FOOTNOTES:

The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate.

The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it. To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist, a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentricsfound in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order. Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose ground.

Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one important occasion.

The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage ... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’ replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites, whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25]One has a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels.

Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi, after preaching to a throng whichpacked the cathedral, he called upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,” St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip. After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing precisely as if he had never come.

In 1165, at Lombers near Albi, we find Catholic priests publicly debating against representative “Albigenses” in the presence of Pons, Archbishop of Narbonne, and sundry bishops, besides the most powerful nobles of the region, Constance, sister of King Louis VII of France and wife of Count Raymond V of Toulouse, Viscount Trencavel of Beziers, and others. When the verdict went against the heretics, no action whatsoever seems to have been taken against them: it was a mere tournament of words, “a matter of public interest” as we should say. Two years later the heretics openly held a council at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The president came all the way from Constantinople to attend, delegates from Lombardy were present, “bishops” were elected for various vacant sees, and a committee was appointed to settle a disputed boundary between the “dioceses” of Toulouse and Carcassonne. Clearly we have here to do with an organized religious body, emphatically a “going concern,” acting fearlessly in the open.

With the year 1178 we get the first suggestion of vigorous direct action against the heresy. Count Raymond V of Toulouse wrote to his brother-in-law, Louis VII of France, deploring the progress of heresy and the abandonment of orthodox religion throughout his lands, and connecting this condition with an alarming increase of brigandage and public disorder. The King of France had just made peace (or rather truce) with Henry II of England, so that the long struggle between the French Monarchy and the Angevin house was at rest for the time being and the two kings were free to combine against heresy. The other great chronic political controversy, between the Papacy and the “Holy Roman” Empire was also inactive, Pope Alexander III having got the better of Frederic Barbarossa and his anti-Pope. Accordingly, the Pope was free to spur on the kings to action. At first it was proposed that Louis and Henrymarch into Toulouse with a joint army. But, finally, it was decided merely to send to Toulouse a mission of high clerical dignitaries with power to act. Lea suggests that the enthusiasm of the kings had cooled off during the long time spent in preliminary discussion. Mother Drane holds that the Pope preferred peaceful measures.

When the mission reached Toulouse they were insulted in the streets. Nevertheless, they went on to draw up a long list of heretics, and finally determined to make an example of a rich old man named Peter Mauran who seems to have been one of the first citizens of Toulouse. They proceeded against him under the canon promulgated by the Council of Tours, which prescribed imprisonment for convicted heretics and confiscation of their property. After much palaver and wordy shuffling by the accused he was adjudged a heretic. To save his property he recanted and offered to submit to such penance as might be imposed. Accordingly, “stripped to the waist, with the Bishop of Toulouse and the Abbot of St. Sernin busily scourging him on either side, he was led through an immense crowd to the high altar of the Cathedral ... (and) ... ordered to undertake a three years’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to be daily scourged through the streets of Toulouse until his departure, to make restitution of all Church lands occupied by him and of all money acquired by usury, and to pay to the Count five hundred pounds of silver in redemption of his forfeited property.”[26]

The results of these measures were only temporary. After his return from Palestine, Mauran was three times elected chief magistrate of the city. In the same year in which he had first been tried, the Third Lateran Council cursed the heretics of Languedoc, together with those who favoured them, and included as heretics the marauding bands of wandering mercenaries who, when out of employment, drifted about as brigands. Further, the Council took the unprecedented step of declaring a Crusade against all these enemies of the Church and of proclaiming a two years’ indulgence to Crusaders. So that in 1181, Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux and Cardinal, was able to raise a military force with which he invadedthe Beziers district and took the castle of Lavaur, capturing in it many prominent heretics. But two of the captured Albigensian “bishops,” upon recanting, were promptly given Catholic benefices in Toulouse, and, all told, Henry of Clairvaux’s little crusade was no more than a flash in the pan.

The Lateran Council’s curse upon bandits, lumping them with heretics, raises the question of how closely the anarchical side of Albigensianism may have been connected with public disorder. The twelfth century men were great bandit-slayers. Probably there were more bandits to be slain because there was more wealth worth robbing in Western Christendom than formerly. The mercenary soldier, a man without a country, hired by the princes of the time for their big or little wars, was not far from the bandit, even when in campaign. In England the name of King John’s mercenaries was hated and feared for generations. In his times of unemployment, when he was drifting about the country he tended to become the bandit pure and simple. Always he was unbound by social and conventional restraints and ties, wanting especially reverence for the Church, which was usually the chief protection for the property of that greatest and richest of mediæval corporations. We are told that one of Richard Cœur de Lion’s mercenaries, quite wantonly it would seem, once ... “broke off an arm of a statue in the Church of Our Lady at Chateauroux, whereupon the figure bled as if it were alive; and John (afterwards King John) picked up the severed arm and carried it off as a holy relic.”[27]But we are not told that the fellow himself was in the least abashed by the miracle, or that he was punished for his sacrilege. However, in twelfth-century Northern and Central France, when banditry became annoying, the bandits by no means had it all their own way. Their career was often short and ended by steel or rope. The community went for them mercilessly, much as men did in our own Wild West.

