As the main crusading force marched over 200 miles from Lyons to Béziers, the smaller, independent army of the Agenais and Quercy opened hostilities. It was not an auspicious start and it set the tone for the bitter conflict that was now unleashed. The crusaders’ conflent motives and conflicting interests are here already on display. The expedition’s most likely promoter, Bishop Arnald of Agen, was an intractable opponent of heretics; that he was also one of the churchmen in conflict with Count Raymond over land rights in the Agenais offered the opportunity for some temporal as well as spiritual gains.
The very first objective was taken without any resistance: Puylaroque had been left undefended. Leaving fortified places open to the enemy was standard strategy in medieval warfare throughout Europe. If the opposing force was too large to resist effectively, the best option for defenders was often to withdraw to somewhere stronger, taking supplies and weaponry with them if possible, and hold that place instead, thereby saving men and supplies for a fight that had more strategic significance. While small fortified places were important locally for control and often because they were part of a larger overall defensive network, the loss of a few was not a major issue.
From here the crusaders moved to Gontaud north-west of Agen and then south-east to Tonneins. Both were sacked; the army was already resupplying itself. That no heretics were reported as having being in the towns was of no matter. The logic of war and the momentum of Mars’s juggernaut had already manifested themselves. The next move was eastwards to Casseneuil, where they encountered their first setback. William of Tudela says that the place was defended by many archers and knights under the command of Seguin of Balenx, as well as by expert Gascon javelin men. The place itself was protected by rivers on three sides and a deep ditch. William says that the town would have fallen but for Count Guy of Auvergne, who did not want it taken and who argued about this with the archbishop. The count was concerned for the safety of his property there and did not wish to see it destroyed by military action or looted by the crusaders, the latter being something hard to deny the many men who had signed up on the promise of booty. One can deduce that the town was spared the rigours of a siege because an agreement was struck, for although the crusaders did not take it, the first killing of heretics took place here. Presumably they were handed over to ensure the safety of the town. The crusaders ‘condemned many heretics to be burned and many fair women thrown into the flames, for they refused to recant however much they were begged to do so’.22 It was the first of many autos da fé in a war where flames and smoke did not just signal the burning of crops and buildings, but also of people.
It was no longer simply a matter of the movement of armies; the war had become real. Word spread and people panicked. Some 60 miles to the east the Cathar town of Villemur heard from a young lad that the crusading army had finished at Casseneuil and was on the march again. Around 21–22 June, the inhabitants burned their own town and defences and fled to the hills and woods. Such a pre-emptive, self-inflicted strike would hopefully keep the soldiers away from their region as there would be nothing left worth taking or defending now any threat had already been removed. This is the last we hear of this branch of the crusade, the region staying quiet for the next three years. Perhaps the crusade dissipated because it was felt that its objectives had been met or crusaders’ obligations fulfilled; it is highly possible that many made their way to the main force at Béziers, where the outcome was to be far more conclusive and far bloodier.
Peter of Vaux de Cernay seems to prepare his audience for the horrors that were about to unfold in Béziers and to justify them with his condemnation of its citizens ‘entirely infected with the poison of heresy’. This was enough to condemn all within the town. ‘They were robbers, lawbreakers, adulterers and thieves of the worst sort, brimful of every kind of sin.’23 Peter illustrates his revulsion with an example of the kind of propaganda that war swiftly generates to demonstrate the inhuman nature of the enemy: a priest on his way to celebrate mass was set upon, beaten and robbed, and had his arm broken; as he lay on the ground, the assailants urinated on him. The tale sounds similar to that of the heretic the Count of Toulouse refused to punish for emptying his bowels on the altar. Such tales were designed to demonstrate the extent to which heretics were beyond saving.
Peter of Vaux de Cernay is one of our main sources for the Albigensian war. The crusade was a major event in an already crowded early thirteenth century, attracting the attention of writers across Europe. Historians are lucky to have four contemporary or near contemporary works by men closely involved in events that between them cover the conflict from start to finish. They are, in effect, our war reporters. How reliable are they? Does their bias hinder our understanding of how the war was fought? Do their accounts present a realistic depiction of medieval warfare at this time? As they are as much a part of our story as the warriors, they deserve some attention here.
Peter of Vaux de Cernay is the French author of the Latin History of the Albigensian Crusade. As he was a northern monk of the Cistercian order whose most important abbot, Arnald Amalric, was leading the crusade, and the nephew of another local Cistercian abbot and Bishop of Carcassonne, we cannot expect from the well-connected Peter much in the way of sympathy towards the Cathars; he makes no attempt to show any in what is a highly partisan account. His chronicle goes up to 1218 and is important because he was an eyewitness to many of the events he writes about; where he was not present, he had access to excellent first-hand knowledge. His age is uncertain, but he seems to have been a young man of about 20 when the crusade started. His family were close to the Montforts and he accompanied his uncle Abbot Guy on the crusade; Guy became Bishop of Carcassonne in 1212. His closeness to military activity is shown by how he narrowly escaped being hit by a crossbow bolt in 1212. It is thought that he was dead by the start of 1219. As he was at the siege of Toulouse in 1218, it is possible that he died as a result of being there, perhaps from disease or illness. His chronicle was widely disseminated and known by other writers of the time, such as Alberic de Trois Fontaines, William the Breton and the English monk Ralph of Coggeshall. Although highly prejudiced, as one would expect of a northern monk, Peter is nevertheless prepared to criticise the crusaders. His chronicle is biased but generally truthful, accurate and reliable.
William of Tudela is responsible for The Song of the Albigensian Crusade (also known as The Song of the Cathar Wars). Here we are in the troubadour tradition. William also became a cleric, who served with Count Raymond’s stepbrother, Baldwin of Toulouse, a prominent ally of the crusaders. The work is therefore written in rhyming Provençal Old French (Occitan) rather than Latin; a language as colourful as it is variable. William was a man of the south, having come from Navarre and then Montauban. He claims that he began writing (or, if one prefers, composing) his work in May 1210. He says that he left the region when he foresaw the destruction to come, which he had divined in geomancy (telling the future from lines, shapes, dots on the earth or shapes formed after earth has been cast on the ground). Whether he believed this to be true, or whether it was foresight from a keen political antenna or just hindsight, his song is more grounded than his geomancy. It is another reliable source with relatively few inaccuracies (always to be expected in medieval chronicles, even as it is in newspapers today) as William was generally either an eyewitness to events or collected his information from first-hand testimony wherever possible, often quoting his sources. He is a supporter of the crusade against the heretics, but less zealously so than Peter. Interestingly, he baulks a little at the brutal excesses of the northerners. This may be because coming from the south he had considerable empathy with its people as distinct from its heretics. That his old home town of Montauban was the site of a particularly vicious crusading massacre means he is likely to have known some of the victims and this may have heightened his sensitivity to violent excess against southerners.
His Song covers the years 1209–13, but is carried on by an anonymous continuator until 1219. This continuator is widely regarded as one of the great writers of the thirteenth century, who combined an enviable ability with words with a very different viewpoint on the crusade. Despite its concern for entertainment value, this is also a largely reliable text, the troubadour’s information often being verified by charter evidence, and many events are likely to have been witnessed by the author himself. The writer, who many believe was a knight from Toulouse or, as has recently been argued convincingly, from Foix, has stirred a debate among historians: to what extent was he an anti-crusader? As a southerner, he was bitterly against the northerners’ invasion and its destructive impact on the people and traditions of Languedoc; and whereas Peter idolises Simon de Montfort, the anonymous continuator of William of Tudela despises him. He presents a genuine sense of the war as one fought between different peoples of different regions, and not just between faiths.
The last main source, in terms of chronological composition, is William of Puylaurens’s Latin Chronicle. Again, he was extremely well placed to write on events as he was from Toulouse; it is thought that he was in the entourage of its Bishop Fulkes and also chaplain to its count, Raymond VII, from 1245. He wrote from personal memory and also utilised written documents, possibly including the History and the Song. His claims to have been an eyewitness to events have recently been challenged as he was writing long after the crusade, in 1275 when his chronicle ends, and possibly as late as 1276. This would make him a teenager or even a boy at the start of the crusade. However, other chroniclers such as Henry of Huntingdon and Jean de Joinville were writing about events from their early lifetime during their final years, so we should not feel the need to distrust William too much on this point. The more recent his chronicle entry, the more confidence we may have in it as a first-hand source, but his connections make his early work, especially on Toulouse’s involvement, very valuable, too. He is indispensable after the Song finishes in 1219, until the end of the crusade. His coverage can be patchy and selective, but this is not surprising for a work that covers sixty-five years. Omissions may be due to poor memory, the deliberate disregarding of events as not essential or because he did not possess clear facts or evidence for them and so deliberately left them out. His position on the crusade is more interesting than Peter’s in that it is more moderate. He approved the original aims of the crusade to crush heresy, but distances himself somewhat from it after 1215 for a while because he deems its aims to have been corrupted by that stage; Montfort comes in for notable criticism. With the arrival of King Louis VIII of France’s crusade in 1226, William favours the French, but his position as a southerner also ensures that he does not lump together the southern lords, the Count of Toulouse and Catharism as a monolithic whole. His factual account is therefore not marred by any lack of balance and as a consequence his chronicle is full of insights and important information.
