The intercourse of all classes of the population in Southern France was distinguished by every manifestation of courtesy. The degrees of precedence, the style of dress, the order of amusements, the arrangement of the banquet, were governed by established rules of etiquette.
Nor was this life by any means devoted to frivolous pursuits. The great hall of the castle was often the scene of debate between famous scholars and ecclesiastics. There, too, were performed the burlesque miracle-plays of the age. An expensive library was the pride of the count. The philosopher was frequently, the astrologer almost invariably, a member of his household. In the secret vaults of the laboratory, surrounded by crucibles and alembics, the adept sought for the secret of potable gold; from the summit of the keep the astronomer held nightly communion with the stars.
An inclination to dialectical controversy, inherited from their Greek ancestry; the subtle arguments of Arab metaphysicians and natural philosophers; commercial intercourse with the Orient, which familiarized them with the religious theories and principles of various heretical beliefs; and the corrupt and debauched lives of the clergy, which excited the universal abhorrence of all, predisposed the piously inclined to the acceptance of new forms of faith. Among the heterodox sects which arose in the early ages of Christianity, that of the Paulicians was the most numerous, the most popular, and the most enduring. Its tenets were partly borrowed from those of the Gnostics, but largely derived from the ancient Persian doctrine of the two antagonistic Principles of Good and Evil, ever contending for the mastery of the universe and the empire of mankind. The peculiar ideas of this Manichean sect had, from the first, awakened the apprehensions and called forth the anathemas of the Church. The mysticism which characterized them, the ascetic life which they inculcated, appealed powerfully to the superstitions and devout impulses which most strongly influence the human mind. From Armenia the belief of the Paulicians rapidly invaded every province of the Byzantine Empire, and then, following the lines of trade, made innumerable proselytes in Germany, Italy, Spain, and France. It gave rise to the Waldenses and the Albigenses, names of sad and ominous import in the religious annals of Europe. In no country were these false doctrines embraced with such enthusiasm as in Provence and Languedoc. Their adoption was not confined to the ignorant and the obscure, for many personages of the most exalted rank openly avowed their adherence to this dangerous heresy. Simplicity of creed and purity of manners distinguished the new sectaries from the subjects of the ancient hierarchy. They denied the real presence in the Eucharist; the value of baptism as a ceremony; the efficacy of absolution granted by a priest whose calling was not unfrequently dishonored by acts of the most glaring profligacy. Their ministers discarded the splendid vestments of the Roman Catholic priesthood for simple robes of black. They rejected the Old Testament, as inspired by the Spirit of Evil, because of the sanguinary deeds authorized by a superior power, which, by the extermination of populous communities, indicated irreconcilable enmity to the human race. Bells and images of every kind alike shared their animadversion. They advocated benevolence, abstinence, chastity, celibacy. In self-abnegation many of them exceeded the discipline of the most exacting of the monastic orders. They denounced as one of the most grievous offences against morality the practice of every form of lying and deceit. In their creed the sacerdotal office and the ceremonial of the Church were invested with no sanctity, and could confer no benefits, if not associated with honesty of purpose and purity of life. Their very existence was a protest against Papal infallibility and an assertion of the right of individual judgment. Their liberal opinions, their charity, the persuasive eloquence with which they promulgated their doctrines, obtained for them the respect of the nobility and the ardent devotion of the multitude. The name of the obnoxious sect was to every consistent member of the Catholic communion a term of peculiar infamy and reproach.
