The Inquisition: A Political and Military Study of its Establishment

This book is rightfully yours for your unfailing help and encouragement. In dedicating it I do but make a payment on account.

It was begun during a term in the New York State Legislature, when I endured Prohibition lobbyists, and cast about for something which might serve as a historical precedent in the way of religio-political oppression on so vast a scale. I was not long before discovering that traditional Christianity had more to say for the Inquisitors than for the Prohibitionists, so that the parallel with Prohibition has been thrust into an epilogue.

My thanks are due to many mutual friends. Among them are M. Joseph Poux, Archiviste du Département de l’Aude; Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church, Carcassonne; Father Villemagne, Curé of Castelnau; Professor Joseph Anglade of the University of Toulouse; M. Galaberd, Archiviste and Librarian of the City of Toulouse, and M. Jules Chalande, also of Toulouse and of the Société Archéologique du Midi de la France. To the studious man, France is a sort of paradise, for the local scholars receive you with enthusiasm and lay themselves out to forward your work.

Our good friend Belloc, the Master of those who would celebrate the Middle Ages in the English tongue, besides his kindly preface, has been good enough to read the manuscript and make several helpful suggestions.

Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have[Pg iv] me frank with my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called Anglo-Catholic party in that communion.

Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past.

The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when the wholesome reaction began.

In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition.

Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and aristocratic institutions.

But the second defect was worse still. History may be scrappy and superficial and yet, on the whole, right; but if its whole orientation is warped by a wrong appreciation of the past, then, however detailed and full of research, it is worse than worthless; it is harmful and it had better not have been written at all.

These preliminary remarks apply to the history of Europe as a whole and especially to the history of Europe between the coarsening of the foundational Roman administrative system in the fifth century and the rise of modern culture in the seventeenth.

They do not apply to late local history. Late (post 1600) local history was thoroughly well done. The history of England itself, when it deals only with the England which sprang out of the completed Reformation[Pg vi] century (still more the local history of the United States) was detailed and exact. What is more important than exactitude in detail, it was consonant with the spirit of the thing described. The writers on either side of the Atlantic, but especially upon the American side, understood the material with which they were dealing. Here in England (where I write this Preface) the work on later history was also national and well done, though it suffered from no small defect in that the original Catholic England (which was like a foreign country to the writers in question) lingered on as a dwindling minority till at least 1715 and somewhat disturbed the picture; so that our modern English historians are never really at home until they get to the Hanoverian dynasty. Before that they have to deal with a remaining remnant of the vigorous Catholic spirit, and they are perplexed and bewildered by it, so that it vitiates their conclusions. That is why they cannot write of the later Stuarts, and especially of James II, with any proper sense of proportion. They cannot conceive how strong nor even how widespread was the support of the national dynasty, because that support was mixed up with the (to them and in our time) utterly alien Catholic idea.

I say that the main task of an historian writing in the English language is the shovelling away of rubbish; and this is particularly true of the rubbish which has accumulated over the record of the Dark and early Middle Ages (A.D. 500 to 1000; A.D. 1000 to 1500).

From the very beginning of the affair popular history was warped by the spirit of ridicule (Voltaire’s creation propagated in the English language by Voltaire’s pupil Gibbon) against the formation of Christendom and that tremendous story of definition upon definition, council upon council, from which emerged at last the full Christian creed. The decisive conflicts of Nicea, of Chalcedon, were made a silly jest, and generations of boys and young men were taught to think of the most profound questions ever settled by the human mind as verbal quips and incomprehensible puerilities.

Next the gradual transformation of our Catholic civilization from the majestic order of our pagan origin to the splendid spring of the twelfth century was represented with incredible insufficiency as the conquest of the[Pg vii] Occident by barbarian Germans, who, though barbarians, possessed I know not what fund of strength and virtue. Institutions which we now know to be of Roman origin were piously referred to these starved heaths of the Baltic and to the central European wilds. Their inhabitants were endowed with every good quality. Whatever we were proud of in our inheritance was referred to the blank savagery of outer lands at no matter what expense of tortured hypothesis or bold invention. This warping of truth was indulged in because the northern part of Europe stood (in the nineteenth century when this false “Teutonic” school had its greatest vogue) for a successful opposition to the rest of Christendom, and for a schism within the body of civilized men.

But the worst fault of all, worse even than the superficial folly of Gibbon’s tradition in our treatment of the great Christian foundation and worse than the Teutonic nonsense, was the misunderstanding of those four great centuries in which our race attained the summit of its happiness and stable culture—the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And of these, the greatest, the thirteenth, was in particular ignored.

Men did indeed (partly because it enabled them to “turn” the position of true history by concession to, partly from the unavoidable effect of, increasing historical knowledge) pay lip service in England, during the later part of the nineteenth century, to the greatness of the true Middle Ages. In his early period, Ruskin is a conspicuous example of a writer who, without in the least understanding what the Middle Ages were like, hating yet ignorant of the faith that was their very soul, could not remain blind to the vivid outward effect of their expression. Even Carlyle, far more ignorant than Ruskin and far more of a player to the gallery, could not altogether avoid the strong blast of reality which blew from those times.

But these concessions, these partial admissions, did but deepen the blindness of such historians and their readers towards the formation and the climax of our race; upon the Dark and the Middle Ages, history as written in the English language was warped beyond recognition.

Then came the reaction towards historical truth: it has[Pg viii] already far advanced and the book for which I have the honour here to write a Preface is a notable example of that progress.

“History” (said the great Michelet in a phrase which I am never tired of repeating) “should be a resurrection of the flesh.” What you need for true history is by no means an agreement with the philosophy of the time which you describe (you may be wholly opposed to that philosophy) but at least a full comprehension of it and an understanding that those who worked its human affairs were men fundamentally the same as ourselves. Humanity has not essentially differed from the beginning of recorded, or, indeed, of geological time. Man as man (the only thing which concerns history, or, indeed, the morals and philosophy of mankind) has been the same since first he appears fully developed upon the earth. But in the case of Western Europe during the Middle Ages the thing is far more intimate. We are dealing with men who are not only of our genus but of our very stock; wholly of our particular blood, our own fathers, our own family. What is more, in those ancestors we should take our greatest pride. For never did our race do better or more thoroughly, never was it more faithfully itself, than in the years between the First Crusade and the effects of the Black Death: 1100-1350. Those three long lifetimes were the very summit of the European story.

Now I say that to treat properly of this affair it is not indeed necessary to agree with the philosophy of those men—that is, with their religion. It is certainly not necessary to agree with the details of their action, as, for example, their lapses into cruelty on the one hand or their fierce sense of honour on the other. We may be baser, or more reasonable, or more gentle, or more lethargic than they, and yet remain true historians of them. But what one must have if one is to be an historian at all, and not a mere popular writer, repeating what the public of “the best sellers” wants to have told to it, is a knowledge of the spirit of our ancestors from within.

Now this can only be obtained in one fashion, to wit, by accurate, detailed, concrete record. Find out what happened and say it. Proportion is of course essential;[Pg ix] but to an honest man proportion will come of itself from a sufficient reading, and only a dishonest man will after a sufficient reading warp proportion and make a brief by picking out special points.

The trouble is that this period has been dealt with in the past without minute research. There has been plenty of pretence at such research, but most of it was charlatan.

Freeman’s huge volumes upon the Norman Conquest were long treated as a serious classic. He pretended to have read what he had not read. He pretended to have studied ground he had not studied. He wrote what he knew would sell because it was consonant with what was popular at the time. He attacked blindly the universal Catholic religion of the epoch he dealt with because he hated that religion. But scholarly he was not and did not attempt to be; yet scholarly he pretended to be, and upon supposed scholarship he based his false representation. I will give three examples.

He calls the Battle of Hastings “Senlac.” He found the term not where he pretends, in Ordericus Vitalis, but in Lingard, who was the first man to commit the error. Lingard was the great quarry from which Freeman’s generation of Dons dug out its history without ever acknowledging the source. “Senlac” could not possibly be a Saxon place-name, but Freeman understood so little about the time and was so ignorant of the genius of the language, that he took it for Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps he thought in some vague way he was restoring a “Teutonic” name; more “Teutonic” than Hastings itself!

To this religious motive of his there was undoubtedly added the motive of novelty and of showing off. What the ridge of Battle was originally called by the people of the place, before the Norman invasion, we cannot tell. It may have been “Sandleg” (which would be Sussex enough), or it may have been “Senhanger,” also sound Sussex, or it may have been something ending in the Celtic and Latin “lake.” But “Senlac” it most certainly could not have been; and that Freeman should have pretended to scholarship in a matter of that kind damns him.

The second point is far more striking and can be tested[Pg x] by anyone who visits the localities mentioned in the five principal contemporary authorities. He desires to reduce the numbers involved in the battle; partly from a silly prejudice against anything written by a monk, partly from a desire to belittle the actions of the early Middle Ages and the whole of its civilization, partly (mainly, perhaps) from a desire to be novel. He makes up the estimates out of his head, grossly reducing the forces actually engaged.

We have contemporary evidence which allows for more than 50,000 men upon Duke William’s side and something of the same sort upon Harold’s. The evidence not only of those who saw William’s host mustered and who must actually have handled the lists on the Norman side, such as the Duke’s secretary, William of Jumièges, but the evidence of topography also proves this. Pevensey, the harbour in which the great Norman fleet of 3,000 vessels moored, was a vast expanse of water comparable to Portsmouth to-day; you may still trace its limits accurately enough round the contour of the present marsh. The position held defensively at Hastings by Harold’s command is only just under a mile long and is one of the most clearly defined positions in Europe, absolutely unmistakable. Freeman, with no appreciation of military history, conceives this line of a mile (held by men closely interlocked and in dense formation capable of withstanding hurricanes of cavalry charges for nine hours) to have been held by a handful of men! It is the wildest nonsense, and yet it passed for a generation as history.

Lastly, as an example of bias and charlatanry combined, you have the confident statement that Pope Sylvester had given a Bull to Duke William in support of the invasion. Here Freeman has at least the grace not to give a sham reference in a footnote, for the thing is completely false. If Freeman had taken the trouble or had had the science to look up the Bullarium, or even the letters and documents of Sylvester in Migne, he might have been spared the contempt of all competent critics. As it is he preferred a legendary piece of nonsense in a piece of popular verse to exact history.

The motive through which Freeman invented this Bull was the motive of his place, time, and generation: hatred[Pg xi] of the Catholic Church, that is, against the religion of the people with whom he was dealing, and a desire to satisfy the animus of his Victorian readers against the Papacy.

In contrast to nonsense of this kind, haphazard, ill-evidenced and invented history, note the admirable description you will read in the following pages of the battle of Muret.

Here is a real knowledge of ground and, what is more important, a careful estimate of time and movement. I know nothing better in the reconstruction of a mediæval battle than this first-rate piecing together of evidence through common sense upon the flanking surprise movement executed by Simon de Montfort against Foix’s division of the enemy at Muret. It is an unbreakable chain of calculation, and at the same time a full explanation of what happened. This piece of work, in the fifth chapter of the volume here presented to the reader, is as good as anything can be of its kind, and an excellent representative of that new, modern, accurate work now ridding us of the loose stuff which encumbered history through the past two generations. That is the way to reconstruct a mediæval battle in the absence of detailed evidence, to see the movements as they actually took place.

I have laid emphasis on this particular section of the book by way of contrast to the insufficiency of so typical a name as Freeman’s. I ought rather, perhaps, to turn to the book as a whole and then again to certain other specific points of excellence which have struck me.

Mr. Nickerson’s study is mainly concerned with explaining the nature of the early Inquisition; incidentally he gives us a very clear view of the Albigensian War, and what is especially remarkable in the clarity of his view is the arrangement of the episodes. I note that the author has done what is of first importance in all military chronicling, and that is, the division of episodes not in equal measures of time but by their separate military characteristics.

It is a principle too often forgotten even by professional military historians. A war may take twenty years, or fifty, or one. It may, by accident, divide itself naturally into two or three episodes of fairly equal length in time or it may by coincidence fall into episodes corresponding[Pg xii] more or less with a successive series of years (e.g.,) Marlborough’s Campaigns in Flanders in the early eighteenth century. But much the greater part of military history is concerned with episodes which have no relation to such more or less equal time-chapters. The general rule is that three or four successive phases of a campaign (or battle) occupy the most disparate lengths of time. The proper way to treat military history is to give to the capital episodes their relative military importance; not, as in the case of a civilian chronicle, to weigh that importance by the time involved.

For instance, no one can read a clear account, however short, of the great European War without seeing it as a siege; it is therefore, like every siege (not raised, nor degenerated into a blockade) essentially divided into three episodes:—

(a) The preliminaries of containment, that is the war of movement prior to the establishment of siege conditions.

Now if we were to take the Great War in years—1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918 would appear. If we divide it into chapters of more or less equal lengths of time we have a confused, meaningless picture such as is given us by nearly all the popular histories as yet published of that great event. However much these accounts succeed in pleasing each its national audience they fail as histories because they think a month of war must be thirty times more important than a day and need thirty times as much telling. The moment we divide the Great War according to its military values the scheme falls into place and becomes clear. You have three divisions, of which you can make, if you like, three volumes or three chapters. The first is absurdly short in comparison with the length of the whole. It only seriously begins with the great shock of August 20, 21, 1914, in Lorraine and in Flanders, and it ends when the Germans went to earth less than a month later—on the Aisne. From that moment onward the war was a siege.

Next you get the second division, the completion of the siege lines in the West to the sea (which is over before[Pg xiii] the middle of November, two more months), and then the solid three and a half years of effort on the part of the besieged to break out in great sorties and on the part of the besiegers to break down the defence of the besieged.

In mere length of time this episode is prodigious and includes all the better known stories of the war. It lasts for over forty-four months and sees the collapse of Russia; the first sorties of the besieged Prussian alliance through Poland; the tremendous efforts made by the Allies to break the enemy’s siege-lines in Champagne, on the Somme, and in Flanders, on the Asiago plateau and on the terrible Carso Plateau in front of Trieste. It sees the failure of the attack on the siege wall at the postern of the Dardanelles, and even in remote Mesopotamia, as well as in the Balkans. It sees further great sorties, especially the violent struggles of the besieged at the end to get out of their net: Caporetto, St. Quentin, the Chemin des Dames. That second division ends on July 15, 1918, when the last effort of the besieged to get out was made against Gouraud and broken by him in front of Rheims. On July 18, 1918, three days later, the third division begins and lasts exactly four months to the Armistice on November 11. It is nothing but the successive breakdown of the defence, the crumbling of the siege wall and the collapse of the besieged.

See the Great War on these lines, and you see it clearly, as it was. Try to write of it by successive years, and you get nothing but a fog.

Now Mr. Nickerson has done exactly that right thing for the Albigensian War. He clearly divides the struggle into its military episodes; the first great rush; the long struggle of de Montfort; the curious but inevitable fruit of the whole business after de Montfort’s death in the lapse of the South to the crown of France, that is to the North.

In this connection one cannot praise too highly the simple and clear fashion in which the author has presented to the reader the real nature of mediæval warfare. There are two points to be established in which, I think, he has been permanently successful. First, in making the reader understand the narrow limits of time to which any effective work on a large scale by a powerful army[Pg xiv] was then confined. Secondly, the contrast between the feudal forces which were, as it were, normal to the times, and those supplementary mercenary forces, which, though they were not regarded by the time as normal, were the real backbone of all continuous military effort in the West. It is an idea which one might develop in many epochs of military history besides the Middle Ages. Over and over again a particular form of recruitment is regarded as normal and after use for some generations begins from causes inherent in itself to yield insufficient results; whereupon a supplementary form of recruitment, which for long continues to be regarded as exceptional, becomes, as the close observer may discover, the essential of the new fighting force, e.g., the Auxiliaries and the Legions after, say 180, and especially after 312.

It was one of the advantages of the English, by the way, in the later Middle Ages that the difficulty of transporting large feudal forces over the sea led to an early development of their mercenary forces and produced the highly trained professional bowmen who are the mark of the Hundred Years War.

Mr. Nickerson is also right in saying how considerable was the degree of military organization in the early thirteenth century.

Too often in military history anything earlier than the seventeenth century or the middle of the sixteenth is treated unscientifically by the writer, who seems to imagine that if he gets far enough back he can treat armies as herds moving about at random. The truth is of course that no great body of men ever so moved or could be moved without a high degree of organization, and that when you are dealing with the rapid movement of a very large body the organization must be nearly as detailed as it is to-day. There is a certain minimum of organization below which you cannot fall without breaking down, when it is a case of great bodies moving quickly; and that minimum is so high that it does not vary very much between the very first epochs of recorded history and the latest.

The next point I have to notice is Mr. Nickerson’s presentation both of the Inquisition as an idea and of the contrast between its methods and those of modern times. The task undertaken is the most difficult of any[Pg xv] that lies before the historian; yet it is also the most essential. The wrong way of dealing with the remote past when it presents acts or states of mind quite unfamiliar, and even repulsive to us, is to express horror or ridicule and leave it at that. Thus we have Mr. Davis in his typical Oxford textbook upon the Angevin period sneering at the massacre at Beziers as “pious butchery”; thus we have another typical Oxford textbook, Mr. Oman’s, dealing with an earlier period, sneering at the piety of Gildas; and thus we have yet another textbook—from Cambridge this time—in which the Regius Professor of History, Dr. Bury, sneers at a vision of St. Patrick’s as the result of a “pork supper.”

Now that way of writing history, which is, I am sorry to say, still the common way in our English Universities, is worthless. Your business in writing of the past is to make the past comprehensible. More: you ought, as I quoted at the beginning of this, to make it rise from the dead; and that you certainly cannot do if you are so little able to enter into its spirit that everything in it which differs from yourself appears small, repulsive, or absurd. Anyone, however ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that. The whole art of history consists in eliminating that shock of non-comprehension and in making the reader feel as the men of the past felt.

We have a very good example of the same difficulty in the case of travel-books. We all know how intolerably boring is a book of travel in which the writer can get no further than decrying or laughing at the foreigner, and we all know how the charm of a book of travel consists in its explaining to us, putting before us as a living and comprehensible thing, some civilization which at first sight seemed to us incomprehensible.

It is just the same with history. In the case of the Inquisition it is particularly difficult to make the modern reader understand the affair because all the terms have been, so to speak, transliterated; but I think we can arrive at a fairly satisfactory result if we translate the terms involved into things which the modern man is familiar with. Instead of physical torture, for instance,[Pg xvi] read cross-examination and public dishonour; instead of the sacrifice of all civic guarantees to the preponderant interest of united religion, read the similar sacrifice of all such guarantees to the preponderant interest of a united nation; instead of clerical officers using every means (or nearly every means) for the preservation of religious unity, read civil officers using every means for the preservation of national unity in time of peril. If you do that, I think the modern man can understand. Had you presented to the early thirteenth century the spectacle of the whole male population medically examined, registered, and forcibly drafted into a life where a chance error might be punished immediately by death or by some other terrible punishment; had you shown him men, doubtful in their loyalty to the nation, condemned to years of perpetual silence, secluded from their fellow beings after being made a spectacle of public dishonour in the Courts; had you even sketched for him our universal spy system whereby a strong modern central Government holds down all its subjects as no Government of antiquity, however tyrannical, ever held them down—could you have shown a man of the thirteenth century all this, he would have felt the same repulsion and horror which most modern men feel on reading of the Inquisition, its objects and its methods.

A man who should so explain our modern life to a man of the thirteenth century as to make it comprehensible to him (a difficult task!) in spite of his repulsion and horror at our cruelties, blasphemies, and tyrannies, would be a good historian. The converse also is true.

There are many special points in the book on the consideration of which I would delay did space allow. Thus my own knowledge of the time and place enables me to make certain suggestions. I see that the author inclines to the Cerdagne route for the march of Pedro of Aragon. I should do more than incline—I should be morally certain of it—at least on the evidence to our hand; and that in spite of Pedro’s presence at Lascuarre in August. If, which is very unlikely, further evidence comes forward, we may have to accept the Somport sallent or even the Val d’Aran, but the more I think of it, the more the latter seems to me out of the question. I know the steep and dangerous approaches upon[Pg xvii] either side, especially upon the Aragonese side. I consider the great difficulty of reaching them from the point of concentration at Lerida. The Cerdagne is the one really open road. It was the only easy pass of value then to large armies; as for the second pass, the Puymorens, into the valley of the Ariege, it is perfectly easy, a mere lift of land. I have crossed it a dozen times under all conditions of weather. Again I would find it most interesting to contrast the procedure even of the late Inquisition with contemporary civilian procedure, e.g., Torquemada’s procedure with Henry VII’s Judges in a treason trial. It is to the advantage of the former. Better still, a trial under Philip III and Cecil’s Judges in his carefully nursed Gunpowder plot.

But such detailed discussion of a hundred matters of history raised in this book would unduly prolong what is already too lengthy an introduction of a work to which the reader must be anxious to turn.

What was the society in which the Inquisition, that great attack upon human liberty, succeeded? To answer this, in the case of that other great attack of which we are the unhappy spectators, it would be necessary to estimate first the chief forces active in the world, and second their modification by local circumstance in America. A man, having done this, is able to get a just idea of Prohibition. He must get into the picture of the great nineteenth century expansion of civilization, and the fact that this expansion was, in great part, due to increased command over material nature through what we call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme importance attributed by our society to power over material things, in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies, and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are, grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos, and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.

What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar “Inquisition” movement?

First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself[Pg 2] in elaborately useless pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government, frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have the right to be anything but hopeful.

Although the twelfth century resembled the nineteenth in vastness of achievement, it differed from the nineteenth in the quality of that achievement, and in the nature of the forces which made it possible. Of course the vigour of human will is the prime mover in both cases. In the twelfth century men felt that their strength had been magnified not so much by new processes giving them an increased command over physical nature as by moral forces suddenly making them aware of unsuspected strength within themselves. I do not mean that the nineteenth century felt that it possessed no new elements of moral strength. It did. The ideas of the American and French Revolution thrilled it profoundly; to a lesser extent it was touched by a limited but nevertheless keen, new, sympathy with those very Middle Ages with which we are concerned. Nor do I mean that the Middle Ages enjoyed no greater power over material things than had been possessed by the simple and childlike Dark Ages immediately preceding them. I do say that in the twelfth[Pg 3] century, as compared with the nineteenth, the sense of new power over physical nature played a lesser, and the confidence in new powers within man’s own nature played a correspondingly greater, part.

Two causes brought about this greater importance of the moral as compared with the physical factors of power. First, the twelfth century successes were, in all outward and secular things, no more than the partial reconquest of the Roman order which, after a fashion, men still remembered. Whereas the nineteenth century, instead of partly restoring that which had been, and had then been lost, conquered nature and barbarism in regions where such conquest had never been attempted. Hence the twelfth century in the full flush of its achievement was less subject to pride and the illusions which wait upon pride. Second, the moral (and intellectual) life of the twelfth century revolved about a single many-sided institution, the Church, which affected all departments of human life.

It is the task of this chapter to set the stage for the events which follow. The reader must have a notion of the slack and sunken age of Gerbert (the great Pope of the year 1000), secondly the vigorous fighting age of Hildebrand and the great Norman chiefs, of the First Crusade and the Song of Roland, that is, the later eleventh century. Next he must grasp the twelfth century itself, Abelard, the teaching of the Roman law at Bologna, the enrichment and refinement of life, chivalry, “feminism,” and the continuing quarrel of the central and all-pervasive Church with the developing civil governments. Finally, towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the idea of nationality.

There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen strokes of the pen. The analysis must of necessity be slight. I shall try to make it just. Especially the influence of the Church must be grasped and also (a thing often missed in accounts of the time) the limitations of that influence.

Before entering upon such a task, I cannot refrain from warning my reader of the necessary limitations and imperfections of history.

The scantiness of record, the bias and the inherent imperfections of human testimony, the tendency of the striking and exceptional fact to get itself recorded and thereby destroy the average (to which I shall return in considering baronial and private wars and comparing them with our strikes); all these things make us see the past not outlined clearly but through a haze.

Finally, we must beware of trying to understand the past too well, when we cannot even understand the present. What evil spell is over the modern male to keep him in such ugly and often uncomfortable clothes? The pedants used to go about solemnly pretending to assay the most inward motives of the great of old time (who were better men than they, and could they come back to the sunlight to deal with these same pedants, would have soused and slimed them in the nearest duckpond for their prying impudence). They went on doing this, I say, until about the year 1905, when Chesterton asked them whether they themselves put flowers on a dead man’s grave in the belief that their dead could smell.[1] Since then they have been a little quieter.

And yet all this seems forgotten by most of the writers and practically all the readers of history. Never mind. When the wretched historians call on the name of “Science,” that modern Mumbo-jumbo idol before whom we are all expected to bow down, let us save our self-respect as honest men by thumbing our noses and wriggling our fingers at such silly superstitions. They are all of a piece with the venerable dotard of an idea that proclaims the Infallibility of the Press and makes people believe a thing “because they see it in print”—pah!

Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization (which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under a system of[Pg 5] taxation such as our own time would call socialistic. At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied, more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire, and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably into political office. The manner and stages of this decline (fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done) do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of degradation which was reached.

To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial weighing of evidence in matters of law.

For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of the principal towns of Roman Britain, the centre towards which the road system of the island converged. From early in the fifth to the opening years of the seventh century the place is not even mentioned in any document known: so that (in defiance of all probability) certain foolish scholars have been able to maintain that, in the interval, London did not even exist. Like London, Paris had been a capital, and to this day the blackened remains of its Roman palace that look down upon the comings and goings of the Latin Quarter in the “Boul’ Mich” are well out from the central “island of the city” on which the place began. The amphitheatre is even further away, behind the Pantheon, and anyone can appreciate how necessary it is that a place of public entertainment should not be too far out from the centre of things. And yet towards the end of the ninth century, when the Viking pirates besiege the place, only the little central island is held against them. Admitting fully that neither London nor Paris meant to Britain and Gaul what they mean to-day, still, I repeat, they were both very considerable towns, and it is entirely fair to use them as tests. The cities of Western Christendom had been “minished and brought low.”

Second, as to the loss of the power to build. That loss was well-nigh complete. Any history of architecture in England will parade before its reader the puny relics of Anglo-Saxon building. Paris has a few such things as the rude tower of St. Germain des Prés and a few doubtful stones in the low little church of St. Julien le Pauvre. In Italy, the “carnivorous” Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters, is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000. Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves of a building. Usually they could not even keep them from decay. Even repair was beyond them.

By what processes of law were civil disputes judged in these diminished cities in which architecture was growing ever ruder, feebler, and more squat? These men, our own ancestors, whose ancestors again had enjoyed the Roman law, decided between litigants by a series of tests or “ordeals” which are a catalogue of trivial stupidity. Merely to give the list will be enough to allow the reader to judge them. There was the “wager of battle,” which was not a duel on the point of honour, but a deliberate judicial test; plaintiff and defendant fought, and the victor won his case. Perhaps the greatest man of the Dark Ages, Charlemagne, is found striving against this custom. In his will he provides that disputes between his heirs as to titles to land are not to be so settled. And for it he substitutes a mild form of ordeal much in favour in settling titles to land, that of the cross. The disputants held out their arms horizontally, and he that endured the longest had the land! There was the ordeal by boiling water, red hot iron, or by fire, all three of which scalded or burned the guilty and spared the innocent. Sometimes lots were drawn, and sometimes the truth or falsity of a statement was tested by whether or not the taking of the consecrated eucharist harmed him who maintained the statement in question. Of course all[Pg 7] these tests were accompanied by religious ceremony, and were believed to be especially subject to the direct interposition of God. But the mental stature of those who maintained them:—

The mention of the direct interposition of God brings us naturally to the supernatural bias of the time. Here judgment is not so easy. It is possible to represent the replacement of the old positivism of the educated ancients (by supernaturalism and the transcendental formulas of the creeds) as part of the general decline. It is equally possible to represent it as the one leaven in an unsatisfactory lump. Certainly the divorce between the thought of the (largely positivist) educated class of our own day and that of the populace, now (as ever) full either of religious or political superstition and careless both of philosophic theory and scientific fact, this divorce, I say, is certainly evil. But in the Dark Ages popular superstition ran riot without qualification or corrective.

