Kill Them All

Cathars and Carnage in the Albigensian Crusade

Sean McGlynn

• Publisher: Spellmount
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750984317, 9780752486321
• eBook ISBN: 9780750951944
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The bloody Albigensian Crusade launched against the Cathar heretics of southern France in the early thirteenth century is infamous for its brutality and savagery, even by the standards of the Middle Ages. It was marked by massacres and acts of appalling cruelty, deeds commonly ascribed to the role of religious fanaticism. Here, in the first military history of the whole conflict, Sean McGlynn tells the story of the crusade through its epic sieges of seemingly impregnable fortresses, desperate battles and destructive campaigns, and offers expert analysis of the warfare involved, revealing the crusade in a different light – as a bloody territorial conquest in which acts of terror were perpetrated to secure military aims rather than religious ones. The dramatic events of the crusade and its colourful leading characters – Simon de Montfort, Louis the Lion, Innocent III, Peter of Aragon, Count Raymond of Toulouse – are brought to life through the voices of contemporary writers who fought and experienced it.

1

CATHARS, CATHOLICS AND CRUSADERS: ‘THE GENERATION OF VIPERS’

The Cathar Heresy

Just before dawn on 14 January 1208, Peter of Castelnau was on the banks of the Rhône north of Arles, making ready to cross the river. Peter was the papal legate, sent to Languedoc by Pope Innocent III to root out the evil scourge of Catharism, a heresy that had taken hold in the region and which threatened the supremacy of the Catholic Church. As Peter prepared himself, ‘an evil-hearted squire’ galloped up to the legate and ‘drove his sharp sword into his spine and killed him’.1 Another account claims that the murderer ran the legate through with his lance. As the unknown assailant made his escape to kinsmen in Beaucaire, a stronghold of heresy, the mortally wounded Peter raised his hands, asked God to forgive his attacker and, as dawn broke, died a martyr to his faith. His death sparked the launch of the Albigensian Crusade and three and a half decades of vicious warfare in southern France.

Just as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in August 1914 was the trigger that unleashed the First World War, so Peter’s murder is the moment at which words were replaced with weapons. In both cases, the precipitating murder was so momentous because it brought to a head, in one defining act, the long build-up of frustration, dispute and tension that was to erupt into open war. The combustible ingredients that sparked such an explosive outburst of prolonged violence had been stirred into the melting pot of Languedoc for some time.

That a crusade should be fought over religion is seemingly self-evident. The target of the crusaders was the heretical Catharism of southern France. The origins of the heresy appear to lie in the dualism of the Bogomils, who stemmed from tenth-century Bulgaria; French writers therefore sometimes called them bougres, a deliberate insult and accusation of sodomy. Less clear is when Catharism originally spread into Languedoc. It may first have appeared there in the form of Manicheanism (itself based on dualism) just after the millennium, a time of febrile religious activity, new thinking and the increased recording of heretical developments. Thus, at the end of 1000, we can read of the case of Leutard, a peasant from Châlons in France, who for some scholars displays Bogomil tendencies. The monk Ralph the Bald tells how Leutard, ‘an emissary from Satan’, fell asleep after exhausting himself with hard labour, and how he claimed that ‘a great swarm of bees entered his body through his privates’. They passed though him, tormenting him with stings, before exiting through his mouth. They then started speaking to him, revealing to him a new spiritual life. He entered his local church and, in an iconoclastic rage, broke the crucifix and image of Christ. He then started preaching anti-clerical sentiments and the rejection of some aspects of the bible. It is interesting to note that ‘in a short time, his fame, as if it were that of a sane and religious person, drew to him no small part of the common people’. Although his career as a visionary was short-lived – before long he ‘threw himself to death in a well’ – it demonstrates that new religious ideas, however oddly inspired, could spread quickly and find a receptive audience.2

That Catharism had established itself in Languedoc by the mid-twelfth century is evident from the works of the great reformist preacher Bernard of Clairvaux during his anti-heresy mission to Toulouse; evidence of Cathar beliefs from the same time is also to be found in the Rhineland. Two decades later, it was concentrating the minds of church leaders. In 1163, Pope Alexander III condemned the heresy emanating from Toulouse but which had by now spread to northern France, Germany and Italy; heretics with Cathar beliefs were burned in Cologne in 1163 and Vézelay in 1167. The German episode prompted the monk Eckbert of Schönau to write his Sermon against the Cathars; he seems to suggest that heretics of similar beliefs had been burned in the city some twenty years earlier. However, a small group of Cathars known as Publicani failed to gain a footing in England in the 1160s: they converted only one Catholic and their group was broken up. A church council at Oxford condemned them and King Henry II, enforcing the secular arm of the law, had the heretics whipped, branded and cast naked into the winter, decreeing that no one should help them or associate with them in any way.