In Languedoc (as we have seen) with its wealth, its Jews, and its nearness to the Moslem, reverence for the Church was less. Further, it may well be that thenobles were more dependent upon mercenaries inasmuch as their vassals were less warlike. We shall find the unhappy Raymond VII refusing to dismiss his hired soldiers, no matter under what pressure. Finally, some heretics denied the moral right of all private property whatsoever; most of them attacked the Church for the great wealth which it possessed, and practically all would refuse to take oaths, and denied the moral force of them when taken, although the feudal oath of allegiance from the vassal to his lord was the chief bond of civil society. In silent witness to the difference these things made, we find many of the southern churches, especially the country churches, were fortified. Whereas in the North, in spite of all the continual quarrelling between priest and noble, the church building nearly always depended for its protection on its sanctity alone.

The churches of Languedoc were not fortified for nothing. Speaking of the bandits, Lea remarks that the chroniclers, who were themselves mostly Churchmen, “... insist that their blows ... fell heavier on church and monastery than on the castle of the seigneur or the cottage of the peasant.” Naturally, since they would get little plunder from the cottage and many hard knocks from the castle. “... They ridiculed the priests as singers, and it was one of their savage sports to beat them to death while mockingly begging their intercession, ... ‘Sing for us, you singer, sing for us’; and the culmination of their ... sacrilege was ... their casting out and trampling on the holy wafers whose precious pyxes they eagerly seized.”[28]

Exactly how much connection Albigensianism had with disorder we cannot say. On the face of it, such teaching tended rather to non-resistance. But in an age so direct, so extreme in brutality as well as in tenderness (as for brutality in speech a leading Albigensian argument against transubstantiation was that it involved the excretion of the body of Christ into latrines), in such an age, I say, it is improbable that the heretics greatly disapproved of anyone who attacked their enemies, the Churchmen. Even assuming that the godless mercenary-turned-banditwas not, strictly speaking, a heretic at all, he was certainly favoured by the atmosphere of heresy.

As the twelfth century neared its close Albigensianism must have seemed “the coming thing” in Languedoc. Although we hear of none of the greatest nobles of the region as having been “hereticated,” yet many individuals among their immediate families had been, especially among the women. In general, the heretics were enthusiastic and the Catholics uncertain and troubled. The Orthodox were still able (as in the affair of Mauran) to win “test cases,” but they must have felt that their hold was slipping.

From the point of view of those resolute to suppress heresy, the only real gain of the whole twelfth century was that both the canon and the civil laws on the subject had become more defined. Even as late as the middle of the century, we find St. Bernard calling the burning of heretics “excessive cruelty,” and favouring imprisonment as a maximum punishment.

The heresy made its only appearance in England in 1166. Henry II, the very man whom we have seen so angry against Becket as to threaten to turn Mohammedan, seems to have felt free to take a line of his own. He had them stripped to the waist, flogged, branded on the forehead, and turned adrift, strictly forbidding everyone to give them any aid and comfort whatsoever. This was effective enough in its way, as they must have soon died from hunger and exposure, but the point is that there seems to have been no recognized procedure to be followed.

This want had been partly met, in the last two decades of the century, by three laws.

In 1184, at the Diet of Verona, the “Holy Roman” Emperor, Frederic Barbarossa, and the short-lived Pope Lucius III, had conferred on heresy. Although in disagreement about many important matters, they seem to have agreed perfectly about the treatment of heretics. They published a joint decree. The Pope on his side directed that the bishops, who had always had jurisdiction in matters of heresy, should make, or cause to be made, an inquiry, or “inquisition,” into the possible existence of heresy in every parish where the presence of heretics was even suspected. Even those whose mannerof living differed from that of the ordinary Catholic were to be questioned as to their faith. The accused were to be tried in the episcopal court and such as should be convicted (if they refused to “repent” and acknowledge their errors) were to be handed over to the secular authorities “in order that they may receive the punishment they deserve (animadversio debita).” This last formula was vague, perhaps intentionally so. All secular magistrates were to take an oath before the bishop that they would enforce the laws against heresy, and those who refused to act after having been duly called upon to do so were to be excommunicated. Furthermore, all Catholics were forbidden to do business with any city which might sustain a pro-heretical magistrate in failure to act.