How conversant were our war reporters with the reality of conflict? Historians have generally dismissed monastic writers as being only of limited usefulness in trying to understand medieval warfare, much preferring vernacular sources such as the Song over Latin ones for getting us much closer to the truth. This is because these used the everyday language of the soldier and were written by men of the world who knew the ways of war better than secluded monks who had their own spiritual agenda and preoccupations. The latter have been considered to have little comprehension of military affairs and next to no interest in tactics and strategy. This is an area I have researched in depth for the thirteenth century and I disagree strongly with this argument: the preference for the vernacular is both overstated and misplaced. Many monastic chroniclers, including Peter and William here, were acute observers of war. Their factual and largely accurate retelling of military events is in itself of great importance, but their understanding went deeper than this.
The Church was more than a bystander or passive observer of war, and its involvement went far beyond praying for its side’s victory, producing propaganda and supplying armies with money, troops, transport and supplies. Such clerical writers as Orderic Vitalis, Abbot Suger of St Denis, Henry of Huntingdon and Gilbert of Mons wrote on warfare with considerable insight in the twelfth century; at the time of the Albigensian Crusade, Roger of Wendover and William the Breton were doing the same but in even greater depth. While both Latin and vernacular sources were prone to exaggeration, the latter could be worse as they strove to shock and entertain their audiences. Vernacular writers might spend twice as long describing a battle as Latin ones, but the extra pages are often filled with florid elaborations, imaginary dialogue and impossibly stylised one-on-one duels. (Latin sources could be guilty of this, but to a far lesser extent.) Monastic and ecclesiastical writers were overwhelmingly from the same fighting class of warriors (bellatores) as their fathers, brothers, nephews, uncles, cousins and patrons, so it is only to be expected that they would be very familiar with the martial world, especially when they researched it and wrote about it in their chronicles. Nor should it be overlooked that many knights retired as monks or were promoted to high appointments in the Church such as that of bishop; these veterans were able to inform many monastic writers of the reality of war. In the late twelfth century, Bishop Hugh of Auxerre enjoyed gathering knights about him to discuss military lessons from Vegetius’s book on the art of war, On Military Matters (also known by its Latin title, De Re Militari, and as Epitome of Military Science). The culture of chivalry did not stop at the church door.
The Church was not only very comfortable with military language and imagery, it thrived on it. It promoted its monastic ranks as the spiritual battalions of God in the fight against the forces of Satan – the Cathars providing an obvious example. The Latin word turma is used in chronicles to denote a body of troops, but it can also be employed to mean a group of monks. Abbot Marcwald of Fulda, famed for his extensive castle building programme, opined: ‘Not that it is proper that monks should inhabit anything but monasteries or fight battles other than spiritual ones; but the evil in the world cannot be defeated except by resistance.’24 The Church might condemn war and mercenaries at one moment, and then hire the mercenaries it had proscribed and start a war the next. Germany in the High Middle Ages saw almost uninterrupted local wars waged between princes and bishops. The Church even had its own armies, the milites Christi (soldiers of Christ) in the military orders of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. These orders were well entrenched in Occitania yet seemed not to play a significant role in the crusade, possibly because they saw their remit as fighting Muslims in Spain and the Holy Land. It is likely that their local knowledge and expertise was offered – but not necessarily to the crusaders. Some Hospitallers actually fought on the southerners’ side, emphasising once more the political, regional nature of the conflict taking precedence over purely religious issues. The Church, with the belligerent Innocent III at its head, had never been so militant.
But even Innocent’s bellicosity and militancy was not as fervent as that of his legate in Languedoc, the overall commander of the crusade, Arnald Amalric, a Cistercian abbot. Such military positions for a churchman were not unusual: in 1214, Guérin, Bishop Elect of Senlis, was commander of the French rearguard at their great victory at Bouvines; Bishop Anthony Bek of Durham was a commander in the English army at Falkirk in 1298; Archbishop Thoresby of York helped to lead the English to victory against the Scots at Neville’s Cross in 1346. When Thomas Hatfield was Bishop of Durham in the fourteenth century, he had a seal made depicting him not with mitre and crosier but on his warhorse as a knight.
Our chroniclers Peter and William had, as we have seen, intimate connections with the leadership of the crusade: Peter was a white monk, a Cistercian, whose uncle, as we have noted, became Bishop of Carcassonne; William was a familiar of Bishop Fulkes of Toulouse. Both places were at the heart of the war. William of Tudela had Roger Bernard, son of the Count of Foix, as one of his patrons. As we read of the nature of the Albigensian war and its horrors, it is fascinating to hear the voices of those writing about it who lived through this remarkable historical episode. As with any sources, medieval or modern, there are of course flaws and problems here, but all three of our war reporters were genuinely concerned to offer a truthful account of the facts of the crusade and to leave their work behind as an honest legacy. The story they tell is a brutal one.
The crusading army approached Béziers via Montpellier to the east, which they reached about 20 July. Here Raymond Roger, Viscount of Béziers, went to meet its leaders. The 24-year-old viscount was panicking and regretting that he had not agreed to a defensive pact with his uncle, Count Raymond of Toulouse, who had sewn the cross of the crusader on his right shoulder and was now directing the holy juggernaut against his troublesome nephew. Castellans owing allegiance to Raymond Roger who were close to the crusading army’s path had already opened their gates as allies and deserted him. Nor was any help in the offing from his suzerain, King Peter of Aragón; he was busy fighting his own crusade against the Muslims in Spain as part of the Reconquista and would not be free to become militarily involved until after the great victory of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The sight of the immense army that spread out before the viscount’s eyes when he reached Montpellier confirmed his worst fears and his plan of action. He would follow his uncle’s lead and transform his position by complying with the crusade’s demands. He submitted.
Or at least he tried to. He apologised for his anti-clerical policies and for not dealing with the heretics under his jurisdiction, attributing this failure to inability rather than permissiveness. He was prepared to offer all that his uncle had. But Arnald Amalric paid no heed to his penitential advances and dismissed him. The viscount rushed to Béziers to make his arrangements for the coming onslaught. The reasons for the legate’s rejection were similar to those we have seen for why the crusade was not abandoned after the Count of Toulouse has so shrewdly capitulated, but even more so. Disbanding the army at this even later stage would have been more disastrous: there was a real danger that the forces would split up and run amok across the region in quest of booty and compensation for their investment of time and money. This risk was even greater for the mercenary bands. The expedition’s leaders had no fondness for the Trencavels so all agreed that the viscount’s lands were the ones best suited to pay the costs – literally – of the crusade.
But there were other reasons for pressing on, too. The intransigent antagonism of the Cistercian order towards the Trencavels has already been cited, although not proven, as a reason for targeting Béziers. Looking at the most obvious explanation, the city certainly harboured over 200 named heretics, and Raymond Roger had done nothing about them; but belief that intimates in his family and court were Cathars has not been substantiated. William of Tudela declares that the viscount was ‘certainly Catholic’.25
When the viscount’s conciliatory advances had been rejected, the Biterrois – the people of the region – went on the defensive, refusing to surrender the city or to hand over the heretics. This in some ways played into the crusaders’ hands as now they felt fully justified in laying siege to the city and issuing it with an ultimatum. This was intended to force the citizens’ collective hand to declare themselves either for the crusade (by yielding to a foreign force) or for heresy and, more importantly, continued political independence. It was the latter more than anything that the Biterrois were defending. The crusaders had sound, long-term strategic motives interwoven with their more cynical reasons for targeting the city. Béziers was the first main sentinel into Languedoc for the crusading army. It needed to be secured by the crusaders before they made their deeper incursions into the region. It was too powerful a base to be left in suspect hands behind the front line.
Even if the viscount’s attempts at submission along the lines of Count Raymond’s had not been rejected, there would have been potential problems. A change of position by Raymond Roger – and medieval barons shifted frequently as they saw fit – would be very dangerous for the crusaders, leaving them with uncommitted allies in the rear in a hostile region. This might have happened had King Peter of Aragón decided to make a move in support of his vassal (the king’s sister Eleanor was married to the viscount). The Biterrois also had a reputation for rising up against their masters; they had killed their Trencavel lord in 1167. The city had to be in the safe hands of a trusted lord, loyal to the papacy and hostile to heresy, ruling over a subdued people.
