The Friar of Carcassonne (5 page)

Many crowding the Roman bridge in the year 1300 did not have counterparts in 1200 or 1100, as their place in society was of recent creation. Without these newcomers, the career of the friar of Carcassonne would not have been possible. Among them were men in white robes draped with a black scapular, many of their tonsured pates housing a fevered, fanatical intellect. These were the Dominicans, the brothers of the Order of the Friars Preachers. They had not existed a century earlier, yet by 1300 they had hundreds of houses and convents throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Shock troops, scholars, administrators, inquisitors, and eventually popes, the Dominicans were, above all else, the
domini canes
—the hounds of the Lord.

Matching them in numbers marched a legion of similarly soulful men, in simple brown or gray robes: the Franciscans, or the Order of the Friars Minor. Coevals of the Dominicans (both Orders date from the early 1200s), the Franciscans rivaled the men in black and white in their explosive expansion during the course of the thirteenth century. However, the fierceness of their piety came to be directed at divisions within their own ranks. Bernard Délicieux partook fully of this Franciscan infighting.

Together these two brotherhoods (and other smaller religious groupings), known collectively as the mendicant friars, had arisen from the longings awakened by revival. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries a once-drowsy Europe had founded new towns, revivified old ones, launched crusades, cracked the books, begun the construction of soaring cathedrals, and taken to trade routes choked by the weeds of millennium-long neglect. This burst of activity engendered a new outlook and an impatience with the haughty prelates, hidebound monks, and illiterate parish priests who were conspicuously failing to give spiritual succor in a time of change.

Into the breach stepped men more attuned to their day. At first came charismatic outliers—lone itinerant preachers—then informally organized groupings of laymen interpreting clandestine, vernacular versions of the Bible. All were dedicated to pointing out the correct heading to townspeople left rudderless in a new world of grasping guild and showy burgher. Wealth, the filthy lucre that would damn one to Hell, was accruing; the Church itself, its great reformers of the early medieval period having successfully urged it to engage with the world, had evolved into a multinational machinery of the here and now, enacting laws, deposing dynasties, starting wars, imposing taxes, endowing benefices, anathematizing, excommunicating, imposing interdicts—in short, behaving as an overweening institutional technocracy. As for the holy men and women of the Church, they were locked in monasteries, quietly living out exemplary lives of piety in the wilderness, their backs turned to the laity, their concerns otherworldly.

As a reaction to both the bedevilment of wealth and the spiritual remoteness of the institutional Church, the idea of apostolic poverty, living a penniless life in the imitation of Christ, rapidly gained ground. More important, this imitation of Jesus' humanity—itself a novel thing for the Christian to think about—carried with it the obligation to do as the Nazarene had done and preach to the people. Holy beggars stripped to the waist, fakirs at fairgrounds and in meadows, became part of the medieval civic fabric, their message about penance as prelude to personal salvation issuing forth from their heaving, emaciated chests, as their listeners, man and woman alike, swooned ecstatically in the dust and the straw. Worse yet, for a Church adamantly opposed to an increasingly literate laity giving its own reading of scripture, came those who not only viewed the meaning of this scripture differently from that of the dominant orthodoxy, but went so far as to say that the insitutional pyramid with Rome at its apex was the edifice of the devil. Of this latter group, the Cathars, or Albigensian heretics, were the most successful, winning large followings in Languedoc in southern France and Lombardy in northern Italy. To them the Church was the enemy, the impostor, the creature of the evil God that had created the world; their God, the good God announced by Jesus, could be reached only by living a life of apostolic poverty.

In the first decade of the thirteenth century, a hundred years before the Jubilee crowded the bridge, the founder of the Dominicans, a Castilian priest named Domingo de Guzmán, or Dominic, met the Cathars in Languedoc. His beloved Church was woefully unacquainted with the zeitgeist of destitution. It had excommunicated orthodox proponents of poverty and was now attempting to overawe the heterodox Cathars through revivalist preaching tours conducted by papal emissaries decked out in opulent finery.
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It was difficult to convince an ascetic of one's spiritual bona fides, Dominic realized, while wrapped in an acre of silk.