It is a commonplace that the officials of the Church retained a measure of organization and discipline when civil government was going to pieces, that the Church was the central institution of the time, and that most of its outstanding personalities were churchmen. What is not always seized is the extreme importance of the monastic institution. The monk scholars, whom the Church alone sheltered, could at least hand on the knowledge of the great books of the past, although when they wrote they could make only huge, dull commentaries on those same books.

How then did such a time get any business done at all? Economically, by raising the slave to a serf; politically, by an increase of local power.

With the decay of communications and police, the slave could simply run away and could not be brought back. Clearly, to get any work out of him at all, it must be made to his interest to stay. This was done by requiring of him only a fixed and comparatively small amount of his produce as dues for the land he tilled, and permitting him to enjoy the surplus which he could increase up to the limit of his power. This arrangement[Pg 8] “worked” after a fashion. In giving to the labourer more dignity and independence, it had an intimate (although apparently quite unconscious) connection with the Church’s doctrine of an equal worth of all souls in the sight of God.

Politically, the financial exhaustion of the central governments, and the slackening of communications, as the great Roman roads were not kept up, helped to throw more and more power and initiative upon local governors; until at last, instead of appointed officers they became almost local kings who could, and did, hand their offices to their sons as they could their property. This last capital change did not occur until midway in the ninth century, the second of three centuries of attacks from without which broke upon the degraded Roman society and almost destroyed it.

I have spoken of the society as degraded Roman because I believe that the entire weight of the evidence is against the idea of a conquest of civilization by rudely noble “Teutons” who then proceed to invigorate the decaying Roman system. The fact is that the coming of the little barbaric war bands, who were not “Teutonic” at all but of mixed bloods, was only a step, although an important step, in a long and gradual process of decay from within. No contemporary writer, except St. Jerome, seems to have seen anything particularly significant or striking in the event when the barbarian “Auxiliaries” (who for a hundred years had made up the chief part of the imperial armies) sacked the city of Rome itself. Such forces were the “Colonial troops” of the time who would occasionally run amuck in the course of their squabbles with other bands of auxiliaries, or with the impoverished government which had contracted to pay them. Throughout the greater part of the Empire, they seem never to have dreamed of an organized campaign against civilization although they indulged in occasional outbreaks of plundering and disorder. I have not space here in which to combat the vague notion of a sudden destruction and thereafter a distinctly “Teutonic” renewal. Let it suffice that not one single institution not common to all primitive folk, such as the council of warriors or of the elders of the tribe, appears. The tie of personal devotion and loyalty[Pg 9] to a chieftain, which they brought with them, belongs not only to every barbarian but also to every schoolboy.

Another line of reasoning which would tend to prove the gradual nature of the decline and the absence of definite break with the past would be to trace the considerable beginnings in the “lower” or later Empire, of the tendencies recognized as marking particularly the Dark Ages. Depopulation, building with the fragments of older and better work, in letters the replacement of any criticism of life by glamour and marvels, all these go back to the fourth and sometimes even to the third century. Nor does the list end here. The fourth century saw cavalry replace infantry as the main reliance of armies, and the third century already saw the wise man thought of more as a magician than a philosopher.

Upon this degraded Roman society fell the triple scourge of Mohammedan, Viking and Magyar. It is perhaps the best answer to the assertion that the “Teutons” had poured new life into Western Christendom to note that it barely weathered the storm. For most of these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb. All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for. They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By 900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle.

Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and[Pg 10] Magyar) the conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession, and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know that many of our public men think of government not as something to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help seeing that it was to his own immediate personal benefit to see that his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a free man.

These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of any sort of defence[Pg 11] and production. The men who established them (or rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds growing on a ruin.

This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king, continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory, and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage of their own needy little vassals to them.

There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors, kings, and nobles alike, to make of the officers of the Church the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to “invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a disintegrating tendency.

There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming principally from the monks and especially from the new order of Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement. Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared, sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year 1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.

The great Gerbert, Pope in the year 1000 under the name of Sylvester II, stands as a symbol. Great as an[Pg 12] intriguer, to us he is even greater as a scholar. He had studied mathematics and “al-gebra” (the word is Arabic) with the Arabs in Spain, and like every scholar worthy of the name he loved the classics. His mathematics made him feared as a wizard, and when writing to a friend in Italy for unchurchly, Latin books, we find him asking that they be “procured quietly,” promising that he will tell no one of the favour done him.

I have called Gerbert a symbol of his time. To call that time the “Dark Ages” is just to a degree that few of the stock epithets of our school are just. They were the morasses from which the Mediæval rise begins.

For, after the doubtful pause of which I have spoken, Europe arose. The Normans conquer England and Sicily, and set up systems of government and administration fit to be models for all the West. The Hildebrandine reforms free the Church from the feudal anarchy, and the Church in her new strength fills Christendom with a new sense of unity and common purpose. This common purpose hurls Europe against Asia, in the tidal wave of the First Crusade, which breaks down the barrier between East and West and begins a new day.

It is important to note how short was this Norman-Hildebrandine period, and how many-sided was its accomplishment.

At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus, if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it. Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it. The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century. Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great accomplishment falls into the little[Pg 13] space of years I have marked out. It is an astonishing time.

In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in “Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private, specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over, has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.

And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm, reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. The new Norman race was ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war, that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.[2] In military engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles, they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too. Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages had begun.

What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to feel it in their buildings and writings, but[Pg 14] the answers to such questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time, with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its

as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to their death.

Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to the lawman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.

In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned. They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a new time, the twelfth century.

I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but also the barrier between Europe and the East. But the expression of a tidal wave is incorrect in suggesting a levelling and destructive force. For what followed was the continuation and enlargement of what the Norman-Hildebrandine eleventh century had done, with greater riches,[Pg 15] complexity and refinement. There appear, also, new forces, but there is no conscious break with the immediate past.

In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great sense of the State.

So also building was continued, and the bases of design do not change, but the severity of the older work begins to be lost in encrusted masses of sculptured detail. Most of the carving strikes us as crude; a good deal of it is meant to be grotesque and much of the rest is grotesque—unintentionally. But there is vigour about it; and an effect of richness, through painstaking repetition of simple motifs. This richness of decorative sculpture links up naturally with the new social tendency to refinement in manners.

With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin.

This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the[Pg 16] corresponding change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father, now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God. What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and pretty things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life, so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the tremendous outpouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.

Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism. If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess has never lasted long.

The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes of men and women[Pg 17] worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,” practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the Gothic. All these things they did, not because of any rule or precept but spontaneously, for their own sake, as things that ought to be done.

While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century, out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in fact, free. The independent “villeins” of[Pg 18] “Aucassin and Nicolette” or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of to-day.

Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years ...” (as Belloc says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate, is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders, ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in substance, universities.

I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower) of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century.

So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads, buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and, like God, seeing that its works were[Pg 19] good. Its cities were growing fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests until their extent was reduced almost to what it is to-day.[3] No new process to spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping energy of its own vigorous will.

In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings, Christendom feels a great calamity.

The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.

While the pointed arch was beginning to be seen in building, the texts of Aristotle were coming in from Spain. Abelard’s time had known of Aristotle only his Logic. But now scholars might read in Latin (translated from the Arabic) the Physics, the Metaphysics, and Ethics. Thus, these men, with their keen and active minds, were suddenly face to face with one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, intellect of all mankind. Upon the crowds of students full of discussion and debate, believing confidently that they could build themselves a tower of logic that would reach heaven, the effect was electric. For such men to have for their study Aristotle’s enormous range of thought, to feel his[Pg 20] luminous common sense, was to give them more than their youth had dreamed, the discovery of a new world.

Meanwhile, behind the endless political squabbles, the vast idea of nationality could be seen just looming up, faint and dim, but enormous. It harked back to the dim, prehistoric forces that had wrought out the words “Gaul,” “Britain,” “Italy,” and “Spain.” Such words had never been represented by governments. They had stood always for ideas only. But in France, where ideas have power, a sort of underlying force in men’s minds was conjuring up, behind the king, the nation. This force acted through the Roman law which was illuminating the active intellect of the time, but the soul of it was a blind instinct.

This growing and vigorous time that had made and done so many new things, had forgotten what it was to feel a check, until, towards the end of the century, Saladin broke the Syrian Franks at Hattin, and took Jerusalem. The disaster did not seem hopeless. Christendom began forthwith to hum with preparation for a new crusade. Nevertheless, this first great experience of failure throws into high relief, as it were, the buoyancy of the time, and gives us, therefore, a point from which we may survey its accomplishment and seek to fix its spirit.

First of all, it is necessary to insist upon the straightforwardness, the downright directness of that spirit. It is true that the Courts of Love preached far-fetched doctrines, but they were a conscious revolt against grossness of manners, a sort of counter-excess. With this exception, the time nowhere attempted extravagance. The elaborate sculpture of its buildings is framed in structural lines that are firm and even severe. As yet the Gothic (which was to be the expression of the mediæval temper in its completeness and in its decline) gives only here and there a hint of its coming. Height is indeed attempted, but everywhere the general lines of the buildings remain square and solid. Wherever the architect has expressed his own thought in altering the inherited arrangement of the Roman column and arch, the change tends towards frankness and logic. Each part aims to express its function, whether structural or decorative, in relation to the whole. The classic forms begin[Pg 21] to be rationalized so as to be not a façade but living parts of the structure; the column begins to be wedded to the arch. As in architecture, so in the other arts and handicrafts. In general, clothes were cut on simple and serviceable lines without hint of theatricality or excess, either fitting close to the body, or falling in simple and graceful folds. Arms, and especially armour, remained light and simple. In the second half of the century the cylindrical pot-helm, completely covering the face, came in and took the place of the open conical helmet with its nose-guard. Already before the new fashion in helmets had come in, the mail shirt had had its sleeves lengthened to the wrist, and now mittens and separate leg coverings of mail were in use also. But the heavy body armour of plate that was to encumber the warriors of later centuries was unknown. The horse-equipment, too, was simple, made for use and not for parade. In all things the time observed simplicity and, as it were, a natural and effortless logic in the outline of that which it made.

The seeming contradiction between the simplicity everywhere aimed at by the men of the twelfth century and the confusion of their society was the natural and inevitable result of the conditions which limited their action. They, with their keenness of mind, could almost remember ancestors who had been half barbarians. The material with which they had to work was painfully scanty. It was not only that the time, with its fluidity and the swiftness and extent of its social changes, had as yet found no formula that might approach a definition of its inmost spirit. That difficulty was met a generation later in the mid-thirteenth century, with Aquinas, St. Louis, and the culmination of the Gothic. The underlying trouble was that, even at their best, the Middle Ages had no sufficient accumulation either of knowledge or of material resources. For want of ordered and detailed knowledge, the complexity of problems could not be grasped, and for want of resources the material disasters of the fourteenth century were to be fatal to the mediæval experiment. As yet, about the year 1200, synthesis and such near approach to perfection as is permitted to man were in process of attainment. There was no muddle-headed modern illusion of the necessary goodness of change under the name of “progress.” It[Pg 22] was because the new things that they had made were certainly good that men felt that they had reason to hope.

Our books over-emphasize the deficiencies of the Middle Ages as compared with ourselves. But it is true that they were unable to transform completely the unpromising material they had at hand.

Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus, in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity. Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day. Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea, more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes (often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole. But to[Pg 23] protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers, government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to give the commander some notion of the enemies’ position and movements.

One must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager spirit.

Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without regret.

This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use of Latin, made for understanding[Pg 24] and community of feeling between localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality” and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together. This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one of another.

We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in so many schoolbooks. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly. Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent—

Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability. But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have been.

The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham priest, covered with an ass’s false[Pg 25] head burlesqued the mass before the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay. So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia, religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross and some refined.

I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned. Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will be active. Accordingly we find the moral and intellectual forces opposed to the Church clearly defined.

In the great Investiture quarrel between the papacy and the secular governments from the Empire down, the faith and morals of the Church were not at stake. But, at the same time, the claims of her champions in her good effort to untangle herself from feudalism were so extravagant that they suggested a downright theocracy, actual government by the ministers of religion, which has always been hateful to men of our European stock. Further, the twelfth century man, in so much fighting against the infidel, had learned that his enemy was no such bad fellow after all. We find at least one ruler, Henry Plantagenet in the heat of his quarrel with Becket, crying out that he would rather turn Mohammedan than yield to the Church! And the outburst does not seem to have weakened his position. Evidently the world was moving[Pg 26] fast in his day. The noble, so far surpassing his fathers in riches, luxury, and refinement, often failed to see eye to eye with the churchman. The story of the time is full of despoilments of the Church and consequent excommunications. Now and then a commune, at the height of political struggle with its bishop, would physically maltreat him (or even kill him) and go off into a short spasm of blank irreligion.

Moreover, the Church had foes, or at least very lukewarm servitors, of her own household. We have seen that the student was usually still in minor orders. But now he was no longer shut up under strict control in a monastery, but free to wander at will. Under no constraint, and full of his classic learning with its glorification of every passion and appetite, he carelessly kicked clear over the monkish interpretation of the Christian ethic, and as often as not went wild altogether from any sort of check on his desires. John Addington Symonds has collected, and translated into English out of the original Latin, a number of these students’ songs, under the title of “Wine, Woman and Song.” They are often charming, but I cannot imagine literature better calculated to enrage a monk, or indeed anyone of a puritanic cast of mind.

Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about “the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of to-day.

Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders, Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is, in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” ... was ... “laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”[4]

Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation was strained.

Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for it a different, hostile body of doctrine.

In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine which has usually been called Albigensianism (inasmuch as one of its chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next chapter shall consider.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905.

[2] By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.

[3] “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New York, Geographical Review, September 1920: “In Central Europe the period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.”

[4] “... tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39.

I have chosen to call the district in question “Languedoc” because the literature which was the mark of its distinctive culture was written in the “langue d’Oc” (in contra-distinction to the North French langue d’Oïl which later became the master idiom), and because the actual fighting to be described in the fourth chapter took place within (or just outside) the territories later known as the Province of Languedoc under the French monarchy, until the old administrative divisions were wiped out by the Revolution. I have rejected the various more definite names given by recent historians to the heretical movement in question because the word “Albigenses” is in general usage, and because I believe that general usage ought not to be lightly disturbed by the preciosity of individual scholars careless of the bewilderment of the non-specialist reader.

First, then, of the general physical characteristics of the country with which we are concerned. The southern half of France is definitely bounded by great mountain chains. The Alps separate it from Italy, the Pyrenees from Spain. It is true that there is a little room for doubt in the Roussillon and around Nice where the Pyrenees and the Alps respectively approach the Mediterranean Sea, but, on the whole, the natural boundaries are quite clear, and modern France in establishing them has resumed the natural frontiers of ancient Gaul, one of those major divisions of Europe that go back beyond recorded history. This southern part of France, besides the mountains which limit it, contains within itself a lesser mountain mass central to itself, the Cévennes. It contains two principal river basins, on the east that of the Rhône, which flows almost due south to the Mediterranean, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Alps; on the west that of the Garonne,[Pg 29] which flows in a general direction north-west to the Atlantic, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees. It contains also a curved strip of coastal plain from the mouths of the Rhône west and south to the eastern Pyrenees, and between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees a region of moderate uplands, broken by a single notch, so low that the highest point of its watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean lies below the 200-metre line.

With the upper basin of the Rhône this study has little to do. The lower Rhône country enters into our story, although not as the main theatre in which its events took place. We are mainly concerned with the upper Garonne basin, the strip of Mediterranean coastal plain curving from the lower Rhône to the Pyrenees, the mountain slopes which border upon these two regions and the passage, or gap, of Carcassonne which connects them. For in that space (roughly of a hundred by a little over a hundred and fifty English miles) was decided the failure of the first attempt to break the moral unity of mediæval Christendom. And in that struggle the Inquisition for the first time definitely appears.

Even this small stretch of country presents great differences of climate and of appearance.

The landscape of the coastal plain between the Rhône and the Pyrenees is of the typical Mediterranean sort which hardly changes all around the inland sea. The sea itself is intensely blue and the boats upon it are rigged with slim lateen sails pointed like sharks’ fins. Within sight of the sea are mountains, great stark masses of rock like the bare bones of the world. No forests, but between the sea and the mountains extends a strip of land systematically cultivated down to its last square inch, showing everywhere the vine and the olive, and built up in terraces wherever there is a slope. This strip of land is always narrow—from the town of Beziers, for instance, both mountains and sea are full in sight. When rain falls it comes down fiercely as it does in America, unlike the gentle misty rains of England and Northern France. Usually the air is so clear that all outlines come out sharp and strong—one thinks of the trenchant Latin phrase and the fixed lines of classic columns. The sun is dazzling and powerful, and the roads are full of white[Pg 30] dust. The houses are of stone, flat topped or nearly so, and generally roofed in red tile.

The people, as befits the heirs of an immemorial and still vigorous civilization, are loud-voiced, vivacious in gesture, ceremonious in compliment, and both easy and dignified in repose.

Westward from Narbonne, a sharply defined valley, deep and regular like a vast trench, seems to open a path toward the Atlantic. A man going east or west is held to this valley; to leave it is to be caught in the deep irregular gorges of the Montagne Noire (which is the southernmost outlier of the Cévennes) to the north of the valley, or in the equally hopeless gorges of the Corbières (which are the north-eastern outliers of the Pyrenees) to the south of it.

This valley culminates in what may be called the gap of Carcassonne, for in the neighbourhood of that town it is deepest and most clearly marked, although the actual water parting between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is somewhat to the west.

The Montagne Noire, the northern limit of the gap, is well named, for it is all of dark slatey rock. The Corbières, on the contrary, are of white limestone, and a man standing a little way above the valley floor can see behind them the snow peaks of the high Pyrenees.

To the west of Carcassonne the hills are lower but the gap continues none the less, with Montreal and Fanjeaux, each on an outstanding buttress of hill, for sentinels upon its southern side. Of these two Montreal stands out against the horizon as one looks west from Carcassonne, and in turn hides Carcassonne as one looks east from the height of Fanjeaux. West from Fanjeaux the hills become mere downs, and the landscape quite loses its Mediterranean look and becomes that of the Toulousain.

About Carcassonne itself the landscape is of an intermediate sort between the Mediterranean and the Toulousain. Between the bare hills one still sees the olive, but more rarely than on the Mediterranean side, and (as in the Toulousain) grain fields begin to alternate with the vine.

The Toulousain, although it is altogether of the south, is a different sort of country from the Mediterranean[Pg 31] slope. In the first place it is not a mere strip of land between sea and mountains, but a broad, fan-shaped arrangement of valleys running together in the general neighbourhood of Toulouse, and separated only by ridges or downs regular in outline and no great height. As on the Mediterranean side the ground is minutely and intensely cultivated; still one sees more trees and shrubs growing freely, although by no means as many as in Northern and Central France. The type of cultivation, too, is different. One no longer sees the olive, and the vineyards are outnumbered by grain fields. Furthermore, it is not the valleys alone that are cultivated, the flat or gently rolling summits of the downs are worked as well.

Although the people are the same, their houses are different from those of the Mediterranean in that their material is brick. Indeed, one sees no masses of rock in the Toulousain, and the bits of stone in the larger buildings are brought from outside the district.

In spite of these physical differences in their country, the men of the three regions have a distinctive character of their own. The north Frenchman will tell you that they are noisy and boastful, fond of jewellery and all sorts of display, better suited to politics than to soldiering. And yet both Joffre and Foch are from the Pyrenees. Certainly the Southern Frenchman’s skin is darker and his speech is not quite the same as that of the Northerner; it is nearer to the old Latin speech in that Gascon and Provençal alike have followed the Italians and Spaniards in keeping the grand broad vowels that make the southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. In the early Middle Ages this tongue of theirs, the langue d’oc, was spoken as far north as Geneva on the east and Poitou on the west (the first troubadour that we know was Count of Poitiers, not far from the central Loire), but the royal province afterwards called Languedoc was much smaller, and included, roughly, only the land already marked off as the theatre of the Albigensian war.

Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and intense local[Pg 32] patriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing. The schoolboy remembers how throughout the Commentaries there is continually talk of calling drafts for the cavalry from “Tolosa et Narbone.” This country came to be called “The Province,” par excellence; the name survives in the modern word “Provence.”

Incidentally it is interesting to note that “Provincia” was not confined to the Mediterranean lands. Scarcely had the Romans occupied these than they went forward, over the gap of Carcassonne, the saddle between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees, where the railway and the canal go to-day. They took the upper Garonne country, then as now centreing about Toulouse as its chief town, and connected it for administration with the Mediterranean coastal plain from the Rhône to the Pyrenees.

This arrangement, after enduring for five hundred years under the Romans, reappears in the Dark Ages under the Counts of Toulouse, and, first under them and later under the Kings of France, lasts for eight hundred years more. It is astonishing to see how closely the Roman administrative division called “Narbonensis Prima” of B.C. 100 corresponds with the province of Languedoc of the French monarchy of A.D. 1790.

Everywhere she went Rome stamped upon the land its permanent form. But nowhere, outside of Italy itself, does she seem to have “Romanized” more thoroughly than in “Provincia.” To this day, “The valley banks of the Rhône ... have still a greater mass of imperial remains than the city [of Rome] itself,”[5] and the churches of Toulouse show the round arch and the small Roman bricks.

When the Empire became Christian, Toulouse still grouped itself, as it does to this day, around its municipal building, the “Capitol.” That building and the “Place du Capitole” continued central in the town. The churches of Toulouse are fitted in like after-thoughts[Pg 33] in the town plan. They do not dominate everything as do the cathedrals of the old towns of Northern France, as Notre Dame must have dominated mediæval Paris. This difference in town-planning[6] seems to be accompanied by a greater measure of continuity in municipal institutions: mediæval Toulouse called her chief magistrates “consules.”

In the decline, when the Roman auxiliaries were fighting their aimless civil wars (much as if the “colonial troops” of to-day were to become dominant in armies and go about setting up their Europeanized leaders as chief executives), Toulouse was for a time the capital of one of their shifting sovereignties, that of the Visigoths, whose power, at its greatest, extended from the Loire and the Alps clear down to Gibraltar. After a few years, another little group of auxiliaries, the Franks, defeated the Visigoths, drove them out of south-western Gaul clear down to the Pyrenees, and took Toulouse. But although the Frankish chiefs would now and then raid Spain itself for plunder, they never cleared the Goths out of the coastal plain from the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees. So matters stood when the first of the three great scourges of the Dark Ages, the Mohammedan Saracens, fell upon Europe.

In their first rush north from Spain, the Mohammedans swept the Mediterranean coastal plain. Narbonne resisted them, and saw its people duly massacred, but some of the cities seemed to have surrendered (as many of the Spanish towns had done) on condition that their laws[Pg 34] should be respected. The “Visigothic” State was a flimsy affair. That part of Gaul which submitted to the Saracens corresponded almost exactly to that which the Goths had held. Carcassonne, Beziers, Agde, Maguelonne, Lodève, and Nismes had Mohammedan garrisons. East of the Rhône they went beyond the Gothic boundaries, and for three or four years, with the support of local rebels, held Arles and Avignon.

Toulouse they never could take. Once they raided up the Rhône and Saône and burned Autun, but with Toulouse in Christian hands they could never hope to do much with the central Rhône valley. It was the successful defence of Toulouse, quite as much as the victory of Charles Martel, that checked their greatest effort in the familiar year 732. Coming over the west central Pyrenees, they turned north-east to attack Toulouse, compelled (like Wellington in 1814) to deal with such a centre of population and communications in order to secure their right flank for a move northward. So that when Toulouse held out, their stroke which took Bordeaux and failed against Charles Martel near Poitiers, was no longer a regular campaign, but merely a plundering raid on a great scale.

It is worth insisting on the resistance of Toulouse to the Mohammedan invasions in order to emphasize the importance of the town. But although the infidel could not take Toulouse, he held Narbonne, eighty miles away, for forty years. He was in Saragossa for just over four hundred years until 1119, and Saragossa, the great town and road centre south of the Pyrenees (corresponding to Toulouse to the north of them), is only 250 miles from Toulouse as the crow flies. Sometimes, from either city, the crest of the mountain chain can be seen. The two faced one another, Toulouse as the untaken pivot of the Christian defence, Saragossa as the bastion of the long, but finally unsuccessful, defence of Islam. For about the same length of time as that which separates Americans of 1920 from the death of Christopher Columbus, Saragossa stood for Asia in the face of Christian Europe.

Naturally, Languedoc felt the Moslem influence in every sort of way. The other two foes of the Dark Ages, the Viking and the Magyar, appear and ravage the[Pg 35] country but leave no trace except ruins. Alone of the three the Mohammedan remained long close by, and he differed from the other two in that he knew that cities were meant to live in, as well as to burn, and in that he had ideas of a sort of his own. It was too much trouble to keep fighting him all the time, and, in the intervals of peace, his ideas sifted in through the intercourse, north and south, over the border. In his train, as it were, came also the Jew; already, in the early eighth century, an archbishop of Lyons was troubled by the “aggressive prosperity” of Jews in Southern Gaul.

In vain we ask ourselves how much all this fighting and plundering left standing of the institutions of the country, and how far it destroyed them. Later we find the cities governed by elected magistrates under the name of “consuls,” while similar magistrates in the French towns outside of Languedoc go by other titles. At first blush this seems to suggest that the Roman municipal organization had been kept up. But whether or not this is true, we cannot tell. The weighty opinion of Brutails is against the idea of continuity. He makes the point that in Roussillon no title deed reposing on any right of ownership before the Mohammedan invasion has come down to us. He reminds us that Charlemagne’s father and grandfather when driving out the Saracen pillaged the country quite as heartily as any misbeliever. Still, the Roussillon of which he writes was the last foothold of the Saracen in Gaul, whereas Toulouse, as we have seen, was never theirs. Therefore the question remains doubtful.

The sudden eleventh century rise out of the sleepy Dark Ages into the true Middle Ages shows us the Counts of Toulouse among the greatest lords in Europe. The office had become hereditary around the middle of the ninth century, about the same time as did so many of the imperial offices. Count Raymond IV, sixth in descent from the first Count who had handed down Toulouse to his son, was the richest of the chiefs that took the Cross for the First Crusade. Already, between the “Provençal” southerners and the North French who were still called simply “French,” there was bad feeling, at least on the part of the latter. A “French” chronicler seems to lump Burgundians, Auvergnats,[Pg 36] Gascons, and “Goths” (that is, men from the Rhône-Pyrenees coast plain) all together under the name of “Provençals,” and says that they excelled in nosing out foodstuffs, and were accordingly very useful in times of famine, but had little stomach for fighting. The antagonism is significant. Whether it was justified or not is another matter; the accusation of cowardice does not clearly appear in the records of the fighting, and does not seem to have affected Raymond’s position. One fancies that, in such an age, his riches would not have kept him among the half-dozen leaders of the Crusade had his eleventh century Provençals been really notorious cowards. Certainly the North Frenchman’s prejudice against the “meridional” as a soldier remains to this day.