Momentum, money and distrust all led the crusading army to Béziers – as did Count Raymond of Toulouse, riding ahead to point out suitable camp sites as he encouraged this massive force against his Trencavel enemy. The army left Montpellier on 20 July. Along the way the crusaders took some minor places, including Servian, a small fortified town less than 8 miles north-east of Béziers. It had been left deserted by its excommunicated lord, who later repented for having allowed Cathars and perfects into his castle.
Ahead of them, Raymond Roger was making his desperate preparations. William of Tudela feels sympathy for the young viscount and sings his praises: ‘Day and night, he worked to defend his lands, for he was a man of great courage. Nowhere in the wide world is there a better knight or one more generous and open-handed, more courteous or better bred.’26 His problems, William believed, stemmed from his youth and amiability, which resulted in his vassals lacking an appropriate fear of his authority and treating him as little more than a good-humoured companion with whom to share a joke.
Raymond Roger rode frantically into Béziers at daybreak on 21 July. The inhabitants flocked to hear what he had to say about their frightening prospects. He urged them to make ready while he made for his principal fortress of Carcassonne to organise its defence and a relief force. With him went the Jews of the city and others, no doubt many of them Cathars. The History accuses the viscount of abandoning the people of Béziers, but it was a sound strategic decision. The crusaders would have to encamp in the open before Béziers, leaving them vulnerable to attack from a relief force from Carcassonne. By itself, Carcassonne’s garrison would have been vastly outnumbered by the crusading forces but it could harass them and pose real problems if it co-ordinated activities with Béziers; and if the latter held out long enough, Aragón might be drawn into the conflict, which of course is what the Biterrois hoped for. Furthermore, at Carcassonne, Roger Raymond sent out the call for his vassals and their forces to come to him there from the Minervois, the Montagne Noire, the Lauragais, from Corbières and from Razès. If they all heeded his call, he would be able to muster a considerable force. Béziers’ stand was to provide him time for this.
While the two cities urgently required an interval to allow them to fortify themselves properly, it would be a mistake to think that they were starting from scratch. Political tensions had been heightening all year and the northern army moving southwards into Lyon would have focused minds sharply on defence. The number of men in a garrison reflected the political situation: in times of peace, garrisons were small, often skeleton, but sufficient for everyday purposes; but when war threatened, they would swell to ensure that the battlements could be adequately manned against assault. Although we do not have numbers, we can safely assume that the latter was the situation in eastern Occitania in July 1209.
Béziers itself was already in a reasonable state of readiness. For a start, it occupied a formidable, elevated position high above the River Orb and was encircled by impressive walls. Its ditches would have been cleared and deepened, with perhaps an extra last minute effort directed here after the viscount’s flying visit. Gates would have been reinforced and the walls inspected. Even churches such as that of St Nazaire had been constructed for defensive purposes as much as for religious ones, with loopholes and machicolations for fending off attackers; such church-fortresses were a feature of the troubled Languedoc. Attacking the place meant crossing the bottleneck of the bridge and fighting one’s way up a steep hill and then breaking through powerful walls defended by many people.
In the early fourteenth century, the population stood at nearly 15,000; at the beginning of the thirteenth century it had an estimated steady population of some 8–10,000 people, which could provide considerable practical support to assist the strong garrison. This number may easily have been doubled during the siege. Ironically, one reason for this was the highly orthodox celebration of a saint’s feast day, St Mary Magdalene, on 22 July, a major event which drew the crowds in; the city had a large church named after the saint that, as misfortune would have it, played a central role in the tragedy which unfolded that very day. Less festively, refugees from the surrounding countryside would have flocked into the city for safety against the invading northerners; we have already seen how castra, towns and villages were being deserted by their inhabitants. Thus although Béziers’ defenders may have been outnumbered by enemy combatants, the discrepancy was not great. The city’s reputation for strength made it a natural place of refuge. The numbers would have meant a drain on the city’s resources in a prolonged siege, but at the same time the festivities would have meant extra food was already available, and refugees would have brought in supplies and livestock to provide for themselves, sell and protect. Obviously there was great fear in the city, but also confidence in its ability to stand.
When the crusading army appeared on the plain below the city on the far bank of the Orb during the evening of 21 July, their spirits must have dropped at the sight of the imposing, fortified cathedral of St Nazaire dominating the acropolis high above them. Even today, without the medieval walls that once surrounded it, the visitor can look up from this position to Béziers and obtain a sense of the crusaders’ task. The first move, as always in siege situations, was to negotiate an agreement for surrender; most sieges were resolved this way. The Bishop of Béziers, Raynaud de Montpeyroux, had gone to meet the crusaders earlier. He now returned to beseech his flock to surrender. The conditions were clear: the burghers were to hand over some 222 leading heretics named on a list (which has survived to the present day); if they did so, the city would be spared. Peter has the bishop tell them that if the Catholics could not do this, they should leave the city so as to avoid being slaughtered with the heretics. One presumes the bishop would have overseen any such departures to ensure that the remaining Cathars did not leave among them. William has the bishop warning the citizens that now was their only chance to choose between life and death. He also confusingly suggests that if they were to surrender the town, any possessions seized from them would be restored. By this he probably means only a portion of their goods, as the crusaders would want their share. Nonetheless, it was made obvious in the starkest of terms that resistance meant death by the sword.
But the city remained resolute, refusing to hand over anyone and displaying an impressive solidarity. Surrender would have meant the imposition of a foreign garrison, oppressive rule and a huge penalty in reparations to the crusaders. The Biterrois cherished their rights and liberties too much to permit such a loss of independence. Their response makes this clear: ‘the majority of the townspeople said … that the crusaders should not get so much as a pennyworth of their possessions from them or in any way change their rule over the town’.27 They placed their confidence in their city’s defences, which they believed could not be stormed even after a month’s siege. But they did not believe they would have to wait that long: ‘They were sure the host could not hold together, it would disintegrate in less than a fortnight.’ This confidence was due to the size of the army: it was simply too large to be sustained. They expected, as was common in extended siege situations, that many of the crusaders would simply drift away, either to find easier pickings or to go back home. It is not absolutely clear that the forty-day service obligation was fully in force at this time, but if it were it would have added to the Biterrois’ confidence. (William of Tudela says that the forty days’ duty did indeed apply at Béziers.) Though not mentioned in the sources here, in their minds the defenders would also have been anticipating the return of their lord, Raymond Roger, with help.
A few townspeople left with the bishop, who then reported back to the legate on the city’s defiance. On the morning of 22 July the crusaders began a formal investiture of the city and started to settle themselves in for a lengthy siege.
Within a few hours it was all over.
Even as Bishop Raynaud was informing the high command of the outcome of his meeting in the city, a group of soldiers from the garrison of Béziers sortied from the fortress to attack the crusaders, hoping to catch them unawares as they made camp and ate breakfast. It was one of the most disastrous tactical blunders in the annals of medieval warfare. All the city’s great defensive advantages were nullified by this one insane act of stupidity.
The sortie was highly unlikely to have been a reconnaissance party as suggested by one French historian: the panoramic view from the heights of the city told them much more than an encounter at ground level with the periphery of the army. An intelligence-gathering mission would have been more apposite as the army approached, not after it had encircled the walls. Reconnaissance sorties of the former type were common. In May 1217 the Anglo-French defenders of Lincoln sent out troops to gauge the size of the royalist army coming to lift their siege of the castle. The English scouts came back and advised the leaders that the oncoming forces were not too large and so they should go to meet them in battle; but the French scouts reported back that the enemy was twice as strong as the English had thought, so the fateful decision was made to stay in the town and defend themselves there. In fact, the French had miscalculated by counting the banners of contingents twice over, thereby doubling the size of their estimate, not realising that the ones at the back of the enemy column simply designated the accompanying baggage train. The consequence of their poorly informed decision was a decisive rout.
The sortie at Béziers was most likely a morale-boosting raid, taking advantage of the army’s disorder as it pitched camp and ate breakfast. The attempt to demoralise the enemy backfired spectacularly. The garrison troops poured down the hill and over the bridge, shouting at the tops of their voices and waving their banners to intimidate the enemy, hoping to put them to flight and, says Peter, ‘began to assail our men with arrows’.28 William of Tudela offers a detailed account of what then happened. The French ribalds looked up to see a knight on guard duty at the bridge being hacked to death and thrown in the river. Ribaldi is a loose term that encompasses the basic, lightest infantry, pilgrims and camp followers. The leader of this group (and it would have been just one section of the ribalds) shouted out ‘Come on, let’s attack!’, while in the main French camp, the cry went up: ‘To arms! To arms!’ With just their clubs (‘they had nothing else, I suppose’) they counter-attacked with animated fury. They quickly turned the tables, using the confusion to their own advantage. In just their shirts and trousers, many without shoes, they attacked the walls, jumped into the moat with their picks, and began to batter and smash down the gates, climbing up ladders and sweeping the defenders off the ramparts. The defenders abandoned the walls and the ribalds poured into the city.
