The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (8 page)

Slander, as we shall see, was a powerful weapon in the crusade against religious liberty and diversity in medieval Europe and long after, and it was used by the Church to turn the Cathars’ theology against them in clever if bizarre ways. The Catholic theologians who investigated the Cathars understood that they regarded the human body as a cage in which an angelic soul was held captive, and that the
perfecti
refrained from sexual intercourse in order to avoid the imprisonment of yet more souls through the act of procreation. The Cathars themselves aspired only to abstinence from sex, but Catholic persecutors with pornographic imaginations accused them of tolerating and even encouraging every kind of “nasty sexual aberration” that did not result in pregnancy, including anal intercourse, bestiality, and oral sex. Thus did
boulgre
become “bugger,” and thus did “bugger” take on the connotation of anal intercourse.

The same twisted logic was applied to the Catharist attitude toward marriage. A
perfectus,
as we have seen, was expected to separate from his or her spouse after the ritual of initiation, or at least to refrain from sexual contact with the spouse. And, because marriage was likely to result in procreation, the Cathars did not regard a wedding as a sacred rite to be celebrated within their church. But the enemies of Catharism convinced themselves that the Cathars actually favored extramarital sex, and they were accused of keeping women as concubines rather than sanctified wives and engaging in the sexual free-for-alls that were supposed to take place at the end of the
consolamentum
ceremony.

So, too, was the end-of-life ritual called the
endura
given strange and dire interpretations by the Cathars’ enemies. A dying man or woman might be too sick or too weak to eat or drink, of course, and the ravages of a final illness surely made it easier for the religious true believer to fast until death. But the spiritual self-discipline of a dying Cathar was characterized by Catholic critics as an act of suicide, and it was later suggested that the
perfecti
who gathered around the bed of a dying Cathar would routinely speed the ritual to its desired end by choking or smothering the helpless man or woman, thus turning the
endura
into an act of sanctified murder.

Once set into flight, the imaginations of the inquisitors and the propagandists in their service reached ever greater altitudes of speculation and invention. Although the Cathars claimed to renounce the ownership of property, they were said to possess vast hoards of gold, silver, gemstones, and other treasures. They were even thought to have purloined the most sacred object in Christian tradition; the legendary Holy Grail was supposedly locked away in the secret treasury at the fortress of Montségur, a remote Cathar sanctuary high in the Pyrenees on the frontier between France and Spain. Here is yet another lie that reflects a certain obsession of persecutors across the ages—the notion that one’s enemy has succeeded in amassing a secret fortune by means of deceit and devilry. Indeed, the looting of victims was a favorite technique of the Inquisition and its successors.
⁴²

All these accusations and speculations are dismissed by modern historians. Principled theologians might even find themselves forced to concede that the Cathars had committed no crime except the one that every person commits in failing to embrace fully every jot and tittle of the dogma prescribed by the religious authorities. But the popes and princes who made war on Catharism were less interested in the fine points of theology than in getting and keeping wealth and power, and they were perfectly willing to make use of a willful lie as a lubricant for the consciences of the crusaders who were called upon to exterminate men, women, and children. Then as now, demonization of the victim is the necessary precondition for genocide.

Bernard of Clairvaux, as we have already seen, was sent to save the souls of Christians who had fallen under the influence of the charismatic preacher known as Henry the Monk, and Bernard’s mission was expanded to include the newly detected heresy of Catharism, then only vaguely known as a sect of “weavers and Arians.” When he arrived in Languedoc in 1145, ready to do battle with the minions of the Catharist church, his arsenal consisted only of his own earnest words of persuasion—Bernard’s aim was to win the hearts and minds of errant Christians through preaching and public debate rather than by arrest, torture, and execution. “Heretics are to be caught,” he reasoned, “not by force of arms but by arguments through which their errors may be refuted.”
⁴³

