The Friar of Carcassonne

Revolt Against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars

Stephen O'Shea

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781553655510
• eBook ISBN:
  9781553659716
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Nearly a century had passed since the French region of Languedoc had been put to the sword in the Albigensian Crusade, but the stain of Catharism still lay on the land. Any accusation of Catharism invited peril. But repression bred resentment and it was in Carcassonne that resistance began to stir. In 1300 a great orator emerged there to bring together the currents of resistance. Three years later the terrible prisons were stormed and the inmates set free. The orator was a Franciscan friar, Bernard Délicieux. The forces ranged against him included the ruthless Pope Boniface VII, the Machiavellian French King Philip IV and the grand inquisitor of Toulouse, Bernard Gui (the villain of The Name of the Rose).This magnificent book, which forms a kind of sequel to Stephen O'Shea 's bestselling The Perfect Heresy, tells Délicieux's inspiring life and tragic story.

NOTES

A narrative with a claim to immediacy on events long past necessitates a good deal of notes. As many, but not all, of the details about Brother Bernard’s activities come from his trial, I will point the skeptical reader frequently to Jean Duvernoy’s French translation of the trial transcript. Decisions and inferences made by me and others will also be discussed. Mundane matters of fact found in all his previous biographies will not be cited, as that would put everyone to sleep. Where the biographers differ, however, will be flagged.

Also cited are sources not directly germane to Bernard, such as, for example, those dealing with the affair of the Templars. And I will also provide additional material in the notes that I could not somehow shoehorn into the main narrative. These digressions, I hope, may lead in a roundabout way to a better understanding of Délicieux and his place in history. Some are amusing, some appalling.

Bibliographical detail in the notes is provided the first time a work is cited. After that, abbreviated entries are the rule. If you don’t want to lose your temper flipping back through the notes to see where such-and-such a book is first mentioned, save yourself the trouble and go to the bibliography. Last, the publishing date covers the edition I used.

BROTHER BERNARD

* Those who commissioned him sought to bolster local pride and regional identity, and to instruct and edify: Tastes changed and the history painting went out of fashion. The most memorable epitaph for the genre came from the savagely witty pen of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) in his story “The Reticence of Lady Anne”: “They leaned towards the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title. A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted ‘Bad News,’ suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to friends of duller intelligence.” The Complete Saki, London, 1998, pp. 46–48. For immediate gratification, the story can be found online: http://haytom.us/showarticle.php?id=119.

* his three major biographers: Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau, Bernard Délicieux et l’ inquisition albigeoise (1300–1320), Paris, 1877; Michel de Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard Délicieux, O.F.M. Sa lutte contre L’Inquisition de Carcassonne et d’Albi, son procès, 1297–1319,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicam, 17, 1924, pp. 183–218, 313–337, 457–488; 18, 1925, pp. 3–32; Alan Friedlander, The Hammer of the Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Délicieux and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century France, Leiden, 2000. To these larger works must be added two invaluable monographs: Jean-Louis Biget, “Autour de Bernard Délicieux. Franciscanisme et société en Languedoc entre 1295 et 1330,” Revue d’ histoire de l’Eglise de France, 70, 1984, pp. 75–93; Yves Dossat, “Les origines de la querelle entre Prêcheurs et Mineurs provençaux,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 10, 1975, pp. 315–354. These scholars produced other works germane to Bernard’s story, but the five works cited here form the core material, aside from the transcripts of the trial. Their other works, and those of other scholars to treat the story, appear in the bibliography.

* an American historian undertook the task of collating, transcribing and publishing: Alan Friedlander, Pro–cessus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Délicieux, 3 September–8 September 1319, Philadelphia, 1996.

* rendered the Latin of the original into a modern vernacular: Jean Duvernoy, Le Procès de Bernard Délicieux 1319, Toulouse, 2001.

