The Friar of Carcassonne (8 page)

But Nogaret and Philip did not blink. Nogaret launched a seven-year-long campaign to have Boniface tried posthumously, surely one of the most egregious instances of lawyerly chutzpah in history. His campaign of continued vilification ceased at last when a council of the Church wearily consented to take up the case, only to end up dismissing it. As a sop to the royal party, the churchmen lifted Nogaret's well-deserved excommunication.

In this overheated, tempestuous atmosphere, when a great Jubilee was called, a king denied the Church its income and its dignity, and his minister claimed the pope was a heretical criminal, a delegation arrived in 1301 before King Philip the Fair from far in the south of France. Their distant cities were in open revolt against the servants of Pope Boniface's Church. Many of these churchmen were corrupt, unjust, and, most important, harmful to the interests of the kingdom, declared the leader of the delegation. Philip, one can easily imagine, would have started at the mention of this last offense—he might even have looked searchingly into the eyes of the speaker, a Franciscan friar of unusual oratorical gifts.

As the king's ministers listened intently, Bernard Délicieux proclaimed that his city wanted peace. His companions seconded him. And they proposed a solution: the inquisitors had to be stopped.

*
French Philippe le Bel avoids any such misunderstanding.

*
Estimates range up to twenty million inhabitants.

*
It was only a matter of time before later humanists exposed the Donation of Constantine, an imperial decree of Constantine's granting the pope lands in Italy, as a medieval forgery concocted by a revenue-hungry curia.

*
Its name today is St.-Félix-en-–Lauragais.

*
Simony is the selling of ecclesiastical offices. The word is derived from Simon Magus, the Samaritan sorcerer who tried to bribe the apostles in Acts 8:9–24.

*
The other two were Gregory IX and Alexander IV.

CHAPTER THREE

THE HOLY OFFICE

C
ARCASSONNE RISES ON HIGH
ground overlooking the tranquil river Aude. Or, rather, the Cité does, the episcopal and royal administrative city, surrounded by tall battlements and a parade of forbidding guard towers. This is the familiar postcard image of medieval Carcassonne, the one that attracts three million sightseers every year. Although it received a fanciful makeover in the nineteenth century at the hands of architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the Cité still retains a great measure of authenticity—a grandee of the Middle Ages miraculously stopping by to spend time with us. Its mass of old stone and fortification fires the imagination of the susceptible. The motto of the city's tourist board is “Carcassonne, un rêve qui se visite”—–Carcassonne, a dream you can visit. Few places in Languedoc inspire such intimacy with people long gone.

There is another Carcassonne. The lower town, called the Bourg, is a rather raffish mix of the modern and historic that stretches out in the flats on the left bank of the Aude, to the west of the Cité. It is laid out in a grid, having been built explicitly for defensive purposes, normally to fend off the marauding English. The grid was constructed this way, and named the Bastide St. Louis, after England's Black Prince had destroyed the older medieval Bourg in the mid-fourteenth century. Much of the martial heritage still lives on—the modern city houses a marine infantry parachute regiment—as does the lively and long-standing commercialism in the crisscrossing of narrow streets. Although much of what he saw is now gone, Bernard Délicieux's Bourg was Carcassonne's beating heart, where merchant allies and other townspeople listened to his fiery sermons and took action against the hated Dominican inquisitors. Theirs, too, was a lively, raffish Bourg, and it was this part of Carcassonne, not the stately Cité standing aloof on a hilltop, that brought the authorities such grief.

To reach the Bourg from the Cité one must naturally descend. Once past the fortress of the royal governor and then the bishop's palace and the towers that held the offices and torture chambers of the inquisition, one emerges through a western gate onto a steep grassy slope. The path downward, called Trivalle, gradually becomes lined with houses, as it may have been seven hundred years ago. The warm domestic scene at that time then suddenly gave way to the cold fist of fear.