Did the ribaldi really win the day in this manner as William of Tudela suggests? The History and a letter from the legates to Pope Innocent confirm that it was the camp followers who took Béziers; William the Breton and Roger of Wendover also attest to their central role. Other strong and fortified towns have been taken by the lowest order of troops; they were, after all, the cannon fodder of the day and so were expected to make frontal assaults over the top of walls and battlements. It does seem that the cream of French chivalry were left gawping as the common folk won the first great prize of the crusade.
However, the rapidity of the assault and its success raises some questions. The legates told Innocent that the city was taken ‘within two or three hours’ while Peter claims ‘astonishingly, they captured the city inside an hour’.29 It would have taken picks and battering rams days or even weeks rather than hours to have made an impression on the walls and gates of the fortress. The only way to have breached the walls would have been escalade – storming over them by ladder. Of our three main reporters, only William of Puylaurens, the furthest away in time from the events, makes mention of this: ‘the attackers scaled and occupied the walls’.30 Interestingly, Roger of Wendover also says that the walls were scaled while William the Breton mentions breaking through the gates. Peter’s estimation that the city was taken within sixty minutes may sound like one of his exaggerations, but it may be accurate if we consider another strong possibility for what happened.
The sortie party must have been of considerable size to have had any impact against the crusading camp. That this party was itself taken by surprise, by the ferocity and swiftness of the ribalds’ response, is clear. The sortie’s only recourse was to retreat. There is no mention of its soldiers being struck down. Thus they would have rushed back to the city and its perceived safety. I think the most likely scenario to explain the rapid fall of the city is one that sees the sortie party piling back through the city gates that had been opened for them to attack the camp. As the gates stayed opened to allow the sortie party to return, the press of cavalry and men desperate to get back in meant that the gates could not be closed, allowing the ribaldi, quite literally on their heels, to pour through as well. The Song tells of the gates opening and of ‘the crush you would have seen there as these lads struggled to get into the town!’ This is exactly what happened at the siege of Taillebourg in 1179. Richard I had deliberately placed his camp near the town walls to provoke a foray from its defenders; his men got into the town the same way the sortie had got out, pressing behind the sortie party trying to get back into the town through its opened gates. At Béziers, the defenders were forced off the battlements; it is easy to imagine that many were pulled off the ramparts by their commanders in an attempt to stem the critical irruption into the city through the gates. Thus the dramatic fall of the city can best be explained by a combination of forcing through the gates and escalade.
The siege was over. Now the massacre began.
The crusaders stormed into the city and sacked it utterly, unleashing one of the most pitiless and notorious massacres of the entire Middle Ages. According to one relatively obscure source, Caesarius of Heisterbach, it was at this juncture that the crusaders urgently asked the legate Arnald Amalric: ‘What shall we do, lord? We cannot tell the good from the bad.’ To which the abbot, fearful lest Cathars pretended to be Catholics to save themselves, gave his notorious response: ‘Kill them all! God will know his own!’31
Peter claims that they ‘killed almost all the inhabitants from the youngest to the oldest’, adding approvingly: ‘What a splendid example of divine Justice and Providence!’32 Just as the worst casualties on a battlefield usually occur during a rout, so it was at Béziers. The defenders, be they the garrison or urban militia, appear to have simply folded. The storming of the city must indeed have been remarkably rapid as there was seemingly no attempt to organise further defences or to hold the line within the walls; the narrowness and steepness of the medieval streets and overhanging buildings that can still be seen today were perfect for blockading and raining down missiles on the intruders. Instead, all ran to the city’s churches, especially St Mary Magdalen’s, whose feast day they had been celebrating; here they hoped to find sanctuary. William of Tudela recounts the horror:
The priests put on vestments for a mass of the dead and had the church bells rung as for a funeral. They [the ribalds] killed everyone who fled into the church; no cross or altar or crucifix could save them. And these raving, beggarly lads, they killed the clergy too, and the women and the children. I doubt if one person came out alive. So terrible a slaughter has not been known or consented to, I think, since the time of the Saracens.
The killing nearly done, the city was systematically looted. Tellingly, only the Song reports this. As the knights moved into the city they snatched much of the booty from the first wave of ribalds. Their bloodlust already bursting through their veins, the outraged looters now vented their anger on the city itself. ‘Burn it, burn it!’ went up the cry as they used ‘huge flaming brands’ to set the town ablaze ‘from end to end’. At St Mary Magdalene’s, any survivors were soon finished off when the flaming roof collapsed in on them: the ribaldi ‘burned the town, burned the women and children, old men and young, and the clerks vested and singing mass there inside the church’.
How many died? It is impossible to know for certain as we do not even have definite figures for the city’s population at this time. The Song does not give a number; William of Puylaurens simply and starkly says ‘many thousands’; Peter of Vaux de Cernay claims ‘7,000’ were killed in the church of St Mary Magdalene; in a letter to Rome the legates wrote that ‘none was spared’ and that ‘almost 20,000’ were put to the sword. William the Breton heard that 60,000 perished; others take it up to 100,000. William of Nangis, writing towards the end of the century, claims all were killed, but interestingly gives a total of 17,000, close to the legates’ figure. Some historians are prepared to accept the legates’ figure approaching 20,000 – in effect, the whole town. (William of Tudela estimated that only between fifty and 100 people escaped death.) This is very much on the highest side, but it is not a totally unfeasible figure given, as we have seen, how the town’s population would have been swollen on 22 July. But a total massacre would have been very difficult to achieve in terms of time and labour, and, to put it coldly, it would have been impractical. The History’s figure of 7,000 deaths in St Mary Magdalene church can be discounted. I visited the church with a police officer experienced with crowd control and supervision; he estimates the absolute maximum capacity of the church to be about 2,500. If the building had been packed, it is possible many of the victims were cut down in the precincts around it. Perhaps Peter was confusing his figure of 7,000 with the total deaths in the city. Other churches were also full of townspeople who would have run to their nearest sanctuary; these, like St Nazaire, were also burned. Only a minority of the dead were heretics. Roger of Wendover rather optimistically reported that God’s protection ensured that ‘very few of the Catholics were slain’.33 But William the Breton confirms that the killing was wholesale: the ribaldi ‘struck out indiscriminately at the faithful and at those who no longer believed, and they did not stop to find out who was worthy of death and who was worthy of life’.34 Killing some 2,000 people or more using just knives and swords would have been a long, hard process; I suspect most lives were claimed when the church was torched and the roof caved in on the people beneath it.
Churches were not the secure sanctuaries they were often thought to be and many a non-combatant died in them during medieval wars. In 1440 Sir John Talbot had over 300 men, women and children burned to death in the church at Lihons, where they had taken refuge; even the pious King Louis VII of France did the same at Vitry in 1143. Béziers was more systematic; here sanctuaries became execution chambers. In the mid-nineteenth century, a mass grave was uncovered beneath St Mary Magdalene; the victims having died on consecrated ground, their bodies could remain where they fell. Whatever the total number of deaths in the city, it is clear beyond doubt that the slaughter was extensive even by the standards of the time.
The name Béziers has gone down in history to represent fanatical religious intolerance and large-scale religious massacre. It has recently been argued that the impact of Béziers was so great – news of the massacre spread across Europe – because the unusual suddenness of the event heightened its horror. There may be something in this, but what really shocked people was its scale and where it took place: in a cultured Christian country in the kingdom of France at the height of the period of chivalry. The most famous massacre of this magnitude previously was the taking of Jerusalem in 1099 during the First Crusade. Here, when the crusaders broke into the city, ‘there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood’; ‘the surviving Saracens dragged the dead ones out in front of the gates and piled them up in mounds as big as houses’; ‘about 10,000 were beheaded’; the crusaders ‘rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins’.35 But here the accounts are considerably more hyperbolic than in 1209. The religious element was also stronger on the First Crusade. Jerusalem was the holiest of all cities and so the massacre there was regarded by many (though not all) as a form of divinely ordained purification that restored the city to its pristine dignity. The element of purification was present for some at Béziers, but surely severely mitigated by the great loss of Catholic lives in the carnage. And where Jerusalem was the most important pilgrimage destination for Christians, Béziers was just an ordinary city.