The Emperor, on his side, was not behindhand. He decreed that any magistrate excommunicated for refusal or neglect to proceed against heretics should lose his office and be debarred from accepting another. All those convicted, or to be convicted, of heresy were put under the imperial ban, which meant banishment, confiscation of goods, destruction of their houses, public infamy, debarment from office, &c. There is no explicit mention of the death penalty. “Animadversio” had meant death in ancient times, and the twelfth-century lawyer was apt to be both a great pedant and a great imperialist. Nevertheless, the formula had become vaguer.

The other two enactments are those of secular princes, acting alone.

Count Raymond V of Toulouse, he whom we have seen appealing to his suzerain Louis VII of France against heresy, at some time during his long reign of forty-six years (from 1148 to 1194) decreed not only banishment but also death by fire for heretics. Probably this was done in connection with Henry of Clairvaux’s mission which condemned Mauran, or with the short “Crusade” of 1181. What action, if any, was taken under it we do not know. In 1209 we shall find the municipality of Toulouse writing to Pope Innocent III to the effect that “many” heretics had been burnt under it. But we must remember that the letter was written when the city was threatened by Montfort and his Crusaders, and its magistrates were correspondingly anxious to make a case.

The third of the three laws against heretics was enacted by King Pedro II of Aragon, who later got himself killed in his attempt to protect the protector of heretics, Raymond VI of Toulouse! In 1197 Pedro banished the Waldenses and other heretics from his lands as public enemies to himself and his realm, and announced that if any of them were found when the months of grace had expired, their goods were to be confiscated and themselves burned. Of course, this was only a threat, and in all human probability no one stayed to risk the stake. The significant thing is that the threat is made against the Waldenses as the heretics par excellence.

But, although it was a gain to have the legal machinery for punishing heretics, still the gain did not amount to much if there was no organized force capable of putting the machinery in motion. Except for the banishment of Mauran and the little Crusade which took Lavaur in 1181, no real action against the heretics of Languedoc had been taken. In 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier and condemned heresy in the strongest terms, but his thunders died away without an echo. No progress whatsoever had been made against heresy in Languedoc when, in 1198, Innocent III became Pope.

Why did Rome wait so long before moving in the Albigensian matter? The Curia must surely have known, for decades past, that things were steadily going from bad to worse in Languedoc. It has been suggested that all the moral forces and diplomatic skill that the Papacy could muster had been needed to make head against the redoubtable emperors, Barbarossa and his son, Henry VI. But this, at most, can be only half the answer. In the first place, the Curia had been and was entirely competent to carry on several major controversies at the same time, with the sure touch of a skilful juggler keeping three or four balls going at once. In the second place, even in the last fifty years, crowded as they had been, still there had been intervals of peace between Papacy and Empire. One such interval had been seven years long, and still the Papacy had made no move in Languedoc. Probably the answer is that none of the popes, not even Alexander III, and still less his short-lived successors, had possessed the tremendous energy and courage of the newly-elected Pope.

FOOTNOTES:[5]“Rome Revisited,” in “The Meaning of History,” by Frederic Harrison. Publishers: The Macmillan Co., New York, 1902.[6]“Some Types of Cities in Temperate Europe,” by H. J. Fleure, in the “Geographical Review,” N.Y., December, 1920, which compares cities like Arles, Nismes and Toulouse on the one hand, and the north-French cities on the other. The author mars an able discussion of the subject by imagining a strong “Frankish” influence in the north—derived no doubt from the tiny mongrel war band of Clovis, some 8,000 strong, including Thuringians and Bretons, by which that leader raised himself to be consul, by imperial commission, over a Romanized Gaul of millions! The point is that military, civil and ecclesiastical authority were alike integrally Roman in the high imperial time. In Northern France, during the Dark Ages, secular civil government seems to have disappeared. Therefore, the Roman military officers who had turned themselves into feudal lords, and the bishops who continued to take their orders from Rome, obtained greater relative importance.[7]“Europe and the Faith,” by Hilaire Belloc. Paulist Press, N.Y., 1920.[8]“Politics,” Heinrich Von Treitschke, trans. Publ. Macmillan 1916. Vol. I, chap. vii, pp. 245, 246.[9]“Aucassin and Nicolette.” Passage translated by Henry Adams, in “Mont St. Michel and Chartres.” Pub. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1913. Chapter xii, page 233.[10]“The Old Road,” by H. Belloc. Published by Constable and Co., London, 1911. Page 30.[11]“History of the Inquisition,” by Philip Limborch, Professor of Divinity among the Remonstrants; Chandler’s translation, London, 1731. Reference page 44, vol. i.[12]“Shelburne Essays,” Sixth Series, by Paul Elmer More. Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1909.[13]“Mr. Britling sees it Through,” by H. G. Wells. Published by Macmillan, New York, 1917.[14]“Italy and her Invaders,” by Thomas Hodgkin. Published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892. Vol. i, chapter III, p. 203.[15]“Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” by “Vernon Lee.” Published by John Lane, New York. 1909. Pp. 47-49.[16]See: Fragments of an “Ancient (Egyptian?) Gospel,” used by “The Cathars of Albi,” by F. P. Bodham and F. C. Conybeare, in theHibbert Journalof July, 1913.[17]“Essays,” by Francis Bacon: “Of Unity in Religion.”[18]I Timothy, chapter i, verse 20.[19]“The Mediæval Mind,” by Henry Osborn Taylor,supra“Carolingian Scholars,” in vol. i, chapter x, p. 217.[20]“On Anything,” H. Belloc; Dutton, New York, 1910, p. 72,et seq.[21]“Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” by John Henry Newman, chap. i.[22]“Thus spake ‘Zarathustra,’” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. publ. Macmillan, New York, 1914, chap. lxvi, p. 318.[23]“Mont St. Michel and Chartres,”supra, chap. xi, p. 218.[24]“Là-bas,” by Joris Karl Huysmans. Published Plon-Nourrit Paris, 1913. Pp. 362-3, author’s trans.[25]“Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 71.[26]“Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 122.[27]“John Lackland,” by Kate Norgate. Macmillan, N.Y., 1902, p. 21.[28]“Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, pp. 125-6.