Nearer the river, off to the left of the Trivalle, rose the hulking prison of the inquisition, constructed in the reign of Louis IX and known thereafter as the Wall. Today, it must be conjured up in the mind's eye only, as it was long ago torn down. In Bernard's day, however, it loomed unmissable, halfway between the royal and priestly power of the Cité and the merchant and commercial ambition of the Bourg. In its dark stone cells rotted those convicted by secret trial and anonymous accusation. Built by a saint, maintained by the king, and staffed by black-robed friars, the Wall served as a daily reminder of the authority of Crown and Church. If they stood together, the people stood no chance. To break the hold of the inquisition, to shatter the climate of fear and betrayal, the Wall had to be attacked. Prior to the rise of Bernard Délicieux, no dissident of Carcassonne had realized that—even though its baleful presence could be seen every day from the upper stories of the Bourg's half-timbered houses and the western gates to the town. Its presence constituted a threat; in the view of a gifted rabble-rouser, it rose as a challenge.

Aside from the town mill at the riverside and the usual huddle of huts, the no-man's-land surrounding the Wall at the foot of the Cité contained no other structures of note.
^*
There were, however, wells in this part of the city, which is why the hard men of the Albigensian Crusade attacked here in the hot summer of 1209, in the hope, soon realized, of making the panicked, overcrowded Cité surrender out of thirst. This, then, was the place that sealed the doom of Languedoc's independence. The Wall, constructed a half century later, only emphasized this mournful reality.

Spanning the river is a fine medieval bridge, the Pont Vieux, which was being built during the lifetime of Brother Bernard. The tendrils of graceful willows reach down from the riverbanks to touch the gently flowing water. Ahead is the Bourg proper, on the left bank, a noisier, more populous settlement than the Cité, with its church spires and market buildings. The first great square reached—indeed, the city's largest—stretches out barren and rectangular, its smooth granite slabs left unadorned. Its only notable vertical feature, a glass booth that reveals itself to be the top of an elevator shaft, betrays the unseen, underground parking lot below. At ground level, the flat slab of this Square Gambetta looks like an immense tabula rasa, waiting to be inscribed. On this spot there stood the Franciscan convent overseen by its prior, Bernard Délicieux.

Rabies Carcassonensis, la rage carcassonnaise
, Carcassonne rabies, or, better still, Carcassonne madness. Such was the term to describe the febrile discontent in the Bourg as the year 1300 approached. Worse yet for the Church, the madness was to spread virulently through the placid woad fields of medieval Languedoc to the important city of Albi, infamous for lending its name to the Albigensian heresy, or Catharism, 150 years earlier.

The root of the anger was a long-standing irritant in the cities and towns of the south: inquisitors. They had plagued Languedoc for seven decades. The year 1229 saw the end of the Albigensian Crusade, a twenty-year-long pageant of atrocity aimed at extirpating Catharism and breaking the backbone of a fiercely independent region. The Church realized that, while Languedocian independence was fatally injured, to the future benefit of the French crown, the feared heresy still had many adherents, even after the Crusade's years of savage repression and devastation. In just one instance from the campaign that beggars the imagination, at the town of Lavaur midway between Toulouse and Albi, on a spring afternoon in 1211, some four hundred people were burned alive just outside its shattered battlements, as churchmen joyfully sang hymns and northern nobles looked on. Earlier in the day, these same nobles had torn the lady of Lavaur from her castle, thrown her down a well, and then hurled rocks on her as she lay dying in the dark. Then they hanged her brother. Given this behavior, and Lavaur was no exception, the madness in thirteenth-century Languedoc had not been confined to Carcassonne—or to the Church's enemies.