Unlike Béziers, Jerusalem can also be explained by pent-up bloodlust. The crusade in the Middle East had lasted three long years of incredible hardship, deprivation and danger in a completely alien land; disease and agonising thirst killed as many as combat, if not more; extreme hunger caused some to resort to cannibalism. The attrition rate has been calculated as being nearly 70 per cent. By the time the survivors reached Jerusalem, the ultimate goal of all Christians, they were ready to seek revenge in a climactic orgy of violence that had been waiting a long time to erupt. By contrast, the Albigensian crusaders experienced next to none of this: they had marched a relatively short distance, mostly through friendly territory whose culture they could recognise as close to their own. And the siege had barely lasted a day since pitching camp. There were other, more calculated, reasons for the brutality at Béziers.
‘Kill them all! God will know his own!’ is one of the most infamous phrases to have emerged from the Middle Ages. For most historians it is entirely apocryphal: just a colourful phrase invented for dramatic literary effect at a later date. However, there is more truth to it than fiction.
The phrase originates in the Dialogue on Miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach, written by 1224, thus still during the Albigensian Crusade. According to his account, when, as the massacre began, the crusaders asked Arnald Amalric what they should do as they could not distinguish Cathar from Catholic, ‘the abbot, as well as others, fearing that as they [the heretics] were in such great fear of death they would pretend to be Catholics, and after they had left again return to their perfidy, is said to have said: Kill them. For God knows who are his. Thus innumerable persons were killed in that city.’36 Translations of Latin texts can – and do – vary widely, and there is no exception here. ‘God will know his own’ and ‘God knows his own’ are equally good renditions, the former conveying the fuller meaning that when any Catholics killed in the city appear before their Maker for judgement, God will know they are not guilty of heresy; thus heavenly paradise awaits them and not Hell, to which the Cathars are condemned. When deploying the phrase, historians tend to add ‘all’ and exclamation marks for emphasis. Again, this is reasonable: historians often add quotation marks that are, of course, not there in the original – they are not used at all in Latin. Caesarius is being quite honest and open: he is not reporting hearsay as fact but reports merely what the legate ‘is said to have said’. Although Caesarius was not present on the crusade, he was a white monk, a member of the same Cistercian order as Abbot Arnald that was so heavily involved in the crusade. The monk’s compatriot, Conrad of Urach, succeeded Arnald as Abbot of Cîteaux and head of the order in 1217; Conrad was also papal legate in Languedoc to counter Catharism there from 1220 to 1223. And as was mentioned in Chapter 1, Germans were heavily represented among the crusaders. Thus it is highly likely that Caesarius had access to some relevant information that has not surfaced elsewhere.
Some doubters point to the sheer impracticality of Arnald Amalric being asked what should be done with the Catholic faithful in the midst of a frenzied slaughter. But butchery on such a massive scale is actually a lengthy process; there would have been time to raise this question, whether or not the response was acted on. If the legate had made the order at this moment, it may simply have been an acceptance of the reality of the situation and reflect that he was trying to look for some spiritual consolation from the atrocity; however, this is less likely than a calculated command. Whether the notorious words were actually said or not said at Béziers, the reality is that they reflect the crusading policy of no quarter. The intention from the start for any who resisted really was to kill them all.
This is seriously overlooked when studying the massacre. The plan from the outset of the crusade was to annihilate without mercy all who resisted the crusaders. The reason was simple: to strike terror into the enemy and to frighten into submission any others contemplating resistance. This was standard practice in the wars of the Middle Ages, as I have shown in a previous book (By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare). William of Tudela actually discusses this strategy. Perhaps the draconian nature of his comments has persuaded some historians to dismiss what he says as an exaggerated statement made for effect and typical medieval hyperbole; it may also be because he makes the relevant remarks a few pages before the massacre at Béziers and so they may have been overlooked. But in the context of medieval warfare, no quarter is not just plausible, it is to be expected. The decision for no quarter was taken in Rome at the first council of war to launch the crusade over a year earlier. Present were Pope Innocent III, Abbot Arnald Amalric and Master Milo (legates on the crusade), twelve cardinals and numerous ambassadors. ‘There it was they made the decision that led to so much sorrow … From beyond Montpellier as far as Bordeaux, any that rebelled were to be utterly destroyed.’37 William says he heard this from the Navarrese ambassador Pons de Mela, who was there. Pons was representing King Sancho VIII of Navarre, who was William’s overlord for Tudela. William was therefore in a good position to offer us this invaluable insight.
The injunction was not forgotten when the crusade started – unsurprisingly, as Arnald Amalric was at its head. In the middle of recounting the carnage at Béziers, William makes space to remind the audience why it was happening:
The lords from France and Paris, laymen and clergy, princes and marquis, all agreed that at every castle the army approached, a garrison that refused to surrender should be slaughtered wholesale, once the castle had been taken by storm. They would then meet with no resistance anywhere, as men would be so terrified at what had already happened. That is how they took Montréal and Fanjeaux and all that country – otherwise, I promise you, they could never have stormed them. That is why they massacred them at Béziers, killing them all.38
The success of breaking into Béziers took everyone by surprise; but the killing was not carried out merely on a sudden impulse. William the Breton, who appears uncomfortable with the bloodshed, is wrong to try and exonerate the crusade leaders and knights when he writes that the ribaldi killed all ‘without the lords having given them their consent’;39 they were, in a well-known modern phrase used to excuse atrocity, simply following orders.
The order for no mercy was a strategic decision. William of Tudela recognises the wisdom of it: by setting an example at the start the crusaders hoped to cow otherwise impregnable fortresses, ones they could not hope to storm, into surrender. Béziers provided them with the opportunity to do this and they seized it. It worked. The road to Carcassonne was left open as garrisons deserted their posts for fear of suffering the same fate as the sacked city. Thus it is misleading to focus, as many historians do, on the extreme religious prejudice of Arnald Amalric as the main factor behind the slaughter. It has been pointed out by historians that the following year he was prepared to give a fair trial and the opportunity to recant to heretics who yielded to him, and that this casts doubt on the veracity of the order to ‘Kill them all!’ But this later tolerance can be judged on the one hand as either completely irrelevant to 1209 or, on the other, as actually reinforcing the veracity of the infamous command. This is so because Arnald was prepared to offer the chance of life to those who surrendered and had not resisted, in keeping with the crusaders’ strategy from the start to kill all those who did not submit. It is vital, therefore, to separate the religious element from the martial one: if the papal legate did issue the command to ‘Kill them all!’, he did so not as an intolerant, fanatical leader of the church, but as the pragmatic, strategising leader of the army. The military imperative overrode everything.
The crusaders were following the established siege practice of using terror as a weapon. A few examples will place Béziers in context. William the Conqueror took a satellite fort of Alençon in 1049; he ordered the hands and feet of the garrison to be cut off. The town of Alençon quickly offered its surrender. In 1381 the Duke of Bourbon laid siege to Moléon; he offered them one chance to surrender or face hanging. They surrendered. What made such threats effective was the belief of those receiving them that they would be carried out. In 1224 King Henry III of England gave the same warning to the garrison at Bedford Castle; they ignored the intimidation and, when stormed, at least two dozen defenders were first beaten and then hung.
The purpose of such merciless behaviour was to bring sieges to a speedy conclusion. The longer spent on a siege, the greater the problems: more expenditure; more lives lost; the greater the risk from starvation, disease and attack from a relief force. At Béziers, there was the fear of Raymond Roger returning with forces from Carcassonne and pinning the crusaders between them and the garrison. There was also the problem of limited service, with crusaders potentially drifting away once they had served their forty days or terms of service. The town’s refusal to surrender was therefore at first a grave concern for the crusaders; a few hours later, it had become a bloody blessing.
There is a misconception among most medievalists that the laws of war relied closely on biblical justification for the total slaughter of men, women and children when a place was taken by storm. Deuteronomy is cited in support of this as verses ten to twenty of chapter two lay out the rules of siege warfare. Deuteronomy 20:16 does stipulate ‘of the cities of these people which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth’. Biblical exegesis is, by definition, all interpretation; that the very next verse clearly specifies that this dire ordinance is aimed against the Hittites, the Canaanites and other Old Testament tribes is conveniently sidelined by medieval commanders and jurists. Verses thirteen to fourteen state: ‘And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it [a city] into thine hands, thou shall smite every male thereof with the edge of a sword; but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself.’ Verse fifteen makes clear that men and only men are to be killed in ‘the cities that are very far off from thee’. Thus one can slay all one’s own subjects but not those of another nation.