Throughout the region tainted with this heresy, which derived its name from the diocese of Albi, where its professors were most numerous, the authority of the Vatican was undermined or entirely destroyed. The habits of the clergy had prejudiced all classes against them. The churches were empty. Payment of tithes had ceased. Vassals subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction refused obedience and withheld their tribute. In certain districts it was unsafe for a priest to appear upon the highway. The public exhortations of friars, whose extraordinary influence was now for the first time disclosed, were interrupted by shouts of derision and flying missiles. At Toulouse, the centre of the Albigensian doctrines, a renegade prelate, usurping the functions of the Pope, convoked at intervals councils of heretic bishops. The recalcitrant sectaries possessed houses of worship, ecclesiastical residences, cemeteries. The piety or fears of the devout bestowed upon their clergy valuable estates and great sums in legacies. That portion of the community which did not accept the new belief—which probably equalled the rest in numbers, and certainly surpassed it in wealth and social importance, infected with the theories of Arabic philosophy—was thoroughly infidel. Against such rebels the thunders of the Vatican availed nothing. Apostolic admonitions were treated with ridicule. Interdicts had lost their power. Even the Papal legate was treated with scant courtesy. The missionary efforts of Dominic, whose fiery zeal now began to raise him to eminence, met with signal and ignominious failure. The Church—menaced at the same time by this serious defection, by rebellion in her own temporal dependencies, and by the aspiring genius of the youthful emperor, Frederick II.—was in great distress. At no time in her history had she been confronted with such powerful enemies or been exposed to more deadly perils. And yet this beautiful land, now under the ban of the Papal See, had scarcely a century before been regarded as one of the bulwarks of the Christian faith. It was at Clermont that the first Crusade was proclaimed by the Languedocian Bishop of Puy, as the representative of the Pope. A hundred thousand persons from Southern France followed Peter the Hermit to Palestine. The famous Order of Hospitallers was a Provençal institution. A large proportion of its Grand Masters were natives of Languedoc. The treasure contributed by its people to the prosecution of these chimerical expeditions of Rome was far from inconsiderable. Such a radical change had increased intelligence and the untrammelled exercise of reason wrought in the minds of the inhabitants of the most civilized country of Christian Europe.
The malignant genius of Innocent III. was, however, equal to the emergency. In spite of the fact that ecclesiastical corruption was principally responsible for the widespread revolt against Papal authority, the Count of Toulouse and his feudatories were, in exquisite irony, appointed the ministers of apostolic vengeance. The mandate was issued by the Vatican that the Provençal nobility should become the persecutors of their vassals and lay waste their own possessions with fire and sword. No family ties, no considerations of friendship or intimacy, no hereditary connections, were exempted from the operation of this atrocious decree. When it had failed, as it was certain to do, as a last decisive expedient, a bull was promulgated announcing a crusade against the infidels of France. Their lands and their lives were declared forfeited for the crime of heresy; all good Catholics were called to arms; and the property of the rebellious sectaries was promised as a reward to the faithful champions of the Holy See. Every resource of Papal ingenuity and power was invoked. From twelve hundred monasteries, bands of fanatics issued to preach the crusade in all the states of Christendom. Plenary indulgence was granted to the warrior who donned his armor in the cause of the Church. Excommunication and the withdrawal of ecclesiastical protection were denounced against any guilty of hesitation or lukewarmness. In addition to the general absolution authorized by the Pope, the Crusaders were during the continuance of this Holy War released from the payment of all pecuniary obligations contracted prior to their enlistment, a concession which was practically equivalent to the repudiation of their debts. The answer to the summons of the Vatican was ready and unanimous. Every absorbing passion and every ignoble impulse—love of fame, religious zeal, national prejudice, desire of novelty, insatiable cupidity, private malice—attracted the roving, the licentious, and the unprincipled to the standard of the Cross. At that time Europe swarmed with military adventurers, some of whom had served in Palestine, in the trains of eminent personages; others, the refuse of disbanded armies, were outlaws and criminals who subsisted by plunder and extortion. To men like these, the announcement of such an enterprise appeared a singular stroke of good fortune. Provence and Languedoc embraced the richest territory, of its dimensions, west of Constantinople. Its luxury and its opulence, its elegant civilization, the magnificence of its cities, the vast treasures of its warehouses, the beauty of its women, were well known to its envious and ambitious neighbors. It was also known that no adequate means of defence existed, and that the hands, which had in the midst of barbarism evoked these marvels, lacked both the power and the resolution to protect them. The frontier was exposed to the invader. No efficient military force could be assembled to successfully resist a hostile advance. The stern qualifications of a soldier were not to be obtained in the effeminate atmosphere of the Provençal court, devoted to dancing, poetry, and amorous indulgence. Physically as well as morally the soft and idle population of the South was not fitted to cope with hardy adventurers accustomed to arms from childhood, tried in a hundred battles, and exercised daily in the broils and contests inseparable from the society of a turbulent and lawless age.
