De Montfort was not the man to admit himself beaten. He determined on a decisive assault by means of a large “cat,” a movable wooden gallery with a steep roof covered with raw hides to prevent fire. Under such cover the defences might be approached and sapped. At the first attempt the “cat” was injured by stones from catapults. Strengthened, it was moved forward a second time, “moving with jerky little steps,” as an eye witness reports. Without waiting for it to reach their lines, the besieged began a general sortie. De Montfort himself was at mass when this news was brought to him. “I will not go,” he said, “until I have seen my Saviour.” Not until after the elevation of the Host did he take command. Then he concentrated his men and had driven the Toulousains back to their walls, when a stone from a catapult worked by women struck him on the head. He fell and died in a few minutes, his face allbloody and black where the helm had been driven in upon it. A few days after a final attack was made and repulsed, upon which the siege was raised.
Despite de Montfort’s apparent failure his work was decisive. The eight years during which he had maintained himself in Languedoc had not only seen many “Frenchmen” assigned to lands there, they had also seen the moral and political prestige of the southern nobles damaged beyond repair. Toulouse had definitely lost any chance she may have had of rallying the south about her to make head against Paris. Languedoc with her wealth, her culture, and her indifference to the moral unity of Europe, was destined to go under. The great tolerant southern houses were to be swallowed up by the “most Christian” kings of France, who represented the new, vague, but enormous idea of the nation. De Montfort, dead and apparently beaten, had changed the course of history.
The next six years of the Crusade (1218-1224) saw only small wars. They are marked by a single brief and inconclusive campaign, commanded by Louis of France.
The permanent effect of de Montfort’s work did not at first appear. His son Amaury could not fill his place. Philip Augustus promptly permitted Prince Louis to lead another crusading army, with Cardinal Bertrand, the new papal legate, at his side. At Marmande a massacre was achieved fit to rejoice the heart of any mediæval Crusader, but Toulouse successfully resisted another siege, and the army returned home having accomplished nothing. In fact the desultory fighting which went on after its departure ran somewhat in favour of Raymond. Amaury’s strength was mainly in his possession of Carcassonne, on account of its great natural and artificial strength under the conditions of the time, together with its powerful strategic position commanding the highway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But Simon’s son had so little of the ability of his father that he could not prevent Raymond from winning back, bit by bit, much of his old domain. In 1220 Raymond retook Lavaur and slaughtered every man in it except a handful who escaped by swimming down the Agout. The Crusaders had no monopoly of massacre.
Meanwhile Pope Honorius tried every means at hiscommand to push matters, but without success. A new legate, Conrad of Porto by name, set up a military order patterned after the Templars and Hospitallers under the name of “Knights of the Faith of Jesus Christ,” but the new foundation achieved little. In the following year Honorius published a sentence of excommunication and exhereditation against the entire Toulousain House, and raised enough money to set on foot another expedition under Prince Louis. But the Prince turned his army against La Rochelle and took that city from Henry III of England, so that the net result of the Pope’s effort to settle Languedocian affairs was just nothing.
Early in 1222, four years after his father’s death, Amaury de Montfort recognized his position as hopeless and offered all that he possessed or claimed in Languedoc to Philip Augustus. This brought on a year full of diplomacy. Amaury urged Honorius to support his action, and the Pope did so, pointing out the deplorable state of religion in Languedoc, where heresy was openly preached and seemed ineradicable. Philip refused, the obstinate caution of the Capets strong in him. Even the offer of a twentieth of the entire income of the Church in France together with all manner of indulgences did not tempt him. Next Amaury made his offer to Thibaut, the powerful Count of Champagne, but again King Philip blocked matters by refusing to exempt Thibaut from service to the Crown in case of a break with Henry of England. In August Raymond died. His son, succeeding him under the title of Raymond VII, promptly wrote to Philip Augustus to ask his suzerain’s help towards the removal of the Pope’s sentence of excommunication and exhereditation against himself. In December, Amaury repeated his offer to the King, and again the King refused.
The confused and indecisive negotiations of 1222 had at least the result of convincing both the new legate and the King of France that Languedoc must be stabilized, and that promptly. The legate saw that heresy was again on the increase, favoured by the confusion born of the long war. The King felt himself near his end—he was suffering from continual fevers—and he feared that after his own death Louis, with his amiable character and weak health, would find himself drawn into the Languedocian business by the clergy and would die tooof the fatigue of it, so that the kingdom would be left in the hands of a woman, Louis’ wife, and of an infant, who was to be St. Louis. Accordingly, when the legate called a council at Sens for the purpose of reconciling Amaury and Raymond VII, Philip asked and obtained a change of meeting place to Paris in order that he himself might be present. He was in the provinces, down with another attack of fever, but felt so deeply the need of a definite settlement that he risked the fatigues of the journey, and died on the way. True to his policy of supporting the de Montforts, but cautiously and without identifying himself with their cause, in his will he left Amaury thirty thousand livres.
