Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

‘I would rather be a Jew,’ was an expression of disdain in the Middle Ages; but in Toulouse the people said, ‘I had rather be a priest,’ and the clergy who walked abroad were forced to conceal their tonsures for fear of assault.

‘Heresy can only be destroyed by solid instruction’ was Innocent III’s first verdict. ‘It is by preaching the truth that we sap foundations of error.’ He therefore sent some Cistercians to hold a mission in Languedoc, and in their company travelled a young Spaniard, Dominic de Guzman, burning to win souls for the Faith or suffer martyrdom. The Cistercians rode on horses with a large train of servants and with wagons drawn by oxen to carry their clothes and their food. This display aroused the scornful mirth of the Albigenses and Waldensians. ‘See,’ they cried, ‘the wealthy missionaries of a God who was humble and despised, loaded with honours!’

Everywhere were the same ridicule and contempt, and it was in this moment of failure that Dominic the Spaniard interposed, speaking earnestly to those who were with him of the contrast between the heretic ministers in their lives of poverty and self-denial with the luxury and worldliness of the local clergy, and even with the ostentatious parade of his fellow preachers. Because he had long practised austerities himself, wearing a hair shirt, fasting often, and denying himself every pleasure, the young Spaniard received a respectful hearing, and so fired the Cistercians with his enthusiasm that they sent away their horses and baggage-wagons, and set out on foot through the country to try and win the populace by different methods. With them went Dominic, barefoot, exulting in this opportunity of bearing witness in the face of danger to the Faith he held so precious.

The attitude of the men and women of Languedoc towards the papal mission was no longer derisive but it remained hostile, for they also held their Faith sacred, while all the racial prejudice of the countryside was thrown into the balance of opposition to Rome. Thus converts were few, and angry gatherings at which stones were thrown at the strangers many; and so matters drifted on and the mission grew more and more discouraged.

In 1208 occurred a violent crisis, for the papal legate, having excommunicated Count Raymond of Toulouse for appropriating certain Church lands and refusing to restore them, was murdered, and the Count himself implicated in the crime, seeing that, as in the case of Henry II and Becket, it had been his angry curses that had prompted some knights to do the deed. Innocent III at once declared the Count deposed, and preached a crusade against him and his subjects as heretics.

Twenty years of bloodshed and cruelty followed; for under the command of the French Count Simon de Montfort, an utterly unscrupulous and brutal general, the orthodox legions of northern France gathered at the papal summons to stamp out the independence of the south that they had always hated as a rival. Languedoc, her nobles and people united, fought hard for her religious and political freedom; but the struggle was uneven, and she was finally forced into submission. Thirty thousand of her sons and daughters had perished, and with them the civilization and culture that had made the name of Provence glorious in mediaeval Europe.

The Albigensian Crusade

The name of Dominic the Spaniard does not appear in the bloodstained annals of the Albigensian Crusade. He had advocated very different measures; and in 1216, pursuing his ideal, received from the Pope leave to form an Order of ‘Preaching Brothers’, modelled on the Monastic Orders, except that the ‘Friars’ (Fratres = brothers), as these monks were called, were commanded not to live permanently in communities but to spend their lives travelling about from village to village, preaching as they went. They were to beg their daily bread; and the very Order itself was forbidden to acquire wealth, their founder hoping by this stringent rule to prevent the worldliness that had corrupted the other religious communities.

Dominic, or St. Dominic, for the enthusiasm of the mediaeval Church soon canonized him, was a son of his age in his intense devotion to the Faith; but his spiritual outlook was beyond the comprehension of all save a few. In Innocent III may be found a more typical figure of the early thirteenth century; and to Innocent’s standard, and not to that of their founder, the followers of St. Dominic for the most part conformed.

Pope Innocent had advocated the driving out of error by right teaching; but his failure by this method woke in him an exasperation that made the obstinate heresy of Languedoc seem a moral and social plague to be suppressed ruthlessly. Thorough in this undertaking as in all to which he set his mind and hand, he added to the slaughter of Simon de Montfort’s Crusade the terrible and efficient machinery of the Inquisition, and this during the pontificate of Gregory IX was transferred from the jurisdiction of local bishops to that of the Papal See. The Inquisitors, empowered to discover heresy and convert the heretic by torture and fire, were mainly Dominicans, selected for this task on account of their theological training and the very devotion to the Faith on which their founder had laid such stress.