No incentive was wanting to arouse the enthusiasm of every rank,—from the king to the villain, from the archbishop to the monk. The monarchy of France, whose feudal obligations nominally included the powerful states of the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, was, in fact, unable to enforce its mandates beyond the Loire. The sovereignty of that rich country, now abandoned to conquest, could not fail to immeasurably augment the power and consequence of the crown. Ecclesiastical avarice and revenge looked longingly upon the wealthy benefices usurped and administered by heretics, the prospect of enormous forfeitures, the certainty of a fearful retribution entailed by religious errors and impious defiance of the admonitions of the Pope. Hope of the unbridled indulgence of every brutal passion appealed to the baser and more selfish instincts of the rabble,—the beggars, the robbers, the soldiers of fortune. The popularity of the enterprise is shown by the numbers who assumed the cross. It is estimated that from three hundred thousand to half a million engaged in the war, of whom nearly a hundred thousand were fighting men who had seen military service. There was not a government in Europe at that time able to withstand the onslaught of such a force. Appalled by the frightful prospect of impending destruction, the Count of Toulouse consented to observe unconditionally the requirements of the Holy See, in the delusive hope of averting from his dominions the tempest which must involve all his subjects in one common ruin. His punishment was inflicted with every circumstance of public ignominy and personal degradation. His excommunication, long since pronounced for heretical opinions which he did not entertain, was not revoked. Summoned before an ecclesiastical council at Valence, he acknowledged his sins and promised future obedience. Stripped naked to the girdle, he was conducted, in the presence of a great multitude, to the front of the principal church, where he abjured his errors, and, his hands placed in those of the Legate, he swore allegiance to the Pope. He conveyed to the clergy, as security for his obligations, seven of the strongest castles in his dominions,—a fatal step, which rendered his downfall, hitherto scarcely doubtful, now a matter of absolute certainty. Then, a rope having been passed about his neck, he was dragged through the aisle to the altar, where he was scourged like the vilest criminal. His recantation was repeated, and absolution was finally pronounced under condition of implicit submission, and with the promise that he would assist in the prosecution of a war which involved the devastation of his country and the extermination of his subjects. These humiliating sacrifices, made with the implied understanding that future immunity would be granted his vassals in case they submitted to pontifical authority, proved unavailing. The clergy placed their own construction upon matters in which they were at once prosecutors and judges. Although the Count of Toulouse observed as far as possible the degrading conditions through whose performance he became reconciled to the Church, it was not the policy of Innocent to deal leniently with those who had disobeyed her canons, questioned her inspiration, or intercepted her revenues. Pretexts were easily found under which Raymond was accused of having violated his covenants. His castles were declared escheated to the Papacy. His actions were carefully observed, and it became evident that his presence with the Crusaders was enforced rather than voluntary. The great army which had assembled to vindicate the outraged majesty of the Vicar of Christ now clamored to be led to battle. Their irresistible numbers darkened the plains of Lyons and spread consternation among the peasantry, whose women they insulted and whose substance they consumed. The eminent prelates of the French hierarchy sanctioned by their presence and their example the most awful of outrages on human rights and intellectual liberty. The religious character of the enterprise was indicated by the predominance of the sacerdotal order; by the omnipresence of holy emblems,—crosiers, censers, banners, relics; by the mitre of the metropolitan; by the scallop-shell of the pilgrim; by the cowl and the knotted cord of the friar; by the tattered garb and emaciated form of the hermit. The clergy were headed by Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux, the Papal Legate. Four archbishops and ten bishops, in their official vestments, were conspicuous in the van. Monkish zealots, whose untaught eloquence had inflamed the worst passions of the ignorant populace of Europe, brandishing crucifix and sword, and calling for vengeance against the abhorred sectaries whom divine justice had delivered as a prey to the elect, foaming at the mouth, and uttering maledictions and inarticulate cries, rushed to and fro through the maddened and tumultuous throng. All wore the cross embroidered upon the breast, in contradistinction to the Crusaders of Palestine, who wore it upon the shoulder. In the train of the higher clergy were numerous priests and thousands of dependents and retainers. The Archdeacon of Paris, a distinguished member of the church militant, was present in the capacity of chief engineer. Despite his pacific calling, he proved himself, in the discharge of the seemingly incongruous duties of his new profession, one of the most talented soldiers of the age. The shrewd and politic Philip Augustus, while anxious to secure for the Crown of France the substantial benefits certain to result from the conquest and spoliation of the great feudatories of the South, yet unwilling to share the ignominy attaching to the undertaking, promoted it in secret, but refused to openly employ the resources of his kingdom in such a cause. The French nobility also, for the most part, held aloof; but the names of the Duke of Burgundy and the Counts of Nevers and St. Pol have come down to us as instruments of the apostolic wrath which extirpated the Albigensian heresy.