Within a few months after Philip’s death, the first of the events his wisdom had foreseen actually came about. Amaury’s financial position had become so bad that in January 1224 he patched up a provisional treaty with Toulouse and Foix, used most of Philip’s legacy to pay off his garrisons, and definitely evacuated Languedoc. The Archbishop of Bourges, together with the Bishops of Langres and Chartres, asked Louis to grant him the reversion of the office of Constable of France, and, with this understanding, for the third time he offered his Languedocian possessions and claims to the French Crown. In February the offer was accepted.
With the acceptance of Amaury’s offer by the French Crown begins the last or monarchical phase of the Crusade, which lasts three years (1224-1227). In it the small war continues—varied by a single major operation, a second campaign under Louis VIII, the amiable son of the wise and crafty Philip Augustus, which operation fails. Despite this military failure, the war ends in a political decision against the House of Toulouse.
The citizens of Narbonne (royalist like all townsmen because of the internal peace and order the Crown stood for) were promptly assured by a letter from the King that he would lead a Crusade which should march three weeks after Easter. In dealing with the Pope, Louis made conditions. Rome was to give him one of his own prelates (the Archbishop of Bourges) for legate instead of the Italian Cardinal Bertrand of Porto, indulgences were to be the same as for a Crusade to Palestine, any of his vassals who might refuse servicewere to be excommunicated, and Roman diplomacy was to do its utmost to assure him peace with all other possible foreign enemies. Finally, the Church was to give him twenty thousand livres of Paris per year out of its revenues during the Crusade, which was to begin and end when Louis chose. It was a formidable list, but the Church could hardly find any conditions too hard.
At this point matters were held up by another of the innumerable shifts of purpose in the Roman Curia. Henry III of England was Raymond’s kinsman. Moreover, Bordeaux and all the lands still left to the Plantagenet in Aquitaine would be dangerously isolated should the county of Toulouse become French Crown land. Accordingly, English influence at Rome was exerted in Raymond’s favour. The young Count of Toulouse himself caused his own ambassadors to promise full obedience to the See of Peter, and through them made exceedingly handsome “presents” to all who might possibly have influence with the Pope. These tactics succeeded so well that Honorius wrote favourably to Raymond, promising to send a new legate (Cardinal Romano of St. Angelo) to arrange matters; and wrote to Louis saying that the Emperor Frederic II’s proposed Crusade was so important that no other crusading indulgences could be issued for the present. The papal letter to the King went on to say that if Louis would but keep on threatening Raymond, the Count must end by giving in. The veteran Arnaut Amalric was directed to lead the local bishops in pressing Raymond VII to make no reservations in his offer of submission to the Church. The legate formally withdrew the Albigensian crusading indulgences and warranted Raymond VII as a good Catholic at a “parliament” in Paris. Louis disgustedly washed his hands of the whole matter, wrote to the Pope that he, Louis, had been played with and tricked, and that Rome might do what it liked without his help so long as his own rights as lay sovereign were not infringed. The French force which was already on foot was used to capture some of the Aquitanian castles still held for Henry III of England.
For a time it looked as if the peace would stand.Under the tutelage of Arnaut Amalric, Raymond VII agreed to enforce anti-heretical legislation as thorough as even the grim old Cistercian could desire. With the Count of Foix and the Bishop of Beziers to confirm his signature, the young Count promised banishment, confiscation of goods and physical punishment of heretics, dismissal of all bandit mercenaries, internal peace and order, restoration of Church privileges and an indemnity of twenty thousand marks to be used partly for repayment of damage to ecclesiastical property in Languedoc during the fighting, and partly (in case the Pope obtained a formal and complete renunciation of the Montfortist claims) to Amaury as compensation. If all this was not enough, Raymond VII agreed to put himself entirely in the Church’s hands, reserving only his allegiance to the King. All of which was agreed to by an Ecclesiastical Council, which Arnaut Amalric attended, at Montpellier in June. Amaury vainly protested, before this decision was taken, saying that Louis was about to act and that the whole Church would be scandalized by such compounding with the House of Toulouse. Unlike his father, Raymond VII made some attempt to confirm promises with deeds, for he restored the See of Agde to Theodisius. Everything seemed to point to confirmation of the settlement by the Pope and an end to the whole Albigensian war.