No laws are more made to be broken than those of warfare. Béziers was part of the Trencavel lands, and the King of Aragón claimed overall suzerainty; this should therefore have exempted the city from the slaughter it suffered, as the foreign invaders should only have killed men (the prerogative to kill men, women and children belonged to Viscount Raymond Roger and King Peter). Perhaps this is one reason why Peter of Vaux de Cernay and William of Puylaurens make so much of the murder of Viscount Raymond Trencavel I by his citizens in 1167. William opines that ‘It was widely held at the time that the Lord had wrought vengeance on them for their having treacherously murdered their lord Trencavel’, before adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘although they were also charged with unspeakable acts by way of heretical beliefs and blasphemies’.40 That the 1209 killing ground was focused on St Mary Magdalene’s church was not just divine, but also poetic, justice, for the viscount had been assassinated in this very church. The History deemed it highly appropriate that the city ‘met its fate on the feast of the blessed Mary Magdalene, in whose church so enormous a crime had been committed, and so suffered a punishment worthy of its crime’.41 The monastic chroniclers therefore emphasise political vengeance and spiritual retribution in explaining the massacre at Béziers. But William of Tudela gives the real reason: it was a strategic decision and a deliberate act of terror.
Béziers, then, shows how the military imperative took precedence in medieval warfare. If that meant thousands were to be massacred to discourage resistance in other strongholds, then so be it. But Béziers was not just a military massacre; it was also a comprehensive sack of a city. This, too, could serve a clear military purpose in medieval warfare that helps us to understand its nature more clearly.
That the sack of Béziers was comprehensive is made clear in a range of sources, but of our three war reporters only William of Tudela records it. The mass looting combines with the indiscriminate slaughter and flames to create a Breughel-like picture of Hell. The ribaldi, being first in the city, took the lead: ‘They were in a frenzy, quite unafraid of death, killing everyone they could find and winning enormous wealth.’ By the time the cavalry had made their way into the town, the killing and looting was in full flow. The knights were utterly horrified at what they found: the common folk were helping themselves to the best plunder. They were not prepared to stand by and see such a terrible injustice being perpetrated. They moved in. The Song says of the first looters, ‘Rich for life they’ll be, if they can keep it! But very soon they’ll be forced to let it go, for the French knights are going to claim it even though it was the lads that won it.’ When the knights saw that ‘the servant lads had settled into the houses they had taken, all of them full of riches and treasure … they went nearly mad with rage and drove the lads out with clubs, like dogs’. The ribaldi had ‘expected to enjoy the wealth they had taken and be rich for evermore’, not unreasonably seeing it as their just reward for taking the town. When ‘the barons took it away from them’, their anger and frustration was such they torched the town to the cry of ‘Burn it, burn it!’
The sacking reinforces the ‘Kill them all’ strategy: when the knights appeared on the scene they stopped the looting, not the butchering. They were not worried about the latter, as it was policy; their first concern was to grab their share of booty and they were prepared to use violence against their own men to get it. All – from the highest lord to the lowest camp follower – were desperate to gain the spoils of war. On a basic level, it was their reward for signing up to the dangers of campaign, covering the costs of their involvement plus an extra bonus. As such, plunder was an essential element of warfare as it paid the troops and helped to keep the army together. There was the chance for real or greater wealth at the high end of the social scale, and, for the lower orders, unimaginable wealth. After all, for the victorious army it was legitimate stealing. When Southampton fell in 1216, ‘such was the booty taken in that town that the poor folk who wished to take advantage and had their minds on profit were all made rich’.42 We see an interesting case of prioritising on the First Crusade when, in 1097, Bohemond of Taranto puts courage into his impoverished and imperilled infantry with the prospect not of spiritual rewards but of financial ones: ‘Stand fast together united in the faith of the Christ and the victory of the Holy Cross, because today, God willing, you will all be made rich.’43
Looting was not necessarily chaotic, but was sometimes carried out as a formal closing stage of the siege. When Philip took Luxembourg in 1463 he commanded that his army remain outside the town walls while he entered to give thanks in the main church; only when he had come out was the army given the all clear to loot the place. But discipline could easily break down. One example where it did, but in a clearly intended, organised fashion, was at Fronsac in 1451, during the closing stages of the Hundred Years War. The English surrendered the town under terms that guaranteed it protection from sacking. A large contingent of French besiegers was very disgruntled that they were to be denied their plunder and hatched a plan to rectify matters. That night, they created a situation which made it seem as if the English had gone back on the agreement and were making a sortie. Horses were stampeded and war cries went up. It worked. The French seized their weapons and, no doubt led by those behind the ruse, scaled the walls and looted the place. The officers could do little but play their part in the sack. The prospect of loot was therefore central to an army’s motivation. In 1358 Charles the Dauphin needed more men to take Paris; recruitment shot up when he promised the spoils of the capital to those who would enlist with him. The ribaldi at Béziers would have kept some of their allotted share of the booty, it was just not as much as they had hoped for and not as much as the knights took. Medieval armies often had strict policies on the division of spoils and how much was apportioned to combatants according to their status. Out of the diabolical anarchy at Béziers, order was restored.
The frenzied sacking undoubtedly added to the numbers killed. A looter would not often risk being stabbed in the back by the inhabitants of the house or the owner of the goods he was ransacking. Nor would he necessarily be prepared to spare a family member, especially if male, of the wife, daughter, mother or sister he was raping for the same reason. Although there is no record of rape at Béziers, we can be sure it took place. It was one of the rewards of soldiering. It was also another weapon of terror, of warning and vengeance: if you do not submit or flee we will rape your wives and daughters. In recent times we have seen rape used in this way in former Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sudan, the Congo and Syria. Froissart, one of the most famous chroniclers of medieval Europe, tells of how those involved in the Jacquerie uprising in France ‘violated and killed all the ladies and girls without mercy’. One family suffered a particularly horrific end: ‘Having seized the knight and bound him securely to a post, several of them violated his wife and daughter before his eyes. Then they killed the wife, who was pregnant, and the daughter and all his other children and finally put the knight to death with great cruelty.’44 The pathos of rape as part of a profitable sack is captured by Roger of Wendover when he recounts the pillage of Lincoln in 1217: ‘Many of the women of the city were drowned in the river, for, to avoid shame, they took to small boats with their children, female servants and household possessions, and perished on their journey. But there were afterwards found in the river by the searchers goblets of silver and many other articles of great benefit to the finders.’45
The victory at Béziers was almost complete, marred only by the burning of the town. As well as the structural damage caused, much of the booty went up in smoke: ‘many helmets and padded jerkins and jackets made in Chartres, in Blaye or Edessa and many fine things had to be abandoned’.46 William of Tudela says all the crusaders would have been made rich for life but for the conflagration. There were to be many more such fires in Languedoc over the next few decades.
It had been an astonishingly successful start for the crusaders: the first mighty fortress they had encountered fell within hours. It had offered up valuable supplies and allowed an object lesson in terror to be taught. After three days camped outside the city – perhaps conditions were too grim to stay within the walls – they headed south-west, passing close by Narbonne. Viscount Aimery of Narbonne and Archbishop Berengar had been rather lukewarm in dealing with heresy there; not any more. After Béziers, they were all too eager to sign up to the crusaders’ agenda, offering full military, financial and spiritual co-operation and support; Cathars who had fled there were handed over. This was just one of many effortless successes following the terrifying victory at Béziers. Along the route to Carcassonne, place after place either opened its gates to the northerners or its inhabitants took flight, providing a bounty of supplies and forts. Roger of Wendover reported that news of Béziers caused the fearful to scatter to mountain hideaways, leaving behind ‘more than a hundred unmanned castles between Béziers and Carcassonne stocked with food and all kind of stores’.47 The number may be an overestimation (though it is given in a letter by the legate), but one can gauge from it the force of the Béziers effect.
The advance of the French might have taken weeks if any resistance had been offered, but now they made a simple and straight procession to Carcassonne, arriving there by the end of the month. The city is hugely impressive today, and was only marginally less so in 1209. The skirting wall was constructed in the mid-thirteenth century; today the visitor can walk around the city in the lices, the space between the old and new walls. Built atop the steep incline of an escarpment above the River Aude, Carcassonne had twenty-six wall towers, plus fortified gates and the comital castle. Two suburbs – the castellare to the south-east and the bourg on the north side – were walled; a third, St Vincent, was less well protected, and lay more exposed between the city’s wall and the river. These suburbs are no longer there, the inhabitants having moved either into the city or into the bastide St Louis new town across the Aude, when the extra ring of defences was built. Opinion differs over the relative strength of the place, but both William of Tudela and Roger of Wendover attest to its power. In 1355 Edward the Black Prince managed to destroy its suburbs but left the fortress itself alone, deeming it too difficult to take. Its long wall would have been a weakness if insufficiently manned, but with a population estimated at around 8,000, and with refugees having flocked in from Béziers and the surrounding countryside, and also with Viscount Raymond Roger having called his vassals in, there was no danger of this. Its western side, some 600yd from the river (a serious drawback), was more vulnerable, but the castle keep dominated here.
