The Friar of Carcassonne (14 page)

According to the registers, Fabre had received the Cathar sacrament, the
consolamentum
, from two Good Men, Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès, on his deathbed in 1278. The ceremony involved the laying on of hands by a Good Man, the recital of the Lord's Prayer, and the promise to live an unblemished life of exemplary asceticism. Thus “hereticated,” in the Church's lexicon, the person in receipt of the sacrament became a Good Man or a Good Woman.

This ritual was commonly administered as a last rite to Cathar believers. To expire in the state of holiness conferred by the
consolamentum
meant that the individual could at last escape the cycle of return to the world's garden of evil and be joined forever with the good God in the hereafter. Once Catharism was forced underground, the sacrament had to be be performed surreptitiously, away from the eyes of the inquisitor's informers. Naturally, then, vigils at deathbeds were watched with interest in Languedoc—when dying, especially, a person showed his hand.

The grave of Castel Fabre was in the grounds of the Franciscan convent. To strike two blows at once, Nicolas d'Abbeville planned to disinter and burn his remains—and punish anyone connected to his depravity.

In July 1300, the Dominicans announced from the pulpits of the Bourg that an
inquisitio
concerning the late Castel Fabre had confirmed his suspected involvement with vehement heretical depravity. The import of the proclamation would have escaped only the dim-witted. Fabre had entrusted his mortal remains to the Franciscans, no doubt in the hope that he would be spared posthumous indignity were the Dominicans ever to accuse him of heresy, on either real or trumped-up charges. He had given a large bequest to the Franciscan convent. If the friars proved powerless to protect him, the Dominicans knew, other burghers of Carcassonne would hesitate before entrusting themselves to the Franciscans, for fear that they too could be molested, their families ruined, their remains incinerated, never to be resurrected on Judgment Day. They would decide that the charity strategically dispensed at death's doorstep was best directed elsewhere.

Worse, if the Friars Minor were shown to have sheltered a heretic, they too were guilty of abetting heresy, and thus contact with them endangered one's immortal soul. Fabre had been watched by six praying friars for weeks as he lay dying: had they just stood aside when the Good Men Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès paid a visit to hereticate him? D'Abbeville's accusation called into question the spiritual respectability of all Franciscans.

News of the inquisitor's announcement rocketed up the Franciscan hierarchy. Alarmed provincial leaders huddled in meetings, trying to decide what action to take. The accusation was as serious as could be made: the convent at Carcassonne stood charged, implicitly for the moment, with encouraging heresy. According to the taxonomy established at Tarragona sixty years earlier, the brothers were favorers, perhaps even supporters, of Catharism. They could be locked up in the Wall. No doubt the Dominican leadership was rubbing its hands in glee at the discomfiture into which the Franciscans had been thrown.

Time was of the essence. The Franciscan hierarchy decided to appeal directly to the inquisitor, however unusual or unprecedented that might be. When the inquisitor, as an administrator of God's justice, delivered his sentence, it was taken as a matter of faith to be just and deserved. Appeals were rare (partly because defending a heretic cast a cloud of suspicion on the defender), but an appeal to Nicolas d'Abbeville and his colleague Foulques de Saint-Georges had to be made; some face-saving compromise had to be reached, to avert the grievous harm the Friars Minor faced. Two men were designated by the Franciscan leadership to engage with the Dominicans. From Carcassonne word then came from the brothers that a third man was needed—the prior of the convent, Bernard Délicieux.

On July 4, 1300, the three Franciscans crossed the Aude and made their way up the Trivalle and through the gate of the Cité to the house of the inquisitor. They came unannounced but not unprepared—Bernard had seen to that. They were eventually ushered inside, a tactical error by the Dominicans. The inquisitors were under no obligation to receive the Franciscans, either cordially or frostily, but once they were confronted with Délicieux and his confrères, an official proceeding can be said to have begun. Certainly that was the light in which Bernard chose to cast it. Thus on the basis of this meeting, an appeal, a transcript of the discussion and further explanations in writing, could be required.

Bernard began to lay out his case. Foulques must have strained to keep his cool in the presence of the man who had jeered at him the previous winter. Bernard likely reasoned that to arrive at a conviction of Castel Fabre his beloved Dominican brethren had used Registers X and XI, compiled some years earlier by Jean Galand, inquisitor at Carcassonne. If Délicieux did mention these documents in the discussion, the color would have drained from the faces of his Dominican listeners, for much of the agitation of the past fifteen years had cited the registers as a cause of grievance.

Nicolas d'Abbeville cut him off and told the Franciscans they were not welcome and that they had no business being there. He quit the room abruptly, leaving the friars to be evicted from the premises by Foulques. This rudeness was, significantly, grounds for appeal—the irregular termination of the meeting needed to be explained, the proprieties of procedure respected.

The Franciscans returned to their convent and conferred with their fellow friars. No doubt sympathetic lawyers were summoned from the Bourg for advice. Some time toward day's end, Bernard and his companions left the lower town and made their way back up to the Cité. They knocked on the door of the Holy Office. It swung open and Foulques de Saint-Georges stood before them. They asked him for a transcript of their interview with the inquisitors earlier in the day. Foulques informed them that no such document would be drawn up and that they would not be allowed inside again. He shut the door in their faces.