Dominic ordered the pope's men to doff the fancy dress and adopt at least a simulacrum of apostolic poverty. The zealous Spaniard then sought out the Cathars and invited them to debate. The heretics believed all of the sacraments of the Church, including marriage, to be illegitimate practices; the cross, a symbol of imperial Roman torture and nothing more; the creator God of the Old Testament, the equivalent of the devil; the notion of Hell, an absurd fabrication; the fate of all men and women as creatures of matter, a repeated return to this vale of tears; and the entire edifice of hierarchy and grandeur ruled from Rome, a monstrously demonic fraud hoisted on Christians of goodwill by a cabal of ruthless voluptuaries enslaved to the pleasures of the flesh and the appetite for gain.

Given the heat these debates between Catholic and Cathar must have generated, Dominican lore soon produced the Miracle of Fire. During one of them, in Fanjeaux, a town south of Carcassonne, some nefarious Cathars supposedly threw Dominic's debating notes, or his breviary, into the fireplace, but the document refused to burn, drifting up and up and up until, at last, it scorched a ceiling beam (still on display at the Dominican church there). However fireproof his notes, Dominic did not win many Cathars back to orthodoxy—but his steadfast selflessness attracted a large following of like-minded men, and soon the Dominican order, begun in Toulouse, awaited papal approval as a confraternity of mendicant friars.

The Cathars, pyromanes or not, were then mercilessly persecuted by the Albigensian Crusade, a twenty-year, papally sponsored series of atrocities begun in 1209 that aimed to eliminate them from the face of the earth. The scorched-earth wars of the Crusade effectively ended the independence of Languedoc, which would in a few generations become a part of France, but it failed to extirpate the heresy. From the 1230s on, the Cathar survivors of the years of ferocity had to face a permanent, Dominican-dominated innovation: inquisition. Involved in the genesis of Dominican austerity and, later, in the spread of Dominican inquisitorial activity aimed at rooting out every last one of them, the Cathars would also be a bone of contention in the Order's conflict with Bernard Délicieux, the standard-bearer of the Franciscans in Languedoc.
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The Franciscans differed from their Dominican brethren in several respects. Their founder, Giovanni Francesco di Bernadone, or Francis of Assisi, was a layman. The son of a well-to-do textile merchant, Francis threw off the trappings of wealth and spontaneously embraced a life of indigence and inspiration. Soon he was joined in this revolt against comfort by other sons of affluent traders—but not by the sons of the peasantry, as poverty held no romance for those born into it. Together Francis and his followers took to the roads of Umbria, sleeping rough, refusing to touch money or women, begging for food and preaching the need for repentance.

Hagiographical embellishments aside, Francis of Assisi must have been stupendously charismatic, a superstar of spirituality. To find a pious personage of equal power, a holy man in the right place at the right time, one would have to go back six centuries to the Prophet Muhammad. When Francis famously preached to the birds, he undermined the heretical belief, prevalent in the nurseries of heterodoxy in neighboring Lombardy, that nature and creation were evil. When he traveled on crusade and set out across the Nile delta alone to seek and gain an audience with the Ayyubid sultan, Malik al-Kamil, a nephew of the great Saladin, Francis displayed both missionary panache and a willingness to engage in dialogue.
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And when he—dirty, scruffy, and serene—dared go to Rome and confront the greatest medieval pope, Innocent III, the man who lit the bonfires of the Albigensian Crusade and whom Boniface VIII, the pope of the Jubilee, vainly tried to imitate, Francis showed a fearlessness bred of unshakable conviction. The times were on his side. The saint's first biographer had Innocent imperiously dismissing the beggar, then dreaming of him that night, seeing Francis, Atlas-like, shouldering the massive load of the Church of St. John Lateran, then the mothership of Christendom.

