it had taken 112 years, the reigns of 19 popes and thousands of violent deaths before the Church of Rome, its crusaders and its inquisitors and torturers finally prevailed.
The murderer turned Cathar who finally closed the book on the Cathar heresy was Guillaume Bélibaste. He began life as a shepherd tending his flocks high up in the Corbière hills near the River Aude in Languedoc. In 1306, Bélibaste killed another shepherd in a brawl and went on the run to escape the law. During his wanderings, he encountered Philippe d’Alayrac, one of Pierre Autier’s Cathar Perfects who was hiding from the Inquisition. Together, the shepherd and the Perfect fled over the Pyrenees into Catalonia, in northeast Spain. Before he was hunted down by the inquisitors and burnt at the stake, d’Alayrac initiated Bélibaste into the Cathar faith. By this means, Bélibaste came to believe that not only was the world a wicked, evil place but that it was ruled by four demons: King Philip IV of France, Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Palmiers, Pope Boniface VIII and Bernard Gui, a merciless inquisitor based at Carcassonne.
It was not long before Bélibaste had gathered in a flock of credentes who, like himself, had fled for safety to Spain. For nearly five years, this Cathar community was undisturbed, or so it seemed. What they did not know was that in 1317 they had admitted to their ranks a certain Arnold Sicre who was a secret agent employed by Bishop Jacques Fournier. Sicre bided his time until he could betray Guillaume Bélibaste to the Inquisition. His chance came in the spring of 1321, when, with others, he accompanied Bélibaste on a journey into France to see Bélibaste’s aged aunt, Alazais, who had generously financed her nephew’s small Cathar community. Two days into their journey, armed men, tipped off by Sicre, broke down the door of the house in Tirvia, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, where Bélibaste and his companions were staying. All of them were arrested. Guillaume Bélibaste completed his journey over the mountains and into France in chains. He was put on trial for heresy, but the verdict was never in doubt. In the autumn of 1321, he was led into the courtyard of the castle at Villerouge-Termenès in Corbières where a stake awaited him. A blazing torch was applied, the flames surged upwards and in a matter of minutes, the last of the Cathar Perfects met his end.
Guillaume Bélibaste believed that Pope Boniface VIII, pictured, was one of the four demons who ruled the earth. Bélibaste was burned at the stake in 1321.