Again, as had so often happened, Rome reversed the decision of the Languedocian Church, only this time the local clergy were for peace and it was the Curia that was for war. Toulousain promises had too often proved broken reeds. Heresy was again raising its head; another public debate like those of the years just before the Crusade had even been held, and heretical “bishoprics” were multiplying. All this must have been well known at Rome. Moreover, not a few of the local clergy had increased their possessions during the war and had no wish to go back to thestatus quo. Finally, Louis sent Guy de Montfort to oppose the settlement. From October, 1224, until after the new year Honorius refused to move.
When at last the Pope’s decision was made it was hostile to Raymond. Cardinal Romano of St. Angelo was again sent as legate to France to threaten the youngCount and to try to patch up a truce so that Louis might be free to use his whole strength in Languedoc. During this year, nothing happened. Raymond VII, who had permitted the Dominicans to preach in Toulouse against heresy, and welcomed the Franciscan Saint Anthony of Padua, offered a national Church council at Bourges such unreserved submission that the council could not bring itself to condemn him, but broke up without giving a decision. To meet the situation, Cardinal Romano the legate ordered each archbishop to take counsel with his suffragans and give him written decisions to transmit to Louis and the Pope. The strictest secrecy was to be kept in the matter of these decisions. Anyone who revealed them was to be excommunicated on the spot. Clearly such a system would enable Pope and King to do exactly as they pleased. Raymond could not flatter himself that the attack would be delayed much longer, especially as the English had decided to leave Louis free to weaken himself by taking on the difficult job of breaking the high spirit of a district removed by so great a distance from his base of operations. Further, old Arnaut Amalric, who had helped play the Toulousain game ever since becoming a Languedocian Archbishop himself, chose this unfortunate moment to die, and to be succeeded in the Archbishopric of Narbonne by Peter Amiel, a bitter enemy of the young Raymond.
In January, 1226, a grand parliament of the kingdom was held in Paris. An address from the nobles was presented to Louis asking that he undertake the Crusade. This he accordingly did, with the reservation that he must be free to break off the campaign when he should so desire. Raymond’s full submission at Bourges two months before had prejudiced many French nobles in his favour, but nevertheless nearly all of them took the cross with their King. The one interruption to the proceedings was the Pope’s action in ordering those of the nobles of Aquitaine and Poitou who had changed their allegiance from English to French to change back again. The action of the Pope was entirely defensible on moral grounds but had been brought about (so the chroniclers say) by liberal use of English and Toulousain money at Rome, as any trouble between the two crowns at this timewould benefit Toulouse enormously. Louis promptly went to work to show even greater liberality to the Curia; the Papal orders were suspended, and the preparations for the Crusade were resumed. At a parliament held on March 29 orders were issued to concentrate at Bourges on May 17. Service was to be for the duration of the King’s stay in the South, instead of for forty days as before. The ruinous effects of short enlistments had been as much of a curse to former Crusades to Languedoc as to Washington in the American Revolution. Raymond VII was supported only by the Count of Foix. Comminges had made his peace, and Louis had taken diplomatic precautions to prevent any intervention from Spain. Everything pointed to a complete conquest of the South, except the delicate health of the King, on whom the whole enterprise depended, since his presence in the field was necessary to keep the army together.
On the appointed day, the army mustered at Bourges. Louis was deaf to the pleas of the numerous clergy who begged of him remission of the heavy tithe laid on them. He further swelled his war-chest by accepting money payments instead of field service from certain nobles not keen for the expedition. Even after these exemptions had been granted, the army was enormous for the time. There were fifty thousand knights and mounted men-at-arms, and “innumerable” infantry it is said. The line of operations was on Lyons, and thence down the Rhône, as in 1209.