Innocent decided to channel the spiritual athleticism of this motley crew of ragtag beggars into reinvigorating the Church. In the decades to follow, that daring decision to accept rather than to anathematize the mendicant friars proved resoundingly right. Within a few generations, after jettisoning some of the more impractical dictates of destitution, the Dominicans and Franciscans had stormed the nascent institutions of the thirteenth century. The fledgling universities—at such centers as Bologna, Paris, and Oxford—became hotbeds of recruitment and brotherly achievement. Even a partial roll call of friars of genius from their first century—Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Grosseteste, Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus—gives an idea of how influential the brothers were in shaping the Western intellectual tradition. Even the fellow usually credited with slicing scholasticism to pieces with his logical razor, William of Occam, was a Franciscan.

But their reach extended far beyond the universities. Proselytizing missions were dispatched to the Muslim world (often with friars actively seeking martyrdom by insulting the Prophet in their harangues) and to places farther afield, as in the Franciscan 1294 embassy to the Mongol khan in China.
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At home, hospitals were set up, convents established and churches built. The Franciscans gradually went from a lay confraternity to a clerical one, dispensing sacraments, hearing confessions, and celebrating mass. As for the Dominicans, who had been disciplined and clerical from the outset (Dominic had a knack for organization sorely lacking in the dreamy Francis), they took to the pastoral task as well.

Not that the friars were all living embodiments of some unblemished Christian ideal. With expansion and the normalization of the orders came a watering down of their initial purity: the supposedly gentler Franciscans became inquisitors in some parts of Europe, most notably in Provence and Tuscany—although they were discharged from their duties in the latter province by Boniface because of their venality. The Friars Preachers and the Friars Minors competed fiercely over real estate—who would get the best building site in any given town—and over wealthy benefactors. Landing a rich corpse, with the requisite burial bequests, helped put a lot of food on their communal table, so unseemly squabbles over dead grandees could break out. Few things were exempt in this quarrel of the mendicants: the evangelization of Bosnia, for example, was held up for several years as Franciscans and Dominicans fought bitterly over who would have the honor of going there first. And the two Orders did not just have each other as brotherly enemies. Very early on they had earned the hostility of ordinary priests and bishops for diverting the faithful—and their funds—away from them. The newcomers were seen as poachers, and their runaway success as the thirteenth century progressed created suspicions that behind their convent walls might lie a very nonapostolic opulence.

Yet, overall, the fat indolent brother of folklore lay in the future, for the dynamic men of the first blossoming of the mendicants were by no means cut from the same cloth as Friar Tuck. To the contrary, the best of these men were engaged in what their literature calls metanoia, a heartfelt conversion in the struggle to get closer to God. Had they lived on another shore of the Mediterranean, they would have called their journey “the greater jihad.”

As they crossed the Ponte St. Angelo, to celebrate the Jubilee with their papal protector, they had reason to look back on the past century with a great deal of satisfaction.

They had reshaped the Church and Europe. The friars were at their apogee. Others on the bridge were, unwittingly, nearing their vanishing point. They were men in white cloaks embroidered with a red cross. Influential and incalculably rich, these were the Knights Templar. The Temple was one of the two great orders of warrior monks—the other was the Hospital—to have waged war against the Muslims and protected pilgrims to Outremer, the crusader states of the Levant. In 1300, however, Outremer was no more. The last toehold had been relinquished just nine years earlier, when St. Jean d'Acre had been lost to the armies of the Mameluke sultan.
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The Templars and Hospitallers had put up a heroic fight, but they were eventually thrown back into the sea, a Muslim ambition since the crusaders had first arrived in Palestine at the close of the eleventh century.

The Hospitallers stayed on in the region by moving to Rhodes. Not so the Templars. They had been content to retire to their commanderies and castles in Europe. They might have lost their
raison d' être
but they most definitely still had their
avoir
. Two centuries of moneylending by the Templars—issuing letters of credit in exchange for deposits at home—and the constant acquisition of new properties and receipt of new bequests had left them immensely wealthy. Such wealth excited jealousy, but they were untouchable. Like the friars, they too answered only to the pope. Barons and kings might fume, but whenever they needed money it was to the Templars that many turned. No matter that they were crusaders in a lost cause, the Templars believed themselves to be indispensable, a belief that was to prove horribly wrongheaded within a decade of their traveling to Rome for the Jubilee.