The first secular law in the Middle Ages dealing with heresy is English. In 1166 two Cathari were brought before Henry II at Oxford, whipped and branded with a red key and banished.[266] Shortly afterwards in the same year appeared the clause in the Assize of Clarendon, forbidding the sheltering of heretics on the pain of having one’s house destroyed.[267] Other severe secular legislation soon appeared in other countries. In 1194 the Emperor Henry VI ordered the confiscation of the property, and the destruction of the houses, of heretics and inforced fines on communities and individuals who neglected to assist, when they had the opportunity, in the arrest of heretics.[268] The same year Alfonso II of Aragon, aiming at expelling all Manichæans and Waldenses from his dominions, issued an edict declaring all heretics public enemies and banishing them.[269] The ineffectiveness of this edict is demonstrated by the appearance of a severer one three years later issued by Alfonso’s successor, Pedro II, famous as the victor over the Moors at Las Navas de Tolosa, equally notorious for his warlike prowess, his religious zeal, his prodigality and licentiousness. Once again banishment is decreed, but it is added that if any heretics remain in defiance of the edict after a specified date they shall perish at the stake and their effects be confiscated.[270]
Whatever may have been the case earlier, there seems good evidence of the zeal of the clergy against heretics in the latter part of the twelfth century, which saw so much more precision in the declarations of ecclesiastical councils and secular laws on the subject. In 1167 we find the Abbot of Vézelai, when several heretics were before him, appealing to the people to give sentence, and accepting their demand for a death of torture. Some years later at Rheims we find the Archbishop and clergy in agreement with the nobles that two Catharan women should be burnt.[271] Hugh, Bishop of Auxerre (1183-1206), is a busy prosecutor of heretics, causing many to be burnt or exiled. More notable than such isolated instances of clerical activity is the co-operation between Pope and Emperor which led to the important bull entitled Ad abolendam.[272] In 1184, Lucius III and Frederick Barbarossa met at Verona, and as the result of their conference this bull was promulgated, which (among other provisions) fixed rules for the prosecution of suspected heretics, the visitation of infected areas and the assistance of all civil authorities. The Emperor for his part placed heretics under the ban of the empire.[273] The decree of Henry VI, already referred to, was plainly based on this action of his predecessor’s.
Towards the end of the twelfth century, then, we have clear evidence of secular and ecclesiastical authorities working hand in hand for the suppression of heresy. To the former, heresy seemed equivalent to rebellion; to the latter, equivalent to murder, being the murder of the soul. When Pedro II issued his harsh edict against the Cathari of Aragon, he claimed that he was actuated by zeal for the public welfare and a desire to obey the canons of the Church.[274] There was no order in the canons that heretics should be burnt to death; but otherwise, Pedro’s appeal to Canon law was justified: and besides the canons, there were the various edicts of ecclesiastical councils during the century, all of them calling upon the secular authority to use its utmost efforts towards the eradication of heresy.
It has been urged that the attitude adopted by the Church was a most unwilling attitude, forced upon it by influences too powerful to resist, that the main motive power of persecution came not from the Church, but from the lay authority and from public opinion. The theory is advanced that during the period, roughly from 1000 to 1150, when the position of the heretic was a matter of legal uncertainty, the clergy opposed the violence evinced against heretics, and in eventually yielding they submitted to the strength of a custom which constituted a sort of jus non scriptum.[275] But there is not much force in this plea. To acquiesce in a jus non scriptum argues either indifference or impotence: and the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was neither indifferent nor impotent. Nor is the opposition of the clergy to mob violence an argument to the point. A dislike for mob law and lynching does not necessarily betoken disapproval of capital punishment.[276] It is true—and this is very important—that spontaneously, without any direct incitement from the clergy, the people regarded the heretic with intense abhorrence. We ought probably to add that in the absence of written law on the subject there was a rather vague idea, shared by the mob and their rulers, that not only death, but a particularly terrible kind of death, was an appropriate punishment for the heretic—this idea being perhaps derived from the fact that Roman law had at different times meted out this doom for certain kinds of heretics, particularly Manichæans, and other offenders, such as sorcerers and witches. It is true also that the heretics upon whom the mob turned were generally Manichæan. Yet no one who has any knowledge of the position of the mediæval Church can honestly maintain on these grounds that the Church had no responsibility for the rigour displayed towards the heretic. The heretic was regarded as an offender against society, because it was a Christian society. Heresy, being error in the faith, was investigated and recognized by the Church. The clergy, not the mob, discovered the heresy and the heretic; for such discovery could not be made without theological knowledge, of which the mob were ignorant. And such knowledge as they possessed, were it reasoned understanding or merely half-assimilated fragments of doctrine, was derived solely from clerical instruction. It was difficult for any sort of knowledge to come from any other source. Heresy was regarded as dangerous to the community, because, to begin with, the Church had found it dangerous to itself. The intellectual and spiritual atmosphere with which Christendom was permeated was of the Church’s making. The attempt, therefore, to absolve the Church from responsibility for the measures taken against heresy in these centuries—by whomsoever they were taken—involves a wholly erroneous, indeed an absurd, under-estimate of the authority of the Church.