Even before the Counts of Toulouse appear as one of the richest families in Europe, we can trace the beginning of the troubadour poetry. It is probably the most distinctive contribution by the lands, now Southern France, to the world’s history. The word troubadour to-day means a poet of lyric love.

The twelfth century was its golden age, although we can just hear its notes beginning in the eleventh, and dying away in the thirteenth.

The language of the troubadour poetry was the “langue d’oc” (as opposed to the North French “langue d’oïl” or “langue d’oui”). It was spoken over a stretch of country far more extensive than was later the province of Languedoc. Thus there were troubadours in the central mountain mass of Auvergne and in the broad Atlantic coastal plain from the Pyrenees up to the Loire. Nevertheless, Toulouse remained its centre.

The first thing that strikes its readers is the familiarity of many of its rhythms. The Greek and Latin classic rhythms have to be learnt. The “Song of Roland,” with all its power, strikes uncouthly on the modern ear. But the troubadour poetry, after seven centuries, sings itself as if it had been written yesterday, in such stanzas as this of Bernard de Ventadour:—

Notwithstanding English blank verse from the sixteenth century on, and notwithstanding the pathetic efforts of our contemporary crew of “free versifiers” feeling ignorantly back to unrhymed rhythms such as the ancients knew, notwithstanding these, I say that Provençal stanza, with its rhyme and regular accents, still represents exactly the sort of lyric rhythm we use. As far as verse form goes, the troubadours were beyond all question the first of the modern poets, in the easy skill and variety of their measures, some simple, some as intricate as any verse ever written. Dante revered them second only to Virgil.

What is most important to us is the picture they give of their society. First of all they represent the chief end of man to be the worship of woman. We have seen in the last chapter that feminism in religion, i.e., the cult of the Virgin, was one of the twelfth century master-passions. In Italy, towards the end of the thirteenth century, poets intertwined love with philosophy, somewhat as the Platonists had before them. The troubadours concerned themselves not at all with philosophy and little with religion. Here and there they bring in religion as a sauce to flavour more piquantly their love for their lady, very much in the manner of our modern decadents. Thus the poet may protest that he loves his lady “more than God loves Our Lady of Puy de Dôme.” Incidentally, the devotion of the poets is almost always for someone else’s wife.

The essential thing about all this “courteous love” is that it is unmistakably the most cultivated and civilized thing that had been since Rome had fallen asleep.

Furthermore, the appearance of the troubadour poetry in Southern Gaul is still another fact proving that the Dark Ages were not a murder but a sleep. The foolish historians of the last generation who attributed the vigour and the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages to an infusion of “Teutonic” blood, got a hard knock when Belloc[7] noted that after the Dark Ages a comparatively high civilization expressing itself in poetry full of the “romantic” idealization of woman arose in precisely one[Pg 38] of the districts least affected by the handfuls of barbarian auxiliary troops of the fifth and sixth century. The soul of Europe was not moulded anew by the barbarians of the northern forests. That soul fell asleep, as it were, from weariness, and then having slept, it awoke and sang.

The courtly fashion set by the troubadours overspread Christendom. Indeed, it became a characteristic of the later twelfth century, as we saw in the last chapter. Treitschke has a lively passage on the “chivalrous, polished” time of the Hohenstaufen in Germany, “the age of gallantry and the Minnesingers, quite distinctly feminine in its universal attempt to adorn itself with womanly graces,”[8] in contrast to the harsher time which had preceded it. But the fact that the new fashion so quickly became European must not blind us to the fact that it began in Languedoc. The troubadour poetry is already fully developed in William Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, who was born in 1071. The first Hohenstaufen king did not reign over Germany until 1138, and it was Count William’s granddaughter Eleanor, Queen to Henry II, who first brought the cultivation of Provence to England about the middle of the twelfth century.

Even in the troubadours, however, the near savagery of the Dark Ages had been merely overlaid and not destroyed. Vivid memories of a time at once feeble and gross swelled up in them sometimes. One poet, that Sordello whose name Dante and Browning have combined to keep alive, when singing the death of a brave knight, amiably suggests that a long list of coward princes would do well to eat of the dead man’s heart to better their courage! The idea was familiar to our Red Indians.

Unfortunately, as events were to prove, their society which still kept something of the underlying spirit of the savage, was losing the spirit of the soldier. The statement needs qualification, especially in the case of one of the greatest troubadours, Bertran de Born, who was never happy without a fight unless he was rhyming about[Pg 39] one. But, although a striking exception he was only an exception. Even if none of the troubadour poetry had survived, we could perhaps prove that the “Provençal” was less warlike than the North Frenchman, or even than most Christians of the time, by the fact that local wars had to be fought with a larger proportion of mercenaries than was the case elsewhere; so large indeed that their roving bands became a serious “social problem,” as we shall see. Even if we assume that the high proportion of mercenaries was due to the wealth of Languedoc, still it is hard for us to imagine any twelfth-century hero of song or story, outside of Provence, who would lose himself so deeply in day dreams of his beloved as to be captured by his enemies, like Aucassin in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” without so much as striking a blow in his own defence.

The evidences of the wealth and refinement of this cultivated and unwarlike society are not confined to the written records of chroniclers and poets. Their buildings prove the same thing. For combined breadth of composition and elegance of detail the porches of such churches as St. Trophimus at Arles or the great church at St. Gilles, are equalled by nothing in the Romanesque. Often their detail is exactly that of the antique world to which they looked back over the intervening lowlands of the Dark Ages.

Further, we have seen that the society for which the troubadours sang was close to the Moslem, and was moved by currents Asiatic in their origin both Moslem and Jew. Moslem coins circulated freely there. The fact is proved beyond reams of learned stuff by such unconscious evidence as that of one troubadour’s simile:—

The poet does not think it necessary to stop and explain that a marabotin was a Moorish penny, and being unconscious his testimony cannot be challenged. Of the Universities, while Bologna studied law and Paris theology, Languedoc in her greatest University, that of Montpellier, studied medicine. This fact again proves her intercourse with the “Paynim,” for it is a commonplace that the Arabs of Spain were the great physicians[Pg 40] of the Middle Ages. Saracen slaves, and negroes brought from Africa by Saracens to be slaves, continued to be held there centuries after slavery was extinct everywhere else in Christendom. As for the Jews, they were so many and so prominent that some chroniclers called Languedoc “Judea secunda.”

In such a society, it would have been strange if the different forces which worked against the Church had not been active. No word remains to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:—

“In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There go old priests, and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before altars, and in old crypts, and are clothed with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags, who are naked and footbare, and sore, who die of hunger and want and misery. These go to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do. But to Hell I am willing to go; for to Hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who die in tourneys and in glorious wars, and good men-at-arms and the well born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair courteous ladies which have two or three friends besides their lords also thereto. And the gold, and the silver go there, and the ermines and sables; and there go the harpers, and jongleurs, and the kings of the world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, with me.”[9]

It is clear that the idea of “Heaven for climate and Hell for company” is not new. Nietzsche himself has nowhere put it better. And it is perhaps significant that of all that glittering company of servants of the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, first of all come churchmen—the “fine scholars.”

Of course, all this sort of thing is not heresy. Logically it might just as well have ended in mere negation. These volatile southerners with their envy of the riches of the Church and their contempt, too often well deserved, for her ministers—so that instead of saying like most Christians “Rather than do so and so I would be a Jew,” they said, “I would rather be a priest”—might have gone on their way without troubling themselves about things not of this world. Nevertheless, they lived in an age which hardly took Nature and her secrets seriously, so absorbed were its thinkers in the nature of God and man and their relation to each other. The other world of the supernatural was as real and vivid to them as, in a different way, it was to the New England Puritans. Irrespective of their own temper, the currents of their time carried them away from secularism and mere denial.

Like practically all keen and vivid times, the twelfth century was full of religious debate. Among the learned the discussion turned largely upon philosophy. The speculative and transcendental doctrines of the Church might be called in question. In this way heresy, that is religious error among those who claimed to be Christians, might arise from intellectual speculation upon intellectual and philosophic themes. Thus the early Church, in the high Imperial time before the Dark Ages, thought of heresy first of all as erroneous speculation. But theology and morals are not and can never be really separate. The very idea of their possible separation could not have arisen except in an age so bent upon “observing” as to be contemptuous of reason. Theology and morals being merely mutually indispensable different sides of religion, it therefore follows that speculative heretics tended to become moral heretics. Now, in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, the scholars were always in minor orders. At least outside of Italy, learned heretics were rare. Therefore a good deal of speculative heresy and near-heresy could, and did, exist without doing much harm to the Church as an institution. A scholar who fell foul of authority with regard to some article of faith was punished of course, but his punishment was merely a matter of internal Church discipline about which the “general public” usually knew or cared very little.

It was very different when a dissenter, instead of confining himself to philosophy, went further and took the logical next step of “stirring up the people” by attacking not only the doctrine of the Church but also the moral conduct of her officials. To-day when a man attacks the idea of property as such, we smile. But when he attacks the excessive inequality of its distribution, that is more serious, because, however false some of his conclusions may be, a part of his major premise is undeniably true. Just so, in the twelfth century, the Church realized that her wealth laid her open to envy, and the evil conduct of many of her ministers was a scandal. Her own true leaders, those who were the most zealous for her honour, spent much of their energy in trying to bring about a wider distribution of morals within the ranks of her own clergy, just as to-day those who believe in the idea of private property would do well to work for a wider distribution of that. Accordingly heresy in the Middle Ages, although necessarily arising, like all heresy, in speculation, based its propaganda upon moral protest.

The tireless Lea has made a long list of preachers who went up and down crying against the wealth and vices of the clergy. Sometimes they opposed a crude abuse of Christian symbols as tending towards idolatry. Sometimes they taught that the sacraments had no virtue when administered by a priest unshriven from mortal sin. This idea, however strongly it might appeal to natural feeling, was utterly anarchic. For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse of established Churches. The early twelfth century shouters began by playing lone hands, like our own Billy Sunday and his tribe. Their stormy careers left little definite trace. At most they set in motion a general criticism of the wealth and pride of the Church in comparison with the poverty of her founder and of the humility which she taught.

After a while these sporadic reformers, each setting up his own little whirlpool or eddy, began to be merged into distinguishable currents each flowing in a definite direction. In the third decade of the century we begin to hear of “Waldenses,” members of a religious body so called after its founder Waldo, a rich but unlearned merchant of Lyons. The Waldenses began in reform and ended in heresy. They are heard of principally in Languedoc, in North-Eastern Spain, and in Lombardy. They were loosely organized, consequently their teaching varied; but, in general, they prized the letter of the Gospel and minimized the distinction between clergy and laity. They translated the Scriptures into the vernacular, read them zealously, and applied rigorously their commandments against lying or oaths of any sort whatsoever. To forbid even “white” lies is certainly harmless enough, although if pushed to an extreme it partakes of the character of impossibilism and eccentricity which the Catholic Church has always avoided. But, in a society knit together by the feudal oath of allegiance, to say that a Christian man ought not to take any sort of oath smelled of nihilism and anarchy. So too, the Waldensian enlargement of the functions of the laity. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that even in those times it might have been wise to enlarge the part to be played by laymen in the work of Christian teaching, still nothing but harmful irregularities could be expected from the Waldensian idea that “any good man” might perform the Sacraments. For instance, take their practice of confession to a layman. Personal and private confessions give to the one who hears them great power for good or evil in families and communities. If his secrecy cannot be guaranteed by the strongest possible means we must admit (whatever our view of confession in general) that the thing would be dangerous. Further, the Waldenses seem to have gone beyond even the Quakers, in that they had their doubts as to the moral right of judges to punish. Nevertheless, Waldensianism had considerable momentum.

At first they insisted vehemently that they were good Catholics, and came not to destroy but to fulfil. After being forbidden to preach by the Archbishop of Lyons, they appealed boldly to the Lateran Council of 1179.[Pg 44] When that Council forbade them to preach without permission from the local bishop the turning point came. Waldo, their leader, preferred his own private judgment to obedience to constituted authority, and refused to abide by the Council’s decision. In a phrase that many have since used he said that he preferred to obey God rather than man.

Still they were slow to break completely with the Church. Not until 1184, five years after the Council, were they definitely excommunicated by the Pope, Lucius III. This was done at the Council of Verona, an assembly of which we shall hear again. Even then, a distinction was sometimes made between them and more pestilent forms of heresy. The fact that, as late as 1218 in the ninth year of the Albigensian crusade, a sort of Waldensian Council including delegates from north and west of the Alps could meet in Bergamo may possibly stand as evidence of an easy-going attitude of the authorities toward them. To-day, the Protestant remembers affectionately that their Provençal translation of the Scriptures, or at least of the New Testament, was the first rendering of the Bible into the vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and the most that a militant Roman Catholic can find to say of their system is that it was a “vapid degradation of religion.”[10] Now “vapid degradations” do not produce great wars like the Albigensian crusade or great systems of persecution like the Inquisition established after that crusade. For my own part I am convinced that, had the Waldenses been the only heretical body in the field, there would have been no crusade against heresy and perhaps no Inquisition.

The movement which called out such resistance from those who repeated the ancient creed of Europe was of a different sort. On its negative side it echoed the same charges brought against the Church by the isolated heretics and by the Waldenses, repeating them so exactly that certain superficial Protestant scholars once maintained that it was little more than a protest against Roman abuses. Even Limborch, whose learning forces him to admit that it was more than this, naively remarks[Pg 45] à propos of their genial custom of starving themselves to death as the highest possible act of faith:—

“’Tis rather to be wondered at, that in so barbarous an age, they should throw off so many errors rather than that they should retain some.”[11] It now seems certain that the movement based itself on a philosophy fundamentally hostile to Christianity and nauseous to us who have breathed no other air than that of Christendom.

Before considering the nature of this philosophy, and of its logical developments in the sphere of morals, let us reject the various names by which it has been called by modern scholars, and refer to it as the “Albigensian” movement. It is true that “Manichean,” “neo-Manichean,” and “Catharist” (after the habit of the sect of referring to themselves as the “Cathari” or “pure”), are more descriptive. “Albigensian” is sanctioned by usage, and usage should prevail over the preciosity of the pedant.

The un-Christian creed of the “Albigenses” began to sift into Western Europe soon after the year 1000. It was very old, for it represented one of the few fundamentally different ways of looking at life, and it is probably indestructible as long as the world endures. Its central idea is that the universe is dual and was created by two Gods, or if you will, two principles, of about equal strength, one Good and one Evil. The attempt to reconcile this idea with Christianity is as old as Manes who lived in Mesopotamia in the third century and founded the heretical sect of the Manicheans. Back of Manes, again, at the very beginning of recorded history, we find the Persians with a dualist religion which they attributed to a shadowy prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. To-day three striking examples of its survival come to mind. First, Dualism, with its scorn for matter as inherently evil, is not far from Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science. Second, in 1909, Paul Elmer More, one of the foremost of American scholars and critics, who would rank among the great critics of all times did he but possess the gift of vivid phrase, published a book, “Studies in Dualism,” which bore on its title[Pg 46] page the following quotation from another modern worthy, Sir Leslie Stephen:—

“Manicheanism may be disavowed in words. It cannot be exiled from the actual belief of mankind.”[12]

Third, in 1917, under the influence of the war, H. G. Wells (whom I hesitate whether to characterize as a sort of prose Shelley, “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” or as an æolian harp upon which almost any passing wind of doctrine can play) thus sets forth the thoughts of his imaginary Englishman mourning for the death of his soldier son:—

“His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the Gnostics and the Manicheans which saw the God of the World as altogether evil. For a while his soul sank down into the uncongenial darknesses of these creeds of despair....

I hasten to add that the Manicheans, following the little-known Gnostics, made matter the evil principle in Nature, as opposed to spirit, the principle of good.

We have seen that it had come originally from the East. Manes himself, away back in the third century, had been a Mesopotamian, and in the fourth century his disciples seem to have been widely distributed from Persia to the Atlantic. They were hated. “Manicheans and Mathematicians (i.e., sorcerers) were alone excepted from the general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.”[14] They reappear, under the name of Paulicians, in the East Roman Empire, during the tenth century, and thence passed into Bulgaria. Later, in Western Europe, they were often known as Bulgars, “Bougres,” or “Buggers.” From Bulgaria they spread westward into what is now Bosnia, and from Bosnia westward again into Northern Italy. By the middle of the eleventh century they were numerous and influential throughout Lombardy and especially in Milan.

Lea suggests that without the impulse these people gave to extreme asceticism, and especially their contempt for marriage, Pope Gregory VII would not have been able to get his decrees forbidding the marriage of priests obeyed in Northern Italy.

“Vernon Lee”[15] gives ... “a very curious anecdote, unearthed by the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his extremely suggestive book on mediæval heresies. A certain priest of Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a saint. The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his death; and in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his intercession, it became necessary to proceed to his beatification. The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when, in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a Catharus, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan, the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming of Christ. It was quite probable that he had spat upon the crucifix as a symbol of the devil’s triumph; it was quite possible that he had said masses to Satan as the true creator of all matter. Be this as it may, that priest’s half-canonized bones were publicly burnt and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows that the Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and foul, had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, should[Pg 48] have found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of the early Middle Ages. In those stern and ferocious yet tender-hearted and most questioning times, there must have been something logically satisfying, and satisfying also to the harrowed sympathies, in the conviction, if not in the dogma, that the soul of man had not been made by the maker of the foul and cruel world of matter; and that the suffering of all good men’s hearts corresponded with the suffering, the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of the Spirit. And what a light it must have shed, completely solving all terrible questions, upon the story of Christ’s martyrdom, so constantly uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediæval men!”

The same author noting what seems to be the intentionally hopeless, repulsive, and horrible nature of twelfth century (or, as she puts it, pre-Franciscan) Italian sculpture, goes on to argue from this that such “Nightmare pessimism had honeycombed the twelfth century Italian mind.” How uncertain was the popular distinction between orthodox and heretical asceticism is attested by many humorous-pathetic stories like that of the priest of Milan. What the distinction actually was may well be considered later in connection with the Dominican order.

The man of European stock cannot but wonder why any Christian people, especially the volatile Provençals, could accept so savage a creed. Perhaps people ready to “... jump the life to come” might be attracted by the moral latitude allowed the Albigensian “Believers” during life, and would, meanwhile, banish the thought of death, as so many moderns do, or else hope to be “consoled” even at the last gasp. But this is guesswork. What is certain is that the sect prospered.

We have seen that the Middle Ages, although weaker than we in the observation of Nature, had a stronger faith in logic, and were, therefore, bolder in the application of formally reasoned, logical, ideas of life. Accordingly, those of them who were possessed of the dualistic idea proceeded to all sorts of perfectly logical extremes in showing their hatred and contempt for matter.

Thus their fully initiated members, or “Perfect,” were sworn never to eat meat, eggs, milk, cheese or anything[Pg 49] which was the result of sexual procreation. Fish was permitted because they thought that fish did not reproduce themselves by the coming together of the male and female! To eat any sort of food which came from a warm-blooded animal might be murder, for they believed in the transmigration of souls, and therefore such an animal might be the dwelling-place of a human soul. This, again, was perfectly logical; to be born again, after death, in another body was, according to this theology, a proper and necessary punishment for sin. All sexual acts which might possibly produce offspring were forbidden to the “Perfect”; they must purify themselves by fasts and elaborate ceremonies if they so much as touched a woman by accident. The propagation of human beings, with their sinful, material bodies, was clearly the worst of crimes. Hence the “Perfect” would sometimes tell a pregnant woman that she had a devil within her. Marriage was a perpetual state of sin; it was worse than adultery and fornication because the married felt no shame, and were, therefore, more likely to persist in cohabitation. It was even whispered that, just as sexual intercourse out of marriage was better than intercourse between married people because the married felt no shame, so, too, any unnatural form of intercourse from which children could not be conceived was better than natural cohabitation. Finally, the horrible and perfectly logical climax to all this was that suicide was the deed above all others most pleasing to God.

It was one of the charges against the sect that their professed hatred for life and its pleasures was accompanied by promiscuous sexual orgies. Nor is there anything improbable in such accusations: they have been true of occasional heretical bodies from the earliest Christian times to Rasputin and certain contemporary Russian sects. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to prove that such sexual orgies were ever regularly practised or officially encouraged by the sect. The weight of testimony would rather seem to prove their extreme asceticism, out of which would naturally come occasional excesses of self-indulgence on the part of the “weaker brethren.”

Naturally, with such a régime as that laid down for them, the Albigensian “Perfect” were few. The sect[Pg 50] made up its numbers by including also “Believers,” who were admitted on their mere promise to renounce the Catholic faith and to receive the Albigensian “Consolamentum” or initiation of the “Perfect,” at least in the hour of death, as many of the early Christians used to receive baptism. The lives of the “Believers” were as unrestrained as those of the “Perfect” were strict. Except to “venerate” or do homage to the “Perfect” according to certain prescribed forms and ceremonies whenever they met, their religion seems to have laid upon them no prescribed duties whatsoever. They were allowed to marry and to eat meat. To be sure they could not be finally saved without undergoing the “Consolamentum,” and, when this was once received, the jaws of the system closed upon them with a ferocity so extraordinary that we shudder at it as we shudder at the lurid horrors imagined by Poe. But this ugly possibility weighed light in comparison with the easy absence of any code of morals for everyday living. Clearly, Albigensianism aimed to meet all tastes.

If we ask why such a life as that of the Albigensian “Perfect” ever attracted anyone, we must go back one step further and ask why asceticism, deprivation for its own sake, has always had such power over mankind. It is one of the unanswerable mysteries of the human soul why men have so often felt that their God, or Gods, would be pleased at seeing the worshipper voluntarily submit to deprivation, discomfort and pain. It has been argued that limitation in pleasure is necessary for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being and that asceticism (itself a word derived from the training of the Greek athletes) merely sets one free for undivided effort. But this does not meet the case. For the fact is that there is always in man the tendency to condemn pleasure for its own sake, as evil in itself, as if there was something holy in the mere state of being deprived or uncomfortable. And this curious state of mind is as strong to-day as it ever was, witness the extraordinary savageness of the campaign waged by what an Englishman would call the “Dissenting” religious bodies in America to-day against any pleasure or amusement that strikes them as “sinful.” Finally, it is also the fact that many who would not dream of denying themselves a certain[Pg 51] amount of physical satisfaction of different sorts will applaud ascetics. Accordingly, the Albigensian system addressed itself to a fundamental instinct of human nature.

Finally, it must be remembered that the Albigenses claimed to be purifying, not destroying, Christianity. Just so, the Humanitarians of to-day reduce Christianity to “Social Service” and throw over supernatural teaching altogether. In most cases the Albigensian system had certain outward likenesses to the Catholic. Their distinction between “Perfect” and “Believers” was somewhat like the Catholic distinction between clergy and laity, or that between monastic people and people “living in the world.” The form of their promise to renounce “Satan” (i.e., the Catholic Church), by which one became an Albigensian believer, was a little like baptism, and their “Consolamentum” was like Communion and Extreme Unction combined. They claimed to be true followers of Christ, they particularly reverenced the Lord’s Prayer, and they even went through a form of Lord’s Supper. The fasts of the “Perfect,” except when prolonged into the “Endura,” were not altogether unlike the Catholic fasts. As to the points in which they differed from the Church, they made the usual heretical claim of following “purer” traditions. Certain modern scholars see reason for believing that they possessed apocryphal writings dating from the apostolic or post-apostolic age.[16] In their propaganda they laid stress upon the negative side, that is, of their opposition to the “corruptions” of Catholicism, and thus secured for themselves the support of much of the prevailing dissatisfaction with the Church.

Why their practice of fasting themselves to death, in what they called the “Endura,” did not drive away converts is the hardest question to answer concerning them. That the “Perfect” voluntarily practised it was bad enough. What was worse was their treatment of believers who had received the “Consolamentum” when thought to be on death-beds and had then been so unlucky as to begin to get well. The “Perfect” had probably learned by[Pg 52] experience that “Believers” who had been “consoled” on their death-bed and had then recovered, were not likely to follow the extraordinarily strict rules for the “Perfect” as all “consoled” persons were bound to do. For them, the relapse of a “consoled person” was the greatest conceivable horror. Therefore, when a “consoled” sick person showed signs of recovery the “Perfect” forbade the family to give the patient food, and, if the family showed signs of weakening, they stationed themselves by the bedside or took away the sufferer to some place of safety where they might starve him or her to death in peace!

How such amiable folk ever led away much people after them is a riddle. And yet, despite the appalling features of their system, during the eleventh century Manicheanism is found sprouting up here and there throughout Western Europe. In the second half of the eleventh century we find it powerful in Northern Italy, and especially in Milan, but it seems not to have had any deep root north or west of the Alps before 1100. We hear of Manicheans at Toulouse in 1018, at Orleans in 1022, at Cambrai and Liège in 1025, and at Châlons in 1045. By the middle of the century they had penetrated north into the Germanies as far as the city of Goslar. Nowhere do we hear of their appearance without hearing also of their persecution.

It is one of man’s deepest instincts to defend that which he holds sacred, and to the man possessed of a religion, nothing is so sacred as his gods. What can be more natural than to wish to punish offences against the gods? Limborch has a long account of “Persecution among the Pagans.” For us it will be enough to remember that Athens itself put Socrates to death on the charge of teaching men not to believe in the gods of the city. And this in spite of the fact that Bacon truly says, “... the religion of the heathens consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their church were the poets.”[17]

Roman tolerance was born of the necessities of ruling over many races, none of whom except the Jews had an[Pg 53] exclusive, “Jealous” God. Almost all the other people of the Empire were willing to accept the gods of strangers as differing from their own merely in name. Naturally, when one fanciful story about a god or goddess was as good as another, the educated man cared little about the whole body of myths. As an administrator, this same educated man was easily able to be “tolerant” to all religions because he cared little or nothing for his own, and was, in reality, indifferent and therefore not “tolerant” at all in the strict sense of the word. St. Paul’s Gallio, so much maligned by fools but so worthily celebrated by Kipling, is a fine specimen of the type. Such a man was devoted solely to the public interest. His feeling would not be as clear cut as our national patriotisms: “Rome” was almost the whole civilized world, so that the chance of her perishing was unthinkable. Nevertheless, she could still be an object of affection; her government represented the definite benefit of order. Devotion to her was not vague emotionalism like that of our internationalists of to-day. After a fashion she could be worshipped.

On the other hand when any religion or religious practice seemed to threaten the government upon which order reposed, the Roman magistrate struck at once. The rediscovered Roman law, remember, was to be a great force actively informing the twelfth century.

In adopting Christianity, Europe exchanged a religion in which one god, or one story about a god, was about as good as another, for a religion which claimed a definite, historical founder who had left behind him a corporate teaching body, the Church. To such a body, the out-and-out pagan or disbeliever is an open and possibly generous enemy. Whereas he who proclaims himself a fellow Christian, but meanwhile falsifies the Church’s doctrine by twisting and altering it to suit himself, is a traitor, a snake in the grass compared to whom the heathen is an angel of light.

Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential, of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. She must, therefore, contend especially against the heretic, the[Pg 54] enemy from within, who would disfigure the faith by which she lives; and she has done so, from the “false teachers” and “heretics” whom St. Paul so often urged his flock to avoid, down to the poor creatures who would reduce her Saviour to the stature of a “social uplifter” or the walking delegate of a labor union. To keep the faith is a perpetual warfare.

Make what you will of the body empowered to interpret and define Christian doctrine and of the means of defending that doctrine when defined: the necessities of some sort of definition and authority will remain as long as the Christian name endures.

Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “... Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”[18] Later, he would find Christian Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors, including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences, and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force. Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare, our[Pg 55] imagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin, Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19] Even in those sleepy days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the refutation of heresy.

But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple, would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein defined) he cannot be saved?

Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day. But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; in[Pg 56] the modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture indeed.

But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they repented, although too late to be rescued.

The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner of the punishment we shall in a moment return.

We hear of the execution of heretics here and there[Pg 57] throughout Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them, as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned.

If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic, there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion, as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities. Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law, methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience.... You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses, sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ... a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate[Pg 58] even in words ... the framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous instances ... Savonarola is one in point ... that the judges often appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead. The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain could have existed, but it did exist.”[20]

It is possible to go even further than the passage quoted above. For, if the culprit had died, it was thought worth while to dig up his corpse and at least burn that. Certainly, then, it would seem as if there was something almost sacramental about burning the heretic.

Study of the discussion of witch-burning in the “Golden Bough” suggests the idea that heretics were burned, as witches were, because it was believed that fire was the one adequate means of purifying the community from the pollution which they had brought upon it. If this is so, then heretic- and witch-burning is connected with the most primitive superstitions, not only long before Christianity, but before the possibility of any systematized religion.

On the other hand, burning alive conformed after a grisly fashion to the letter of an old saying that “the Church abhors bloodshed.”

Cardinal Newman has left us an interesting passage combining extreme hatred for the heretic, or rather for the heresiarch (i.e., the active preacher of heresy and corrupter of the faithful), with the typical modern sensitiveness to the sight of physical pain:

“Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs I had said: the latter should meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter; and so far as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable toward himself. I cannot deny that this is a very fierce passage; but Arius was banished, not burned;[Pg 59] and it is only fair to myself to say that neither at this nor at any other time of my life, not even when I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a Puritan’s ears, and I think the sight of a Spanish auto-da-fé would have been the death of me.”[21]

It would be a study in itself to work up the evidence as to the toughness of the mediæval mind with respect to disagreeable ideas and to the actual infliction of pain. To-day, in America, we have our lynchings, and we have the ugly stories of torture inflicted in revolutionary Russia. But, on the other hand, we have a crew of drivellers against capital punishment, and many people can hardly bear the idea of hell. As Zarathustra puts it, of the God of the Christians:—

“When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.”

“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother.”

“There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22]

“The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23]

With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover (like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he cheerfully risked being roasted eternally.

As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between mediæval and modern as follows:—

“Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the papers say about the[Pg 60] execution of those condemned to death; they reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man. What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado, roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan. These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24]

Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part, although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.

With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse, and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people of Albi prevented the bishop[Pg 61] and a neighbouring abbot from imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126 we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In 1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more.

The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate.

The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it. To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist, a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentrics[Pg 62] found in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order. Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose ground.

Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one important occasion.

The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage ... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’ replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites, whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25] One has a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels.

Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi, after preaching to a throng which[Pg 63] packed the cathedral, he called upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,” St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip. After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing precisely as if he had never come.

In 1165, at Lombers near Albi, we find Catholic priests publicly debating against representative “Albigenses” in the presence of Pons, Archbishop of Narbonne, and sundry bishops, besides the most powerful nobles of the region, Constance, sister of King Louis VII of France and wife of Count Raymond V of Toulouse, Viscount Trencavel of Beziers, and others. When the verdict went against the heretics, no action whatsoever seems to have been taken against them: it was a mere tournament of words, “a matter of public interest” as we should say. Two years later the heretics openly held a council at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The president came all the way from Constantinople to attend, delegates from Lombardy were present, “bishops” were elected for various vacant sees, and a committee was appointed to settle a disputed boundary between the “dioceses” of Toulouse and Carcassonne. Clearly we have here to do with an organized religious body, emphatically a “going concern,” acting fearlessly in the open.

With the year 1178 we get the first suggestion of vigorous direct action against the heresy. Count Raymond V of Toulouse wrote to his brother-in-law, Louis VII of France, deploring the progress of heresy and the abandonment of orthodox religion throughout his lands, and connecting this condition with an alarming increase of brigandage and public disorder. The King of France had just made peace (or rather truce) with Henry II of England, so that the long struggle between the French Monarchy and the Angevin house was at rest for the time being and the two kings were free to combine against heresy. The other great chronic political controversy, between the Papacy and the “Holy Roman” Empire was also inactive, Pope Alexander III having got the better of Frederic Barbarossa and his anti-Pope. Accordingly, the Pope was free to spur on the kings to action. At first it was proposed that Louis and Henry[Pg 64] march into Toulouse with a joint army. But, finally, it was decided merely to send to Toulouse a mission of high clerical dignitaries with power to act. Lea suggests that the enthusiasm of the kings had cooled off during the long time spent in preliminary discussion. Mother Drane holds that the Pope preferred peaceful measures.

When the mission reached Toulouse they were insulted in the streets. Nevertheless, they went on to draw up a long list of heretics, and finally determined to make an example of a rich old man named Peter Mauran who seems to have been one of the first citizens of Toulouse. They proceeded against him under the canon promulgated by the Council of Tours, which prescribed imprisonment for convicted heretics and confiscation of their property. After much palaver and wordy shuffling by the accused he was adjudged a heretic. To save his property he recanted and offered to submit to such penance as might be imposed. Accordingly, “stripped to the waist, with the Bishop of Toulouse and the Abbot of St. Sernin busily scourging him on either side, he was led through an immense crowd to the high altar of the Cathedral ... (and) ... ordered to undertake a three years’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to be daily scourged through the streets of Toulouse until his departure, to make restitution of all Church lands occupied by him and of all money acquired by usury, and to pay to the Count five hundred pounds of silver in redemption of his forfeited property.”[26]

The results of these measures were only temporary. After his return from Palestine, Mauran was three times elected chief magistrate of the city. In the same year in which he had first been tried, the Third Lateran Council cursed the heretics of Languedoc, together with those who favoured them, and included as heretics the marauding bands of wandering mercenaries who, when out of employment, drifted about as brigands. Further, the Council took the unprecedented step of declaring a Crusade against all these enemies of the Church and of proclaiming a two years’ indulgence to Crusaders. So that in 1181, Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux and Cardinal, was able to raise a military force with which he invaded[Pg 65] the Beziers district and took the castle of Lavaur, capturing in it many prominent heretics. But two of the captured Albigensian “bishops,” upon recanting, were promptly given Catholic benefices in Toulouse, and, all told, Henry of Clairvaux’s little crusade was no more than a flash in the pan.

The Lateran Council’s curse upon bandits, lumping them with heretics, raises the question of how closely the anarchical side of Albigensianism may have been connected with public disorder. The twelfth century men were great bandit-slayers. Probably there were more bandits to be slain because there was more wealth worth robbing in Western Christendom than formerly. The mercenary soldier, a man without a country, hired by the princes of the time for their big or little wars, was not far from the bandit, even when in campaign. In England the name of King John’s mercenaries was hated and feared for generations. In his times of unemployment, when he was drifting about the country he tended to become the bandit pure and simple. Always he was unbound by social and conventional restraints and ties, wanting especially reverence for the Church, which was usually the chief protection for the property of that greatest and richest of mediæval corporations. We are told that one of Richard Cœur de Lion’s mercenaries, quite wantonly it would seem, once ... “broke off an arm of a statue in the Church of Our Lady at Chateauroux, whereupon the figure bled as if it were alive; and John (afterwards King John) picked up the severed arm and carried it off as a holy relic.”[27] But we are not told that the fellow himself was in the least abashed by the miracle, or that he was punished for his sacrilege. However, in twelfth-century Northern and Central France, when banditry became annoying, the bandits by no means had it all their own way. Their career was often short and ended by steel or rope. The community went for them mercilessly, much as men did in our own Wild West.

In Languedoc (as we have seen) with its wealth, its Jews, and its nearness to the Moslem, reverence for the Church was less. Further, it may well be that the[Pg 66] nobles were more dependent upon mercenaries inasmuch as their vassals were less warlike. We shall find the unhappy Raymond VII refusing to dismiss his hired soldiers, no matter under what pressure. Finally, some heretics denied the moral right of all private property whatsoever; most of them attacked the Church for the great wealth which it possessed, and practically all would refuse to take oaths, and denied the moral force of them when taken, although the feudal oath of allegiance from the vassal to his lord was the chief bond of civil society. In silent witness to the difference these things made, we find many of the southern churches, especially the country churches, were fortified. Whereas in the North, in spite of all the continual quarrelling between priest and noble, the church building nearly always depended for its protection on its sanctity alone.

The churches of Languedoc were not fortified for nothing. Speaking of the bandits, Lea remarks that the chroniclers, who were themselves mostly Churchmen, “... insist that their blows ... fell heavier on church and monastery than on the castle of the seigneur or the cottage of the peasant.” Naturally, since they would get little plunder from the cottage and many hard knocks from the castle. “... They ridiculed the priests as singers, and it was one of their savage sports to beat them to death while mockingly begging their intercession, ... ‘Sing for us, you singer, sing for us’; and the culmination of their ... sacrilege was ... their casting out and trampling on the holy wafers whose precious pyxes they eagerly seized.”[28]

Exactly how much connection Albigensianism had with disorder we cannot say. On the face of it, such teaching tended rather to non-resistance. But in an age so direct, so extreme in brutality as well as in tenderness (as for brutality in speech a leading Albigensian argument against transubstantiation was that it involved the excretion of the body of Christ into latrines), in such an age, I say, it is improbable that the heretics greatly disapproved of anyone who attacked their enemies, the Churchmen. Even assuming that the godless mercenary-turned-bandit[Pg 67] was not, strictly speaking, a heretic at all, he was certainly favoured by the atmosphere of heresy.

As the twelfth century neared its close Albigensianism must have seemed “the coming thing” in Languedoc. Although we hear of none of the greatest nobles of the region as having been “hereticated,” yet many individuals among their immediate families had been, especially among the women. In general, the heretics were enthusiastic and the Catholics uncertain and troubled. The Orthodox were still able (as in the affair of Mauran) to win “test cases,” but they must have felt that their hold was slipping.

From the point of view of those resolute to suppress heresy, the only real gain of the whole twelfth century was that both the canon and the civil laws on the subject had become more defined. Even as late as the middle of the century, we find St. Bernard calling the burning of heretics “excessive cruelty,” and favouring imprisonment as a maximum punishment.

The heresy made its only appearance in England in 1166. Henry II, the very man whom we have seen so angry against Becket as to threaten to turn Mohammedan, seems to have felt free to take a line of his own. He had them stripped to the waist, flogged, branded on the forehead, and turned adrift, strictly forbidding everyone to give them any aid and comfort whatsoever. This was effective enough in its way, as they must have soon died from hunger and exposure, but the point is that there seems to have been no recognized procedure to be followed.

This want had been partly met, in the last two decades of the century, by three laws.

In 1184, at the Diet of Verona, the “Holy Roman” Emperor, Frederic Barbarossa, and the short-lived Pope Lucius III, had conferred on heresy. Although in disagreement about many important matters, they seem to have agreed perfectly about the treatment of heretics. They published a joint decree. The Pope on his side directed that the bishops, who had always had jurisdiction in matters of heresy, should make, or cause to be made, an inquiry, or “inquisition,” into the possible existence of heresy in every parish where the presence of heretics was even suspected. Even those whose manner[Pg 68] of living differed from that of the ordinary Catholic were to be questioned as to their faith. The accused were to be tried in the episcopal court and such as should be convicted (if they refused to “repent” and acknowledge their errors) were to be handed over to the secular authorities “in order that they may receive the punishment they deserve (animadversio debita).” This last formula was vague, perhaps intentionally so. All secular magistrates were to take an oath before the bishop that they would enforce the laws against heresy, and those who refused to act after having been duly called upon to do so were to be excommunicated. Furthermore, all Catholics were forbidden to do business with any city which might sustain a pro-heretical magistrate in failure to act.

The Emperor, on his side, was not behindhand. He decreed that any magistrate excommunicated for refusal or neglect to proceed against heretics should lose his office and be debarred from accepting another. All those convicted, or to be convicted, of heresy were put under the imperial ban, which meant banishment, confiscation of goods, destruction of their houses, public infamy, debarment from office, &c. There is no explicit mention of the death penalty. “Animadversio” had meant death in ancient times, and the twelfth-century lawyer was apt to be both a great pedant and a great imperialist. Nevertheless, the formula had become vaguer.

Count Raymond V of Toulouse, he whom we have seen appealing to his suzerain Louis VII of France against heresy, at some time during his long reign of forty-six years (from 1148 to 1194) decreed not only banishment but also death by fire for heretics. Probably this was done in connection with Henry of Clairvaux’s mission which condemned Mauran, or with the short “Crusade” of 1181. What action, if any, was taken under it we do not know. In 1209 we shall find the municipality of Toulouse writing to Pope Innocent III to the effect that “many” heretics had been burnt under it. But we must remember that the letter was written when the city was threatened by Montfort and his Crusaders, and its magistrates were correspondingly anxious to make a case.

The third of the three laws against heretics was enacted by King Pedro II of Aragon, who later got himself killed in his attempt to protect the protector of heretics, Raymond VI of Toulouse! In 1197 Pedro banished the Waldenses and other heretics from his lands as public enemies to himself and his realm, and announced that if any of them were found when the months of grace had expired, their goods were to be confiscated and themselves burned. Of course, this was only a threat, and in all human probability no one stayed to risk the stake. The significant thing is that the threat is made against the Waldenses as the heretics par excellence.

But, although it was a gain to have the legal machinery for punishing heretics, still the gain did not amount to much if there was no organized force capable of putting the machinery in motion. Except for the banishment of Mauran and the little Crusade which took Lavaur in 1181, no real action against the heretics of Languedoc had been taken. In 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier and condemned heresy in the strongest terms, but his thunders died away without an echo. No progress whatsoever had been made against heresy in Languedoc when, in 1198, Innocent III became Pope.

Why did Rome wait so long before moving in the Albigensian matter? The Curia must surely have known, for decades past, that things were steadily going from bad to worse in Languedoc. It has been suggested that all the moral forces and diplomatic skill that the Papacy could muster had been needed to make head against the redoubtable emperors, Barbarossa and his son, Henry VI. But this, at most, can be only half the answer. In the first place, the Curia had been and was entirely competent to carry on several major controversies at the same time, with the sure touch of a skilful juggler keeping three or four balls going at once. In the second place, even in the last fifty years, crowded as they had been, still there had been intervals of peace between Papacy and Empire. One such interval had been seven years long, and still the Papacy had made no move in Languedoc. Probably the answer is that none of the popes, not even Alexander III, and still less his short-lived successors, had possessed the tremendous energy and courage of the newly-elected Pope.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] “Rome Revisited,” in “The Meaning of History,” by Frederic Harrison. Publishers: The Macmillan Co., New York, 1902.

[6] “Some Types of Cities in Temperate Europe,” by H. J. Fleure, in the “Geographical Review,” N.Y., December, 1920, which compares cities like Arles, Nismes and Toulouse on the one hand, and the north-French cities on the other. The author mars an able discussion of the subject by imagining a strong “Frankish” influence in the north—derived no doubt from the tiny mongrel war band of Clovis, some 8,000 strong, including Thuringians and Bretons, by which that leader raised himself to be consul, by imperial commission, over a Romanized Gaul of millions! The point is that military, civil and ecclesiastical authority were alike integrally Roman in the high imperial time. In Northern France, during the Dark Ages, secular civil government seems to have disappeared. Therefore, the Roman military officers who had turned themselves into feudal lords, and the bishops who continued to take their orders from Rome, obtained greater relative importance.

[7] “Europe and the Faith,” by Hilaire Belloc. Paulist Press, N.Y., 1920.

[8] “Politics,” Heinrich Von Treitschke, trans. Publ. Macmillan 1916. Vol. I, chap. vii, pp. 245, 246.

[9] “Aucassin and Nicolette.” Passage translated by Henry Adams, in “Mont St. Michel and Chartres.” Pub. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1913. Chapter xii, page 233.

[10] “The Old Road,” by H. Belloc. Published by Constable and Co., London, 1911. Page 30.

[11] “History of the Inquisition,” by Philip Limborch, Professor of Divinity among the Remonstrants; Chandler’s translation, London, 1731. Reference page 44, vol. i.

[12] “Shelburne Essays,” Sixth Series, by Paul Elmer More. Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1909.

[13] “Mr. Britling sees it Through,” by H. G. Wells. Published by Macmillan, New York, 1917.

[14] “Italy and her Invaders,” by Thomas Hodgkin. Published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892. Vol. i, chapter III, p. 203.

[15] “Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” by “Vernon Lee.” Published by John Lane, New York. 1909. Pp. 47-49.

[16] See: Fragments of an “Ancient (Egyptian?) Gospel,” used by “The Cathars of Albi,” by F. P. Bodham and F. C. Conybeare, in the Hibbert Journal of July, 1913.

[17] “Essays,” by Francis Bacon: “Of Unity in Religion.”

[18] I Timothy, chapter i, verse 20.

[19] “The Mediæval Mind,” by Henry Osborn Taylor, supra “Carolingian Scholars,” in vol. i, chapter x, p. 217.

[20] “On Anything,” H. Belloc; Dutton, New York, 1910, p. 72, et seq.

[21] “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” by John Henry Newman, chap. i.

[22] “Thus spake ‘Zarathustra,’” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. publ. Macmillan, New York, 1914, chap. lxvi, p. 318.

[23] “Mont St. Michel and Chartres,” supra, chap. xi, p. 218.

[24] “Là-bas,” by Joris Karl Huysmans. Published Plon-Nourrit Paris, 1913. Pp. 362-3, author’s trans.

[25] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 71.

[26] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 122.

[27] “John Lackland,” by Kate Norgate. Macmillan, N.Y., 1902, p. 21.

[28] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, pp. 125-6.

The religious and political manœuvres leading up to the Albigensian Crusade extend over the space of ten years and divide naturally into three stages, the first of six years and the second and third of two years each.

The first stage (1198-1204) begins with the accession of Innocent III to the Papacy, followed by his prompt dispatch of legates to work against the Albigensian heresy. It ends with the recognition of the failure of the means first used and determination to intensify them.

The second stage (1204-1206) is marked by the investiture of the papal legates in Languedoc with extraordinary powers over the local clergy. Its first year, 1204, contains a political event of the highest importance: the conquest of the Angevin lands of Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine, by the King of France, Philip Augustus. The period ends with the recognition of the insufficiency of even the extraordinary powers granted to the legates.

The third stage (1206-1208) opens with the arrival of St. Dominic, the adoption of apostolic poverty by the legates, and the setting on foot by them of a regular campaign of preaching and debate. This method yielding only slight results: the period closes with the murder of de Castelnau and the mobilization of the crusading army.

Lothario Conti, Innocent III, is one of the great figures of history. Few men, whether Churchmen or lay statesmen, have exerted a wider or more far-reaching influence. Learning and executive ability, energy and persistence, breadth of view, and, above all, the sense of a great purpose, combined with extraordinary fortune to make him great. We are here concerned with but one of his acts, the launching of the Albigensian Crusade, by which he preserved the moral unity of Europe so that it remained unbroken until the sixteenth century.

He had been born about 1160. His family were nobles of the Campagna, whose castles of Anagni and Segni dominated the “Appian Way,” the main Roman road between Rome and Naples. They early chose to make a priest of him. Accordingly he studied first at Rome, then at the Universities of Bologna where was the great law school, and finally at the University of Paris, the centre of theological study, the “queen science” of the Middle Ages. Paris he especially loved, like so many before and after him, and in the years of his power we shall see him make great play with the “French” (that is the North French, as we would say), those unequalled weapons ready to the hand of a thirteenth century pope. In 1190, when he was only 30, his uncle, Pope Clement III, made him cardinal—an example of favour promoting ability faster than it would rise by itself and thereby giving to the able man room for his powers, quite the reverse of the conventional use of favour to bolster up incompetence. Celestine III’s election forced the newly-made cardinal into retirement, for Celestine was of the Orsini family, hereditary enemies to Innocent’s mother’s people, the Scotti. In his retirement he wrote, first on “Despising the World” and the “Miseries of Mankind,” and second on mystic theological symbolism, with such rhetoric and such a jungle of quotations that his withdrawal from the administrative work of the Papal Curia rather increased his fame than lessened it, by giving him opportunity to exercise his pen on these mediæval stock themes. On the very day of Celestine’s death he was elected Pope while still only in deacon’s orders. Within two months after his consecration, already he had two agents in Languedoc to take action against the heretics there.

Certainly the Pope was not interfering in Languedoc because he had nothing better to do. It is true that the Empire was not threatening or even in a position to threaten. That huge, ill-knit mass, stretching from the Rhône to the Oder, from Holstein to the Sicilies, and including both Lille and Vienna, was taking one of its periodical sudden plunges from glittering dreams of world power into civil war and blank anarchy. When Innocent was elected, the terrible Emperor Henry VI was barely three months dead and already his work was in ruins and the Italian cities were busily driving out his[Pg 72] German officials whom he had put to rule them. It was not that they had a scrap of anything approaching national Italian feeling; the modern reader needs to have it repeated again and again that the twelfth century had not even the idea of nationality except for the glimmering of it in France. They acted because they disliked Germans as such, and because they preferred to pay municipal salaries and perquisites to someone born and bred among themselves. Like all popes since Hildebrand, Innocent welcomed this sort of thing and aided and abetted them in it. A well-organized Empire which included Italy would have been in a position to put pressure upon popes. In his letters to the cities Innocent even speaks sometimes of “The Interest of all Italy,” but that great phrase died away without contemporary echo.

In Rome itself the imperial prefect swore homage to the Pope without even a protest. The municipality of Rome was a different matter. Even in the tenth century, long before the Papacy had set itself up against the Empire, the turbulent nobles of the Eternal City had several times driven out popes in fear and trembling. The twelfth century communal movement made matters worse from the papal point of view. Even a pope like Innocent could be insulted in the streets by the Roman mob, so that he feared for his life and quitted the place, to return only after nearly a year. From his consecration until the year 1208, when again he brought the citizens to terms by temporarily leaving town, he had on his hands the most explosive sort of political situation in his own city.

Meanwhile his agents (two monks, Rainier and Guy by name) arrived in Languedoc, accredited by papal letters to the “Prelates, Princes, Nobles and People” of Southern France, to begin the papal effort against the Albigenses. At this time there was no idea of using force on a large scale. There was already a precedent in Henry of Clairvaux’s little expedition which had taken Lavaur in 1181. But it seems to have been assumed that this sort of thing was unnecessary, perhaps that it was impossible. At any rate, it was not tried. Rainier and Guy were merely expected to persuade the religious and secular authorities to banish heretics and confiscate their property, the usual[Pg 73] laws of the time against heresy. The two commissioners were empowered to compel obedience by interdict, and to reward those who should assist them by granting the customary “indulgences” usually enjoyed by pilgrims to Rome or Compostella.

It should perhaps be explained that interdicts are sentences laid upon localities, and in a place so sentenced there can be no public worship, no bell may ring and no Church service be held. Sometimes marriages cannot be celebrated, even in private, nor extreme unction be given to the sick. In mediæval times they were powerful weapons but at the same time dangerous ones, because they accustomed people to living almost completely shut off from the public practise of religion.

Six months later, the powers given to Rainier were enlarged so that he might reform the Church in the infected regions and restore ecclesiastical discipline. In July, 1199, he was formally designated Papal “Legate,” to be obeyed and respected as if he were the Pope in person. Thus early in the business it was necessary to “reform the lives” of the local clergy clear up to archbishops, as even these last could not be counted upon to lead outwardly pious lives, much less to take action against heresy in defiance of the public opinion of their flocks. But although he had already seen the weakness of the local clergy as instruments against heresy, nevertheless the Pope continued to act on the assumption that the local secular authorities were up to their work in the matter, if only enough clerical pressure of the proper sort could be put upon them.

It seems as if Innocent and his advisers ought to have known enough of the political situation in Languedoc and the universal failure to enforce heretical legislation there to see that this would not do. And yet anyone who has been connected with the central offices of a large corporation, or the general headquarters of a modern army of millions, knows how hard it is, with the best will in the world, to get information on conditions in the field. In this case we may assume it was at first believed at Rome that local action, or at least local secular action, against heresy would be sufficient. Or, per contra, we may assume that such local action was never confidently relied upon, but that it was thought[Pg 74] best to try all other means to the utmost before beginning religious war against an infected member of Christendom itself. At any rate, as in all her important decisions, Papal Rome moved slowly.

Moreover, Innocent, over and above his legal training, had a fine sense of fairness and, Italian gentleman that he was, a vast deal of tact. In his dealings with the sporadic cases of heresy that sprang up here and there, weed fashion, outside Languedoc, he followed the papal precedent of curbing and moderating the sometimes excessive zeal of the lower clergy.

In 1199 we find him gentle towards a group of Lorrainers in the diocese of Metz who had come under suspicion for reading translations of the Scriptures and for murmuring against their parish priests. He reproved them indeed for not preferring charges through regular channels to their bishop against the priests complained of. He warns them that the profundity of certain dogmas makes them difficult of comprehension by the laity. Nevertheless he assures them that the desire to understand the Scriptures is worthy, in itself, of praise rather than blame, and makes haste to take upon himself the conduct of the case, apparently because he fears that their bishop may be too strict.

In the same year we find him protecting the “humiliati,” of Verona, a brotherhood who had bound themselves to voluntary poverty. An archpriest of their city had included them in the excommunication pronounced against the Manicheans, Waldensians and Arnoldists (the followers of Arnold of Brescia). Indeed, to judge from bits of heresy trials which have comedown to us, it seems as if mere eccentricity of life was reason enough for suspicion of heresy.

In appeals to Rome, whenever it appeared that the charge of heresy had not been completely proved we find the Pope anxious to give the accused the benefit of every doubt. In the district of Nevers he twice interfered in this way in the case of priests, and twice in favour of the burghers of La-Charité-sur-Loire, although there, unfortunately, his leniency bore no fruit, so that he finally felt himself forced to proceed against them.

Even in the full heat of the Albigensian Crusade, we still find him favouring an accused canon of Bar-sur-Aube,[Pg 75] an incident which can only receive its full value by being told in connection with the very different things then going on in Languedoc.

But, however careful to go lightly in doubtful cases, Innocent was very different toward proved and defiant heretics. Luchaire would have us believe that when the great Pope calls the heretics a scourge, a pestilence, filth, an ulcer infecting society, a savage beast, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a fox that destroys the Lord’s vine, a villainous inn-keeper who poisons his guests by selling them adulterated wines, when he seems to believe in their secret sexual orgies, he is only repeating a set of stock phrases and that he was in no way animated by “fanaticism,” or by any especial hatred towards heresy. The learned Frenchman goes so far as to suggest that Innocent “proceeded rigorously against heresy ... more because of the necessities of his policy than because of the ardour of his faith.”[29] Nevertheless, such assertions are without a scrap of definite proof, as far as Luchaire’s published work is concerned. Moreover, he admits that Innocent, along with almost all his contemporaries, felt “repulsion” for the heretics. Finally, the American of to-day will be apt to say sadly that a French anti-clerical cannot even know what real fanaticism is, since, in political action, France has not for centuries even “seen the animal” in its strength.