* the memory of Brother Bernard Délicieux: The Franciscan is not universally revered. While inspecting the lower town of Carcassonne (called the Bourg in the main narrative) in the summer of 2009, I entered an old cathedral, St. Michel, which stands more or less unchanged since Bernard’s time. I was alone. I took notes, which I didn’t end up using, on the interior of this fine example of Languedocian Gothic. A figure approached from a side aisle, smiling, thirtysomething, in priestly attire. I asked him about his church, its past and present. He was very affable, knowledgeable, a learned clergyman affiliated with the Dominicans. His edifying explanations drawing to a close, he asked me why I was so interested in the church. I told him I was researching a book on Bernard Délicieux. It was if I had slapped his face with a large, wet fish. He recovered his smile, then snapped in premature parting, “On dit tout et n’importe quoi à son sujet!”—don’t believe what you hear about him.

1. THE BRIDGE AT ROME

* the drudges of his Wasteland: The passage is found in T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland: i The Burial of the Dead, 60–64. From T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962, New York, 1963.

* the Ponte St. Angelo: The beautiful bridge still stands and is reserved exclusively for pedestrians, a measure enacted by Mussolini in the early 1930s.

* Dante commanded his underworld denizens: Dante, Inferno, xviii 27–32:

come i Roman per l’essercito molto,

l’anno del giubileo, su per lo ponte

hanno a passar la gente modo colto,

che da l’un lato tutti hanno la fronte

verso ’ l castello e vanno a Santo Pietro,

de l’altra sponda vanno verso ’ l monte.

de l’altra sponda vanno verso ’ l monte.

I used in the narrative the verse translation of Pinsky, Inferno. It is clear. A more stately, but not altogether transparent, translation of the passage was made by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published to great fanfare in 1867:

Even as the Romans, for the mighty host,

The year of Jubilee, upon the bridge,

Have chosen a mode to pass the people over;

For all upon one side towards the Castle

Their faces have, and go unto St. Peter’s;

On the other side they go towards the Mountain

The Castle is undoubtedly Hadrian’s mausoleuem, aka the Castel St. Angelo. The Mountain or mount is the Gianicolo (Janiculum), the tall, distant ridge beyond the Borgo of central Rome and another bend of the Tiber. It is not one of the Seven Hills.

* “Day and night two priests stood at the altar of St. Paul’s”: The chronicler is William Ventura, cited in Paul Hetherington, Medieval Rome: A Portrait of the the City and Its Life, New York, 1994, p. 79.

* he was moved to undertake his Nuova Cronica: Rome impressed him so much that he thought of Florence: “It was the most marvellous thing that was ever seen . . . Finding myself on that blessed pilgrimage in the holy city of Rome, beholding the great and ancient things therein, and reading the stories and the great doings of the Romans, written by Virgil and Sallust and Lucas and Titus Livius and Valerius and Paulus Orosius, and other masters of history . . . I resolved myself to preserve memorials . . . for those who should come after . . . But considering that our city of Florence, the daughter and creature of Rome, was rising, and had great things before her, whilst Rome was declining, it seemed to me fitting to collect in this volume and new chronicle all the deeds and beginnings of the city of Florence . . . and to follow the doings of the Florentines in detail.” Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, viii 36. From translator Rose E. Selfe, Villani’s Chronicle, Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani, London, 1906, p. 321. In this section Villani estimates a crowd of 200,000 pilgrims is present every day of that year in Rome.

* his massive marble tomb . . . apostolic deputy: Both details in Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias, Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim, New Haven, 2000, pp. 215–16. 13 The expansive pope had called the Jubilee to celebrate the commonwealth of Christendom: Like Christianity itself, the notion of Jubilee is derived from Judaism. The traditional Jewish jubilee, like the timing of the Sabbath, was connected to the number seven. Thus, every forty-nine years—that is, seven times seven years—was a jubilee year. Kessler and Zacharias, Rome 1300, p. 2.

* a despairing Pope Celestine: Details of the papal politicking are found in many of the books consulted. I found most useful to have at hand: J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, Oxford, 1986; Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, London, 2003.

* the old man dutifully died: Celestine’s imprisonment and demise had two important consequences: it would be used by Guillaume de Nogaret to accuse Boniface of murder, and in the eyes of radical Spirituals and Joachites...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Usage
• The Combatants
• Brother Bernard
• I. The World of Bernard Délicieux
• II. The Years of Revolt
• III. The Time of Repression
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index