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, and engaged 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 first the 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.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THE
INQUISITION.
The political decision achieved by the Albigensian Crusade, in the hands of the French Crown, against the House of Toulouse, permitted the establishment of the Inquisition in Languedoc, the centre of thirteenth century heresy. Now the subject of this book is not so much the Inquisition itself as the forces which established it. Therefore the military and political struggle in which the House of Toulouse went under has been narrated at some length, as well as the events leading up to that struggle. But it is also necessary to our subject to note the workings of these forces when regular armed resistance had ceased.