The situation proved very different in Languedoc, where tolerance rather than suppression was more widely the response; indeed, across the region Cathars were living openly among the orthodox believers without any hindrance and very little, if any, censure. By the early 1170s, the Cathars had established their first diocese at Albi, hence the name Albigensians given to them. And by the end of that decade, Count Raymond V of Toulouse sent letters of supplication to the Church calling for assistance:

The disease of heresy has grown so strong in my lands that almost all those who follow it believe they are serving God … The priesthood is corrupted with heresy; ancient churches, once held in reverence, are no longer used for divine worship but have fallen into ruins; baptism is denied; the Mass is hated; confession is derided … Worst of all, the doctrine of two principles is taught.3

Raymond’s letter captures how pervasive Catharism and some of its tenets, including dualism (‘the two principles’), had become. Christian theology – which at this time meant Catholic theology as Catholicism was the monolithic religion – teaches that God is the ‘Maker of all things visible and invisible’. Cathars rejected this doctrine and instead proposed a dualist one. For them, the real, tangible world was the creation of an Evil God of darkness, the demiurge, while the spiritual world was the work of the competing Good God of light. The demiurge kept the divine souls of humans imprisoned in their physical bodies (or other warm-blooded animals), condemning them to perpetual reincarnation. This cycle could only be broken by adherence to Cathar beliefs.

There are similarities and differences between Catholic Christianity and Catharism. Moderate dualists can be considered Christian heretics in that they believed Christ and Satan were the sons of one God and that Christ was sent to this world to free it from Satan’s clutches and release men’s souls to heaven. Absolute dualists offered a new religion (but still with very strong Christian influences) as they held the belief that the Evil God and the Good God were independent, of equal power and co-eternal. By the end of the twelfth century, following a successful preaching mission in the early 1170s by Bishop Nicetas of the Bogomil Church of Constantinople, the absolutist version had gained dominance in Languedoc. But we should allow for variances: different Cathars held their beliefs to varying extents, just as today many Catholics, for example, do not follow every single teaching of the Church in Rome. As the unorthodox new faith grew and developed, so it was received in different forms in different places by different people.

Nonetheless, there were some accepted basic tenets adhered to by the majority of the Cathars, many of which share a Christian heritage. Although Cathars obviously did not celebrate the Eucharist (as they would not rejoice in the body and blood), at breakfast and at dinner they did break bread and share it with the words: ‘May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us always.’ A more explicit sharing was the acceptance that the bible was divinely ordained, but with some exceptions (much as the unfortunate Leutard had claimed). Cathars anticipated the Protestant reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in reading the bible in the vernacular and in rejecting most of the sacraments of the Catholic Church; for the Cathars, as with the Protestants, the sacramental focus was on baptism. In keeping with their rejection of the physical world, Christ became man to spread his message but his body did not rise again as his spirit returned to heaven, while his mother Mary was an angel. (These elements were present in the Docetic sect of the early Church.)