Certainly Innocent appealed not only to the Scriptures but also to human reason against the heretics. Thus he makes great play with the logical impossibility of the Manichean idea of two contradictory gods. That is characteristic not only of the man but of the time in which he lived, with its great scholastics, a time that believed in logic as devoutly as our own time believes in “science.” Most certainly he recognized that occasions for scandal given by the clergy were at the bottom of much of the trouble. He keeps insisting that the sacraments in the hands of a priest of evil life do not lose their virtue any more than medicines in the hands of a doctor who might, personally, be far from well himself. Above all, he worked to remove the causes of[Pg 76] scandal by improving the conduct of the clergy. But this is merely to say that anger did not blind him to facts (he had the fits of anger usually found in dominant natures). Certainly he was no vulgar ranter, but from this it by no means follows that his faith was not ardent and his feeling against heresy correspondingly keen.

In the year of his accession we find Innocent already corresponding with Raymond VI of Toulouse. The Count was then 41 years old, having three years before succeeded his father, Count Raymond V, whom we have seen (in the last chapter) appealing for help to put down heresy. The Counts of Toulouse were the most powerful princes of the South. As Dukes of Narbonne they were the first lay peers of France. They held the Marquisate of Provence, they were Counts of Vivarais, Venaissin, St. Gilles, and Rodez, and lords of the Albigeois, Gevaudan, Velai, Rouergue, and Agenois, besides being Suzerain to the Counts of Foix and Comminges. Raymond VI was married to Princess Joan of England, daughter of Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and sister to Richard Cœur de Lion and King John. The Count himself was no heretic, although certain hasty expressions which he had thrown out in favour of the heretics were treasured against him by zealous Catholics. However, according to the custom of Languedoc, his orthodoxy was anything but belligerent. He was accustomed to nominate Jews and heretics to public office, and altogether he and his wealthy court thought more of enjoying themselves with poetry and the society of women than of anything else in the world. He was not warlike, and trying events were to prove him lacking in courage, self command, and staunchness of purpose. He was equally innocent of wisdom or cunning in policy. He does not seem to have been base but merely weak and easy going. If not in great place or troubled times such men may do well enough.

In his first encounter with the great Pope he appears not as a favourer of heretics but as an oppressor of monks. As such he had already been excommunicated by Pope Celestine III. Innocent sent his legates to offer him absolution if he would give satisfaction to the abbot in question, that of St. Gilles; and on his promise to do[Pg 77] so, wrote to suggest that he do penance in order to show his good will. Before a twelvemonth was out the Abbot of St. Gilles was complaining that he had in no wise mended his ways, so Innocent wrote again to his legate directing that the Count be held to his promises. It was not a hopeful beginning.

For six years, with frequently changing personnel, the papal legation in Languedoc kept on trying to realize its original programme. It was a thankless job. William VIII, Lord of Montpellier, whose family was by tradition strongly Catholic, asked for the appointment of a legate to help him root out heresy from his lands. Unfortunately he was not a personage of first-rate importance, and his action was a mere flash in the pan, as none of his fellow nobles followed suit. Lea claims that even William himself had a special interest in showing zeal because he was trying to get the Pope to legitimatize the children of a second wife whom he had married without being legally separated (by annulment no doubt) from his first.

In 1200 we hear of a Cardinal “John of St. Paul” (meaning probably that his titular church was the basilica of St. Paul without the walls at Rome) taking part in the Albigensian mission, but of him we hear no more. Two years later it appears that Rainier fell sick and was accordingly relieved from duty as legate. What became of his companion Guy we are not told; he seems to have sunk in the waters of oblivion without a splash or even a bubble.

Rainier was replaced by two Cistercian monks from the Cistercian abbey of Font Froide, near Narbonne. One of the two Cistercians was named Raoul. The other, the soul of the mission, was Peter de Castelnau, that famous name of Castelnau whose arms are still seen in the hall of the knights at Versailles, a name that the Germans will long have reason to remember, since in the desperate first week of September, 1914, it was a Castelnau who fended them off at the Grand Couronné de Nancy, and thus made possible the victory of the Marne. De Castelnau, with an energy and decision that may well remind us of the soldier Castelnau of our own generation, made straight for Toulouse itself. There he harangued the inhabitants, demanding that[Pg 78] their magistrates should swear to keep the Catholic faith and expel heretics, in return for a papal confirmation of the liberties of the city (which were set down, no doubt, in a charter much like the old English charters preserved by Bishop Stubbs). The Toulousains rose to the bait, took the oaths and then failed to move. The legates talked in a high tone about angry princes and kings coming upon the city to pillage and destroy, and effected thereby some show of reform, but no sooner were their backs turned than the heretical preachers began their midnight meetings as before.

Incidentally, it is interesting to note that, in a place like Toulouse in the year 1203, the utmost daring of the heretics was to hold their preaching services at midnight. It looks as if, in the large centres, there was still a strong feeling that heresy, after all, was not “the thing.” It was still under a certain amount of social ban. The feeling even of these non-persecuting communities must have looked a little askance at it.

Having obtained from the “consuls” of Toulouse a promise, however hollow, of obedient persecution, the legates turned their attention to Count Raymond. They invited the Archbishop of Narbonne, the Primate of Languedoc, to join with them in demanding from the Count not only banishment of heretics and confiscation of their goods but also the dismissal of the mercenary troops who, as we have seen, were near-brigands on active service and brigands pure and simple at all other times. The Archbishop refused. Accustomed throughout a long life full of ease and riches to see heresy all about him, he had probably long forgotten to be shocked at it. As to the “brigands,” he probably made allowances, as the legates did not, for the fact that mercenaries were the only troops possible to an overlord like the Count of Toulouse whose feudal vassals were almost certain to be either unwarlike or disobedient—if not both at once. Knowing his man and Languedoc in general as he did, he must have thought it useless and silly for the legates even to make the attempt. Very likely he was alarmed at such activity shown by papal legates in his territory and afraid lest his own position might be threatened and his own sloth and unworthiness be thrown in his teeth or denounced to the Pope by this[Pg 79] meddlesome pair of Cistercians from his own province, who might better have stayed at home in their abbey. He refused to go with them and would hardly even lend them a horse for their trip. The bishop of Beziers, who had been asked to be of the party, also refused, so the legates proceeded alone. As for Raymond, we have already seen him readier to promise than to perform in the case of the monks of St. Gilles. Now he would not even promise.

Even de Castelnau despaired. He wrote to the Pope telling of his failure, and asking to be relieved from duty as legate in order to return to his abbey. Innocent held him to his work, reminding him that heaven would reward him not according to his success, but according to his labours.

However, it was probably de Castelnau’s letter which persuaded the Pope to broaden the scope of the mission. He now took the radical step of depriving the Languedocian bishops of jurisdiction in cases of heresy and conferred it on his legates. On top of this, he went even further and empowered the legates to remove any of the clergy from their benefices should they seem unworthy to hold them, and denied to the condemned the right of appeal to Rome and of delay in executing the sentence.

From the standpoint of the canon law this was revolutionary; the grant of these wide powers to the legates marks the second stage in the preliminaries of the Crusade. Gradually, the seriousness of the situation was being understood in Rome. Only the clear belief that the higher clergy of Languedoc must be drastically purged of evil-livers, and of those who were slothful and lukewarm in prosecuting heresy, before anything else could be accomplished would justify such measures.

That there was need of strong measures was proved by the continued activity of the heretics. After the Count of Toulouse, the Count of Foix was the greatest noble of Languedoc. In this same year his sister Esclairmonde was “hereticated,” and in the great crowd present at the ceremony only the Count himself failed to “venerate” the “Perfect” according to the prescribed heretical form. His wife was already a “Cathar,” and another of his sisters was a Waldensian. So things went in the “midi.”

At the same time that the powers of the legates were increased, Innocent empowered them to offer Philip Augustus and his son Louis complete remission of sins, as if for a crusade to Palestine, if they would move against the Albigenses of Languedoc. The indulgence was to be extended to all nobles who might aid in suppressing heresy; and all who were under excommunication for crimes of violence, nobles or villains, were to be absolved on joining the expedition. At the same time, the Pope himself wrote direct to Philip, promising him not only full indulgences, as for a crusade against the Moslem, but also the territories of such nobles as might obstruct the pious work of suppressing heresy.

The time was altogether unfavourable for the King of France to grant such a request, for he was otherwise engaged. About the middle of the twelfth century, as a result of two great marriages, the Plantagenet Counts of Anjou (in addition to their hereditary lands of Anjou, Maine and Touraine) had become kings of England and Dukes of Normandy, suzerains of Brittany, and Dukes of Aquitaine, which included Poitou, Guienne, Gascony, and Auvergne. Naturally, as masters of this great sweep of territory so much greater in extent than the little royal domain which alone was directly ruled by the kings of France, the Angevins were almost continually at war with the French kings to whom they theoretically owed homage for their Continental possessions. Besides their vast lands, the Plantagenets possessed high personal energy and complete ruthlessness; their line was supposed to descend from a devil, and from their behaviour it seemed fairly probable. Further, the Norman system of administration and (as we should say) “civil service” which they directed and applied throughout their territory, was the best of its kind in Latin Christendom, at least outside of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily which was also Norman-ruled. On the surface of things, the “kings of Paris” seemed hopelessly overmatched. On the other hand, the Angevin dominions could have no possible feeling of attachment to one another. They were held together only from above. Whereas behind the kings of France were dim, vast, memories of the Roman unity; as yet mere “ideas,” to be sure, but in France ideas have power.

It is with a sure instinct that Michelet has contrasted the fashion of the great seals of the Plantagenets with those of the Capets. The demon race of Anjou are seen fully armed, mounted, and charging, while the kings of France have no need of war horse, armour, or weapons, but are sitting enthroned, holding the orb and sceptre, full of the calm consciousness of power admitted and acknowledged. I repeat once more that the time had almost nothing of our idea of nationalities; nevertheless, as we have seen in the first chapter, its currents were setting strongly in favour of the central kingships, and especially in favour of the kings of France. Even in the matter of the Albigensian crusade, we shall see the Capets, and with them the national unity, profiting quite as much as the Church from the conclusion of the struggle.

Now, in 1204, there reigned at Paris a great man, Philip, whose surname Augustus of itself recalled Rome. His character was a little detached and remote, bent altogether upon making real the great shadowy power that was lawfully his by virtue of his office. Like his father and grandfather, he was a friend to merchants and wayfaring men, a mighty slayer of bandits, and a protector of the new Municipal Communes. Like all his ancestors, he allied himself with the Church. Like some of his ancestors, and like a true Frenchman, he might quarrel bitterly with the Pope, when there was a petticoat in the business, but in spite of his dabbling in bigamy on the modern American plan, in the matter of his second marriage he remained the “eldest son of the Church” and the staunchest champion of the Papacy in Europe, and in his alliance with the Church he received quite as much as he gave.

Ever since John’s accession to the Plantagenet lands in 1199, the long struggle between the Angevins and the French Crown had gone on in haphazard raids and skirmishes, interrupted by fitful truces which settled nothing. From February to September, 1200, France had been under a Papal interdict for Philip’s repudiation of his wife followed by a second marriage, after a questionable annulment of the first marriage by the French bishops. Even though the interdict had been imperfectly enforced, still it had sufficiently weakened[Pg 82] his general position to make him willing to conclude a truce with John, and to promise the Pope that he would mend his ways. The interdict once lifted, the intriguing and skirmishing had begun again, going more and more in Philip’s favour. In the fall of 1203 major operations had begun. After a successful six months’ siege of Chateau Gailliard, ending in March, 1204, Philip had won all Normandy and deprived John of the entire continental Plantagenet inheritance except Gascony, Guienne, and part of Poitou. With so much freshly conquered land to be administered and so many new vassals to be handled, it was no time to ask the King of France to take on the heavy task of intervening against heresy in Languedoc, or even to weaken himself by allowing any of the forces of his kingdom to do so. He refused to move.

There remained the chance of accomplishing something through reform of the personnel of the southern Church by a drastic use of the extraordinary powers granted to the papal legates. These were now three in number, the newcomer being Arnaut Amalric, abbot of Citeaux, and therefore head of the powerful Cistercian order, to which both Raoul and de Castelnau belonged. With the addition of Arnaut (whose surname of Amalric recalls the old family of Amal chieftains among the Goths), the legates attempted to use their power of deposing bishops to its full extent. They proclaimed the deposition of Berenger II, primate of Languedoc! Berenger broke boldly with the legates and refused to quit his archbishopric of Narbonne. He protested violently to the Pope, representing that only his great age and “infirmities” prevented him from pleading his cause in person at Rome, so that his case dragged on.

Meanwhile, the Bishop of Beziers, besides refusing to go with the legates to Count Raymond, had gone even further in disobedience to them than his ecclesiastical lord of Narbonne. When asked to demand of the “consuls” of his city that they abjure heresy and engage to expel heretics, he at first refused point blank and encouraged the magistrates not to do so. Under pressure he finally promised to excommunicate them, but failed to do so. Accordingly, the legates suspended him, and ordered him to appear in his own defence at[Pg 83] Rome. Shortly afterwards he was assassinated by some treachery “among his own people”—why, our authorities do not state.

Perhaps he had been particularly slow to prosecute heresy inasmuch as his neighbour, the Bishop of Carcassonne, had gotten himself driven out for merely threatening to do so. The municipality of Carcassonne had even forbidden anyone to have relations with the unhappy cleric, on pain of a heavy fine.

In the same year that saw the assassination of the Bishop of Beziers, the legates deposed the Bishop of Toulouse for “simony,” that is selling appointments to Church offices within his control. He was a turbulent, feudal, sort of person, who had spent his time in making war on his vassals, and had mortgaged the properties of his see right and left to enable him to do so. On account of his resistance it was not until the next year that a successor could be elected.

While the see of Toulouse was still vacant, de Castelnau again went boldly to Raymond and frightened him into taking an oath to dismiss his bandit-mercenaries and personally to prosecute heretics. As in the case of the monks of St. Gilles, he took no steps towards keeping his word.

Hardly was Raymond’s oath sworn when the consuls of Toulouse passed a law forbidding an accusation of heresy to be begun after the death of the accused unless they had been “hereticated” on their death-bed—some bones of heretics having been dug up and removed from consecrated earth. And what was worse, this action of the municipality was supposed to have been due to Raymond’s influence as overlord. At any rate, he seems to have consented to it, and certainly made no move to prevent it.

Altogether, the year 1205 had been as depressing as its predecessors. A second appeal to Philip Augustus, in February, had brought no result.

In 1206 the discouragement of the legates again came to a head as it had done two years before. The one bright spot was that the cathedral chapter of Toulouse had finally elected, as their bishop, Fulk of Marseilles. After winning fame as a troubadour, he had entered the Cistercian order and been chosen an abbot. Fulk[Pg 84] had all the enthusiasm typical of converts. He had transferred the passion that had set him writing love songs into his new task of smiting the heretic. Indeed, he was to be one of the foremost in the Crusade. Nevertheless, his election was not enough in itself to keep the legates in good heart, for in general their task was as ungrateful as ever.

Towards midsummer, the three legates with their retinues, together with a number of bishops from neighbouring sees, assembled in council at Castelnau (named for the family of the legate Pierre de Castelnau) near Montpellier. Not only the gentle Raoul, but even the stern and unbending Arnaut Amalric, and de Castelnau with his fearless, fiery spirit, were ready to despair. They talked of resigning their mission. It seems that they had even agreed to do so, when a new impulse and an altogether different plan of campaign was given them by a newcomer.

This newcomer was a Spaniard, Diego (or Didacus), Bishop of Osma in the Upper Douro valley in Castille. He had been much employed in diplomatic business by his king, and was now returning from Rome whither he had been refused permission from the Pope to go as a missionary to the savage heathen Tartars of the Ukraine steppes.

At the head of Bishop Diego’s suite was his sub-prior, Domingo de Guzman, later to be known as St. Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers which bears his name, then a young man in the middle thirties, slender, fair-haired, dressed in the white habit and surplice worn by Augustinian canons regular. He was a gentleman born and bred who had taken his university course at Palencia, had been made canon and then sub-prior at Osma, and was Bishop Diego’s constant companion. Three years before, while accompanying his patron on one of the latter’s diplomatic trips, he had passed through Toulouse. Being lodged in the house of a heretic, he had sat up all night with the man, until by dint of prayer, exhortation, and argument he persuaded him to turn from the error of his ways. Now he was admitted, with Diego, into the council chamber of the legates.

No one else who comes directly into our story has set[Pg 85] in motion such a force as did St. Dominic. He and St. Francis more than any men since the conversion of the Roman Empire, were to give to the Catholic Church new power over men’s thoughts and affections. Perhaps he would loom larger in our sight were he not so often considered together with St. Francis. It is true that his personality has not the same extraordinary poetry, simplicity and charm as that of the “Poverello” of Assisi. But in his consuming zeal for the faith he was Francis’s equal, while in organizing ability and statesmanlike adaptation of means to ends, he was by far Francis’s superior. He was an extraordinary man.

For the time being, he was merely the chief of Bishop Diego’s suite, and there is no evidence that he even spoke in the council. It was Diego who advised the legates to put all their energy into preaching, and (that their pomp and retinue might no longer be contrasted with the simplicity and self-denying asceticism of the heretical chiefs) he further suggested that the legates rid themselves of guards, servants, horses, and even of shoes and sandals. They were to go forth barefoot, in perfect apostolic poverty, having neither purse nor scrip like the original twelve.

Luchaire thinks[30] it improbable that a mere passing bishop, on his own responsibility, would have presumed to urge upon men in the official position of the legates so startling a departure; and that, had he done so, his counsel would almost certainly not have been accepted. He therefore infers that Diego was acting under orders from Innocent. As there is no mention in any of the chroniclers of direction from Innocent at this time, the idea remains mere inference, although probable enough.

From whatever source it came, the new and radical proposition was not easily accepted by the legates. Perhaps they feared ridicule, perhaps insults and bodily harm if they went about unprotected. At any rate they balked, suggested that they would follow if someone set the example, and ended by imitating Diego when he himself put in practice what he had just preached.

With this decision begins the third and last stage of the preliminaries of the Crusade. The preaching[Pg 86] apostolate was destined to be continued while the Crusade itself was going on, and was to grow into the great Dominican order. The idea of voluntary poverty in the service of others was to electrify Christendom and remain as a permanent force in the world.

Promptly, the new plan of action once decided on, the legates, Diego, and Dominic, went at it vigorously. Arnaut, who had to return to Citeaux to preside at the approaching chapter general of his Order, departed thither on foot. Meanwhile de Castelnau and Raoul, with the two Spaniards and the other clergy attached to the legation, divided themselves by threes and fours and went here and there throughout the country. Barefoot, begging their bread and carrying with them only staff and breviary, they preached and debated publicly against the heretical “Perfect.” We hear of these formal “theological tournaments,” as it were, lasting a week at Servian near Beziers, for a fortnight at Beziers itself, at Carcassonne for eight days. Certainly there was no lack of energy.

Unfortunately, the effort produced no commensurate result. Peter de Vaux-Cernay says that at Servian the people were so moved by the debate that they would have expelled the heretics had it not been for the opposition of the local lord, and that they escorted the missionaries in triumph along the road when they left the town. But at Beziers there was so much hostile feeling among the inhabitants that Diego and Raoul advised de Castelnau to flee for his life. Evidently it was not altogether without reason that the legates had hesitated to dismiss their armed guards. At Carcassonne we hear of a miracle but no conversions. In the neighbourhood Dominic vehemently reproved certain peasants, possibly Catharists, who were reaping on St. John’s Day. One of them, in reply, threatened the saint, when suddenly he and his companions found the sheaves which they held in their hands red, as with blood. At Verfeil, where St. Bernard had been jeered at sixty years before, the debate is said to have gone completely in favour of the Catholics, without impressing the people in any way. Clearly, although the new tactics had made a certain impression, especially upon the lower classes, there was to be no rapid progress.

In November the Pope formally prescribed the novel methods already adopted. The legates were to choose[Pg 87] men of “proved virtue,” who were to go about “dressed humbly and taking for model the poverty of Christ” to make conversions. The new departure was to be tested to the uttermost.

The effort was continued in the same way in 1207. At his chapter general, Arnaut Amalric had recruited many of his Cistercians, including twelve abbots, and these reinforcements gave a new impetus to the work of debate and of preaching. The conferences seem to grow more formal and to take place on a greater scale, attracting more general attention. We hear especially of two, one at Montreal and one at Pamiers.

At Montreal the debate lasted a fortnight, and here, according to Peter de Vaux-Cernay, the miracle placed by Dominican tradition at Fanjeaux really occurred. St. Dominic drew up a summary of his arguments, as did the heretics, and the two memoranda were submitted to the four judges of the debate, two knights and two burghers. The judges, in executive session, despaired of coming to an agreement and decided to try a form of ordeal. Accordingly, they ceremonially threw both manuscripts into the fire. Whereupon the heretical manuscript promptly blazed up, and St. Dominic’s, three times thrown in, was three times cast out unharmed by the flames. The judges agreed to say nothing of the matter and, miracle or no miracle, failed to give a decision.

The last of the public debates took place at Pamiers, in the territory and under the patronage of Raymond Roger, Count of Foix. Faithful to his usual policy of “Good Lord, good Devil” the Count entertained the disputants of both parties in turn, and offered his great hall for the debate. On the Catholic side, the Bishop of Osma was seconded by Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, and by the Bishop of Conserans. The opposition seems to have been quite as much Waldensian as Catharist. A single judge presided. In the course of the debate, Esclairmonde the heretical sister of the Count of Foix, broke into the debate in favour of the Cathari, with quite the assurance of a Roman lady of the first century or of a wealthy English or American woman to-day. In this case, however, one of the Catholic priests present, Stephen of Metz, replied: “Go back to your spinning, it is not for you to make a[Pg 88] speech in such a company,” and she seems to have subsided, possibly choked with anger at being so addressed by a wretched barefoot priest. At the close of the conference certain Waldensians, among them Duran (or Durand) of Huesca, a Spanish Waldensian prominent in the sect, were converted. Otherwise this conference, too, seems to have had slight results. As at Montreal, no decision was given.

Although after the Conference at Pamiers we hear no more of public debates on a grand scale, the preaching work of the mission was continued. Legate Raoul drops out of the story. The Bishop of Osma returned to his diocese to die, the sooner perhaps because of the hardships to which the old man had subjected himself, but left Dominic to go on with the work. Arnaut Amalric was again called away for a time by business in Northern France, leaving Pierre de Castelnau, and (apparently) Dominic, as the dominant personalities of the Papal mission.

During 1207, the year of the conferences of Montreal and Pamiers, the earlier idea of putting pressure upon the secular authorities was by no means given up. It is quite possible, as Luchaire suggests, that men of the stamp of de Castelnau, Arnaut Amalric, and Fulk, continued to believe all along in measures stiffer than mere persuasion. And in this belief, if they held it, time was to show them right enough. De Castelnau crossed the Rhône into Raymond’s “Marquisate of Provence,” and persuaded the nobles there to associate themselves in a league which he organized for the prevention of feuds between its members. He further arranged to include in the objects of the league the prosecution of heretics and then summoned Raymond himself to join the association formed for two such worthy purposes by this good-sized group of his vassals.

Raymond refused. Besides being utterly unwilling to prosecute heresy, he probably felt that his prestige would suffer if he did so as a late comer into an association of his own liegemen which he had not himself helped to organize.

De Castelnau’s next move shows the gathering exasperation of years of failure. He excommunicated the Count. He interdicted his lands. Not content with that, he[Pg 89] went boldly into his presence and denounced him publicly, to his face. No doubt he threw in his teeth the two promises which he had already broken, first that of 1199 to the Pope in the matter of the monks of St. Gilles, and second that to de Castelnau himself in 1205, two years before the denunciation when he had sworn to dismiss his mercenary troops and to prosecute heretics. The spectacle must have been dramatic; the monk, remember, had especially drawn upon himself the hatred of the heretics and the easy-going Catholics (who between them made up nearly all Languedoc), standing up barefoot in his grey Cistercian habit and cursing to his face the greatest lord of the south. For protection he had nothing but such moral authority as the Church still possessed in the face of the heresy all about. His worst enemy could not have denied de Castelnau’s courage.

Innocent lost no time in confirming the sentence. He ordered the Archbishops of Vienne, Embrun, Arles, and Narbonne to publish and to enforce it. He did more; he wrote directly, and fiercely, to Raymond himself.

The counts of the indictment as repeated to the archbishops are interesting and inclusive. Besides the two main charges of having employed bandit-mercenaries and refusing to prosecute heretics, Count Raymond had refused to interrupt military operations during Lent and on feast days and holidays, he had made fortresses out of churches, he had persecuted abbeys, despoiled the Bishop of Carpentras, bestowed public offices upon Jews, refused to join the league of peace of Provence, increased tolls upon the roads and bridges, played host to heretics, and finally (although this was never proved and seems not to have been the fact) he had become a heretic himself. It is particularly interesting, and in line with the Church’s condemnation of usury and extortion generally, to see the strong line taken in the matter of tolls.

Naturally, his vassals owed no duties of allegiance as long as their lord remained unabsolved. Should any man give him aid and comfort that man was, ipso facto, excommunicate himself, down to the blacksmith who might shoe him a horse.

The Pope’s letter to Raymond himself was devastating.[Pg 90] “Impious folly and tyranny” were among the gentler of its phrases. It spoke hopefully of the Count’s chances of fever, leprosy, paralysis, demoniacal insanity, metamorphosis into a beast after the fashion of Nebuchadnezzar. Contrasting his love of war with the angelic devotion to peace shown by the Provençal nobles and by “the illustrious” King Pedro of Aragon, it likened its addressee to a crow feeding on dead bodies. Altogether, its tone left very little to be desired.

Specifically, Innocent accused the Count of retorting to de Castelnau that a heretic, perhaps a “Catharan bishop” could easily be found to prove the superiority of their religion over the Catholic. He speaks, therefore, of the serious grounds for suspicion of heresy in Raymond’s own case, but guards himself carefully against offering it as a fact. He is to give prompt and full satisfaction and seek to be absolved. Otherwise he will lose the county of Melgueil held by him as a vassal of the Roman Church, and if this is not enough then other princes will be stirred up against him and granted title to any of his lands they may conquer.

Raymond collapsed. He signed the Provençal truce and again swore to do everything that was demanded of him. But it was the fatal weakness of his character that he was always willing to mortgage his future by yielding to present threats and then fail to keep his engagements. He could never understand that this sort of thing would be even worse for him in the end than out and out resistance. Again he did nothing.