The next step required the writing of a formal, notarized appeal regarding the inquisitor's actions at the meeting and the charges against Castel Fabre. A duly empowered notary was fetched from another town. No such official in Carcassonne had sufficient backbone to brave the ire of the inquisitor. Bernard dictated, scribes transcribed, the notary awaited with his seal. Copies were made for distribution.

Bernard Délicieux stated what had been whispered for years: Registers X and XI contained outright fabrications. The registers, the appeal argued, had been used and abused thoroughly, to cow the poor people of Carcassonne and its countryside into submission and to imprison and torment the innocent. Even for one as headstrong as Bernard, this was a stunning accusation to make in public, given the aura of menace surrounding the Holy Office.

In the case of the late Castel Fabre, the appeal maintained that the two men alleged to have hereticated him, Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès, never existed. They were men without a past, a trade, a residence, having left no trace of their passage. They had been invented by the inquisition to bring down Christian men and women with concocted tales of mysterious Good Men moving wraith-like through the vineyards to spread the sickness of heresy. If they had ever, or still, existed, Bernard demanded the inquisitors show proof.

At his trial two decades later, Bernard repeated the charges to the closed faces of the judges in front of him. Two former supporters, called as hostile witnesses, remembered Bernard saying at the time of the Castel Fabre incident that the inquisition always found those who adored the heretics and never the heretics who had been adored. Clearly, the Franciscan believed that the registers contained a mountain of lies.

The appeal was completed after a few days of work, and Bernard and his entourage trooped back up to the Cité and knocked on the inquisitors' door. This time there was no answer. That had been foreseen, for a hammer was produced and Bernard Délicieux, like Martin Luther two centuries later, nailed his appeal to the door. He then addressed the crowd that had gathered, at last using his tremendous gifts of oratory in the service of a wider cause. The problem, Bernard told his listeners, was no longer just the scandalous prosecution of Castel Fabre, but the scandalous abuse of power by the Dominicans of Carcassonne.

The inquisitor's masterstroke had turned out to be a blunder. Now everyone in the Cité and the Bourg, from the seneschal on down, had reason to suspect the inquisition. Bravery of the type displayed by Délicieux was unlikely to have been spurred by insincerity or frivolous gamesmanship, and it would resonate as far as Paris and Rome.

The Franciscans returned to their residence in the Bourg, leaving their appeal to flutter in the hot summer wind. There was a reason no one had answered the door—the inquisitors had fled town and taken the registers with them, suggesting that Brother Bernard was not alone in doubting the veracity of their leather-bound compilation of accusation. The case of Castel Fabre was dropped.

1301

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE BISHOP OF PAMIERS

T
HE NEW YEAR DAWNED QUIET
in the south of France. In Albi, Bishop Bernard de Castanet reaped the rich harvest of property from those he had so speedily condemned to life imprisonment. Having returned to Carcassonne some time after the Castel Fabre debacle, the inquisitors kept a low profile. They absented themselves frequently, no doubt consulting with their enviably untroubled colleagues in Toulouse and, according to Bernard at his trial, laboriously recopying and “fixing” the registers that had cast a pall of suspicion over them.

They could not very well excommunicate the town again, for two reasons. The first arose from the accord of 1299. The leadership of the Bourg had lived up to the letter, if not the spirit, of its conditions: the new Dominican chapel had been built and the consuls, as promised, had not stood in the way of the arrest of the prominent citizens mentioned in the document. Bernard Délicieux had stood in the way, but that was not the fault of the consuls—and nowhere in the agreement did it say they had to help make these arrests. Second, at this delicate juncture the Dominicans charged with the inquisition at Carcassonne could not invite further attention to their procedures. Taking the drastic measure of excommunicating the town would have occasioned investigations and outside interference in the workings of the inquisition.

For the moment, the Holy Office at Carcassonne was toothless, unable to do much. The city could breathe again. However welcome the lull, Bernard Délicieux was not satisfied. He had only to leave the confines of his convent and look east over the Aude. The Wall still stood. The wretches within still suffered, including the twenty-five unfortunates of Albi. And at any moment, given shifting winds of royal or papal favor, the Dominican machinery could start up again, unleashing the dread repression so at variance with his view of a Christian society. He had stalled the inquisition, not stopped it. For that he would need allies far more powerful than the people of the Bourg.

The diocese of Pamiers, close to the towering Pyrenees, had been carved out of the diocese of Toulouse in 1295. That administrative change and consequent loss of revenue to his see would have angered Toulouse's bishop, who may have had a hand in spreading rumors about the new diocese's first bishop, Bernard Saisset. Whatever their provenance, the stories about Saisset provoked consternation and, in some quarters, hilarity. Famously, Bishop Bernard is reputed to have said that while King Philip the Fair was “more handsome than any man in the world . . . [he] knew nothing, except to stare at men like an owl, which, though beautiful to look at, is an otherwise useless bird.” In addition to delivering this memorable put-down, which implied that the king was a pretty boy exploited by his corrupt ministers, the bishop also characterized the monarch as a bastard, a counterfeiter, and a statue.

All of this, however wounding, might have been taken as the harmless raillery of an old crank in his cups had not the bishop also ventured into political critique. As a scion of a proud Languedoc family, Bernard Saisset clearly resented the presence of the French in his homeland and volubly shared his low opinion of them with others. Of his enemy the bishop of Toulouse, a Parisian and thus automatically the target for withering scorn, Saisset said that he was “useless to the Church and to the country, because he was of a language that was always an enemy to that of our ancestors, and that the people of the country hate him because of that language.”