There was no resistance until Avignon was reached on June 10. There the citizens refused the “French” entry and manned their walls, although they promised not to harass the army in its march if they were left in peace. The place was within the Holy Roman Empire, but Cardinal Romano, the legate, urged Louis to destroy it inasmuch as it had remained ten years excommunicate and impenitent for tolerating Waldensianism, so the King laid siege to it. The incident shows how easy it was to influence Louis and draw him away from the central matter in hand, and also, very significantly, how Waldenses were now attacked as readily as Manicheans. The siege dragged on throughout the summer and into the autumn. Raymond of Toulouse cleverly seized his opportunity to move up and lay waste the country fromwhich the besieging army must draw food and forage. Disease and a plague of flies in the French camp made matters worse. On top of this Pierre Mauclerc, Louis’s second cousin, quarrelled with the King and left the army. Philip Augustus had made this man Count of Brittany by marrying him to the heiress of that fief, and now that she was dead he was out to marry the heiress of Flanders and was angry when Louis thwarted him. So he went off, after serving for forty days, and began strengthening his castles and intriguing with the disaffected Counts of Champagne and of La Marche in Poitou, both of whom were supposed to have an understanding with Raymond. But Louis, although easy to persuade, was not easy to discourage. He stuck to it until, after three months’ siege, Avignon surrendered on September 10. The citizens had been brought very low by the long blockade. They therefore consented to pay ransom, demolish or dismantle their fortifications, and accept from the legate a bishop pledged to suppress heresy.
After the long delay at Avignon the army was at last directed against Toulouse. Almost all the Languedocian cities, including Nismes, Narbonne, Carcassonne, Albi, Beziers, Marseilles, Castres, and Puylaurens had already declared for Church and King. But, just as the end seemed in sight, the hardships of the campaign forced Louis to turn homewards, sick with dysentery. At Montpensier, in Auvergne, on November 8, he died. Within a little over three years after Philip Augustus’s death, his fear had been realized: the kingdom he had given his life to build was in the hands of a woman and child.
Despite this perilous state of affairs, the ideas of centralization and nationality had been so quickened that their growth was hardly checked. At first, to be sure, there was confusion, during which Raymond was able to recover some ground. Louis’ widow, the able and pious Blanche of Castille, was busy getting her 11 year old son, Louis IX, crowned at Rheims. Meanwhile the Counts of La Marche, Champagne, and Brittany intrigued busily with each other and with England, and prepared for open rebellion. Blanche’s position was so difficult that operations on a large scale inLanguedoc could not be continued. Nevertheless the ground already won was held by the royal troops, under the energetic Humbert of Beaujeu who had been left in command in the theatre of war by Louis when he turned homeward to die. As long as Humbert’s force was kept “in being” in the South, the crusading tithes on Church property continued to flow into the royal treasury. During Lent in the year 1227, a local Church council at Narbonne excommunicated those who had broken their oaths sworn to Louis and ordered stricter persecution of heretics, showing therefore that some oaths had been broken and that persecution was not being carried on as faithfully as it might have been. Throughout the year the fighting swayed back and forth. Humbert de Beaujeu, with Archbishop Peter Amiel, of Narbonne, and Bishop Fulk, of Toulouse, at his side, took the castle of Becede, massacred the garrison and joyously burned some heretics. Raymond VII, for his part, recovered the town of Castel Sarrasin on the middle Garonne, but was not strong enough to keep the royalists from laying waste the countryside clear up to the walls of Toulouse.
Both sides were weary of war. The drain on the royal resources was serious, especially in view of the hostile attitude of the three northern Counts, and the Church tithes came in slowly and caused endless friction to collect. On the other hand, Raymond saw his position in the eyes of the world steadily going from bad to worse as his overlord continued to make war against him in the name of the Church. Clearly, if he could save anything at all by submission, he had better make haste to do so. Finally, the third party to the matter, the papacy, had also become anxious for peace in Languedoc. In March, 1227, the mild and aged Honorius III had died and been succeeded as Pope by Gregory IX, equally aged but far harsher than his predecessor. In spite of his eighty years, Gregory was determined to oppose the Emperor Frederic II, who had been growing ever more powerful and readier to oppose the Church ever since his guardian Innocent III had died. For a collision with Frederic, the Church must concentrate all her strength. The Languedocian business, therefore, was better out of the way.
With all three parties to the dispute equally determined upon a settlement, there remained only the question of ways and means. Raymond VII had no son and only one daughter, Jeanne. To betroth her to one of the younger brothers of the King would assure the ultimate reversion of the entire Toulousain heritage to the Crown. The Church would back the Crown in obtaining a settlement favourable to the King of France, granted that strong and systematic measures were taken against heresy. A papal letter of March, 1228, to Cardinal Romano the legate, shows that the proposed marriage was the heart of the negotiations. A second letter, of October 21 in the same year, renewing the crusading indulgences, shows that pressure upon Raymond was necessary in order to make him accept the terms proposed. To the same end, it seems that there was further devastation of Toulousain territory. In December Raymond gave in, and named Count Thibaut of Champagne as his agent with full power to negotiate in his behalf. In January, 1229, the parties in interest, including representatives of the municipality of Toulouse, met at Meaux and signed a preliminary agreement. On Holy Thursday, before the great western doorways of Notre Dame de Paris, was enacted the last scene of the long drama. There Raymond came before the legate, bare-footed like his father twenty years before at St. Gilles and clad only in his shirt. He then walked the length of the church to be “reconciled” as a penitent before the high altar. This done, he yielded himself the King’s prisoner in the Louvre, until such time as his daughter and five of his castles should be in royal hands, and five hundred “toises” (over a thousand yards) of the long-suffering walls of Toulouse should be demolished. The end had come.
