[168] We find few details upon this epoch in the continuator of William of Tyre, or the other historians of the middle ages who mention the Christian colonies.
[169] This penitence and that which follows are mentioned by Fleury, in the sixteenth volume of his History; the guilty were condemned, in addition to the pilgrimage, to wear neither vair, grey squirrel fur, ermine, nor coloured stuffs; they were never to be present at public games; after becoming widowers, were never to marry again; to walk barefooted and be clothed in woollen, and to fast on bread and water on Wednesdays, Fridays, Ember-week, and Vigils; to perform three Lent fasts in the course of the year, to recite the Pater Noster a hundred times, and make a hundred genuflexions every day. When they came to a city, they were to go to the principal church barefooted, in drawers, with halters round their necks and rods in their hands, and there receive from the canons discipline, &c. &c.
[170] Son of Erard II., count of Brienne in Champagne, and Agnes Monthéliard.
[171] The continuator of William of Tyre relates that the barons of Palestine themselves demanded John of Brienne of the king of France.
[172] As Gibbon has done, I have preferred the real name of this sect to the Latinized Albigenses.—Trans.
[173] Bossuet, Histoire des Variat. vol. ii. L’Abbé Paquet, in his Dictionnaire des Hérésies, and Fleury, in his Histoire Ecclésiastique, express the same opinion.
[174] Notwithstanding the partiality I naturally feel for an author whose work I am translating, and to which task I was led by my admiration of it, I cannot allow such opinions of the war against the Albigeois to pass unnoticed. A very sensible French historian says:—“The inhabitants of these provinces were industrious, intellectual, and addicted to commerce, the arts, and poetry; their numerous cities flourished, governed by consuls with forms approaching to republican; all at once this beautiful region was abandoned to the furies of fanaticism, its cities were ruined, its arts and its commerce destroyed, and its language cast back into barbarism. The preaching of the first religious reform gave birth to the devastation of these rich countries. The clergy were not distinguished there, as in France or the northern provinces, by their ardour to improve themselves and diffuse knowledge; they signalized themselves by gross disorders, and sank daily into greater contempt. The need of reform had been long felt among the people of Provence and many reformers had already appeared. For a length of time associations had existed whose aim it was to purify the morals and the doctrines of the Church; such were the Paterins, the Catharins, and the Poor of Lyons; and the greater part of these had obtained the sanction of the popes, who considered them as so many orders of monks, highly calculated to awaken public devotion. But the reforms that were operated extended gradually; dogmas even were attacked, priests were subjected to the insults of the people, and the domains of the Church were invaded. Such was the state of things when the famous Innocent III., at the age of thirty-nine, ascended the pontifical throne in 1198. To his great task he brought the talents of an ambitious, and the energy of a violent and an inflexible character. This pontiff, who dominated over Europe by indulgences and excommunications, watched for and punished with severity every free exercise of thought in religious matters; he was the first to feel how serious and threatening for the Church of Rome that liberty of mind must be that had already degenerated into revolt. He saw with great inquietude and anger the new tendency of men’s minds in Provence and Languedoc, and proscribed the reformers, the most numerous of whom, and who gave their name to all the others, were known under the names of Albigeois and Vaudois. Some among them were Manicheans, that is to say, admitted the two principles; but the greatest number of them professed doctrines differing but very little from those which, three centuries later, were preached by Luther. They denied transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Eucharist, rejected confession, and the sacraments of confirmation and marriage, and taxed the worship of images with idolatry.” In this war papacy put forth all its most dreaded powers; indulgences to its brutal, mercenary soldiers; heaven for wholesale slaughterers of their fellow-creatures; hell for all who dared to think when they worshipped, or to breathe a word against the veriest nonsense of Romish rites: many instances occurred in which the odious doctrine of no faith to be observed with heretics, was unblushingly advanced and cruelly acted upon. I will close my notice of this war against men who ventured to entertain a shade of difference in opinion from their fellow-Christians and the head of the Church, by a quotation that vividly stamps its character. “The Crusaders precipitated themselves in a mass upon the lands of the young viscount de Béziers, took his castles and burnt all the men, violated the women and massacred the children they found in them; then, turning towards Béziers, they carried it by assault. A prodigious number of the inhabitants of the circumjacent country had taken refuge in this city; the abbot of Citeaux, legate of the pope, upon being consulted by the knights as to the fate of these unhappy beings, a part of whom only were heretics, replied by these execrable and ever-memorable words: ‘Kill away! kill away! God will take care of his own!’” The crusade against the Albigeois is one of the blackest pages in the history of mankind, and ought to be described as such by every historian whose disagreeable duty it is to name it.—Trans.
[175] The abbot of Vaux-de-Cernai, who signalized himself in the crusade against the Albigeois, has left us a history of this period, in which he relates with an air of triumph, facts which passed before his eyes, at which religion as well as humanity ought to blush. When we have read his account, we are persuaded of two things: the first, that he was sincere in the excess of his fanatical zeal; the second, that his age thought as he did, and did not disapprove of the violences and persecutions of which he so candidly exposes the history. Le Père Langlois, a Jesuit, has written, in French, a history of the crusades against the Albigeois. The Histoire Ecclésiastique of Fleury, and L’Histoire de la Province de Languedoc may be consulted with advantage.
[176] This crusade of the children is related by so great a number of contemporary authors, that we cannot entertain any doubt of it. We will refer to our Appendix the different versions of the ancient chronicles of this singular event.
[177] Vetus est hoc artificium Jesus Christi, quod ad suorum salutem fidelium diebus istis dignatus est innovare.—Epist. Innocent.