As far as promises went, the Aragonese proposals were fulsome enough. All four accused nobles were prepared to give full satisfaction to the Church, and asked only the restoration of their lands. If restoration was refused in Raymond’s case, then at least a guarantee was asked as to the legitimate rights of his son who was to be brought up a good Catholic under the guardianship of King Pedro. Meanwhile, Raymond himself would do penance by crusading in the Holy Land or Spain. For the four nobles, the King of Aragon said he had come to ask mercy rather than justice; more especially as the Crusade in Spain made it more necessary than ever that Christians should not fall out among themselves.
The Council may or may not have known that this programme had already been proposed by Pedro to the Pope. Neither the Council nor Pedro could possibly know that the Pope had already accepted it. In any case it was clear enough that, in case of its acceptance, its value would depend entirely on the King’s willingness to enforce its terms upon the four nobles, with whom he had already shown his sympathy. Besides, every cleric sitting at Lavaur was steeped in the bitterness of a long, fierce, and still doubtful struggle. Therefore, they refused the Aragonese proposals. The Pope, so they truly told the King, had expressly reserved to himself the final decision in the matter of Raymond’s reconciliation withthe Church. Therefore, since the excommunicated count refused to appear before them and take the preliminary steps, they were powerless; and in actual fact the papal commissioners might not have been safer in going to Toulouse than Raymond would have been, even with King Pedro beside him, in venturing to Lavaur. As for the other three nobles, Bernard of Comminges was believed to have stirred up the Toulousains to oppose the Crusaders in arms. Raymond Roger of Foix, they reminded the King, was a notorious patron of heretics and despoiler of churches, and had failed to keep even the recent convention agreed to in his name by Pedro himself. Gaston of Bearn had protected the assassins of Castelnau, persecuted the Church, and fiercely opposed the Crusade. He maintained bandit-mercenaries who had violated the Cathedral of Oloron, defiled the consecrated Host and parodied the mass. Even so, should Foix, Comminges, and Bearn come for absolution and submit all would be forgiven them. The Council took pains to preface their refusal to treat on the Aragonese terms with a paragraph full of personal compliments and courtesies to the King. Nevertheless, they ended with a warning, reminding him of the honours he had received from the Pope, of the oaths he had taken to suppress heresy, and the suspicion which must fall upon him if he continued taking the part of excommunicated persons accused of so grave a crime. If he was not satisfied with their answer (which was quite likely inasmuch as they refused him everything he asked) the Council would lay the whole matter before the Pope.
Remained the task of persuading the Pope to sustain the Council, as he was by no means eager to do. Accordingly, advice was rained upon him from every corner of Languedoc. From Lavaur the Council itself despatched letters by the hands of agents of Arnaut Amalric and Count Simon. The letters reminded Innocent that he himself had proclaimed the Crusade and afterwards entrusted de Montfort with its command. The crimes of the Count of Toulouse were paraded. Had he not asked help of the excommunicated Emperor Otto, and not only asked but received it (in some measure) from the notorious Savary de Mauleon, who commanded in Aquitaine for the excommunicate King John of England?Had he not committed the abominable crime of insulting all Christendom by sending an embassy to ask aid from the Sultan of Morocco? Should the enemies of religion, by their appeal to Pedro, succeed in “thwarting” the Pope, so that the axe might not be laid to the evil tree of Toulouse; then indeed Christianity in Languedoc was ruined. Another symphony on the same theme was furnished by a second regional council, composed of the higher clergy of eastern Languedoc and the valley of the lower Rhône country, which met at Orange under the presidency of the Archbishop of Arles. Orange rivalled Lavaur in its violent words against the “Toulousain tyrant.” Solos were contributed by the Archbishops of Aix and Bordeaux, and by the Bishops of Bazas, Périgueux, and Beziers. The tone of these prelates varied somewhat, from His Grace of Aix (the immediate neighbourhood of his cathedral city had as yet seen no fighting and he was comparatively moderate in consequence), to the Lord Bishop of Beziers who called Toulouse “a nest of vipers” which must be utterly crushed. But through all variations of tone, the same motif was heard: Tolosa delenda est. The house of Toulouse must be destroyed.
At Rome, the diplomatic struggle must have been bitter. It was not a light thing to ask Innocent publicly to eat his words, and to act on the assumption that the Aragonese version of matters was a mere tissue of lies. On the other hand, I repeat, any central authority in the Middle Ages was far more at the mercy of its agents on the spot than is the case to-day with rapid transit and the telegraph. For the Pope to sustain the Aragonese and disavow Arnaut Amalric and his supporters would have been to go clean counter to the expressed opinion of practically every important Churchman north of the Pyrenees within a radius of 200 miles of Toulouse. Nevertheless, the issue was so evenly balanced that for five months, while the agents of Aragon and of the Crusade continued to set out their respective positions, no decision was reached.