The terms were hard. Raymond was to pursue heretics and their “favorers” without reserve, even to his nearest kinsmen. The familiar conditions of restoration of Church property, dismissal of bandit mercenaries, and establishing public security, again appear. In addition, the Count was to pay handsomely for ten years, “two masters in theology, two decretalists and six masters in grammar and the liberal arts” as members of the faculty of Toulouse University. He made also the familiar promise to crusade to Palestine, andengaged to do so within two years and remain in the Holy Land five years more. He, and after him his daughter Jeanne, were to retain Toulouse itself, Agen, Rouergue, Quercy except Cahors, and part of the district of Albi. The duchy of Narbonne and the counties of Velay, Gevaudan, Viviers, and Lodeve reverted at once to the Crown. The Church took the “Marquisate of Provence” a fief of the Empire to the east of the Rhône. Jeanne’s betrothal to Prince Alphonse, a child of nine, was treated as a royal “grace” bestowed on Raymond, and so was the royal amnesty to the numerous prescribed gentlemen of Languedoc, except the heretics among them. His vassals and people also subscribed to the conditions, and swore to acknowledge the King as their sole lord after forty days should Raymond fail in any particular. The glory had departed from Toulouse.
The settlement ended the struggle. The Count of Foix came in and made his peace the following year. Raymond seems to have lived up to the conditions, except that he kept putting off crusading to Palestine. In 1237 the light-weight Amaury de Montfort played the fool by calling himself Duke of Narbonne and by making attempts on the county of Melgueil in his own name, and on Dauphiné in the name of his wife. Gregory IX brought him up with a round turn and ordered him off to Palestine. His ill luck held; he was taken prisoner by the Saracens and held for three years until Gregory ransomed him, whereupon he ended his futile life at Otranto, on his way home in 1241. In 1240, there was a last flicker of local independence. The last of the Trencavels scraped up some support in Spain and laid siege to his ancestral city of Carcassonne. There was no movement in his favour among the people, and he was unable to reduce the royal garrison, so he ravaged the countryside before taking himself off and disappearing from history. Seven years later Raymond VII died, in the midst of preparing for his long-postponed crusade to Palestine. Countess Jeanne and Prince Alphonse, who had been duly married, succeeded to what was left of his possessions. In 1271 they died without issue and King Philip III, St. Louis’ heir, took their lands.
Summarizing the four phases of the war, in the firstthe Crusaders appear in great force in obedience to the Church and take Beziers and Carcassonne. This phase lasts only a few months in 1209.
The second phase (1209-1212) begins with the appointment of Simon de Montfort, nominally to govern the conquered territory and really to root out the tolerant southern houses. Personal interests now take their place beside religious interests. The second phase lasts for three years. Throughout this period Simon de Montfort uses his scanty resources with such ability that he not only maintains himself but also extends his holdings over the greater part of the country in dispute.
The third phase (1213-1224) begins when Simon breaks the formidable intervention of Pedro, King of Aragon. The capital point of Toulouse he is unable to take, or to hold it after it is adjudged to him by the Lateran Council, and he is finally killed beneath its walls. He is successful in that he weakens the prestige of the House of Toulouse due to the long war waged against it in the name of religion.
After Simon de Montfort’s death, for seven years his son continues to lose ground, and finally resigns his claims in favour of the French Crown.
The third, or royal phase, lasts three years (1224-1227). An imminent decision by arms, in favour of the Crown and against the House of Toulouse, is averted by King Louis VIII’s death, and finally, in 1229, a treaty is made, providing for the eventual absorption of Toulouse by the Crown.
The net results are: (first) the establishment of French national unity down to our own day, with no prospect of its dissolution: (second) the re-establishment of the moral unity of Europe, threatened at the beginning of the thirteenth century by the Albigensian movement; which moral unity, so re-established, endured until the convulsion of the sixteenth century, in which the modern world was born.