Of all the leaders, spiritual or secular, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, was the most zealous and distinguished. An English adventurer, of ancient and illustrious lineage, he had long followed the exciting career of a soldier of fortune, and had won a high reputation for courage and military capacity among the Christian warriors who contended with the infidel in the wars of the Holy Land. In his political and social relations, De Montfort was a man of exceptional probity, courtesy, and honor; but in matters that involved the maintenance of ecclesiastical supremacy, he was a monster of savage brutality, a remorseless persecutor, an incarnate fiend. His bravery, his fanaticism, and his talents for war early secured for him the admiration of the clergy, whose influence eventually raised him to the supreme command of the motley host which their exhortations had assembled. The infamy of the Albigensian crusade is inseparably associated with his name, which has descended to posterity as the synonym of all that is merciless, base, and treacherous in the history of religious persecution. Attendant upon their feudal lords were long retinues of vassals, resplendent in sumptuous armor and gaudy liveries, and the sturdy yeomanry, now beginning to assert their importance in the mailed armies of Europe. The promise of booty and glory, of pardon for past offences and of immunity for future crimes, had, as in former Crusades, drawn from every quarter the dregs of the city and the camp, the footpad and the outlaw, the merciless slaves of rapine, lust, and superstition. This mob was for the most part unarmed, but many were provided with scythes and other implements of husbandry, impotent against the armor of the knight, but amply sufficient for the destruction of those whom age, infirmity, or the disadvantages of sex rendered incapable of defence. Confident in their immense superiority in numbers, this fanatical and disorderly rabble swept like a tornado over the smiling and fertile territory of the Rhone. The authority of the Count of Toulouse, who, incapacitated from hostile action by his humiliating compact with the Pope, was forced to aid the invaders, had been assumed by his nephew, Raymond Roger. The latter, relying upon the strength of his principal cities, Béziers and Carcassonne, two of the best-fortified fortresses in Europe, awaited the approach of the enemy with the calm intrepidity born of the consciousness of right and the resolution of despair. While the Crusaders were pitching their camp, they were surprised by a sally of the besieged. Overwhelmed by numbers, the latter were driven back; the gateways, choked by the fugitives, permitted the ingress of the enemy, and almost in an instant the fate of the populous and thriving city of Béziers was decided. In the horrible butchery that ensued no quarter was shown. The old and the young, the strong and the weak, perished alike under the weapons of the infuriated assailants. Catholics obtained no immunity by reason of their belief, but fell by the side of their Albigensian neighbors. When the soldiers, in the heat of the massacre, demanded of the Papal Legate how they might distinguish the orthodox believer from the heretic, that pious monster replied, “Kill them all; God will know His own!” In the Roman Catholic cathedral seven thousand corpses were counted after the assault. Priests, clad in their sacred vestments, fell at the very foot of the altar. The population of the city had been greatly increased by the neighboring peasantry, who had sought protection behind its ramparts. Of all this multitude, not a single person escaped alive. The estimates of those thus devoted to slaughter are variously given by different writers at from twelve to sixty thousand. The city was pillaged and set on fire, and even the churches and monasteries belonging to the See of Rome disappeared in the indiscriminate destruction. The invading army, flushed with triumph, and not yet satiated with blood, next invested Carcassonne, whose fortifications, still stronger than those of Béziers, offered some hope of successful resistance. Its resources, however, were seriously impaired by the number of refugees who had fled thither for safety. In a few days the water gave out. Defective sanitary conditions, increased by great masses of human beings crowded together in a limited space, produced a pestilence. A surrender was agreed upon, by which the inhabitants were permitted to depart, leaving behind them all their effects. In consequence of these rigorous measures, the entire country was filled with starving beggars, many of whom, but a week before, had been living in affluence and luxury. The Viscount, Raymond Roger, whose safe-conduct had been perfidiously violated, was imprisoned and died suddenly, probably of poison.