Central to their belief was the sacrament of consolamentum, their baptismal rite that also echoed Catholicism’s sacraments of confirmation and, when applied to believers on their deathbed (as was common), extreme unction. ‘Consolation’ by the laying-on of hands was reserved only for those who had full knowledge and understanding of the faith, and for the dying. This ritual reconnected the recipient’s soul with his spirit at death, breaking the cycle of reincarnation. Only those who had been consoled were actual members of the Cathar church; the other believers were followers guided by the clergy. The clergy were known as the ‘perfects’ and, crucially, these included women equally (hence perfecti for men, perfectae for women). They also went by the name the Good Men and the Good Women. The name Cathar itself comes from the Greek katharos (‘pure’). Catholic antagonists played on these terms and used them sarcastically to mock what they tried to project as a holier-than-thou attitude. Becoming a perfectus or perfecta entailed enormous personal sacrifice. Once consoled, the perfect had to reject the world and live a life of extreme asceticism. On the less onerous side, the perfect could not swear oaths, lie or take the life of a warm-blooded animal even to save their own life (as human spirits inhabited the bodies of animals). More onerous on a day-to-day basis were prayers at set hours fifteen times through the day and night; a prohibition against consuming anything from a warm-blooded animal, be it meat, milk, cheese, fat or eggs (only fish was permitted in an otherwise high-carb diet); a requirement to undergo strenuous fasting; a total renunciation of all property (except for a habit and a bible) and of family and social ties; and a lifetime of complete abstinence from sex (as procreation perpetuated the evil world). Given these severe stipulations, it is remarkable that Catharism had any followers at all. But the consoled were a small group of elite clergy and those facing imminent death; followers were free to pursue their own lives fully with none of the curtailments of the perfect, knowing that hedonistic indulgences counted for little when a deathbed consolamentum would spring them into heaven. Perhaps the most overindulgent good-timers would prefer to be reincarnated anyway.

The Cathars were virulently antagonistic towards the Catholic Church, but their own church emulated it in some ways. The relationship between the perfect and followers was not so different from that between more austere monasticism and the laity: most perfects seem to have lived in samesex communes, some offering charity and others being more eremitically inclined, mirroring Christianity’s holy hermits. Catharism had its bishops and dioceses divided into deaconries (though no church buildings: meetings took place in private houses); funding came from the bishops, donations and alms, and from the labour of the perfect, many of whom were weavers. Much of this reflected the structure of the Catholic Church, though of course on a much less grander scale. Despite the Cathars’ anti-clericalism, which reflected some attitudes of the time, extreme deference to their version of the clergy was expected of believers: when meeting a perfect, the follower was to kneel down to him three times while saying ‘Bless us, have mercy on us’. Other than that, believers (credentes) had little to do in the form of rituals that was absolutely necessary; many would still attend Catholic masses (whether for social or protective reasons) and fulfil Holy Day obligations that remained far more exacting than anything they had to perform for formal Catharism. However, devout believers would try to follow the challenging example of the perfects; more challenging again was that the authorities persecuted Cathars, so the heretical faith could demand the ultimate sacrifice.

Recently, an influential school of thought has challenged much of this picture, claiming that Catharism as a threat was little more than a fiction manufactured by a paranoid Church and avaricious princes, and that the heresy was not a counter-church but merely a localised, largely individual unorthodox expression of belief. Even one of the most important scholars of heresy has questioned his earlier work on the Cathars, which has been instrumental in shaping our views on the heresy, suggesting that the early heretics were discontents from monastic orders, especially the Premonstratensians, and otherwise orthodox reformers such as the Patarenes. It has also been argued that the dualism of the Albigensians was a useful excuse to vindicate the sacking of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204, as dualist beliefs were strong in the East, and thus as justification to move into Languedoc. While there is something to be said for medieval powers having overstated the extent of Catharism – it is a constant in warfare to inflate the danger of an enemy one intends to attack – this revisionist approach, which offers some extremely valuable insights, perhaps goes a little too far, and has already been challenged, with the reality lying somewhere in-between.

The extent of an established Cathar church and structure can be overemphasised as the revisionists claim; this structure may have represented an ideal rather than the reality, but may also have reflected the experience of disaffected monks in its ranks who were used to such structure and a chain of command. There was a formal organisation and hierarchy, however loose, as the Cathars imitated existing religious models after their own fashion. But Catharism’s international connections should not be played down too much, either. It is the nature of new religious movements to proselytise, spreading their message far and wide. Missionaries from Eastern Europe, Catalonia and Italy ensured Languedoc had contacts with the wider movement of Catharism. Exaggeration of the heresy by Inquisitors eager to justify their livelihood was indeed common (in the same way that Matthew Hopkins, the notorious Witchfinder General, promoted his career in mid-seventeenth-century England), but they had plenty to work on. Evidence for the Cathar heresy is clear from before Church theologians began denouncing it; furthermore, clear distinctions were made between various forms of heresy, especially those of Cathars and the poverty-inspired Waldensians, with Catholic churchmen holding documented debates with these two groups in the same meeting. While the extent of the threat of Catharism to orthodoxy may have been magnified by the Church, it was a direct and growing challenge to it and a very real phenomenon that required a response. That response was at first spiritual, but then martial.