Meanwhile St. Dominic, having put his hand to the plough, was not the man to turn back. He succeeded in making some converts. The penance laid upon one of these, in order to reconcile him to the Church, has been preserved. Its date seems to be 1207 or 1208. It prescribes that Pons Roger of Treville “en Lauraguais” for three successive Sundays is to strip to the waist and walk from the outskirts of his village to the church, being beaten with rods all along the way by a priest. He is to wear a religious (i.e., monkish) habit with crosses sewn upon it. For the rest of his life he is to eat no meat, eggs, or cheese. Exception is made for the great feasts of Easter, Pentecost and Christmas, not for the comfort of the penitent but so that he might openly[Pg 91] show that he had broken with the Catharan law of fasting described in the preceding chapter. Three days a week he is to have no fish, oil or wine, unless in case of sickness. He is to keep three Lents a year, and to live in perpetual chastity. The obligation, to hear mass at least once a day and to show his letter of penitence once a month to his parish priest, round out his sentence. Should he disobey, he is ipso facto excommunicate as a heretic and perjurer on top of that. A propos of this bristling catalogue the good Mother Drane, comparing it with the comparative gentleness of present-day Roman Catholic penitence, remarks that ... (the) ... “difference ... should cover us with humiliation for the feebleness of modern penitence, rather than send us to criticize the severity with which the Church has ever looked on sin.”[31] Unfortunately even in the thirteenth century few Provençals seem to have been of the good lady’s opinion. It appears quite certain that converts willing to tread such an heroic road for the sake of reconciliation with the Church were few.

In another direction St. Dominic’s labours were more fruitful. He had observed that the heretics made a practice of caring for the children of the very poor in order to bring them up in Catharan practices and beliefs. Accordingly he founded the famous nunnery of Prouille to receive the girl children of poor Catholics and also female converts from heresy who desired a secure refuge in which they might enjoy their new faith. The place filled a real need and prospered from the first.

However, in spite of the fame that Prouille was to have in the future, its foundation had little immediate effect upon the situation. Converts by preaching were few, as we have seen. The people cared no more for sermons than for rotten apples, remarks the “Chanson de la Crusade.” For the third time discouragement fell upon the papal mission to Languedoc.

There is a bit of evidence tending to prove that, in St. Dominic, the discouragement of his fellow missioners was translated into anger. To his congregation at Prouille he is said to have told of his years of preaching, prayer and tears, in their behalf, then to have quoted[Pg 92] a Spanish proverb: “Use the stick where a blessing will not serve!” “So,” said he calling up before them visions of war and massacre, “force shall prevail where sweetness has failed.”

If this sermon of St. Dominic’s was, in fact, preached towards the end of the year 1207, it coincided in time with a new and particularly solemn and pressing series of letters addressed by Innocent not only to Philip Augustus but also to that king’s chief vassals the Duke of Burgundy and the Counts of Bar, Dreux, Nevers, Champagne, and Blois. The Pope recalled to the “French” princes (i.e., North-French as we should say) the nine years already spent in the hopeless effort to convert the southern heretics by means of gentleness. Now, said he, the miseries of war must bring them to truth. Those who took the Cross were to receive full and complete remission of their sins as if their crusading had been to Palestine itself. As the lands of heretics were to be their lawful prey, so their own lands and families were under special protection of the Pope. No creditors could collect interest from a Crusader during his absence, and crusading clergy were authorized to mortgage their revenues for two years in advance. Really it seems as if the Pope could hardly have bid higher. By this time he must have been convinced, not only that the Albigenses must be put down by force, but also that the task was equal in importance to recovering the Holy Land itself. Better a lion in the desert than a wild cat in the bed chamber, as Scott makes Saladin remark to Richard Cœur de Lion. Innocent would almost certainly have maintained that the Saracenic lion was a fair fighter, whereas the teeth and claws of the Albigensian wild-cat bore poison.

We hear of no reply to Innocent’s three former appeals, but in this case Philip answered briefly by a letter written in the King’s name by the Bishop of Paris. Whether any of his great vassals answered is not known, but if their decisions were essentially different from that of their overlord then they were certainly of no effect. The King’s answer was typical of the colder side of his character, for besides his ceaseless energy, his boldness where only boldness would serve him, and his gift for intrigue, he possessed a prudence that never ran unnecessary[Pg 93] risks but made sure to get as many chances as possible on his side before he would move. As we say, he was a great “politician.” Three years before by taking Normandy he had cleared the mouth of the Seine, the only real navigable river in France, in the middle basin of which river the centre of his power lay. For the first time since the coming of the Danish invasion nearly three centuries before, northern Gaul held the keys of her own door so that her commerce could come and go at her own will. He had done more. He had settled himself in the rich lower valley of the shallow Loire and pushed back John almost to the Dordogne. Now, when he received Innocent’s letter, the campaigning season of 1207 had passed without incident thanks to a two years’ truce patched up in the previous autumn (of 1206), which had still about another year to run. Nevertheless the King of France knew that John had not given up the struggle but was making great efforts to raise money for the hiring of mercenaries and the bribing of possible allies. The Archbishop of York had just gone into exile in protest against unprecedented taxation of the English clergy for these pious objects. Also, it was common talk throughout Europe that John was refusing to recognize Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, in spite of strong pressure from Innocent to do so. A complete break had not yet come, but relations between the King of England and the Pope were getting more and more strained.

Under these conditions Philip Augustus’s answer to Innocent’s invitation to go crusading in Languedoc was, in form, a half consent to do so, hedged about with such conditions as to make it, in fact, a refusal. He reminded the Pope of his war with John. His resources were not large enough for him to levy two armies at a time. Let Innocent first make a firm truce between John and himself for two years and, second, decree an assessment upon the French clergy and nobles. Then, according to Luchaire’s account of the letter, Philip Augustus would himself undertake the Crusade, reserving the right to withdraw his troops in case John broke the truce. According to Lea, he promised, in case the truce were arranged, only to permit his barons to undertake the Crusade and to aid them with fifty livres a day for a[Pg 94] year. In either case he knew very well that Innocent could get him no truce with John. Since the King of England was already braving possible excommunication for himself and interdict for his kingdom, the Pope had no hold on him whatsoever. With a craftiness worthy of his far-off Roman namesake Augustus, the King of France had knowingly proposed conditions impossible to fulfil.

In those times of slow communication we do not know exactly how long it took important despatches to pass between Rome and Paris. Innocent’s letter is dated November 17, 1207, but perhaps even before it was received, and certainly before King Philip’s disappointing answer to it could have been delivered, a crime was committed that put the whole game in the Pope’s hands. On January 15, 1208, de Castelnau the legate was murdered by a retainer of Count Raymond.

Of the crime there are different versions. In Hallam’s ill-informed Victorian day it could be maintained that Raymond was responsible in no way whatsoever. There is a story that the legate got into a hot religious argument with a gentleman of the count’s retinue who ended by drawing his dagger and killing him. The version of the Catholic chroniclers is substantially as follows: Raymond had called the legates to a conference at St. Gilles in order to arrange the conditions on which he might give satisfaction to the Church and thereby obtain the lifting of the excommunication in force upon himself and the interdict upon his lands. Very likely he was informed of the new call to a Crusade and was correspondingly frightened. As before, he was willing to promise anything, but de Castelnau and the Bishop of Conserans who was present understood him thoroughly by this time, and refused to give absolution until he should at least begin to fulfil his easily given pledges. Lea speaks of “demands greater than Raymond was willing to concede.” In all probability de Castelnau carried things with a high hand. Already we have seen him forced to escape by night from Carcassonne, and already he had cursed Raymond to his face. The tree of faith, he was accustomed to say, would never spring up in Languedoc until its roots had been watered with the blood of a martyr. Now, when the discussion was about to be[Pg 95] broken off, Raymond is said to have uttered threats, more or less vague. In fear for the legates, the abbot and burghers of St. Gilles gave the legates an escort as far as the western bank of the Rhône, where they passed the night at an inn already partly occupied by some of Raymond’s people. In the morning, after saying mass, the Churchmen set out to cross the river, de Castelnau being mounted (according to William of Tudela) “on his ambling mule,” which would seem to show that in his case at least the practice of barefoot apostolic poverty had not lasted long, when a “sergeant” (i.e., a heavy armed, mounted, soldier not of noble blood) in the service of the Count, coming treacherously and from behind, mortally wounded him, with his lance. “May God forgive thee even as I forgive thee!” said the dying man.

Accounts of Raymond’s behaviour after the crime differ as widely as those of the crime itself. The version quoted by Lea claims that the Count, “... greatly concerned at an event so deplorable, ... would have taken summary vengeance of the murderer but for his escape and hiding with friends at Beaucaire.” According to the Catholic chronicler Peter de Vaux-Cernay Raymond showed himself throughout his domain with the murderer at his side, making an intimate of him and covering him with praise and with gifts. This was the version published far and wide by Innocent, although with his usual lawyer-like exactitude he adds that in so doing he is merely echoing the reports sent to him, which makes it appear as if, perhaps, he did not altogether believe those accounts. Finally, it is worth noting that, unlike Becket, the martyred de Castelnau was not canonized nor did his tomb at St. Gilles become a centre of pilgrimage and of miracles.

Whatever the details of the affair may have been, the crime made Innocent master of the situation. As with Becket, so it was with de Castelnau: the dead Churchman was too much for the layman who had successfully resisted him living. The Pope lost little time. Within three months of the murder, the unrivalled papal heavy artillery of curses was put into action so vigorously as almost to surpass itself. Flaming circular letters went to every bishop in Raymond’s lands, recounting the crime[Pg 96] and the strong presumption of the Count’s complicity therewith, directing that the murderer be excommunicated, that Raymond be re-excommunicated, and that the interdict upon Raymond’s lands be enlarged so as to cover any place that either he or the murderer might curse and pollute with their presence. This masterpiece of malediction was to be solemnly published with bell, book, and candle, in all churches and republished, until further notice, every Sunday and feast day. Raymond’s person was outlawed, his land titles were voided, saving only the rights of the king as suzerain thereto; any Catholic who was able might kill him and seize upon anything that was his. His vassals were loosed from their oaths of liege-homage to him and his allies loosed from their oaths of alliance. Before he could even seek reconciliation by penitence he must first banish the heretics from his dominions. “No pity for these criminals who, not content to corrupt souls by abetting heresy, kill bodies also.”

At the same time, letters went to the French bishops and archbishops, to Philip Augustus, and to his chief vassals. The prelates were directed to help the legates make peace between Capet and Angevin, and to stir up clergy and laity to the Crusade. Philip was congratulated on his great increase in power, his affection for the Holy See, and the hatred which he had often shown for heresy. Now, so it was represented, his office compelled him to punish the murderers of the papal legate. He had once crusaded to Palestine. Now he ought again to serve the Church, more and more imperilled as she was by the heretics who were worse than Saracens (an epoch-making phrase). It was his duty to drive out Raymond, to take the land from the heretics, and to give it to good Catholics who would faithfully serve the Lord, “under Philip’s happy suzerainty.” Probably Innocent wished Philip to read between the pious lines the thought that vassals directly planted upon new lands by the King would be far more his creatures than those who held them by a long chain of inheritance. As usual with Innocent, the letter is a masterpiece of its kind.

Meanwhile, Arnaut Amalric made haste to call a chapter general of the whole Cistercian order. That the[Pg 97] murdered de Castelnau himself had been a Cistercian was an additional reason for his own order to see to it that their dead brother should not be forgotten and that the cause for which he had given his life should not be allowed to fail for want of champions. Their chapter-general, when assembled, voted unanimously to direct the whole energies of the order into preaching the Crusade, and forthwith throughout Christendom their monks set themselves to stir up the people.

In all this, Arnaut Amalric surpassed himself. The “Chanson de la Crusade” makes him say, in words that echo a fierce (sometimes grotesque) rhetoric he may well have used: “Cry the indulgences throughout all the earth, even to Constantinople. Let him that will not crusade never more drink wine, never more, evening or morning, eat from a table decked with a table cloth (!), may he never more wear cloth of flax or of linen, and at his death let him be buried like a dog.”

Innocent’s letters and the Cistercian’s hardly less passionate sermons had their effect. Enthusiasm rose. It was like the ominous cracking and groaning that sometimes follow the explosion of a heavy blasting charge at the base of a mountain, threatening a landslide, perhaps greater and more uncontrollable than those who set the train foresaw.

Still, Philip Augustus stood out. He wrote to Innocent a letter full of decorous grief for de Castelnau, in which he recited also his own complaints against Raymond. Although the Toulousain held one of the greatest baronies of the kingdom, he had lent no aid to his suzerain in the great struggle with John. Nay more, when Philip had taken Falaise he had found Toulousain soldiers among John’s garrison there. Nevertheless, the King of France refused to throw himself whole-heartedly into the Crusade. He repeated, once more, that Innocent must give him the means of raising the money for the expedition and must see to it that John remained quiet. He even read the Pope a lesson in law by insisting that Raymond could not legally be deprived of his lands and honours (the two words were almost synonymous to a mediæval) unless he had first been convicted of heresy, which was not the case. Whether or not he was actually displeased at the idea of the Crusade, is by no means certain. It[Pg 98] would seem that he might well count on better service from North-French barons established in Languedoc than from its hereditary lords, accustomed as these last were to the independence of Paris. We find him attempting at least to limit the size of the crusading army. In his authorization to Eudes Duke of Burgundy and Hervé Count of Nevers to take the Cross, he stipulates that, between them, they must take no more than five hundred knights.

Significantly enough, this letter is erased from the royal register. Events were to make the King wish to destroy any evidence which might put him in the position of having hindered the Crusade.

Nevertheless, he persisted in refusing to join personally in the proposed expedition. Innocent did all that was possible to persuade him. After asking him, in a letter dated October 9, 1208, to assist the legates in persuading his subjects to take the Cross, the Pope wrote again, on February 9, 1209, asking him to designate a commander whom all were to obey, and so avoid the danger of faction in the crusading higher command. The King of France preferred that the entire responsibility for the undertaking should rest with the Pope.

Little the French nobles and their followers cared for the cold caution of their King. Frenchmen had been and were to be foremost in every Crusade from Godfroy de Bouillon to Philip’s grandson, St. Louis. It is the peculiar and permanent gift of that people, not only to phrase ideas in clear and definite terms, but to act upon the ideas thus formulated with an intensity and passion that perpetually amazes those who do not know them. Finally, it is their glory to make of the ideas which they define so clearly, and upon which they act so intensely, the instruments of a vast and solid accomplishment. They are an astonishing nation.

Now they began to swarm like bees. Seeing Languedoc hostile to the creed that inspired and held together all their society, they prepared to move upon her as their descendants, singing the “Marseillaise” and shouting for “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” went out against the kings of Europe. In the Crusades, as in those later Crusades of the Republic and the Empire, the inspiration was a transcendental formula, from its nature, therefore,[Pg 99] incapable of proof, but with enormous power to stir and to persuade. Moreover, that formula, the creed, was the visible architect of a new and fruitful world. The crusading times must have felt themselves above the Dark Ages as the French Republicans despised the innumerable petty restrictions that made of the old régime a stifling thing. So they made ready to come out, as we or our descendants may see Frenchmen come out, to do battle for a creed and thereby to change the world.

Of course there were other and lesser motives. Instead of having to make the long and dangerous trip to Palestine, a mere forty days’ term of service in Languedoc was enough to qualify a man for the crusading indulgences. The price of a salved conscience had fallen. Further, the enemy to be combated was probably known to be divided against himself, and certainly known to be rich and unwarlike compared with those who were preparing the invasion. Jealousy of the refined and wealthy South no doubt spurred many a Crusader. Finally, there was the chance, not only of fine plunder, but also of permanent possession at the expense of the heretic. No doubt certain Crusaders felt that they were using the Church more than the Church was using them, just as certain of our large employers of labour use a base religious fanaticism (which in other respects they despise) to deprive the workman of his beer.

Raymond was frightened, and no wonder. He felt the ground cracking and stirring under his feet. Weak and infirm of purpose as he was, at least he had wit enough not to stand still under the menace that threatened him. His first move seems to have been to consult with his nephew and vassal, Raymond Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne, with a view to a common plan of action. In this he was unsuccessful. One account has the nephew for resistance and his uncle for submission, and another account has these positions reversed. At any rate they could not agree as to what should be done and parted on bad terms. The Count of Toulouse next made for the court of his overlord the King of France. Philip received him kindly and courteously but would promise nothing. Some authorities say he advised Raymond to yield, and others[Pg 100] that he forbade Raymond to appeal to the Emperor Otto who was unfriendly to Philip.

Otto, it should be explained, had for ten years been gradually losing in a haphazard civil war for the imperial crown. Innocent had supported him, in return for a grant of increased privileges for the Church. Nevertheless the other candidate, Philip of Hohenstaufen, Duke of Suabia, a younger brother of the redoubtable Henry VI, with the prestige of his line and the traditional German dislike of Papal interference to help him, had been gradually getting the upper hand. Otto was nephew to John of England, his mother had been the Plantagenet Princess Matilda, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was in close touch with John, and correspondingly hostile, in diplomacy at least, to Philip Augustus, John’s mortal enemy. Philip Augustus had even gone so far as to get into relations with Otto’s rival Philip of Suabia. While neither the two Philips nor Otto and John had ever actively aided one another with more than diplomatic and moral support, still the diplomatic alignment counted for something. In June, 1208, Otto’s rival, Philip of Suabia, had been murdered. Otto’s position was accordingly strengthened, particularly as he had had nothing to do with the crime, which had been committed for private motives.

At the time of Raymond’s visit to Philip Augustus, Otto had just become sole Emperor, so that the King of France was particularly anxious that Raymond should not attach himself to the powerful German nephew of John Plantagenet his greatest enemy. As often happened in feudal law, Raymond had more than one overlord. For the greater part of his lands he owed allegiance to the King of France. For the Marquisate of Provence, which lay east of the Rhône, and for the county of Vivarais to the west of that river, he was the “man” of the Emperor. Philip’s interest in him was so much greater than Otto’s that Raymond would have done well to leave the German alone. Unfortunately he could never take a broad view. With his usual knack for doing exactly the thing that would hurt him the most in the long run, he went straight from Philip to Otto. The Emperor had not his own house in order, therefore[Pg 101] he could give no help, and any dealings with him were sure to weaken Raymond’s position with Philip.

One last resource remained to the Toulousain, to throw himself on the mercy of the legates and the Pope. While he had been running after Philip Augustus and Otto, his agents had been dealing with the papal curia, under instructions to raise the question of the personality of Arnaut Amalric. Should another legate, less hard and pitiless, be sent, then Raymond authorized them to promise complete submission. While Raymond’s ambassadors were framing these promises (no doubt in the full-blown oratory characteristic of the meridional to this day), laying the blame for what had occurred upon Arnaut Amalric, and showering rich presents upon all who might be useful to them, Raymond himself was giving away the game by throwing himself on the mercy of the man he professed to be unwilling to deal with on any terms. Hearing that Arnaut Amalric was holding a council at Aubinas, he knelt at Arnaut’s feet, and begged for mercy and pardon. As might have been expected, he gained nothing, the abbot coldly referred him to Rome. The effect of the fruitless humiliation was only to strain still further his relations with his nephew, and to lower still further, if possible, Churchmen’s opinion of his crooked dealings with them.

Innocent determined to play with the wretched count. Excommunicate as he was, the fact that his agents had been received at Rome and their complaints against Arnaut listened to at all may prove that the Pope and his advisers had already considered such a plan. Certainly Raymond’s repeated shuffling with the Church had been enough to wipe out any further claim to consideration for him. His abject fear was now to be used to put him into the power of Rome, so as to lessen his ability to resist the coming Crusade, should he determine to do so. As for renouncing the Crusade, whatever Raymond might do, that was probably not considered for a moment. After ten years of failure Rome was at last convinced that nothing could be done with heresy in Languedoc except by terrifying that country. Further, now that the crusading army was actually mobilizing, the Church could not call off the expedition even if she so desired.

Accordingly, the curia fell in with Raymond’s request[Pg 102] for new legates. Without removing Arnaut Amalric, the Pope gave him two new colleagues—Milo, a notary of the Lateran, and Theodisius, a Genoese canon—who were to arrange the conditions of the Count’s reconciliation with the Church. Raymond was overjoyed, and there are indications that Arnaut Amalric and his colleague the bishop of Conserans were correspondingly depressed, or at least puzzled at the apparent success of the Toulousain ambassadors at Rome, with their fluent tongues and their showers of presents.

Innocent made haste to reassure his earlier legates. Milo was directed to obey Arnaut Amalric implicitly. The new appointments were a mere ruse. The Pope quoted Scripture in defence of the use of craft, and explained that, while seeming for a time to favour Raymond, the lesser defenders of heresy could be the more easily crushed by the Crusade. Raymond himself, should he make no move to support his vassals, was at first to be left alone. Then, when those who might have rallied round him had been disposed of, he could be easily dealt with in his turn—that is, “should he persist in his evil ways,” Innocent added for form’s sake. What had appeared as a diplomatic victory for Raymond was only a move to make his destruction more certain.

Through the spring and early summer of 1209 the pious comedy was played. Raymond again solemnly swore (he must have known the formulas by heart, he had sworn to them so often) to consider as heretics those designated as such by the clergy, and to turn them over to the Crusaders, together with their abettors and goods; to dismiss his bandit-mercenaries, and never hire such troops again; to remove such Jews as he had appointed to public offices; to restore the Church properties he had stolen; to police the roads; to abolish his excessive toll-rates, and keep the “Truce of God” on feast and fast days. All this was familiar ground. What was new was the oath taken by the “consuls” representing the municipalities of Avignon, Nimes and St. Gilles, no longer to recognize him as their overlord should he fail to satisfy the Church. More serious still was Raymond’s delivery of seven of his strongest castles into Milo’s custody, thus giving the Church party the whip hand in a military sense when the crusading army should arrive. Only[Pg 103] when this had been done did Milo and Theodisius proceed with the ceremony of formal reconciliation.

On June 18, 1209, the humiliating ceremony of his public penance took place at St. Gilles, on its bluff over the Rhône delta. The town was the seat of Raymond’s remote ancestors, from which they had gradually extended their power through four centuries. Its great romanesque church had been built by his grandfather. A great throng filled the square before the church, crowding, no doubt, upon the broad flight of steps that rises to the façade with its wealth of sculpture and its three round-arched bays. Before the central door, the excommunicate Count swore upon relics of Christ, and of various saints, to obey the Pope and the legates in everything. Milo then put his stole about the penitent’s neck, and using it like a halter, drew him along, naked to the waist, and stooping forward so that he might the better be beaten with rods as he walked the whole length of the church. Before the high altar he was absolved. Then came a hitch in the proceedings. It had been planned that he should leave the church by the door through which he had come, but the crowd had packed the whole place so densely that their humiliated lord with his shoulders all bloody had to be gotten out by way of the crypt; past the tomb of de Castelnau which stood there—an unexpected change of plan which added still another touch of drama to the vivid scene.

Readers of English history will be reminded of the similar penance of Henry II for the murder of Becket. Two differences, however, should be noted. De Castelnau (unlike Thomas of Canterbury) was never canonized, and Raymond’s penance (unlike Henry’s) did not improve his political position in the least. Within six days, before his lacerated shoulders had ceased to smart, the crusading army marched south from its mobilization point at Lyons. Raymond was to learn that, like Ulysses in the Cyclops’ cave, he had obtained only the privilege of being eaten last.

Before closing the account of the preliminaries of the Crusade and taking up the Crusade itself, a word should be given to a short lived but significant movement which came about in consequence of the Papal mission. At the conference of Pamiers, a Spanish Waldensian leader,[Pg 104] Durand of Huesca, was converted to orthodoxy. It seems that he and his immediate personal followers had, all along, considered Waldensianism as an instrument for re-invigorating the Church rather than for opposing her. Their strength seems to have been on both sides of the Eastern Pyrenees, although we hear of their founding a school at Milan. As the limits of what was and what was not heresy were rapidly becoming more defined, their middle position became untenable. They had finally been excommunicated and their school at Milan torn down by the archbishop there. Now Durand went to Rome and asked sanction of the Pope himself for the foundation of a community of “Poor Catholics” (so called in contrast to the “Poor men of Lyons” as the Waldensians called themselves). The members of the new community were to be bound by strict vows of abstinence, chastity, and especially of poverty. They were forbidden to possess anything more than bare necessities, and were to beg their bread from day to day. Their clothing was to be of the coarsest stuff, with shoes of a special design so that they might be distinguished from the Waldenses. The principal change from their former life was that they promised no longer to attack the clergy as the Waldensians did, but to preach against heresy instead. Innocent saw at once the value of the proposed community, and in December 1208, accepted Durand’s oath binding himself and his followers. Already, in 1209 there were communities of “Poor Catholics” in Aragon, Narbonne, Beziers, Uzès, Carcassonne, and Nimes. At this time, they must have quite overshadowed the little band of preachers, as yet loosely organized and bound by no rule, who had grouped themselves around St. Dominic. But unfortunately for the “Poor Catholics” they were permanently suspected as converted heretics. In those crusading days, it needed no prophet or son of a prophet to predict that such a body would survive with difficulty, if at all. That Innocent authorized it is proof of his desire to spread the peaceful propaganda of Catholicism by every possible means.

Meanwhile, events were moving swiftly. As has been said, the Church had not the slightest intention of giving up the Crusade because of Raymond’s submission. He[Pg 105] had violated too many oaths. Besides, they probably could not have persuaded the Crusaders to disperse, at least without causing bitter disappointment, and very serious loss of prestige to the Church among her own champions. Not more than a week after Raymond’s humiliating penance at St. Gilles, the crusading army moved southward from Lyons.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] “Innocent III, La Croisade des Albigeois,” by Achille Luchaire. Published Hachette, Paris, 1911. Ch. ii, p. 47.

[30] Innocent III, “La Croisade des Albigeois,” Luchaire, p. 91.

[31] “Life of St. Dominic,” p. 40.

The Albigensian Crusade lasted for twenty years, from the original mobilization and march of the crusading army to the treaty which finally ended hostilities. Naturally, for the greater part of this long period there was no heavy fighting, the resources of the opponents could not have supported any such continuous performance; indeed throughout considerable intervals there seems to have been no actual fighting at all. Nevertheless, for twenty years there were hostile forces in being and a state of war existed.

The chief single episode of these twenty years is the astonishing battle of Muret. It will be best, therefore, to consider separately, first the earlier stages of the war, and second the campaign of Muret and the subsequent events which that action made possible.

The early war falls naturally into two periods of unequal length. The first, of only two months, comprises the original crusading march with its overwhelming numbers, and the capture of Beziers and Carcassonne. It ends with the appointment of Simon de Montfort to govern the conquered territories, and the return of the great majority of Crusaders to their homes. The second period lasts for four years. Throughout this time de Montfort commands the Crusade, maintains a government in Languedoc, and extends his power. This he does, in spite of his slender resources, by virtue of high personal ability. The period ends with the military intervention of King Pedro of Aragon against the Crusade, and the general expectation that de Montfort, with his greatly inferior forces, would be annihilated forthwith.

All warfare, it is axiomatic, is merely a means to a political end. One group attempts to impose its will[Pg 107] upon another which asserts a contrary will of its own and resists.

We have seen in the first chapter that the Middle Ages were politically decentralized to a high degree, but that, on the other hand, they had a strong sense of moral unity. Christendom was one big family. Mediæval warfare was conditioned by these two political factors. On account of decentralization in all its forms, the central governments had only a slight power to compel the entire body of their nominal subjects to move, irrespective of the individual wills of those subjects with regard to the particular matter in dispute; slight, that is, compared with the power of modern governments. On account both of decentralization and also of the moral unity of Christendom, wars between Christian men in the Middle Ages seldom involved any great point of principle. There could be no opposition between different and mutually exclusive types of civilization, as between the French and German types to-day. Usually the dispute concerned merely the opposing claims of two parties to ownership of, and therefore feudal administration over, a patch of land. Accordingly campaigns were apt to be short and inconclusive, and warfare in general somewhat of an adventurous sport. It is true that in the thirteenth century, a time still simple, war had not yet taken on the unreality of aim and the elaborate trappings which are the mark of the later Middle Ages. Already, however, it had become something of a “gentleman’s game,” as were the dynastic wars of the eighteenth century. Naturally, therefore, when a vital principle was involved (as in the Crusade which we are about to study), operations were always tending to relapse into the haphazard fashion fostered by the contemporary idea of war as an affair in which nothing of great moment to society as a whole was at stake.

