The Inquisition

by Hoffman Nickerson

In their march down the valley of the Rhône, with its glare and white dust, they were met at Valence by Raymond of Toulouse himself. Without hesitation, virtually on the morrow of his humiliating penance at St. Gilles, with the welts of the monkish lash unhealed on his back, this man, against whom the Crusade was principally directed, himself took the Cross and joined the army which had mustered to destroy him. Following out Innocent’s plan of “divide et impera” (divide and conquer) he was permitted to join the army, which continued on its march. Of course the Crusade was, officially, aimed at the heretics of the south, and Raymond, with all his shiftiness, was no heretic. Protestant historians have blamed the Churchmen in charge of the policy of the Crusade for duplicity in this matter. Of course, Raymond’s submission was accepted merely because it was temporarily convenient for them not to have him for an open enemy, although it was intended in the long run to ruin him altogether. Still I confess that I cannot see that severe condemnation is justified. He had played fast and loose too often.

Where the army crossed the Rhône we are not told; possibly at Orange or Avignon, but more probably from Tarascon to Beaucaire, where the main Roman crossing had been. Once across the Rhône, it took up again the old road by Nismes into Spain which so many armies had followed since Hannibal. At Montpellier, Raymond Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne, and nephew to Raymond of Toulouse, came to meet the chiefs of the Crusade, as his uncle had already come to them at Valence, to make his peace. He was refused a hearing. It was necessary that the great army should not disband without striking terror into the heretical south and giving some, at least, of its feudal lordships into the hands of proved and zealous Catholics. Otherwise the effort involved in organizing the expedition would have been wasted. Accordingly, for Raymond Roger to plead his own personal orthodoxy and claim that only irresponsible subordinates had favoured heresy, was not to the point. The “Chanson” says that Raymond of Toulouse, with his usual shortsighted cunning, suggested an attack on his nephew, with whom he had recently quarrelled. It would have been so like the wretched Count of Toulouse to have done so, that we may accept the story.

Raymond Roger hurried back from Montpellier to his own lands. Why the Crusaders, after once having had him in their power, let him go in peace to organize resistance against them is not clear. Perhaps he had come in under some sort of guarantee like the modern flag of truce, and was therefore protected by the highly developed military courtesy of the day, which had grown up around the idea of knighthood.

At any rate, he was allowed to go, and made haste to put his two chief towns, Beziers and Carcassonne, in a state of defence, following the usual custom for the weaker party in a mediæval conflict, i.e., to stand on the defensive behind walls. The Crusaders sat down before Beziers on the 20th or 21st of July. They had started from Lyons between the 24th and 30th of June, and had marched close to 230 miles, making an average march of between 10 and 8¾ miles a day, a very creditable showing, and one which deserves to be called to the attention of despisers of things mediæval. No doubt it was desired to waste as little as possible of the short forty-day enlistment before coming to grips with the heretics and their noble patrons.

Before Beziers they were joined by two detachments, one from the neighbourhood of Agen and the other from Auvergne. Each detachment had won certain successes of its own on its way. The Agenais had held to ransom two towns in the Aveyron Valley, Caussade and St. Antonin, and were looked upon with some disfavour (mingled perhaps with envy) by the other Crusaders, for having compounded with wickedness for a money payment. One of the commanders of the Auvergnats bore the great name of Turenne. His detachment had captured a strong castle and burned the heretics found therein, the first but not the last time that we shall hear of burning in connection with the Crusade.

Incidentally, the military aspect of this concentration deserves a word. Lyons and Agen are 225 miles apart as the crow flies, with the mountainous country of Auvergne between. Anyone with the slightest military experience knows how hard it is to synchronize the movements of distant columns so that they may meet at a common centre, even with accurate maps and with all modern means of communication. In this case, maps, telephone, telegraph, and all means of mechanical rapid transit were lacking. Probably an advance concentration point in the neighbourhood of Beziers was selected before any of the columns commenced its march, and during the march communication was kept up by an inter-weaving system of mounted couriers. The risk of the comparatively weak centre and right columns being cut off before they could join was practically nil because of the submission of the Count of Toulouse, and because the entire countryside was terror-stricken by fear of the Crusaders. Even so, the accurate concentration of the three columns on Beziers was a feat of considerable military skill.

Beziers, like most Mediterranean towns, had been an organized city throughout the time of recorded history and before. Under mediæval conditions it was easy to defend, being built on a hill. Heresy was particularly strong there; we have seen in the last chapter how de Castelnau, in 1205, had had to leave the place because of the fury stirred up against his person and his defence of the faith. There is even some reason for believing that the great majority of the citizens were heretical, which was by no means the case in places like Toulouse, where the utmost that the heretics dared do was to hold their services at midnight. If there were only a few Catholics within the walls, it is not surprising that the city refused to surrender. Its bishop was with the Crusaders, and was allowed to propose that the town should capitulate and hand over its heretics for punishment in return for guarantees on the part of the Crusaders for the persons and property of the Catholic citizens. This most fair and liberal offer, from the crusading point of view, was rejected. The besieged preferred to run the chances of war, probably not because of any great solidarity between the heretical and Catholic citizens (as certain modern Protestant historians do vainly talk), but no doubt because the Catholics were few in numbers, and did not control the decisions taken by the defence.

Having refused to treat, the inhabitants made a sortie across the bridge over their river, killed a Crusader and threw his body into the stream. The sortie was repulsed, and thereupon, according to the account generally received, the camp followers of the Crusade succeeded in rushing the defences. This surprising success was achieved without orders, by divine inspiration as the legates piously put it, while the chiefs of the Crusade were deliberating as to their next step. Those in search of secular explanations may well suppose that the assailants entered on the heels of the inhabitants driven back in the repulse of the sortie before the gate could be closed, or that defective dispositions of the defence had left some point unguarded, or, finally, that a local panic among the men told off to guard a particular tower or bit of wall had permitted the success of the attack.

After the storming of the walls there took place in the crooked, steeply sloping streets of the town, the massacre for which Beziers and the Albigensian Crusade itself are principally remembered. Priest and layman, woman and child seem to have suffered equally. Of a great crowd which had taken sanctuary in the church of St. Mary Magdalene, not one survived. With the sword came fire. Since, as we have seen, the camp followers, probably mixed with the peasant infantry, had been the first to enter, the knights began to drive them out by force, for fear that they themselves would get no loot. In their anger at this, the “villeins” set fire to the town, which burned fiercely. The cathedral of St. Nazaire got so hot that the stone vaulting cracked and fell in.

One admiring Cistercian contemporary makes Arnaut Amalric answer the question as to whether the Catholic citizens should be spared with the famous “Kill them all, for God will know His own,” for fear that many heretics might escape by feigning orthodoxy. Certain modern Catholic writers maintain that the lay chieftains of the Crusade had determined beforehand upon a massacre, as a military measure, to terrify the country. It would seem as if no such decision could have been made by the lay nobles if the legates had opposed. Still the point is not worth labouring, inasmuch as it has over and over again on these occasions proved impossible to restrain armies much more regularly and firmly disciplined than the Crusaders. The definite reasons for doubting the completeness of the massacre are that the church of St. Mary Magdalene, where the slaughter was heaviest, is so small that not a third of the seven thousand supposed to have been killed in it could possibly have packed into the place, and further, that the corporate life of the town was so quickly reconstituted that it was soon able to resist the Crusaders again.