Something of a benign myth has been created around the Cathar faith, whose adherents are known to us as gentle, vegan pacifists who would not even allow animals to be harmed. Yet their ultimate goal – as extreme in its belief as its chances of success – was the elimination of the human race through the ending of procreation. As mentioned above, the perfects constituted a very small group; followers might try to imitate them, but as a whole they do not seem to be that different from their neighbours in displaying nastiness and discriminatory behaviour; indeed, the slightly cultish feel of Catharism led to some unsympathetic treatment of those less fervent or inferior in their devotions. It is important that this less favourable picture is depicted, as it helps us to understand why the Albigensian Crusade was not a one-sided act of extreme violence with atrocities meted out just by those wearing the cross.

Ermessinde Viguier was a Cathar wife who lived in the village of Cambiac on the eastern side of Toulouse. In 1222 she was present at a Cathar meeting where other women mocked and belittled her for being pregnant. Having been told she was carrying a demon and bringing forth wickedness into the world, she understandably left the church, even though her Cathar husband beat her with a rod to force her stay. Some Cathar women were coerced into abortions. This attempt to counter maternal instincts ensured that male followers outnumbered female ones.

The famous Cathar village of Montaillou near Ax les Thermes offers more extreme examples. Sybille Pierre’s daughter of under twelve months, Jacotte, was seriously ill. A perfect, Prades Tavernier, consoled the infant (the consolamentum was not usually administered to dying children) and told Sybille not to give her any milk; in effect, Jacotte was to undergo the endura, the final fast after a deathbed consolation that ensured release of the spirit. Sybille would not stand by and let her child die, so she strengthened Jacotte by ‘putting her to the breast’. When her husband Raymond discovered this, ‘he was very grieved, troubled and lamented’. Other villagers labelled Sybille a ‘wicked mother’ and a ‘demon’ for saving her baby daughter, and for a long while afterwards Sybille said that her husband ‘insulted and threatened me … and stopped loving the child’.4 Insecurity heightened tensions in the village. Arnald Lizier was a Catholic and not trusted by the villagers; he was murdered and his corpse discarded at the castle gates. Mengarde Maury had denounced Pierre Clergue, the village’s womanising priest, to the Inquisition; she had her tongue cut out. The gap between a religion’s ideals and practices – common to all faiths – affected the Cathars as much as the Catholics. The Cathars were governed by human instincts and thoughts that they may have striven, but often failed, to overcome. Throughout history, beliefs – be they religious or political – have all too often been cited as the justification of an end, no matter how bloody or cruel, or how imperfectly adhered to by followers.

Nor was general morality very different between Cathars and Catholics, the records from Montaillou revealing rape of females and male youths at knifepoint. Pierre Clergue, the priest, encapsulates the crossover between the two religions: a Catholic by ordination but a Cathar by sympathy, he had over a dozen mistresses and took delight in deflowering virgins. ‘One woman is just like another,’ he said. ‘The sin is the same, whether she is married or not. Which is as much as to say that there is no sin about it at all.’5

A great appeal of Catharism was the example set by the perfecti in their holy, simple and devout lives. But the perfects were often not perfect at all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction The Albigensian Crusade: A Brutal War of Conquest
• 1. Cathars, Catholics and Crusaders: ‘The Generation of Vipers’
• 2. 1209: ‘Kill Them All! God Will Know His Own!’
• 3. 1209–10: ‘Frantic Men of an Evil Kind and Crazy Women Who Shrieked Among the Flames’
• 4. 1211: ‘There Was So Great a Slaughter It Will Be Talked of Until the End of the World’
• 5. 1212–13: ‘All Were Seized Without Mercy and Put to the Sword’
• 6. 1214–17: ‘We Shall Carry Death Across Your Land’
• 7. 1217–18: ‘Who Could Fail to Dissolve in Tears?’
• 8. 1219–29: ‘They Completed the Work of Destruction’
• Epilogue: 1230–40 – ‘The Synagogue of Satan’
• Bibliography
• Plates
• Copyright