Studies in the Ecclesiastical and Social History of Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars

John Hine Mundy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754653165
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351897310
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Studies in the Ecclesiastical and Social History of Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars is John H. Mundy's last major book concerning social and religious life in the city of Toulouse during the period 1150-1250 AD, a time when the alternate religion of Catharism, together with other divergent beliefs, rose to its height and, soon under intense repression, began to die out. The various studies, entirely reworked for this publication, and prefaced with an account of Mundy's early research in the Toulouse archives in 1946-47, document his understanding that religious divergence flourished when the town's well-to-do were building a semi-popular oligarchy at the expense of local princely power. The book reveals how the religious orders managed an extensive insurance network providing pensions, old age care and burial for lay society. His chapters on hospitals and leprosaries, charities, entertainers, judges, heretics and usurers bring the daily life of this period to life. The studies of Toulouse are enhanced by Mundy's expert cartography drawing on the Plan Sanguet of 1750. This volume, compiled in the year prior to his death, represents the culmination of his long career as archivist, scholar and teacher. It completes the work he began in 1946 and published in earlier books: The Medieval Town (Princeton, 1958), Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150-1309 (Longman, 1975), The Repression of Catharism at Toulouse: the Royal Diploma of 1279 (Toronto, 1985), Men and Women at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars (Toronto, 1990) and Society and Government at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars (PIMS, 1997).

ARTICLES

Chapter 1
The Town’s Parishes from 1150–1250

Some twenty years ago Canon Etienne Delaruelle and Janine Povill wrote a history of the parishes of Toulouse from their origins to 1160.¹ This subject has also benefited from a study of 1990 by Pierre Gérard of the history of the parishes in the Bourg. My intention is to review and incorporate the findings of these scholars for the mid-twelfth century and carry the history forward until about 1250.² Although not rigid, the limitation of 1250 is imposed by a change in the nature of the documentation of Toulousan local history which, among other things, involved a great diminution in the number of preserved private documents dating from the mid-thirteenth century.³

The Parishes

In 844 a privilege of Charles the Bald mentioned the City, with its centers at Saint-Etienne and the Daurade, and the Bourg, centering in Saint-Sernin. About this document, Delaruelle and Povill observed that the episcopal see was probably the City’s only parish, the others mere ‘loca sanctorum.’⁴ Although rural parishes had long since been established, Toulouse’s urban parishes only began to be delineated as the town grew in the late eleventh century.⁵

The earliest is the initially suburban parish of Saint-Sernin, first mentioned in 1060, but nothing is known about it in detail until 1145.⁶ An ‘ecclesia’ of Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines first appears in a document of 1155, although a cult center or chapel certainly existed there in the eleventh century.⁷ In 1160 Raymond, bishop of Toulouse, refers to the parishioners of four churches in the town: the cathedral, the Daurade, Saint-Sernin and Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines.⁸

This document raises questions. The bishop may have believed that two churches, that of the Dalbade in the City, just south of the Daurade, and that of the Taur in the Bourg, just south of Saint-Sernin, were not parish centers. On the other hand, he may have merely listed the institutional patrons who provided the parish pastors. Because the Dalbade was a dependency of the Daurade and the Taur of Saint-Sernin, the latter conjecture is a good guess. This document, indeed, probably represents the stage in parish development when monasteries had replaced secular or lay patrons, a change also seen in northern France.⁹ The history of the Dalbade (in the southeast corner of the City) indicates that this view is correct. Admittedly, the ‘cura animarum’ of the Dalbade’s priest was not mentioned until 1184.¹⁰ Long before that, however, no later than sometime between 1128 and 1135, the church was surely parishional because a confraternity from that ‘parrochia’ acted to help endow the newly founded Templars.¹¹

Documents hitherto not exploited suggest that five of the seven parishes were surely established before 1200, and the other two not long after, if not earlier.¹² Largely based on the conventional charitable donations made by dying penitents to their parish churches, documents cited here show that there were regular parish rectors at Saint-Sernin from 1158 or 1159 on, at the Daurade from 1176, the Dalbade from 1181 (perhaps even 1154), Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines from 1187 (perhaps 1184), and the Taur from 1235. Parish ‘scolares’ whose presence implies parish schools begin to be mentioned in testaments just after the end of the Albigensian war, starting in the 1230s.¹³ During the 1200s, such schools were cited in six of the town’s parishes. The only parish where a school is not reported is Saint-Nicholas in Saint-Cyprien (Saint-Subran), then an unfortified ‘barrium’ or suburb of the town across the Garonne from the town. No charter calls Saint-Nicholas a parish until the early fourteenth century, but the church was receiving the conventional testamentary bequests made to parish churches long before, and was probably therefore also a recognized parish. Some of these parishes were truncated because they lacked tithes. The Dalbade had been created from the priory of the Daurade and the Taur from Saint-Sernin, and these founding institutions retained or did not share their tithes.¹⁴

Gregorian ‘Reform’