As far as the technique of operations is concerned, the important features are mail-clad cavalry and permanent fortification. Axiomatically, infantry is worth more than cavalry in combats between disciplined bodies of troops, but less than cavalry in raids and in defence against raids, as in our own Indian wars, and in the Boer War. Thus, in late Roman times and the Dark Ages, cavalry gradually became preponderant over infantry, throughout the[Pg 108] greater part of Europe. The Franks who ended by setting up their chieftain as successor to the Western Emperors, were an exception. It was not until the great Viking harry of the ninth century, in which our tradition almost went under, that the defenders of “Francia” began to rely mainly upon cavalry. That arm alone was fast enough to overtake the pirates whose first act on landing was to steal horses for themselves. And it was in the repulse of the Viking, as we have seen, that mediæval society crystallized.

Fortified points, as well as cavalry, take on additional importance when the resources of one’s opponent seldom permit him to sit down before them and maintain a blockade and regular siege for a long time. A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the “impregnability” of fortification before the discovery of gunpowder. Any man acquainted with military things knows that, even irrespective of blockade, any fortress must fall before besiegers in sufficient numbers and possessed of armament and engineering skill equal to the defenders, unless the defence can receive relief from outside. Thus Philip Augustus took Chateau Gaillard, the strongest fortress of its time, not by blockade but by regular siege.

On the other hand, it has been truly observed that mediæval commanders of Philip’s type, and with his resources, were rare. The value of fortification is that it gains time, and few men of the Middle Ages had their troops well enough in hand to hold them long at the monotonous drudgery of siege work—even if they had resources sufficient to keep their force continuously in being at all. The well-provisioned fortress could usually count on starving out its besiegers before being starved out itself. Accordingly, if one party to a quarrel felt himself to be weaker than his enemy, he was apt to shut himself up promptly behind walls.

Furthermore, fortifications played a large part in mediæval warfare because a fortress covering only a small area could resist a regular siege as well as one of great extent. The importance of comparatively small fortified points, that is of castles, sprang from the lack of missile weapons capable of battering down stone walls. Obviously, as the power, accuracy, and effective range of missile weapons increase, the circumference of the first-class[Pg 109] fortress must correspondingly increase if it is to escape being overwhelmed by the converging fire of the greater number of engines which the concentric position of the besiegers enables them to bring to bear upon it. Conversely, when the problem (as in the Middle Ages) is of close-in defence only, the area to be defended matters little with reference to the siege work involved. Whereas, on the other hand, the expense of construction mounts as the circumference to be fortified increases. The resources of the besiegers were sapping or battering the base of the walls; or escalade from behind the cover of movable towers which could be set up out of range, and then rolled up so as to let down drawbridges on a level with the battlements.

Finally, the mediæval was no fool. I have made this point in my first chapter; nevertheless, I repeat it here. We have seen that the importance of cavalry and of fortification, especially of castles (i.e., small highly-fortified points) resulted not from folly, but from the conditions of the time. Social and political conditions, again, were unfavorable to regular discipline, but no more so than in our own American Revolution. Less so, in fact. It is true that there was no regular study of war as an art. Nevertheless, our modern staff colleges could not easily improve on the decisions of many mediæval commanders. Even the lack of maps on which modern staff work is built up did not necessarily blind the eye of the commander operating in familiar or partially friendly country.

The men of the Middle Ages sometimes show the power of sizing up the strategic essentials of a large theatre of war which they had never seen, and had never even seen mapped. For instance, take the case of Philip Augustus’s advice to his son with regard to the campaign of 1216 in England, that is that the Prince should first of all seize the castle of Dover which commanded the English terminus to the shortest possible sea route between England and France.

In the present instance, the mobilization point and the line of march were intelligently chosen. It was clearly out of the question to cross the “Massif Central,” the mountains of Auvergne, since armies are compelled to seek the lines of geographical least resistance, and must[Pg 110] avoid, whenever possible, thinly peopled districts which cannot keep them in food and shelter. The choice which faced the leaders of the Crusade was whether to outflank the mountainous country by the west or by the east.

It is only a guess, but I think that the decision to march by the easterly route was mainly for political reasons. To march by the west would have brought the crusading army close to territory still held by John of England. That monarch was still firmly planted on both sides of the lower Garonne, and had even held on to parts of Poitou well to the north of that river. The much widowed Raymond of Toulouse had married John’s sister Joan, who had since died. John had broken with the Pope over the candidacy of Stephen Langton, later of Magna Charta fame, for the archbishopric of Canterbury; and when Innocent had replied by interdicting all England, John had been able to compel most of the English clergy from enforcing the sentence. Since the Crusade was obviously directed against Raymond, John might move. It would be well, therefore, for the Crusaders not to give him an opportunity of falling upon their flanks or rear while marching south on the westward route.

Furthermore, there were geographical points to be considered. Crusaders from Germany and the Slavonic lands east of the Adriatic could more easily reach Lyons than, say, Limoges. Of course, most of the Crusaders would be “French,” that is North French, but German and Slavonic contingents were expected and did, in fact, turn up. East of the mountains, the expedition would be in closer touch with Rome, which might prove important in those days of slow couriers. Finally Lyons, being a large town, would be more suitable for a mobilization point than any smaller city further west, for cities draw armies like magnets since only in cities is there enough surplus food and shelter for large bodies of men. Lyons was, therefore, wisely chosen as the concentration point, and the Rhône Valley as the line of march.

The main force which assembled at Lyons was extremely large. The “Chanson de la Croisade” says twenty thousand knights and men-at-arms plus two hundred thousand “villeins” on foot. Until recently it has been fashionable for historians to disbelieve mediæval[Pg 111] high numbers, but fashions change. At any rate, a huge army assembled.

The weakness of the great force was that only forty days’ service sufficed to fulfil the crusading vow. Hence the Crusade, if prolonged, was bound to suffer (like so many American armies from Washington’s to the Civil War) from the plague of short enlistments.

Besides the papal legates Arnaut Amalric and Milo, there were with the army the Archbishops of Reims, Sens, and Rouen, the Bishops of Autun, Clermont, Nevers, Bayeux, Lisieux, and Chartres, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Counts of Nevers and St. Pol.

Just how the higher command was organized we do not know. Arnaut Amalric seems to have been the strongest personality.

Inconspicuous, no doubt, among the lesser nobles was a Baron of the Isle of France, also Earl of Leicester in England, Simon de Montfort by name. Possibly people pointed him out as the only man in the Fourth Crusade five years before to refuse to march against Zara, so that when the Venetians persuaded the other Crusaders to pay for their passage to the East by taking this Christian city he had left the expedition and gone home. It seems quite clear, however, that at the beginning he was of little authority in the Crusade.

In the last week of June the Crusaders moved south from Lyons, keeping, apparently, to the east bank of the river where the main Roman road ran.

In their march down the valley of the Rhône, with its glare and white dust, they were met at Valence by Raymond of Toulouse himself. Without hesitation, virtually on the morrow of his humiliating penance at St. Gilles, with the welts of the monkish lash unhealed on his back, this man, against whom the Crusade was principally directed, himself took the Cross and joined the army which had mustered to destroy him. Following out Innocent’s plan of “divide et impera” (divide and conquer) he was permitted to join the army, which continued on its march. Of course the Crusade was, officially, aimed at the heretics of the south, and Raymond, with all his shiftiness, was no heretic. Protestant historians have blamed the Churchmen in charge of the policy of the Crusade for duplicity in this matter. Of[Pg 112] course, Raymond’s submission was accepted merely because it was temporarily convenient for them not to have him for an open enemy, although it was intended in the long run to ruin him altogether. Still I confess that I cannot see that severe condemnation is justified. He had played fast and loose too often.

Where the army crossed the Rhône we are not told; possibly at Orange or Avignon, but more probably from Tarascon to Beaucaire, where the main Roman crossing had been. Once across the Rhône, it took up again the old road by Nismes into Spain which so many armies had followed since Hannibal. At Montpellier, Raymond Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne, and nephew to Raymond of Toulouse, came to meet the chiefs of the Crusade, as his uncle had already come to them at Valence, to make his peace. He was refused a hearing. It was necessary that the great army should not disband without striking terror into the heretical south and giving some, at least, of its feudal lordships into the hands of proved and zealous Catholics. Otherwise the effort involved in organizing the expedition would have been wasted. Accordingly, for Raymond Roger to plead his own personal orthodoxy and claim that only irresponsible subordinates had favoured heresy, was not to the point. The “Chanson” says that Raymond of Toulouse, with his usual shortsighted cunning, suggested an attack on his nephew, with whom he had recently quarrelled. It would have been so like the wretched Count of Toulouse to have done so, that we may accept the story.

Raymond Roger hurried back from Montpellier to his own lands. Why the Crusaders, after once having had him in their power, let him go in peace to organize resistance against them is not clear. Perhaps he had come in under some sort of guarantee like the modern flag of truce, and was therefore protected by the highly developed military courtesy of the day, which had grown up around the idea of knighthood.

At any rate, he was allowed to go, and made haste to put his two chief towns, Beziers and Carcassonne, in a state of defence, following the usual custom for the weaker party in a mediæval conflict, i.e., to stand on the defensive behind walls. The Crusaders sat down before[Pg 113] Beziers on the 20th or 21st of July. They had started from Lyons between the 24th and 30th of June, and had marched close to 230 miles, making an average march of between 10 and 8¾ miles a day, a very creditable showing, and one which deserves to be called to the attention of despisers of things mediæval. No doubt it was desired to waste as little as possible of the short forty-day enlistment before coming to grips with the heretics and their noble patrons.

Before Beziers they were joined by two detachments, one from the neighbourhood of Agen and the other from Auvergne. Each detachment had won certain successes of its own on its way. The Agenais had held to ransom two towns in the Aveyron Valley, Caussade and St. Antonin, and were looked upon with some disfavour (mingled perhaps with envy) by the other Crusaders, for having compounded with wickedness for a money payment. One of the commanders of the Auvergnats bore the great name of Turenne. His detachment had captured a strong castle and burned the heretics found therein, the first but not the last time that we shall hear of burning in connection with the Crusade.

Incidentally, the military aspect of this concentration deserves a word. Lyons and Agen are 225 miles apart as the crow flies, with the mountainous country of Auvergne between. Anyone with the slightest military experience knows how hard it is to synchronize the movements of distant columns so that they may meet at a common centre, even with accurate maps and with all modern means of communication. In this case, maps, telephone, telegraph, and all means of mechanical rapid transit were lacking. Probably an advance concentration point in the neighbourhood of Beziers was selected before any of the columns commenced its march, and during the march communication was kept up by an inter-weaving system of mounted couriers. The risk of the comparatively weak centre and right columns being cut off before they could join was practically nil because of the submission of the Count of Toulouse, and because the entire countryside was terror-stricken by fear of the Crusaders. Even so, the accurate concentration of the three columns on Beziers was a feat of considerable military skill.

Beziers, like most Mediterranean towns, had been an[Pg 114] organized city throughout the time of recorded history and before. Under mediæval conditions it was easy to defend, being built on a hill. Heresy was particularly strong there; we have seen in the last chapter how de Castelnau, in 1205, had had to leave the place because of the fury stirred up against his person and his defence of the faith. There is even some reason for believing that the great majority of the citizens were heretical, which was by no means the case in places like Toulouse, where the utmost that the heretics dared do was to hold their services at midnight. If there were only a few Catholics within the walls, it is not surprising that the city refused to surrender. Its bishop was with the Crusaders, and was allowed to propose that the town should capitulate and hand over its heretics for punishment in return for guarantees on the part of the Crusaders for the persons and property of the Catholic citizens. This most fair and liberal offer, from the crusading point of view, was rejected. The besieged preferred to run the chances of war, probably not because of any great solidarity between the heretical and Catholic citizens (as certain modern Protestant historians do vainly talk), but no doubt because the Catholics were few in numbers, and did not control the decisions taken by the defence.

Having refused to treat, the inhabitants made a sortie across the bridge over their river, killed a Crusader and threw his body into the stream. The sortie was repulsed, and thereupon, according to the account generally received, the camp followers of the Crusade succeeded in rushing the defences. This surprising success was achieved without orders, by divine inspiration as the legates piously put it, while the chiefs of the Crusade were deliberating as to their next step. Those in search of secular explanations may well suppose that the assailants entered on the heels of the inhabitants driven back in the repulse of the sortie before the gate could be closed, or that defective dispositions of the defence had left some point unguarded, or, finally, that a local panic among the men told off to guard a particular tower or bit of wall had permitted the success of the attack.

After the storming of the walls there took place in the crooked, steeply sloping streets of the town, the massacre for which Beziers and the Albigensian Crusade itself are[Pg 115] principally remembered. Priest and layman, woman and child seem to have suffered equally. Of a great crowd which had taken sanctuary in the church of St. Mary Magdalene, not one survived. With the sword came fire. Since, as we have seen, the camp followers, probably mixed with the peasant infantry, had been the first to enter, the knights began to drive them out by force, for fear that they themselves would get no loot. In their anger at this, the “villeins” set fire to the town, which burned fiercely. The cathedral of St. Nazaire got so hot that the stone vaulting cracked and fell in.

One admiring Cistercian contemporary makes Arnaut Amalric answer the question as to whether the Catholic citizens should be spared with the famous “Kill them all, for God will know His own,” for fear that many heretics might escape by feigning orthodoxy. Certain modern Catholic writers maintain that the lay chieftains of the Crusade had determined beforehand upon a massacre, as a military measure, to terrify the country. It would seem as if no such decision could have been made by the lay nobles if the legates had opposed. Still the point is not worth labouring, inasmuch as it has over and over again on these occasions proved impossible to restrain armies much more regularly and firmly disciplined than the Crusaders. The definite reasons for doubting the completeness of the massacre are that the church of St. Mary Magdalene, where the slaughter was heaviest, is so small that not a third of the seven thousand supposed to have been killed in it could possibly have packed into the place, and further, that the corporate life of the town was so quickly reconstituted that it was soon able to resist the Crusaders again.

At all events the impression caused by the massacre was tremendous. As many as a hundred castles, some say, were abandoned by their garrisons who fled to the mountains. The turbulent city of Narbonne made haste to put itself on record by executing some heretics, by contributing generously to the expenses of the Crusade, and by allowing certain of its castles to be garrisoned by Crusaders as pledges of good faith.

The next objective of the Crusade was the strong hill-fortress city of Carcassonne. Thither Raymond Roger Trencavel had gone, leaving Beziers before its investment.[Pg 116] The massacre had strengthened his determination to resist, and he had gone so far as to destroy all mills near Carcassonne so as to hinder the provisioning of the Crusaders should the expected siege be prolonged. The “soldiers of Christ” appeared before the place on or about July 24, 1209, having left Beziers the morning of the 22nd, the day after the massacre, and covered the intervening distance of over fifty miles in forty-eight hours, assuming that they went through Narbonne along the line of the Roman road and the modern railway—another good piece of marching.

Carcassonne was a much tougher nut to crack than Beziers. The steep escarpements of its hill were crowned by the remarkable circuit of late Roman walls and towers which we see to-day. Only the château, the outer town wall, the gates in the main wall, and a few large towers easily distinguishable from the older work have been added since 1209. The customary first assault to feel out the defence was repulsed with loss, although the defenders also suffered. Another attack carried the slightly fortified suburbs on the lower slopes of the hill crowned by the city proper. This success was followed by a pause of some weeks, during which siege engines of different sorts were constructed.

Meanwhile diplomacy was active. King Peter of Aragon intervened in the hope of making peace between the Crusaders and his vassal, Trencavel. He was a picturesque person, a great lover of tournaments and of women, what we should call to-day a sportsman; also a great fighter against the Moslem. In language and culture Aragon was then closer to Languedoc than Languedoc to Northern France. Peter, himself a troubadour and a generous patron of troubadours, held the Roussillon in his own right, and claimed from many of the southern nobles a homage difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the homage they owed to the far-off king “of Paris.” Like the other southern leaders, who sooner or later opposed the Crusade, he was no heretic. On the contrary, he delighted to be known as “the Catholic,” and had in person done homage to the Pope for his kingdom, as recently as 1204, and received in return the title of “First Standard Bearer of the Church.” His ferocious legislation against heretics in general has been noted in[Pg 117] the last chapter. On the other hand, Spanish religious enthusiasm, in the early Middle Ages, was generally directed far more towards belabouring the infidel than towards discussing doctrine. Politically, King Peter necessarily disliked any extension of North French influence in the south, and could not sit still and see his kinsman and vassal Trencavel destroyed merely because he had not been active enough in putting down heresy. Finally, he was now brother-in-law to Raymond of Toulouse, whose fifth and last wife was his sister. While there was no question at this time of his resisting the Crusade by arms, he made haste to offer his services as peacemaker.

Accordingly Pedro appeared at the crusading camp followed by a handsome suite, and made straight for Raymond’s tent. It was soon arranged that the Aragonese should enter the town to treat with Trencavel. The Crusaders’ terms were hard. The young viscount would be permitted to leave accompanied by twelve knights, but the town must surrender unconditionally. Therefore, although a prolonged drouth was causing the besieged in their hill city to suffer from want of water, terms were refused; and King Peter, whose dignity seems to have been ruffled, went off in a rage against the crusading leaders.

Another assault was delivered, but was repulsed with the aid of boiling oil and melted lead. To console them for their failure, the Crusaders could boast of an act of personal gallantry on the part of de Montfort, who went back into the ditch after the repulse and rescued a severely wounded Crusader.

Meanwhile time was working against the besieged through disease, aggravated by the want of water. They had expected a bread shortage in the crusading camp, the mills having been destroyed far and wide, but the expectation was not realized, on account of aid given by certain nearby castles whose owners were friendly to the Crusades. Calling the legates sorcerers, and the Crusaders “devils in human form who could live without food,” failed to help matters, so that at last the besieged surrendered, and were allowed to leave the town in peace, abandoning all their goods. Trencavel was held a prisoner.

The legates apologized by letter to the Pope for the comparative mildness shown in not burning the place and massacring its people, as at Beziers. The nobles, they said, could not control their troops in the matter; which may well indicate that there had been a shortage of food, so that the rank and file saw severe privations staring them in the face if any more destruction was indulged in. As far as Trencavel was concerned, from the crusading point of view, the aftermath of the siege left nothing to be desired. The young viscount promptly died in his prison. Dysentery was officially given as the cause of death, but some suspected poison.

The month of August was now well along. Having accomplished the prescribed forty days and won the crusading indulgences, the great body of the army were preparing to return home gorged with spiritual graces and not altogether lacking in temporal booty. The great force was about to melt away (as Washington’s militia so often melted away). But before the crusaders could return to their homes, they had first to provide for the continuance of the campaign against heresy. Someone must be set up in the viscounty of Beziers and Carcassonne, left vacant by the death of Trencavel. Furthermore, several other towns, including Albi and Pamiers, together with a number of castles, had surrendered without fighting. These places had been garrisoned, and the garrisons needed a central command. The Duke of Burgundy, the Counts of Nevers, and of St. Pol, to whom in turn the fief was offered, refused on the pretext that they had lands enough already; but really, says the “Chanson de la Croisade,” because they felt that they would dishonour themselves should they accept the spoils of such a conquest. Perhaps the corpses of Beziers were already beginning to stink in their nostrils, as they have stunk in the nostrils of so many historians to this day. Furthermore, dishonoured or not, the new viscount would be in an exposed position, alone—a northerner, confronted by Raymond of Toulouse and Peter of Aragon, with only the Church to back him. The Church had the feeble Christians of Palestine to support; it had taken five years to launch the Albigensian Crusade, and might take as long to organize another. Altogether, there is nothing improbable in the story that[Pg 119] only after considerable pressure from the legates and much prayer on his own part did de Montfort, the fourth candidate, finally accept the office.

With the acceptance by de Montfort of the viscounty of Beziers and Carcassonne, and with the prompt disbandment of the original crusading army, the first period of the Crusade comes to an end. It had lasted little over the forty days required to win the indulgences, and had been marked by the overwhelming superiority in numbers of the crusading forces in the field. Throughout the second period this superiority no longer exists, and for nine years the military strength of the Crusade is found principally in the qualities of its leader.

Simon de Montfort was one of those extraordinary men who deflect the course of history. He was descended from Rollo the Norman, and took his name from a small domain which he held in the Ile-de-France, on the road from Dreux to Paris. Physically, he was blond, tall, broad-shouldered, distinguished in appearance, and full of activity. Naturally enough his character has been both praised and blamed to the nth power. Peter de Vaux-Cernay praises his eloquence, affability, faithfulness in friendship, his rigid chastity, and rare modesty. Sismondi, in a famous passage, says of him: “an able warrior, austere in his personal habits, fanatical in religion, inflexible, cruel and treacherous, he combined all qualities calculated to win the approval of a monk.” The important thing is that de Montfort was, above all, a soldier, and a soldier of a type not uncommon in French history, from the First Crusade to the wars of the French Revolution, in that he was consumed with a sense of the sacredness of his cause. As in so many determined men of strict sexual morality, in him fairness was all but swallowed up in fanaticism.

Such men are ill understood by men of English culture. It is a commonplace, for example, that no character approaching the type is to be found in the long gallery of Shakespearean portraits.

Meanwhile, although the student may smile at the fanatic, he will do well to remember the greatness of the work done in the world by fanatics ... those curious creatures. Directly, by keeping alive crusading activity in Languedoc, de Montfort preserved the moral[Pg 120] unity of Christendom. That unity, rescued from the grave peril which threatened it in the beginning of the thirteenth century, endured until destroyed by the great sixteenth century centrifugal movement, which is only just beginning to subside. Indirectly, he broke down the Provençal culture, and established the French monarchy upon the Mediterranean, thus establishing the permanent unity of the French nation. But from de Montfort, as from all men, the future was hid.

Geographically, his position was strong. Of the two centres of his power, Beziers and Carcassonne, Beziers preserved his communication with the east, and, when war broke out, would help to cut off Toulouse from the Rhône valley. Carcassonne was the capital strategic point of the whole theatre of war, commanding as it did the main Narbonne-Toulouse road from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. All considerable west-bound traffic headed for Toulouse coming from as far north as Belfort or Dijon would naturally pass under the walls of Carcassonne. To do otherwise meant either a vast circuit by Limoges or a struggle with the mountains of Auvergne. Similarly, the main route to Toulouse from the south was, and is, around the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees, north to Narbonne and west by Carcassonne. A man starting from as far west as Saragossa, or in winter from far to the west of that point, would normally travel thus. An alternative route existed by way of the Cerdagne: once over that pass a road led north-east to Perpignan, and north-west by the Puymorens to Foix and Pamiers. Its grades were steep, but traffic could use it well enough at most seasons of the year. De Montfort’s garrison at Pamiers, one of the strongholds occupied during the panic caused by the great crusading army, threatened the Cerdagne route. Should he gain Foix, he could close it almost altogether. From Albi, the fourth of his main strongholds, he could threaten Toulouse from the north-east, and, perhaps, operate in the Agen and the Cahors districts.

Nevertheless, as he considered his position, he had military and political difficulties enough to appal a weaker man. His military resources were small. The crusading army had scattered to their homes, leaving him with a mere remnant of about four thousand five-hundred[Pg 121] effectives, mostly Burgundians and Germans. The crusading leaders had sworn to come and help him at need, but none knew better than he how slight was the chance of their willingness or even of their power to do so. Indeed, one is forced to believe that so hard-headed a zealot asked for the promise more to keep their goodwill by emphasizing his humility and comparative weakness than for any other reason. He could count only upon such crusaders as might chance to come from time to time for a forty days’ tour of duty, and, permanently, upon those whom he was able to pay or to attach to himself by gifts of lands and castles. Moreover, he knew that many of his new southern vassals were bitterly hostile to him, and he himself had alienated moderate opinion by sailing very close to the wind of dishonour in accepting this new viscounty, won by massacre, and made vacant for him (as many believed and whispered) by poison.

Of the forces in opposition, Raymond of Toulouse alone, with all his weakness of will and his recent humiliation at St. Gilles, was far stronger in material resources than de Montfort. King Pedro of Aragon had been angered against the Crusaders at Carcassonne, all the more because their temporary numbers made it impossible for him to oppose them, and Pedro had much credit at Rome. He persisted in refusing to accept de Montfort’s homage as Viscount of Carcassonne. John of England who held Gascony, Guienne, and parts of Poitou was, like Pedro of Aragon, brother-in-law and friend of Raymond. John had broken with the Pope for reasons of his own, and was, nevertheless, flourishing like the green bay tree. Otto of Brunswick who had crushed all opposition throughout Germany and most of Italy, and was about to be crowned emperor by Pope Innocent, was John’s favourite nephew. For the present, Otto was strongly pro-papal, but as emperor he would be strong enough to make trouble even for such a pope as Innocent, should he so desire. Altogether, there was ample material for the building up of alliances against the Crusade, and possibly against the Papacy itself.

Against all this de Montfort had chiefly his own stout heart and resourceful brain. His cause was bound up[Pg 122] with that of legate Arnaut Amalric, who was prepared to go to any lengths. Innocent would be a tower of strength, provided only King Peter of Aragon did not get at him, and Arnaut Amalric ought to be able to manage the Pope. Finally, Philip Augustus not only stood with the Pope on most political matters but also, as King of France, would be delighted to see “Frenchmen” (that is North Frenchmen) established in southern lordships. While Philip was cautious and would always rather wait for fruit to fall in his lap than risk a fall by climbing the tree after it, still he might move if he saw his way absolutely clear, and he and Innocent were a redoubtable pair.

De Montfort made haste to put himself right with Rome, while insisting, at the same time, on his need for aid. He wrote promptly to Innocent announcing his election, and his purpose of rooting out heresy altogether. He owed allegiance, he said, only to God and the Pope. He promised payment of local Church tithes held up by the heretics, and a hearth-tax throughout his lands for the direct benefit of the Holy See. On the other hand, he somewhat illogically emphasized his need of money, offering to the Pope with one hand while begging from him with the other. Even his men-at-arms, he said, were demanding double pay, and without heavy Church subsidies he could not long maintain himself in Languedoc.

Innocent confirmed Montfort’s acts and titles, and enlarged upon the crushing successes in fulsome letters to Otto of Brunswick whom the Pope himself had just crowned Emperor. But, with a bad situation in Palestine on his hands, his definite financial support of the Albigensian Crusade left something to be desired. The most fruitful of his measures was to empower de Montfort to confiscate all valuables which heretics had deposited for safe keeping with Churchmen throughout Languedoc.

Meanwhile, the Church’s activities were not confined to the Crusade. St. Dominic with his little band of followers continued going up and down Languedoc preaching. Early in September the future saint met de Montfort, and a warm friendship sprang up between them. At the same time Durand of Huesca and his “poor Catholics” were also active. Innocent had to[Pg 123] write and reassure the Languedocian bishops, scandalized because Durand and his followers had clung to certain outward marks of their former Waldensianism; at the same time warning the poor Catholics to cooperate with the regular clergy and not try to act independently of them. The Pope understood clearly that orthodox propaganda must be carried on more strongly than ever, if possible, in the existing state of war.

