The Pope had actually recalled the Crusaders from the Holy Land to turn their arms against their own kindred. Heretics at home, he held, were more dangerous than infidels abroad. The war-intoxicated Defenders of the Faith needed no incitement. Their ruthless savagery has cast a shadow over the land to this day. This shadow hangs heavily over the scene of the worst atrocities of the war, and it was remarkable how the radiance so thrillingly pervasive in Provence failed to follow us into the richer country of Languedoc.
Count Raimon's persistent defence of his Albigensian subjects kept the war centred more or less within his dominions, of which Toulouse was the capital.
Here, in Languedoc, it was, above all, that the gracious life which we had learnt to associate with the troubadours was blotted out and quenched in a very sea of blood and suffering.
It is saddening, too, to think that one of those very singers in his later days became infected with the spirit of the Church, and ended as one of the most ferocious of the persecutors.
This renegade was Folquet of Marseilles, who loved Azalais, the wife of Count Barral of Marseilles. He was of a tenacious, zealous, gloomy temperament—not at all of the true troubadour spirit—and this characteristic afterwards shows itself in his ardour against the heretics.
"Too late," he laments, "I have discovered love's falsehood: I am like one who swears never to gamble again after he has lost his whole fortune." Azalais dies, and Folquet enters the monastery of Citeaux. And then he becomes Abbot of Toulouse in the heart of the Albigensian troubles. From that time forth he devotes himself to persecution.
ENTRANCE TOWERS, CARCASSONNE.
By E. M. Synge.