In 1198 there came to the papal throne perhaps the greatest of the whole pontifical line, Lothario Conti, Innocent III. High in resolve to strengthen Church and Papacy, he at once gave his attention to the problem of heresy. But though zealous, in some respects he showed a commendable moderation. He was anxious that the innocent should not be confounded with the guilty in the impetuosity of the perfervid clerk or the impatience of the mob; and for the first ten years of his pontificate he made trial of a pacific programme.[277] But in one part of Christendom the problem of heresy had by this time become acute. In the lands of the Count of Toulouse, Catharism was as rampant as were clerical abuses. The pleasure-loving, prosperous inhabitants of Provence, of Narbonne, of Albi felt the authority of the Church to be an obnoxious incubus upon their worldliness, their careless independence. The clergy were hated and despised. The troubadour made pleasant ridicule of the sacraments and every doctrine of the Church, however sacred. The death-bed repentance scheme of the Catharan system, its denial of a purgatory and a hell, were popular. Still more so was the pretext afforded by its anti-sacerdotal precepts for despoiling the Church.[278] So the nobles and the rich bourgeoisie and merchants received heretics into their houses, clothed them and fed them, while they were exempted from taxes. So great was the hold of heresy in his lands, that Count Raymond V of Toulouse declared himself to be wholly unable to resist it.[279] His successor, Raymond VI, had no wish to resist it, being of the same stuff as his people and seeing no call to disturb them at the bidding of priests. Thus when a Council at Montpellier in 1195 anathematized all princes failing to enforce the Church’s decrees against heretics, he paid no heed.
A couple of months after his accession Innocent III sent two commissioners into Languedoc, one of them being subsequently entrusted with legatine powers, to tackle a situation so serious that the whole of that country seemed on the point of slipping away from its allegiance to the Catholic faith and communion. They were instructed that obdurate heretics were to be banished, their property confiscated; and the secular authority was to see to it that their measures were carried out under pain of interdict. The efforts of these two commissioners were entirely fruitless. In 1204 their successors were entrusted with increased authority, which gave them a complete dictatorship over the ecclesiastical dignitaries of Languedoc, who were bitterly reviled for their incapacity. Yet neither these measures nor lavish bribes to secular rulers proved efficacious, and even the iron resolution of the commissioners, Pierre de Castelnau and Arnaud of Citeaux, was breaking down beneath the weight of persistent failure, when a certain Spaniard, Diego de Arzevedo, Bishop of Osma, suggested to the legates the scheme of an evangelistic enterprise. This was adopted, and bare-footed missionaries were sent forth to re-convert the erring by simple preaching and exhortation. Among the preachers was St. Dominic himself. This laudable scheme also failed. There is a legend that Dominic, stung by his ill-success, predicted what the upshot of such deplorable obduracy must eventually be. There was a saying in Spain, he quoted, that a beating may work where a blessing won’t. The towers of the cities of the fair land would have to be laid low, its people reduced to servitude.[280] The actual signal for a complete reversal of policy was the murder of Pierre de Castelnau in circumstances which recall the murder of Becket. The legate had exasperated the Count of Toulouse; one of the latter’s knights slew the priest. Innocent called for vengeance upon the blood-guilty Count; and the Albigensian Crusade, which Innocent had ere this been preaching in vain to Philip Augustus of France, was the immediate consequence. The first crusading army, an international force, assembled at Lyons in June 1209.[281] The ensuing wars are memorable for the men who took part in them—Pedro of Aragon, the zealous Catholic, now intervening on behalf of Count Raymond and perishing on the field of Muret, Simon de Montfort, the ‘athlete of Christ’! Never was there Christian warrior purer in his motives than Simon, more whole-hearted in his enthusiasm, or more utterly inhuman in his fanaticism. These wars are also memorable for their political issues and consequences. From the outset purely political interests were intermixed with the religious. The great nobles who led the forces of the Cross united with their pious zeal an at least equally genuine and powerful hatred and jealousy of the rich and bountiful southern land which harboured a culture so different from their own, more Saracen than European. The wars were wars of the north against the south, of one civilization against another. The astute and calculating Philip Augustus seized with avidity the opportunity of bringing under his direct control a province of France, which had been practically an independent kingdom; and the crusade is, therefore, of first-rate importance as a big contribution to the unification of the French kingdom.
If to many who took part in them the original purpose of these religious wars was altogether subsidiary, that purpose was none the less most horribly accomplished. The peculiar civilization of Languedoc was blotted out, its beauty and fragrance being utterly extinguished by the onslaught of the crusaders. With the civilization went the heresy that it had harboured. Catharism indeed continued to exist in the devastated region, but all its vital power of expansion had been destroyed when the conditions that fostered it vanished. The Albigensian wars were the most successful attempt to extirpate heresy known in history. They were successful because they were utterly ruthless and included wholesale massacres. When the town of Béziers fell, it is said that twenty thousand of its inhabitants were slaughtered. There were good Catholics as well as Cathari among the populace of the place; but the story goes that when Arnaud of Citeaux was asked whether the Catholics were to be spared, in his anxiety lest a single heretic should escape by pretending orthodoxy, he replied, ‘Kill them all, for God knows His own.’[282]
When the crusaders appeared in Languedoc, toleration vanished out of western Christendom. There was no asylum left where the heretic could feel assured of safety from the persecutor. The power of the Church against the disobedient had been mightily asserted. The ruler who had dared to disregard her order to purify his land of its contaminators had been brought low. From every country the papacy had been able to bring together doughty warriors to uphold the unity of the faith by spilling the blood of the perverse wanderers from the fold. The policy of force had been triumphantly vindicated by the amplitude of its success.