One aspect of the parish history of Toulouse is barely mentioned by Delaruelle and Povill, namely the invasion of the Toulousan church by the Cluniac Benedictines of Moissac (around 60 kilometers north of Toulouse). As the parishes were beginning to form during the Gregorian turmoil in the late eleventh century, Moissac momentarily gained control of almost every town church, except those in the parish of the cathedral of Saint-Etienne, whose bishop was for the moment their close ally. Reaction soon followed. Saint-Sernin broke free in the early 1080s. Aided by the popes and new orders such as the Hospitalers, Templars and Cistercians, the local church counterattacked vigorously.¹⁵ After things had settled down, mid-century Toulousan churchmen envisaged their town as divided into four grand ecclesiastical districts, those of the cathedral, the Daurade, Saint-Sernin, and Saint-Pierre-des-Cusines, of which the Daurade and Saint-Pierre were held of Moissac.¹⁶

Although Cluny’s attack was halted, its early success left a mark: the riparian parts of both City and Bourg were under the patronage of Moissac, whose Benedictines directed the parishes of the Dalbade, the Daurade and Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines. Just to the south of the town in the suburb later called Saint-Michel, Moissac also controlled Saint-Antoine (Antonin), a dependency of Lézat, itself a dependency of Moissac, and across the Garonne river in Saint-Cyprien the church of Saint-Nicholas. Along the river, the only part not wholly under Moissac was the newly founded ‘salvetat’ in the southwestern part of town which, although in the Dalbade parish, was peopled by the new military orders. The parishes in the less populous eastern and northern parts of town were associated with the cathedral of Saint-Étienne and the basilica of the canons regular of Saint-Sernin. In fine, the majority of the town’s inhabitants seem to have attended churches patronized by Moissac. With the exception of Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines (itself following the traditional Cluniac cult of Saint Peter as did Saint-Pierre-de-Cluny or Saint-Pierre-de-Moissac), all of the churches and hospitals associated with this Benedictine devotion were initially called after the Blessed Virgin. This was true of the Daurade, its dependency the Dalbade and of its hospital. It is therefore likely that Cluny had introduced the new forms of the Virgin’s cult to Toulouse during the Gregorian age, just as it had done in many other communities.¹⁷

The Gregorian age left other marks, one of which may relate to the enforcement of clerical celibacy. In 1174 Petrona, daughter of the deceased Peter Marcabrunus, surrendered to the Daurade the tithe of Pouvourville, but retained its ‘badlia’ or ‘collectio.’ In a second act on the same parchment dated 1182, she alienated this right to a family named Dalbs, the document stating that her claim derived from her father and grandfather. The latter relative was a Bonetus ‘capellanus,’ presumably a chaplain or parish priest who had had issue.¹⁸

Another change in the Gregorian age was the recovery or acquisition of tithes and churches from lay hands. Tithes will not be discussed here, however, because almost all extant documentation concerns religious orders. What is of concern for the moment is the dissolution of the so-called proprietary system affecting parish churches. An example is a gift of the small church of Saint-Quentin near the Portaria by a lay family called the Turrenses to the canons of Saint-Sernin.¹⁹

The Dalbade is another and more significant example. Some time before 1109, the newly founded Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem appears to have acquired either from the Daurade itself or, more likely, from a secular family, the Dalbade church or a part of it. In or around that year, the head of the Hospital of Toulouse, Gerald, ‘returned’ the church of Sainte-Marie of the Dalbade to the church of Sainte-Marie of the Daurade.²⁰ A little later, a family especially active in introducing the military orders into the southern quarter of the City obviously had rights in the Dalbade church. This clan, the Tolosa, between 1114 and 1116 endowed the Hospital, and between 1128 and 1132 the next generation did the same for the Templars with property and parts of the church of the Dalbade.²¹ A member of the same family gave additional rights in the Dalbade church to the Hospitalers in 1150.²² Eight years later arbitration by the bishop of Toulouse and the abbot of Figeac gave the Hospital’s newly acquired rights over this church to the Daurade in exchange for 800 Toulousan shillings and other rights.²³ In short, it took at least half a century for the Dalbade church to recover or obtain what a knightly family of the town had possessed.

The use of the title ‘capellanus’ was another characteristic of the age. ‘Capellanus’ meant the head of any church or chapel, the charge being the ‘capellania.’ Since most twelfth-century charters derive from the archives of religious orders, the chaplains that appear most frequently are those of the chapels of such establishments as the Hospital of Saint-Rémézy and Saint-Antoine of the Benedictines of Lézat.²⁴ The term, however, seemed suitable for all parish priests because all Toulousan churches were under the patronage of the cathedral chapter, the canons regular of Saint-Sernin or the Benedictines of Moissac. Parish ‘capellani’ and ‘subcapellani’ are the clergy most frequently seen in testaments. Occasionally other titles and persons appear. A ‘capellanus’ of the Daurade was once also called ‘decanus,’ thus suggesting administrative duties beyond the parish. Terms like ‘sacerdos’ and ‘presbyter’ pepper the documents, but they refer to grades of clerical order and not of office in the administrative hierarchy. Other and lesser officers were sometimes mentioned in the benefactions or lists of witnesses: deacons, subdeacons, a sacristan, and simple ‘clerici.’

Conflicts between Churches

Subject to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Articles
• Notes
• Index