But Catharism, wounded and much reduced, nonetheless remained. Prior to the Crusade, the faith had been practiced openly; afterward, it went underground. The most important of the Languedoc nobles, the defeated count of Toulouse, Raymond VII, had by the terms of the peace treaty of 1229 pledged to continue the fight against the heresy. But his family, most notably his late father, had been notoriously loath to inflict punishment upon the people of Languedoc for crimes of conscience. Indeed, the competing power centers in medieval society, the rich town consuls, the merchants—even some of the local Catholic clergy—had family or friends of a heretical bent, or were themselves so. All of this was known only too well in Rome, so Pope Gregory IX forced Count Raymond to fund a university in Toulouse with the express purpose of defending the faith and training Dominican brothers. Dominic had founded his order in that city; it was only fitting to aid its expansion there. But Gregory had other, greater plans. These friars would go on to become inquisitors, answerable not to a bishop or a Dominican provincial, but to the pope alone. With the letter
Ille humani
generis
in 1231 to a Dominican prior in Regensburg, he took the historic step of creating a papal inquisition, thereby ensuring himself a posterity of dubious distinction.
^*
Two years later Gregory would write to the Dominicans in Languedoc instructing them to appoint inquisitors.

Much has been imagined about inquisitorial practice as a sort of malevolent and centralized medieval Department of Homeland Security. In reality, there was no unified inquisition, just individual appointments in certain jurisdictions for varying periods of time. The phantasmagoric uppercase “Inquisition” owes much of its existence to nineteenth-century liberal historians whose ideological repugnance toward the practice also informed the work of history painter Jean-Paul Laurens. That inquisition subsequently leached memorably into popular culture—for example, as buffoonish broad comedy (
Monty Python
) or literary villainy (
The Name of the Rose
)—only makes clarification more necessary.

At the outset, the rise of heresies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—or, rather, the detection and definition of these heresies—put the men of the Church in a quandary as to how to handle a laity forming its own opinion about man's relation to the divine. When persuasion proved ineffective in bringing people back to orthodoxy, which itself was constantly undergoing modification and renovation, Rome looked back to old Rome, to the empire and institutions of which the Catholic Church came to feel itself the inheritor. Perusal of this authoritarian past focused on the
inquisitio
, a procedure by which the empire's legists hunted down those who were thought treasonous, disloyal, or guilty of some form of classical lèse-majesté. The investigator in old imperial Rome—the inquisitor—searched for evidence, collected testimony, extracted (or didn't) confession, passed judgment, and in some cases carried out the sentence. He was detective, prosecutor, jury, and judge all rolled into one. There were no adversarial proceedings, no real opportunity for mounting an effective defense or bringing down a prosecutorial argument. In effect, the plaintiff was the imperial state—and now, a millennium later, it would be the imperial Church. A streamlined, rationalized method of repression heretofore foreign to the medieval mind, an inquisition, or the Holy Office as it came to be called by its supporters, held out many attractions in the changed circumstances of the late twelfth century.

The times called for the lawyerly, given the explosive growth of different and competing bureaucracies and courts in the High Middle Ages. States and institutions were aborning, needing to define themselves and their place in the world. The sheer number of heretics had become a major problem, a threat to a worldview of a Christian commonwealth ruled from Rome. And the times were turning toward persecution, not only by the Church but also by agents of kings and their barons. This “formation of a persecuting society” was a deliberate, conscious choice driven by social change and the entry of new actors, particularly literate lay bureaucrats, into the arena of power. The Church was far from immune to these currents of thought. A “Christianity of fear” pervaded the period. As one example, the notion of Purgatory, perfected in the thirteenth century, changed from a sort of benign cotton-cloudy waiting room for souls still sullied by minor sin to a place of unspeakable physical and spiritual torment rivaled only by Hell itself. As a French historian writes: “Burdened with the weight of oriental apocalyptic literature, a literature full of fires, tortures, sound and fury; defined by Augustine as the site of punishments more painful than any earthly pain; and given its finishing touches by a Church that dispensed salvation but only in fear and trembling, Purgatory had already veered in the direction of Hell.” The thought experiment of Hell itself had been heightened during the same period into a horror show so vivid and terrifying as to stand as impressive testament to the demons resident in the human psyche. A Dominican scholar of the thirteenth century, Humbert of Romans, whose biography of Dominic became the officially sanctioned life story of the saint, also penned a work in praise of the utility of Hell, entitled
On the Gift of Fear.