The examples of Béziers and Carcassonne were not lost upon the terror-stricken people of Languedoc. Strongholds and villages submitted by the hundred without resistance; the garrisons of those castles which held out were massacred to a man; the lands of the heretic were parcelled out among the crusaders, under the suzerainty of that faithful and consistent servant of the Papacy, the Earl of Leicester. The establishment of the Inquisition, under the auspices of the Dominican order of friars, completed the ruin of the country, whose civilization had long been a shining beacon amidst the intellectual darkness of Christendom. The classic monuments which had escaped the violence of former ages were broken to pieces or defaced. The destruction of great cities, the dread of mysterious tribunals, whose victims, immured in filthy dungeons or devoted, in the name of religion, to awful tortures and a lingering death, never saw again the light of day, the insatiable rapacity of the clergy, the tyranny of alien masters, depopulated entire districts and turned the commerce upon which the prosperity of Southern France principally depended into foreign channels, where the property and person of the merchant could be reasonably secure. The beautiful and melodious language of the troubadours, the parent of the modern idioms of Latin derivation, which seemed about to be adopted by all the people of French extraction, was abandoned, and degraded to a patois which, much corrupted, is still spoken by the Gascon and Catalan peasantry. The gay diversions, the dances, the literary contests, the musical chants of the jongleur, the passionate and satirical verses of the poet, the banquets, the Courts of Love, the hunting parties, the tournaments, disappeared forever.
The Albigensian crusade is one of the darkest blots upon the religious history of Rome. It gave rise to the infamous maxim, then first officially promulgated by Papal authority, that no contract made with heretics was binding upon a member of the Roman Catholic faith. Then the civil power was for the first time employed in the systematic and unrelenting suppression of independent thought. Then was organized and set in motion the most gigantic and effective engine of persecution that the world has ever known. Then was perfected that grand and imposing fabric of government which, begun and improved by the genius of many successive pontiffs, rose to such a towering height during the administration of Innocent III.,—a system in whose policy the religious and the secular powers, while theoretically separate, were, in fact, closely co-ordinated and combined; which, while draining of its revenues every kingdom within its grasp, extolled beyond all virtues the merit of evangelical poverty; which, while discouraging philosophical studies, endeavored to secure a monopoly of learning, thus adding to the superiority attaching to a sacred character and profession the influence derived from mental attainments and unusual erudition; which fastened upon Europe an intolerable despotism, under which it was doomed to suffer for more than three hundred years, and which brought to the prosecution of its ambitious designs every device of intrigue and every method of intimidation, enforced by the infliction of punishments whose ingenious and merciless atrocity had been hitherto unknown to the political oppression of ancient or of mediæval times.
In this way was the absolute power of the Papal system consolidated by one of the greatest of the Supreme Pontiffs, through the extirpation of two grand civilizations which for more than a century had represented the intelligence, the culture, and the science of Christian Europe.