Bernard himself was a mystic and an ascetic, and he was as unhappy about the excesses of the Church as any of the heretics who were his declared enemies. Like the
perfecti
of Catharism, Bernard’s physical appearance—his spare diet rendered him pallid and emaciated, and he wore only the simplest of clothing—was the best evidence that he practiced what he preached. Moreover, like the gnostics of Orléans who declared that they regarded the scriptures as nothing more than “the fictions of carnal men, scribbled on animal skins,” Bernard was willing to entertain the subversive notion that words written on parchment were not the only or even the best resource for achieving spiritual enlightenment. “You will find something much greater in the woods than in books,” he wrote. “The woods and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from other masters.”
⁴⁴

The roots of the Inquisition, in fact, can be traced back to the otherwise benign missionary work of friar-preachers who, with nothing more than their own ardent words, sought to persuade their fellow Christians to correct their errors and return to the Church. Like Bernard himself, other cloistered monks of the Cistercian order were released from their cells and sent into the world to preach against the heretics. By the opening decade of the thirteenth century, the newly chartered Franciscans and Dominicans, too, were charged by the pope to “go humbly in search of heretics and lead them out of error,” according to a papal bull of 1206. By way of shining example, Domingo (Dominic) Guzmán himself, founder of the Dominican order, once argued with an errant innkeeper in Toulouse from sundown to sunrise before finally winning him back to the Church, and he later established a safe house for the women and children whom he succeeded in spiriting away from the Cathars.
⁴⁵

The willingness of the Church to fight a war of words led to a few scenes that are strange indeed when viewed in the light of what we know now about the Inquisition. Catholic monks engaged in public disputations with the
perfecti
of the Catharist church, including one well-advertised debate at which the audience included such luminaries as the archbishop of Narbonne, the viscount of Béziers, and the countess of Toulouse, who happened to be the sister of the king of France. Remarkably, the defenders of the Roman Catholic church were willing to fight according to rules set by the Catharists; since the Cathars rejected the authority of the Hebrew Bible and regarded only the Gospels (and especially the Gospel of John) as holy writ, the Catholic debaters agreed to confine themselves to the New Testament.

The Catharists were not so deferential, or so we are told by the Catholic chroniclers, and they appeared to be utterly fearless in confronting their adversaries. The Catholic clergy “were not bishops and priests,” the Catharists are shown to say in the medieval transcripts of these great debates, “but ravening wolves, hypocrites and seducers, lovers of salutations in the market place, desirous of being called rabbis and masters contrary to the command of Christ, wearers of albs and gleaming raiment, displaying bejeweled gold rings on their fingers, which their Master Jesus did not command.” Crossing oneself, according to one Cathar preacher, “was only good for batting away flies.” And the notion that bread and wine were changed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the rite of Communion—the cherished Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—struck the Cathars as both impious and ludicrous, since the communicants would “have God in their bowels, a God who would inevitably be expelled from the body on their next visit to the water closet.”
⁴⁶

The debaters, Catholic and Catharist alike, discovered that words alone are rarely enough to change the mind of a true believer. The Church, in any case, was not willing to suffer such taunts and insults for long. Preachers and propagandists began to escalate their rhetoric against the Catharists, and Pope Innocent III eventually declared open war on the dissident Christians whom he condemned as “filth”—a term of abuse previously reserved only for the Muslims who faced the crusaders on the fighting fronts in the Holy Land. Ominously, the dissidents whom Saint Bernard proposed to take “by force of argument” were now characterized in much harsher and even horrific terms, all designed to inspire fear and panic throughout western Christendom. “The heresy of Catharism gives birth continually to a monstrous brood,” declared Pope Innocent III, “by means of which its corruption is vigorously renewed, after that offspring has passed on to others the canker of its own madness and a detestable succession of criminals emerges.”
⁴⁷

Pope Innocent III resolved to escalate the war on heresy by preaching a new crusade, not against the Muslims in the distant Levant but against the Cathars across the frontier in southern France. On November 17, 1207, the pope sent a letter to the king of France, calling on him to raise an army of crusaders to march into the province of Languedoc to exterminate the Cathars. Significantly, the pope offered the same spiritual rewards available to crusaders who traveled all the way to the Holy Land to take up arms against Islam—the pope’s forgiveness for their past sins and the status of a martyr if they fell in battle against the enemy.

