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 Henry march 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 invaded the 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 the nobles 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-bandit was 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.