[5]“Rome Revisited,” in “The Meaning of History,” by Frederic Harrison. Publishers: The Macmillan Co., New York, 1902.

[6]“Some Types of Cities in Temperate Europe,” by H. J. Fleure, in the “Geographical Review,” N.Y., December, 1920, which compares cities like Arles, Nismes and Toulouse on the one hand, and the north-French cities on the other. The author mars an able discussion of the subject by imagining a strong “Frankish” influence in the north—derived no doubt from the tiny mongrel war band of Clovis, some 8,000 strong, including Thuringians and Bretons, by which that leader raised himself to be consul, by imperial commission, over a Romanized Gaul of millions! The point is that military, civil and ecclesiastical authority were alike integrally Roman in the high imperial time. In Northern France, during the Dark Ages, secular civil government seems to have disappeared. Therefore, the Roman military officers who had turned themselves into feudal lords, and the bishops who continued to take their orders from Rome, obtained greater relative importance.

[7]“Europe and the Faith,” by Hilaire Belloc. Paulist Press, N.Y., 1920.

[8]“Politics,” Heinrich Von Treitschke, trans. Publ. Macmillan 1916. Vol. I, chap. vii, pp. 245, 246.

[9]“Aucassin and Nicolette.” Passage translated by Henry Adams, in “Mont St. Michel and Chartres.” Pub. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1913. Chapter xii, page 233.

[10]“The Old Road,” by H. Belloc. Published by Constable and Co., London, 1911. Page 30.

[11]“History of the Inquisition,” by Philip Limborch, Professor of Divinity among the Remonstrants; Chandler’s translation, London, 1731. Reference page 44, vol. i.

[12]“Shelburne Essays,” Sixth Series, by Paul Elmer More. Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1909.

[13]“Mr. Britling sees it Through,” by H. G. Wells. Published by Macmillan, New York, 1917.

[14]“Italy and her Invaders,” by Thomas Hodgkin. Published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892. Vol. i, chapter III, p. 203.

[15]“Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” by “Vernon Lee.” Published by John Lane, New York. 1909. Pp. 47-49.

[16]See: Fragments of an “Ancient (Egyptian?) Gospel,” used by “The Cathars of Albi,” by F. P. Bodham and F. C. Conybeare, in theHibbert Journalof July, 1913.

[17]“Essays,” by Francis Bacon: “Of Unity in Religion.”

[18]I Timothy, chapter i, verse 20.

[19]“The Mediæval Mind,” by Henry Osborn Taylor,supra“Carolingian Scholars,” in vol. i, chapter x, p. 217.

[20]“On Anything,” H. Belloc; Dutton, New York, 1910, p. 72,et seq.

[21]“Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” by John Henry Newman, chap. i.

[22]“Thus spake ‘Zarathustra,’” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. publ. Macmillan, New York, 1914, chap. lxvi, p. 318.

[23]“Mont St. Michel and Chartres,”supra, chap. xi, p. 218.

[24]“Là-bas,” by Joris Karl Huysmans. Published Plon-Nourrit Paris, 1913. Pp. 362-3, author’s trans.

[25]“Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 71.

[26]“Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 122.

[27]“John Lackland,” by Kate Norgate. Macmillan, N.Y., 1902, p. 21.

[28]“Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, pp. 125-6.

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