The usual preparations for a siege had been put in place as best as time had allowed. Wooden hoardings were constructed to overhang the walls, allowing the defenders to better protect the bases against the works of enemy picks. The garrison and inhabitants were allocated sectors to defend and made ready to douse fires. The fabric of non-essential buildings was cannibalised to further shore up the defences, the cathedral losing some stone and its wooden stalls (much to the horror of Peter of Vaux de Cernay). Food was brought in and anything left outside was destroyed to deny the enemy provisions. Even the flour mills were destroyed so that the besiegers would struggle to make bread. The burghers of Rye did this in 1217 to hamper the French invaders, who were left desperate for food as a consequence. The Trencavel lord therefore had reasonable cause to hope that the northerners could be resisted and that time would see the besieging army dwindle through departures, disease and lack of supplies.
Remarkably, if true, the viscount seemed prepared to risk the same tactic that had been the ruin of Béziers: a pre-emptive sortie. ‘To horse, my lords!’ he cried, as he made ready to lead 400 knights into the crusaders’ camp.48 The young viscount was persuaded against this course of action by the veteran lord Peter Roger of Cabaret (part of the stunning Lastours castle group), who advised him to preserve his forces for the morrow, when the French would attack their access to water. That night, guards rode around the city as both sides readied themselves for combat.
Hostilities began on the morning of 3 August with an attack, as the Lord of Cabaret had predicted, on the suburb St Vincent. The clergy called on divine help, chanting ‘veni Sancti Spiritus’ (‘come, Holy Ghost’). The History says the suburb was overrun immediately as the defenders retreated. The Song claims, whether truthfully or so as to excite its audience is not clear, that the fighting was fierce and both sides suffered heavy casualties. Within two hours the suburb had been cleared. Peter draws attention to the first notable deed of his hero, Simon de Montfort, who ‘courageously advanced into the ditch ahead of all the others – indeed he was the only knight to do so and thus played an outstanding part in capturing this suburb’.49 Peter says that the ditches were filled in and the town razed. The first action makes obvious sense as it made the walls more accessible, but the reasoning for the latter is less clear: it cleared the way for the siege machinery to be brought up, but it also denied the northerners cover. It is likely that only some obstructions were removed for the artillery, which battered the walls incessantly when they had been constructed and drawn up.
William of Tudela makes the important observation that the city was now cut off from its main water supply; the southerners were left with just the deep-sunken wells within the walls. Meanwhile, he says that the northerners were sitting pretty as they had an abundance of supplies; these had been boosted by the abandoned places the crusaders had come across en route. Nonetheless, their expenses continued to mount. The bourg was their next target the following day. With its stronger defences, it proved much harder to take. The crusaders in the ditch were forced to pull back under the barrage of stones raining down on them. A knight was left behind with a broken leg until he was rescued by Simon de Montfort and a squire. Montfort was quickly building a reputation for bravery which, despite the sycophancy of the History, was justly earned. Under heavy bombardment, a ‘cat’ was sent against the wall: this was a four-wheeled wagon covered in oxhides under which engineers and soldiers could sap the base of the defences.
Fire, wood and stones thrown down destroyed the cover, but not before the sappers had carved out a hollow in the wall that afforded them the protection to continue their work. On the morning of 8 August this section of the wall collapsed and the crusaders stormed the breach; the southerners retreated. However, Peter relates that when many of the crusaders had withdrawn satisfied with their work, a sortie from the citadel ‘chased off any of our men they found still in the suburb, slaughtered many who could not escape and set fire to the entire suburb’.
At this juncture, politics intervened in the form of King Peter II of Aragón, come to mediate between the northerners and his vassal Raymond Roger. He arrived at dinnertime with 100 knights. Civilities were exchanged and discussions held. The king was there not to offer military assistance, despite the hopes of the besieged – Peter needed his forces for the crusade against the Muslims in Spain – but to arbitrate between the forces so that his territorial interests in the region were not jeopardised. He entered the city and told the viscount that little could be done against such numbers as the northerners possessed but that he would do what he could to secure decent terms for the city. But the legate Arnald Amalric was prepared only to allow Raymond Roger and eleven of his men to leave the city with what they could carry and nothing more. King Peter knew the viscount would not dishonour his name by deserting his people, saying it would ‘happen when donkeys fly’. Raymond Roger rejected the terms indignantly. The king, both angry and saddened, returned to Aragón. Any false hopes that the besieged had entertained on Peter’s arrival were now dashed. The tension in the city must have been unbearable as all now feared another Béziers.
The siege of Carcassonne, 1209.
Conditions for the besieged crammed into the citadel were dreadful in the summer heat. The Song tells of the stench from those who had fallen ill and from the livestock that had been brought within the walls for slaughtering and skinning, and of flies that tormented everyone. Within a week of King Peter’s departure, another round of negotiations began; it is uncertain at whose instigation. William says that the viscount was warned by a kinsman fighting for the crusaders to surrender, or ‘you will get the same treatment as Béziers’. Raymond Roger knew he had to seek terms. But when he entered the tent of the crusader Count of Nevers to begin talks he suddenly handed himself over to the custody of the crusaders, apparently of his own volition. ‘To my mind he acted like a lunatic’, exclaims William.
Whether terms had been agreed before or settled after this surprise move by the previously defiant viscount is unclear. The conditions of surrender were notably harsh: the inhabitants were permitted their lives and freedom, but they had to leave everything behind except for the light clothing they were wearing. On 15 August, William the Breton says they departed through a narrow gate so that they could be checked to ensure nothing was being smuggled out; they left ‘to the disposition of the Catholics all their goods, their fields, their arms, their herds, their treasures, their vineyards, their homes’.50 Peter of Vaux de Cernay mocked that they carried with them nothing but their sins. Most headed either for Toulouse or Spain. They had been impoverished in an instant. But at least their lives had been spared.
As was the city itself. The commanders did not want a repeat of Béziers; they were determined to keep the fortress intact as their headquarters. Roger of Wendover, confirming crusading sources, explains the northern barons’ thinking at a council: ‘if the city were completely destroyed, no nobleman of the army would be found to lead the government of that country.’51 Without goods and infrastructure, the new lord would have no means of sustaining the garrison needed to guard it. If a stronghold was deemed necessary, as Carcassonne was, it would be re-strengthened after a successful siege and any damage inflicted repaired; if it was thought difficult or dangerous to hold, or that it did not serve a particular strategic purpose for the victor, it would usually be destroyed to deny its use to the enemy. With towns such as Carcassonne, as the barons pointed out, there was a need for a regional seat of governmental administration; for that to be effective, it had to be economically viable. Note William the Breton’s list above of all that the citizens had to leave behind: it represents some of the basic forms of livelihood. A depopulated town, such as Béziers was to some extent, was one without markets and hence without economic benefits to its ruler. Furthermore, a scarcity of labour would, by the laws of supply and demand, place upwards pressure on wages, thereby increasing the costs of labour and decreasing competitiveness, as wage increases after the Black Death in the fourteenth century show. It could make sound military sense to kill a garrison and much of the male population as a warning to others and to keep survivors subjugated by fear, but to kill everyone made military sense only on relatively rare occasions. After all, vibrant towns and commerce were vital in creating the wealth that could be channelled into war.
At first sight, then, it would seem that the crusaders’ policy for the defeated had been ill thought out. However, while our three war reporters make no mention of this, the well-informed William the Breton, much overlooked here as elsewhere, informs us of what happened after the city had been depopulated: ‘the Catholic warriors filled the city with the faithful and worked to restore it’.52 Who these faithful were and when they moved in is not specified. But just as field armies left garrisons behind to hold forts, as they did at Carcassonne, so it can be assumed that a large proportion of the camp followers settled into the city. To these might be added people from securely orthodox places in the Carcassès region and those from further afield who had heard of events and saw a new life for themselves in this part of Languedoc. War afforded such opportunities to settlers. When Philip II of France was invading Normandy in 1203–04, he spent six months besieging Château Gaillard. When his troops had taken the town of Les Andelys that lay beneath it, he filled it with settlers even before the castle had been taken. The crusaders’ intentions at Carcassonne were therefore clear: this was a war of colonisation.