While the whole future of the Crusade thus hung in suspense, Paris seemed for the first time ready to move. Philip Augustus hoped to round off his successes against the Plantagenet by taking from him Englandas well. But before a French army could cross the Channel, the fullest possible diplomatic assistance from the Papacy was desired. Therefore, in March 1213, the King of France called a general assembly of his barons to decide what force should follow his son, Prince Louis, crusading to Languedoc. To work up sentiment, the zealous Bishop Fulk of Toulouse and Guy de Vaux-Cernay, Bishop of Carcassonne, journeyed to Paris, the latter having appointed the future St. Dominic to administer his diocese in his absence. To oppose them, came the Bishop of Barcelona, as Pedro’s ambassador, armed with Innocent’s January letters putting an end to the Crusade and disavowing the legates! Here was a pretty complication. Philip Augustus knew how to be shifty himself on occasion, but even he must have been puzzled as to the true state of affairs in Rome. However, it was decided that a large force should move south under Prince Louis. Only Innocent’s own command received about a month later, that Philip should take up the Pope’s quarrel with John by sending the young Louis to invade England, prevented the French Monarchy, then and there, from taking its part in the Albigensian Crusade.
At last, in Rome, the die was cast. About June 1, Innocent wrote in his usual vigorous tone to Pedro, Simon, Arnaut Amalric, and Fulk of Toulouse. The Pope had found, he said, that the ambassadors of the southern lords had lied to him. He, therefore, disavowed his January letters, withdrew his protection from the citizens of Toulouse and from the Lords of Foix and Bearn; until such time as Fulk might absolve the Toulousains, and Arnaut Amalric the three nobles, after due and complete submission in all cases. Pedro was reminded of the favours he had received from Innocent, and blamed for having shown so little wisdom and piety as to have protected heretics and favourers of heresy, more dangerous than the heretics themselves. He was ordered not to attack de Montfort and, finally, was warned that strong measures would be taken against him, darling of the Church though he was, should he disobey. The extraordinary spirit of the great mediæval Popes, their enormous sense of power and their bold determination to use it to the uttermost, vibrates in the letter. Withthe Emperor and the King of England both excommunicated and defying the Church, Innocent nevertheless threatens to move against the foremost champion of Christendom against the Mohammedan! As before, he made one reservation. He granted the Aragonese request for an additional new legate, and notified King Pedro that he was sending the Cardinal Robert de Courcon to act in that capacity. But this concession was but a drop in the bucket. The new papal policy left the Aragonese practically no choice between war and abandoning Languedoc to de Montfort.
Before the Pope’s decision was known, the first Standard Bearer of the Church had chosen war. Without breaking openly with the Pope, he decided that it was worth risking much to save Raymond, who had himself married one of Pedro’s sisters and had married the heir of Toulouse to another. It is characteristic of the man and of the time that, even while he was ordering a general mobilization of his forces against the Crusade, he was at the same time obtaining from Innocent the renewal of a papal bull of the year 1095 which provided that no interdict could be laid on the dominions of his house except by the Pope in person, thus blunting the spiritual sword in the hands of the redoubtable Arnaut Amalric. Meanwhile he formally took Toulouse, Foix, and Bearn under his protection and began to bestir himself mightily to raise troops, calling upon his lieges to pawn their possessions and follow him to the rescue of his brother-in-law whom clerics and “Frenchmen” were seeking to despoil. Conformably to the immemorial traditions of Europe, Catalonia was already, as it still is, inclined to be anti-clerical over against devout Aragon. Accordingly, although the Aragonese held aloof and showed little spirit for the war, the Catalans swarmed out briskly so that by springtime Pedro had a large force equipped, as the “Chanson” expressly says, not only with pack transport but also with wheeled transport as well, and ready to march.
All these preparations were pushed on through the late winter and early spring. Towards the end of spring, when mobilization was complete, there seems to have been a pause. The anti-crusading party in Languedoc were anxiously waiting for Pedro, as an extant troubadourpoem vividly shows, but the Aragonese delayed. No doubt before he moved, he preferred to know how he stood with Innocent, who was so long in coming to a decision. Should the Pope’s verdict be favourable to the King, then he would certainly not have to use as much force, perhaps he might not have to move at all. On the other hand, should Aragonese diplomacy lose at Rome, then Pedro must win some substantial military success quickly, so as to present Innocent with an accomplished fact as a basis on which to treat. At last came two abbots; charged by de Montfort and the legates to show the King the papal letter of June 1, in which Innocent came out flatly against Aragon. The King answered the two abbots by promising to obey the Pope. De Montfort sent a knight, Lambert de Thury by name (to whom he had entrusted the castle of Puivert about fifteen miles from Quillan on the road to Foix), with a letter in which he told Pedro, “without any of the ordinary salutations,” that the Aragonese must withdraw his protection from the Languedocian nobles, “on pain of being proceeded against like all other enemies of the Church.” To which Pedro returned no answer, except to threaten the life of the messenger, and crossed the Pyrenees with the greater part of his large force, leaving the rear echelon to follow as fast as it could and proclaiming that he was acting under orders from the Pope in taking up arms against the Crusade.
Pedro’s intervention promised to be decisive. For four years, in the face of heavy odds, Count Simon had snatched success out of the jaws of hostile circumstance. But now the odds were so overwhelming that only one result seemed possible. In the summer of 1213 any man (no matter what he desired in the matter) estimating the chances of the future would have told you that de Montfort and his little band of Crusaders would be wiped out.