In seeking to cut out the cancer of heresy, however, the pope sanctioned the use of a new and even more radical instrument. By contrast with Saint Bernard and Saint Dominic, who armed themselves only with sermons and texts in their struggles against the Cathars, the crusaders sent into southern France were to be soldiers of Christ in the most literal sense. “For the first time in Europe, a pope was calling upon Christians to kill other Christians,” explains Karen Armstrong. “Innocent was setting a precedent for a new kind of holy war that would become an incurable disease in Europe.”
⁴⁸

The crusaders were charged with the solemn task of rooting out heresy throughout Europe but especially in the towns of Toulouse, Agen, and Albi in southern France, where the Cathars were thought to gather in the greatest numbers and where they were sheltered by a defiant local gentry. Albi, as it turns out, was hardly the Vatican of the heretical church, but the name of the town came to be used as a kind of code word for Catharism and served to focus the fears and fantasies of the knights and soldiers who took up the cross. For that reason, the crusade that Pope Innocent III preached in 1207 against the Christian dissenters of France has come to be called the Albigensian Crusade.
⁴⁹

The town of Albi lay in the province of Languedoc, a place-name that literally means “the language of yes” and refers to the fact that the word
yes
in the dialect of southern France is
oc
rather than
oui.
It’s a bit of wordplay that captures the spirit of southern France in the late Middle Ages—easygoing and tolerant, prosperous and independent, a stronghold of the troubadours and the chivalric tradition of courtly love, and a stopping place on the route along which both ideas and merchandise reached Europe from points east. Not surprisingly, the Cathars, too, thrived in the welcoming and open-minded cities of Languedoc.

Other beneficiaries of the spirit of Languedoc were members of the Jewish community, who fared far better in southern France than elsewhere in medieval Europe. They were not granted full citizenship, but they were permitted to own land, engage in business and the professions, and live where they pleased. They were able to delve into the mystical traditions of Kabbalism, and some historians have suggested that Jewish and Cathar ascetics inspired and influenced each other. What we learn from the example of Languedoc on the eve of the Inquisition is that ordinary men and women, when given the opportunity to explore the varieties of religious experience, do not simply shut up and submit to the dogma offered by the religious authorities.

One outspoken farmer in medieval Languedoc, for example, was heard to say in the village square that the Bishop of Pamiers and Jesus himself had been brought into the world “through fucking and shitting, rocking back and forth and fucking, in other words, through the coitus of a man and a woman, just like the rest of us.” To which an outraged villager replied: “If you don’t stop it, I’ll break your head open with my pick-axe.” A dying Catholic, when urged by a Cathar
perfectus
and his companions to submit to the
consolamentum,
found enough strength to forcefully turn them away: “Stop harassing me, you devils.” But the records of the Inquisition also preserve a similar story told about a dying Catholic who was offered the Eucharist by a Catholic priest: “
Sancta Maria, Sancta Maria,
I can see the Devil.”
⁵⁰
“[W]hether you were a Cathar or a Catholic,” observes historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his classic sociological study of a medieval French village, “you were always the devil to somebody.”
⁵¹

The apparent willingness of the Albigensians to speak bluntly about their doubts and convictions is the first and most important reason that they found themselves targeted by a crusade. But it is not the only reason. The pope found a willing ally in the French king, Philip Augustus, who had motives of his own for sending an army into Languedoc; the king resented the autonomy of the provincial aristocracy of southern France and sought to impose his royal authority on them. And the men who actually crusaded in Languedoc—the great nobles of northern France—were more interested in acquiring new lands and new titles than in crushing the Cathars. The meshing of religion and politics can always be detected in the workings of the Inquisition and explains where and why it operated as it did.