Having been spared the flames, Carcassonne offered up fantastic booty. This was piled up while the horses and mules were shared out. In the city, Arnald Amalric called the crusaders to him and, addressing them from a marble plinth, warned them to hand over all their plunder. If anyone so much as kept a piece of charcoal, they would be excommunicated. The wealth was to stay with the city so that it would remain strong enough to prevent the heretics from ever taking it again. All agreed to this, though no doubt reluctantly. The knights chosen to guard the hoard were not so keen: three months later, they were excommunicated for helping themselves to 5,000 livres of goodies from the pile.
The fall of Carcassonne leaves in its wake two mysteries: the submission of Raymond Roger and his ultimate fate. Did the young viscount hand himself over or was he grabbed by the crusaders during the negotiations? His open, heroic defiance less than a fortnight earlier had evaporated in the punishing summer heat. The failure of King Peter’s mediation and his morale-destroying departure must have caused Raymond Roger to reconsider his bold stance. Conditions in the city were only worsening. A repeat of Béziers seemed ever more likely. William of Puylaurens suggests that Raymond Roger wanted peace talks as he was ‘stricken with terror’ and that he was taken hostage to ensure that the terms of the surrender were met.53 The History claims that the viscount’s imprisonment was part of these terms. Frustratingly, the Song appears to be on the verge of telling us what happened in the Count of Nevers’s tent when … there is a gap in the single surviving manuscript. Just before this, as noted above, William of Tudela writes that the viscount had handed himself over completely voluntarily and judges that ‘he acted like a lunatic, putting himself into custody’. At the time of writing, he knew the young man’s fate. Perplexingly, William of Tudela also says that Raymond Roger only joined the crusaders in talks following the promise of his kinsman in the crusader army to ‘take you there in safety and bring you back here to your own people’. Perhaps the viscount had planned to hand himself over but wanted to let his people think he had been taken by the enemy so as to avoid his reputation being besmirched. Perhaps he handed himself over on impulse after being warned of the dire consequences of further resistance.
We will never know what really happened in the tent that day. It seems likely that the viscount had thrown himself at the mercy either of his peers or of the Church. Whatever is the case, the might of the crusade had been directed against Raymond Roger and here was a golden opportunity to seize him, as some sources suggest, with no further expenses incurred. Yes, he was a fellow noble, but it would be easy for the barons and churchmen to convince themselves that in harbouring heretics he could be treated in an unconventional and unchivalrous manner.
The belief that he had been arrested dishonourably by his captors was heightened by the young viscount’s fate: within three months he was dead. He died on 10 November, a prisoner in Carcassonne. Whether he died in a cell or confined in apartments (William of Tudela says he was ‘lavishly supplied with everything he needed’) is unclear.54 Peter of Vaux de Cernay simply states that he suddenly fell ill and died; the Song says he was killed by dysentery (‘I believe’). William of Puylaurens also says that dysentery claimed the viscount while he was still a ‘hostage’, but notes that ‘news of his death produced widely current false rumours that he had in fact been murdered’. If merely rumours, they carried some weight: even Pope Innocent III wrote that the viscount had been ‘wretchedly slain’. William of Tudela, sympathetic to Raymond Roger, vehemently denied the notion that ‘he was killed at night by treason’ and rejected the possibility of his captor, Simon de Montfort, ever allowing such a thing to happen: ‘Not for anything in the world, by Jesus in heaven!’55
Raymond Roger might reasonably have calculated that he would not be treated too harshly in captivity; the Middle Ages are full of stories of noblemen and noblewomen being imprisoned in extremely comfortable conditions. Like his uncle Count Raymond of Toulouse, he was never indicted for heresy and his status would ensure his escape from public execution. The converse of this, however, is that any death would therefore need to be surreptitious. Nobility was no guarantee of safety. We are a century away from when English kings stared to be murdered in captivity (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, Edward V); the thirteenth century is seen, in contrast, to be generally a period of leniency to errant nobles.
But King John’s recent activities might have shown the northern leadership how to deal with the viscount. In 1202 John captured his nephew Arthur of Brittany at the siege of Mirebeau. He was thrown into a dungeon in Rouen. Arthur, a contender for the English throne and an ally of Philip of France, was only 16; like Raymond Roger, he had plenty of years ahead during which time he could become the figure-head of resistance and trouble. After his incarceration, Arthur was never seen again. In a forerun of Richard III and the princes in the tower, John was suspected and accused of murdering Arthur. Stories abounded as to what had happened, two prominent ones being that John had killed Arthur in a drunken rage or had had him castrated, the shock of which killed him. Nothing was proven, but there can be little doubt a political murder had occurred. Six years later, he had the wife and son of William de Braose imprisoned in Corfe Castle. William, who had been one of John’s closest familiars, had lost the king’s favour. He had been with John at the time of Arthur’s disappearance in Rouen and knew the duke’s fate. When William fled from John the king targeted his wife, Matilda, and their child. He left them to starve to death in their cell. Stories went around afterwards telling how the bodies were found with Matilda slumped between her son’s legs with her head lying on his chest, expiring that way after having gnawed at his cheeks for food. This death by neglect meant that John had not actually physically killed them, providing a rather empty case for non-culpability.
Such stories circulated rapidly throughout England and France, making news in nobles’ courts. Many of the crusade leaders would have known about John’s actions – the Angevins were important players in south-western France – and they may have decided to emulate his repulsive example in dealing with Raymond. It would have been a neat solution. Weighing up the possibilities, my inclination is to believe that Raymond Roger was not seized in the negotiation tent by the Count of Nevers, but agreed to become a hostage, something that was normal practice. I suspect that as plausible as dysentery may be, it is a little too convenient and that Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel, the target of the first phase of the crusade, was either killed or left to starve to death as a political solution to a long-term problem.
In just three weeks of active military operations, the crusaders had crushed their Trencavel enemy and taken, with very little effort, the two most important hostile towns of south-eastern France. It was an astonishing achievement. For many, it was enough. Just as the first, independent crusade from Quercy and the Agenais had dissolved following its brief, initial success, so the great crusading host was now to shrink dramatically. And as the remnants of the crusade prepared to extend its conquest of Languedoc, it also underwent a complete change of command. From this time onwards, the northerners had a ruthless and brilliant new leader, the most famous knight of the whole crusade: Simon de Montfort.
The invasion of 1209.
Chronicle |
William of Puylaurens, The Chronicle of William Puylaurens, ed. and trans. W. and M. Sibly, Woodbridge, 2003 |
Chronicle |
William of Puylaurens, The Chronicle of William Puylaurens, ed. and trans. W. and M. Sibly, Woodbridge, 2003 |
History |
Peter of Vaux de Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade, ed. and trans. W. and M. Sibly, Woodbridge, 1998 |
RW |
Roger of Wendover, Rogeri de Wendover Liber Qui Dicitur Flores Historiarum, ed. H. Hewlett, Rolls Series, ii and iii, London, 1886–87 |
Song |
William of Tudela and Anonymous, The Song of the Cathar Wars, ed. and trans. J. Shirley, Aldershot, 1996 |
WB |
William the Breton, Oeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, 2 vols, ed. H. Delaborde, Paris, 1882 |
22 Song, 18.
23 History, 48–49.
24 T. Reuter, ‘Episcopi cum sua militia: The Prelate as Warrior in the Early Staufer Era’, in T. Reuter (ed.), Warriors and Churchmen in the Middle Ages, London, 1992, 93.
25 Song, 18.
26 Song, 18.
27 Song, 19–22 for this and William’s following quotes on Béziers.
28 History, 50.
29 History, 50, 289.
30 Chronicle, 33.
31 Barber, The Cathars, 211 n. 20.
32 History, 50–51.
33 RW, ii, 89.
34 WB, i, 230.
35 R. Hill (ed. and trans.), Gesta Francorum, 1962, 91–92; E. Peters (ed. and trans.), The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1998, 92, 260–61.
36 Barber, The Cathars, 211 n. 20.
37 Song, 13.
38 Song, 21.
39 WB, i, 230.
40 Chronicle, 33.
41 History, 51.
42 History of William Marshal, ed. A. Holden, D. Crouch and S. Gregory, Anglo-Norman Text Society, London, 2002–06, ii, 301.
43 Hill, Gesta Francorum, 19–30; W. Zajac, ‘Captured Property on the First Crusade’, in J. Phillips (ed.), The First Crusade: Origins and Impact, Manchester, 1997,155.
44 Froissart, Chronicles, trans. G. Brereton, Harmondsworth, 1978, 151.
45 RW, ii, 218.
46 Song, 22.
47 RW, ii, 89.
48 Song, 22–26 (for this and William’s following quotes on Carcassonne).
49 History, 52–53 (for this and Peter’s following quotes on Carcassonne).
50 WB, i, 231.
51 RW, ii, 90.
52 WB, i, 231.
53 Chronicle, 34.
54 Song, 29.
55 Song, 28, 29; Chronicle, 34.