Meanwhile, far from the jealousies and violence of Languedoc, Francis of Assisi was putting on his brown habit to mark himself the joyous bridegroom of poverty.

During the martial summer of 1209, diplomacy had been silent. Now she came out of cover and became active once more; indeed, for the next four years the struggle is as much diplomatic as military. On the one hand the fair-spoken, shifty, and unstable Count Raymond and behind him (and more formidable) the chivalric sportsman King Peter of Aragon sought to check, or at least to limit, the Crusade. On the other, the legates, de Montfort, and the newly-imported, irreconcilable, Languedocian clergy, all completely absorbed (as the Pope was not) by the struggle, were out for the destruction of the house of Toulouse.

To persuade the Pope was, of course, the object of both sides. Innocent was determined to destroy heresy. In that he never wavered. It was with reference to the implications of the job of heresy-smashing that there was room for difference of opinion, especially with regard to Count Raymond. Could a prince, himself Catholic, be lawfully deposed for failing to suppress heresy? To the men of the early thirteenth century it was by no means a foregone conclusion that he could. We have seen even the zealous crusading nobles shrinking from the “dishonour” of taking up the bloody titles left vacant by the the death of Trencavel. Innocent was no more a vulgar zealot than were these reluctant nobles. He had the high sense of fairness often bred in upright natures by the study of law, plus the exercise of power. Accordingly, his conscience was troubled, and there were many who worked to keep it so. But, troubled or not, the great Pope having set his hand to the plough was not one to turn back. And, even should he desire to do so, the slowness of communication was such as to make it[Pg 124] almost impossible for him effectually to control his agents.

Exactly how long it took for a despatch to pass between, say, St. Gilles and Rome is not clear. By land, the distance was over six hundred miles. By sea it was somewhat shorter, but a sea trip involved waiting for a ship to start and might mean delay because of storms or head-winds during the passage.

The first move in the complex diplomatic game was made by the legates. Raymond of Toulouse had left the crusading army after the capture of Carcassonne. Outwardly he kept on friendly terms with de Montfort, and talked of marrying his son to de Montfort’s daughter. But presently the legates demanded from the municipality of Toulouse the surrender of a number of citizens accused of heresy, and at the same time de Montfort wrote to Raymond threatening to attack in case the demand was not met. The municipality protested vehemently that theirs was a Catholic town, which had proved its orthodoxy by burning heretics as long ago as the time of Count Raymond V and was still doing so. They refused to surrender their accused fellow-citizens, whereupon the legates promptly called a council at Avignon on September 6, at which they re-excommunicated Raymond and laid his lands under interdict. Municipality and Count severally appealed to the Pope against this sentence. The legates, on their side, told Raymond that the toilsome journey would profit him nothing. But when he had made his will and departed in spite of them, they showed uneasiness. Vehemently they insisted, in letters to Rome, that the slippery count had failed to keep his former promises and would be equally ready to make and break new ones. In particular, they urged that the castles handed over by him as security for his good behaviour were now forfeited because of his slackness in repressing heresy, and that, for the same reason, the citizens of Avignon, Nismes, and St. Gilles owed no more homage to Raymond but only to the Church. Should the seven castles be restored to him, he would again be in a position to resist. Finally, they urged that it would have been better never to have undertaken the Crusade than to abandon it with its work half-accomplished.

The foreboding of the legates was in some part justified. The Pope pronounced himself satisfied with the Toulousains, and directed the lifting of the interdict laid upon them. With Raymond, Innocent’s play was more subtle. Outwardly he received him graciously and gave him costly presents, a mantle, a ring, and a horse. The Count had something of a case. He had surrendered the seven castles and agreed to forfeit the three towns merely as guarantees for the execution of the agreement made at St. Gilles the previous June. Some of the clauses of this agreement he had already fulfilled; he produced a list of churches whose former wrongs at his hands he had redressed. Further, he urged that although never convicted of heresy and legate murder, he had nevertheless submitted to heavy penance as if guilty, and had been reconciled in due form. Innocent, therefore, gave judgment that the castles and towns were not yet forfeit, “inasmuch as it is not seemly that the Church should enrich itself with the spoils of another.” Three months after receipt of the Pope’s letter the legates were to hold a council to determine Raymond’s guilt. There, if no one formally presented himself as his accuser, he was to be admitted to canonical purgation; after which he was to be publicly declared a good Catholic, and was to receive back the seven castles. If he were accused, a hearing was to be held but no decision taken. The record of the proceedings was to be forwarded to Rome, where judgment would be pronounced. Because of Raymond’s personal objections to Arnaut Amalric, a new papal agent, Theodisius by name, without the title of legate, was appointed to arrange the details of the Count’s reconciliation. The Crusaders were not to touch Raymond’s lands. In appearance, the Pope seemed to come out strongly for moderation.

Raymond’s diplomatic victory, however, was far more apparent than real. Innocent secretly placed Theodisius altogether under the orders of Arnaut Amalric, stating dryly that the new agent was to be merely the bait by which Raymond was to be caught on the hook of Arnaut’s sagacity. Meanwhile the seven castles, although not yet declared forfeited, were to be held.

With regard to the reconciliation of Toulouse, Innocent had empowered the legates to take guarantees and[Pg 126] precautions. Accordingly Arnaut Amalric set himself to humiliate the city, with the able but guarded assistance of its bishop, the zealous Fulk. The ex-troubadour bishop was fast increasing his influence. He had organized the more orthodox Toulousains into a powerful brotherhood, in order to work against heresy and usury. Finally, after much backing and filling, the city contributed heavily in money to the Crusade and gave hostages to de Montfort for future good behaviour.

Before the campaigning season of 1210 opened, de Montfort’s military position had taken a turn for the worse. He and his remaining crusaders were far too few to garrison effectively the multitude of towns and castles which had submitted. Beziers, Carcassonne, Pamiers, and it seems Albi were still held, but a number of smaller places, such as Castres north of Carcassonne, and Lombez south-west of Toulouse, together with many castles, returned openly to Catharism. Furthermore, Raymond Roger Count of Foix broke with the crusaders. This worthy and his family have already been touched upon in the last chapter. As soon as the huge, terror-inspiring army of Crusaders was disbanded, he returned to his normal policy of favouring heresy. He was especially anxious to recover possession of his second best stronghold of Pamiers; but a conference, arranged and presided over by his suzerain Peter of Aragon, failed to come to any agreement with the Crusaders.

During the year de Montfort took several castles in his new Viscounty of Carcassonne, such as Bram about ten miles west of Carcassonne itself on the road to Castelnaudary (where he put out the eyes of a hundred of the garrison, leaving their commander one eye so that he might act as their guide), Alairac to the south of Capendu about ten miles east of Carcassonne overlooking the road to Narbonne, and Puivert in the mountains west of Quillan. However, he had force enough for two major operations, the capture of the strong castles of Minerve (a hill fortress about seventeen miles north-west of Narbonne, which looked down upon that city and threatened communications between his two main bases of Beziers and Carcassonne) and Termes in the south-east.

The first operation was not the act of the Crusaders[Pg 127] alone, but was accomplished with the aid of Narbonese militia. Mediæval cities were normally willing to attack nearby strong castles which too often served as bases for brigandage against their trade. In attacking these eagles’ nests in the mountains of Languedoc, the chief task of the besieger was to cut off the garrison from access to the brooks or springs in the canyons below the ramparts. If this could be done, then the besieged were compelled to depend upon cisterns and could not long hold out. In this case, after a lively siege of about a month, supplies and especially water in the castle ran short, so that its garrison offered to surrender on terms. Its lord and the Catholics within the walls were offered their lives. On strict orders from Rome to fit such cases, even the heretical believers and Perfect were to be spared, should they recant. The army murmured. The “very Catholic” Robert Mauvoisin, de Montfort’s first lieutenant, expressed the general disgust at accepting such forced conversions of wretches whom they had taken up arms expressly to kill. “Calm yourself,” said Arnaut Amalric, “the converts will be few.” In fact, only three out of a hundred “Perfect” abjured. The rest did not even need to be forced into the fire prepared for them, but cast themselves in. The resistance had served to prove a certain solidarity between heretics and Languedocian Catholics.

The siege of Termes lasted into November, and was finally decided by want of water in the place.

Artillerymen should remember the name of Archdeacon William, de Montfort’s chief of artillery (i.e., master of the catapults) during the siege. This Parisian priest, a veteran of crusades against the Moslem, was so fascinated with his machines that he afterwards refused the fat bishopric of Beziers, “loving better to follow the wars and handle the artillery”!

At St. Gilles, in September, was held the council to arrange for the reconciliation of the Count of Toulouse. In a single interview with Theodisius, Arnaut Amalric had fully convinced him that either Raymond or the Languedocian Church must inevitably be destroyed. How the Count was to be rebuffed in the face of Innocent’s positive instructions to the contrary was a puzzle. After anxious thought, a single phrase of the Pope’s was seen[Pg 128] to offer means of escaping his general tenor. Raymond, as we have seen, had fulfilled some but not all of the conditions demanded of him. In particular he had neither dismissed his mercenaries nor expelled heretics, both groups being essential for his support. By the phrase in question, Innocent had informed the legates that he himself had directed Raymond to fulfil completely the conditions already demanded and to do so before the council should meet. At the council, therefore, he was told that, being false to his oath in these minor points, his testimony in his own behalf on the two chief points of his personal orthodoxy and his share in the murder of de Castelnau was worthless. At this disappointment he burst into tears, which was interpreted by Theodisius to the assembly as a proof, not of contrition, but of innate despicableness. The wretched nobleman, saying that his whole county would not satisfy the legates, broke off negotiations and rode sadly away. Whereupon the legates promptly set themselves to write to Innocent in such wise that the Pope might believe that the culprit had not wished to clear himself.

When the news came to Rome, Innocent clearly had his suspicions; inasmuch as he wrote to Philip Augustus saying that he did not know whether or not Raymond had failed through his own fault in proving his innocence. At the same time, now that the Count’s failure to suppress heresy had been made the key-point, it is hard to see how the Pope could fail to sustain the council. He therefore wrote severely to Raymond, reproaching him for breaking faith inasmuch as he continued to tolerate the heretics. On the whole, Arnaut Amalric had carried his point, and made haste to press his advantage in subsequent conferences.

Meanwhile, during the year the general position of the Papacy in European politics had changed for the worse. Otto of Brunswick, once crowned emperor, had rapidly become anti-papal. Indeed, he had been so aggressive and successful in Italy that he might soon be in a position to menace the Pope. Innocent had therefore excommunicated him and had raised against him numerous German nobles who feared from the new emperor a policy of centralization and regular taxes such as marked the government of his near kinsmen the Plantagenets.[Pg 129] But, despite Pope and German rebels, Otto continued successful. In England John was at the height of his prosperity. With an excommunicated emperor and an excommunicated King of England on the Pope’s hands, a better man than the Count of Toulouse might have turned the European scale.

The same papal courier who had brought the Pope’s letter of reproach to Raymond, also brought instructions to him, to the Counts of Foix and Comminges, and to Gaston, Viscount of Bearn, demanding aid for de Montfort and threatening to hold them favourers of heresy in case they failed to give it. These letters resulted in the holding of three councils in quick succession, at Narbonne in December, 1210, continuing into January 1211, at Montpellier later in January, and at Arles in February.

At Narbonne there were present not only the legates, de Montfort and Raymond, but also Count Raymond Roger of Foix, and his suzerain the King of Aragon. Here Arnaut Amalric changed his tone and enlarged on the material wealth which would accrue to the Count of Toulouse should he participate in suppressing heresy—the houses and lands of the convicted would be his according to the law and custom of the time, and also a fourth or even a third of the captured castles whose owners had favoured heresy. Still Raymond refused. At the instance of King Pedro, the council next took up the case of the Count of Foix, who was anxious to recover his second best stronghold at Pamiers and others of his castles from garrisons which held them for de Montfort. After Raymond Roger, that inveterate favorer of heresy, had refused an offer of the return of everything that had been taken from him except Pamiers, on condition that he swear to obey the Church and cease resisting de Montfort, the King of Aragon went over the head of his vassal, promised to garrison Foix with his own troops and turn the place over to the Crusaders should its owner turn against them.

Pedro’s anxiety was natural. The Count of Foix was one of his most important northern vassals. The road running from the north-west over the Puymorens to the pass of the Cerdagne went by way of Pamiers, Foix, and the upper Ariege. The Cerdagne was the one broad and[Pg 130] easy inland pass across the Eastern Pyrenees. By the Cerdagne also ran the shortest line of communication between the centre of Pedro’s power in the kingdom of Aragon on the one hand, and his outlying personal domains, i.e., the Roussillon and the lands of his northern vassals, on the other. Obviously, since the chances of an open break with the Crusade must have been ever present with him, he had no mind to see the north-western approach to so important a pass in de Montfort’s hands.

The Pope had been pressing the Aragonese to come out strongly for the Crusade. When at last Pedro obeyed he did so with a Spanish thoroughness, accepting de Montfort’s long refused homage for Beziers and Carcassonne, offering to marry his son Jaime, the heir of Aragon, with de Montfort’s daughter, and even handing over the young prince into de Montfort’s power as a sort of hostage. Probably the King, like Count Raymond two years before, thought that the best way of keeping the Crusade within bounds was to go along with it. That it was his real intention to continue playing a double game he presently proved by marrying his sister to the often widowed Count of Toulouse.

At Montpellier and Arles the same parties in interest, minus the Court of Foix, were present. For Raymond the conditions offered were hard: razing of his castles, unlimiting billeting rights throughout his lands for crusading soldiers, and, for himself, pilgrimage to the Holy Land “as long as the legates shall wish to prolong his penitence.” King Pedro took the matter calmly, remarking merely that the conditions needed amendment at the hand of the Pope himself. Count Raymond again broke off negotiations, and rallied his vassals to him by publishing far and wide the harsh conditions offered. This time the legates re-excommunicated him. Gradually, in spite of himself he was being forced into a position of open hostility.

Innocent sustained Arnaut Amalric and in April confirmed the renewed excommunication of Raymond. Still the latter failed to break completely with the Crusade.

Perhaps it was the Pope’s stronger line that had bettered recruiting for the Crusade in 1211 as compared[Pg 131] with 1210. At any rate, as the campaigning season of that year came round, de Montfort found himself in a position to act with considerable vigor. The hitherto impregnable castle of Cabaret capitulated to him without waiting to be attacked, putting him at last in complete possession of his viscounty. He moved first to besiege Lavaur. Its capture would improve his communications with his northern base at Albi, and correspondingly threaten communications between Toulouse and Castres. He besieged it with his usual energy, and on their side the besieged resisted desperately, under the leadership of the lady of the place, an elderly “Perfect” of scandalous life, so said the orthodox. Early in the siege, Raymond visited de Montfort in camp, although he had previously sent some of his knights to help garrison the place. Accordingly he was upbraided for double dealing by certain northern barons, temporarily crusading, who were his near kinsmen. Soon afterwards, he had words with Bishop Fulk, who defied him and marched off to the siege of Lavaur with many of his Toulousain Catholic brotherhood at his back. Nevertheless, all this time, the Count allowed supplies to be sent to the Crusaders from Toulouse. Even when a body of German Crusaders, marching to take part in the siege, without proper precautions for security, was successfully ambushed and cut to pieces by the Count of Foix, who thereby broke the oath which King Pedro had sworn in his name, still Raymond held aloof. At last, the place was taken by assault, and the capture celebrated with the usual wholesale hangings, beheadings and burnings.

The notorious elderly chatelaine had the distinction of being thrown into a well which was then filled up with stones. She was pregnant as a result of incest, so she is reported to have said herself, with her brother and her own son. St. Dominic was present at the siege and with the other clergy sang the “Veni Creator” during the final assault, but what part, if any, he took in the genial goings on which followed the capture is not recorded.

Having consolidated his positions towards the north by the capture of Lavaur, de Montfort made the bold decision to attack Toulouse itself.

A first-class city was nearly always too hard a nut for[Pg 132] any mediæval army to crack. In this case there were grounds for expecting dissension within the walls, inasmuch as a bastard brother of Raymond’s had recently deserted to de Montfort, and Bishop Fulk’s Toulousain brotherhood had shown zeal at Lavaur. Therefore de Montfort’s permanent forces, amply reinforced with temporary Crusaders, moved against Toulouse with high hopes.

Nevertheless, the siege failed, constituting the first serious military check to the Crusade. The practically independent mediæval commune bred an intense local patriotism of which to-day our large nations have only the shadow. The citizens resisted as one man, Catholic confraternity and all. Fulk himself had not returned to his episcopal seat after the siege of Lavaur, having quarrelled with Raymond. Even Raymond, who with his vassal the Count of Comminges was in the place, now, when driven to the wall, showed a flash of spirit. By an irony typically mediæval, the favourer and patron of heretics was ardently engaged in building the new nave of the Cathedral, and forced the workmen to stick to their task in spite of stray missiles, for the building was near the walls. Such was the spirit and energy of the besieged that they not only kept their gates open for sorties but opened new sally ports by knocking breaches in their own walls. From the beginning, there must have been little chance of success if no factions arose within the place. De Montfort stuck to it for three weeks and then, seeing that the besieged held firm, raised the siege.

During this siege, a ceremony of some political importance was gone through. In full sight of the besieged, the Bishop of Cahors renounced allegiance to Raymond and did homage to de Montfort in the name of his city and its neighbourhood. On the charter attesting this act, last on the list of nobles and clergy stands the signature of “Brother Dominic, Preacher.”

The next move of the Crusaders was to ravage the county of Foix. No doubt their thorough devastation of the country round Toulouse had strengthened Raymond politically, by angering the Toulousains. At any rate, the Count now felt himself strong enough to take the offensive, and undertook to besiege Castelnaudary.

De Montfort, from his base at Carcassonne, was just in time to throw himself into the threatened castle. Apparently many Crusaders had gone home, as their aggravating custom was, for the force which he was able immediately to concentrate was far inferior in numbers to Raymond’s troops. Nevertheless the Crusaders were so superior in morale that the Toulousain could not extend his lines so as to blockade the place, but instead spent his time in heavily entrenching his own camp. The Count of Foix, that specialist in laying ambuscades, prepared to trap a reinforcement of Crusaders marching from Lavaur. The reinforcement discovered the ambush too late to refuse battle. They had just time to deploy and charge in the hope of cutting their way through. Hard pressed by numbers, their case was desperate when de Montfort, by a brilliant sortie, created a diversion and enabled them to gain the castle. Even after other bodies of Crusaders from Castres and Cahors had come in, the Toulousains still outnumbered the Crusaders, and matters seemed to be at a standstill. About this time word came that certain castles had gone over to Raymond on the strength of a rumour, spread by the Count of Foix, that de Montfort had been captured, flayed alive and finally hanged. To break the deadlock, the crusading leader decided to go himself to Narbonne and Beziers for reinforcements; whereupon Raymond, on learning that his redoubtable enemy was no longer in his front, mustered up courage to destroy his cherished entrenchments and retire.

On the whole, the third year of the Crusade had been successful, despite the check at Toulouse. Peter of Aragon had not been there to hinder, having gone off to southern Spain to fight the Moors. The European situation had changed little. Emperor Otto had conquered more Italian territory. Toward the end of the year, southern Germany had definitely declared against him, but the rebels were still the weaker party. John of England was still none the worse for being excommunicated to his face by a papal legate. Whether or not Otto and John aided Raymond, is not clear. One of John’s biographers says that it was their aid which enabled him to hold Toulouse against de Montfort, but no reference to John and Otto’s interference at this time appears in the historians of the Crusade itself.

1212 saw de Montfort growing still stronger. His theatre of operations was now to the north-west of Toulouse, where he took La Penne d’Agen and Moissac. At Moissac appeared the first signs of active disunion in any of Raymond’s cities. The inhabitants attacked the garrison which was composed of mercenaries and of Toulousain militia, and delivered the place to de Montfort. On the Garonne, Castelsarrasin, Verdun, Muret, and St. Gaudens opened their gates, while Raymond, now practically reduced to Toulouse itself and Montauban, attempted no counter-stroke. De Montfort, on his side, made no attack upon Toulouse.

Naturally, after so much success, the morale of the Crusaders rose higher and higher. In their enthusiasm they saw miracles, and they fought, massacred, and burned with a touching joy. De Montfort himself was the first to seek danger or hardship. After entering Muret with his knights, he found his infantry unable to ford the flooded Garonne after the horsemen. Mediæval infantry were accustomed to being despised, being recruited from men of low social class and considered of little military value, as we have seen in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. Furthermore, an attack from Toulouse was feared. Nevertheless de Montfort insisted upon recrossing the river to share the dangers and hardships of the “poor in Christ.” His wife, the Countess Alice, was hardly inferior to him in spirit and energy.

His successes were achieved in spite of many difficulties. He was often short of men, many of the Crusaders having to be brought up with a round turn by the legates for trying to make off before serving even their forty-day tour of duty. Money, too, was lacking. Once the commander could not even buy bread for himself, and had to go for a walk at meal times so that his poverty would not be noticed.

De Montfort was statesman as well as soldier. In December 1212, he called together at Pamiers the “three estates,” nobles, clergy, and townsmen, of his new dominions for a sort of constitutional convention. This convention discussed the whole body of North French law, known as the “custom of Paris,” for Languedoc, and ended by voting for its adoption. To the townsmen, the régime stood for order and the suppression of brigandage,[Pg 135] a feat which the Counts of Toulouse had never achieved. To the clergy, the “custom of Paris” meant increased privileges and immunities. Of the nobles, most were by this time already committed to de Montfort. All parties concerned had the chance to “save face” by accepting the opportunity to vote freely in favour of the proposed changes. For de Montfort, the parvenu, the convention was a triumph. Clearly the Crusade was turning into a permanent government of Languedoc by the “French.”

With so much success, de Montfort had received but one check during the year. A temporary coolness had sprung up between him and Arnaut Amalric. The redoubtable Cistercian, having been elected Archbishop of Narbonne, wished to be Duke of that city as well. The title was hereditary in Raymond’s family, but by this time he was no longer worth considering in Languedocian politics; the sole contest for the office was between Arnaut Amalric and de Montfort. Angry at being opposed, Arnaut Amalric went off to join Pedro of Aragon and fought under him through the summer of 1212 against the Moors in Spain. Had the energetic legate remained in Languedoc, de Montfort’s great successes of the year might have been even greater. However, the estrangement between the two leaders of the Albigensian Crusade was only temporary. From de Montfort’s point of view, the serious thing about the Spanish campaign was its complete success and the increased prestige of King Pedro which resulted therefrom. Far to the south, at “Las Navas de Toulosa,” about the time that La Penne d’Agen fell to de Montfort, King Pedro helped to break the last great army of the African Moslems that Spain was ever to see. For the Albigensian Crusade to have its chief opponent known as one of the foremost champions of Christendom in Europe was an ominous thing.

All the time the Pope, the mainspring of the enterprise now rapidly outgrowing his original design, had kept clearly in his mind the religious purpose of the Crusade as opposed to its later political development. During the year he had again protected Durand of Huesca, writing letters in behalf of his following of converted heretics turned Catholic missioners to the bishops of[Pg 136] France and Italy. By such action Innocent obstinately refused to go over to the extreme party that was for making an end of mildness and mercy even to the repentant sinner. Furthermore, outside Languedoc, in the previous year in the case of a canon of Bar-sur-Aube who feared for his life because of his heretical reputation in his own neighbourhood, he had insisted that the accused be protected from mob violence. The great Pope was a great lawyer and a great gentleman.

Clearly Innocent was not the man to approve lightly of the transformation of the Crusade into a general deposition of the southern nobles, and their replacement by “Frenchmen.” Accordingly, the winter of 1212-13 and the following spring saw the diplomatic crisis of the Crusade. For some months past, the legates had been asking from Rome a sentence of deposition against Raymond and, for de Montfort, a confirmation in all the titles of the deposed. When that news reached Paris, Philip Augustus undertook to read the Pope a lesson in law to the effect that only the suzerain of a fief could dispose of it in case of confiscation. Innocent felt obliged to reply defensively, assuring the king that the legates had strict orders to safeguard the “honor and interests of the realm of France.” Meanwhile, Peter of Aragon, back from his Andalusian triumph over the Mohammedan, displayed great activity; went himself to Toulouse; took the place formally under his protection; and sent an embassy to Rome to plead the cause of the southern lord against de Montfort. Towards the end of 1212 the first fruits of the Aragonese diplomacy appeared in the shape of letters from Innocent to Arnaut Amalric and his co-legate the Bishop of Uzes, and other letters to the Bishop of Riez and Theodisius, whom Innocent over two years before had charged with the reconciliation of the Count of Toulouse. The Pope flatly refused to substitute de Montfort for Raymond, blamed the legates for even proposing to disregard the rights of Raymond’s innocent heir, and disavowed altogether the acts of the councils of St. Gilles, Narbonne, and Montpellier. Finally, he gave strict orders to the Bishop of Riez and Theodisius to arrange for Raymond’s reconciliation forthwith; to lay aside their lukewarmness and sloth, and to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth to Rome henceforward!

Still the Pope felt that he had not done enough. Towards the middle of January, therefore, he began to send out a whole series of letters to Languedoc. Already there had been a good deal of correspondence with de Montfort complaining of the scanty returns of the three deniers hearth tax. Now, on January 15th, 1213, Innocent again reproves the chief of the Crusade, this time for non-observance of his duties as vassal to Pedro of Aragon for his Viscounty of Beziers and Carcassonne. On the same day, another papal letter left Rome addressed to Arnaut Amalric directing him bluntly to cease preaching the Crusade and to come to an understanding with Pedro and with the “counts, barons, and other prudent persons whose assistance shall appear to be needed,” for the pacification of Languedoc in the interest of the Christians of Spain and Palestine threatened by the Moslem. Not content even with this, two more papal bulls, dated the 17th and 18th, repeated the orders to the legates and de Montfort to make an end of the Albigensian Crusade altogether. They repeated the imposing list of charges brought by Pedro and the Toulousains to the effect that Comminges and Bearn, vassal lands of Pedro’s, had been attacked by de Montfort at the very moment when their suzerain was fighting the battles of Christianity at Las Navas. The Pope therefore ordered the crusading leader to restore the lands he had taken from the vassals of Aragon. The charges against Arnaut Amalric, to wit that he had practised “usurpation” in directing the Crusade against Raymond’s lands, were also paraded over the papal signature and seal. Pedro had guaranteed, so Innocent wrote, that Raymond would do penance by crusading in Spain or Syria. The heir of Toulouse was to be the ward of Aragon during his minority, and was to be brought up by him as a good Catholic. These propositions were to be debated at a sort of constituent assembly of Languedoc, in which not only the higher clergy and the nobles but also the city “consuls” and the “bailiffs,” that is the mayors of villages, were to sit. This assembly was to report its findings to Rome, where the Pope would render the final decision.

While going so far in support of the Aragonese policy, Innocent nevertheless made two important reservations. In the first place, he did not take the decisive step of[Pg 138] recalling Arnaut Amalric. Although the redoubtable Cistercian’s policy was disavowed, he was still given the job of calling the congress and of bringing the new papal policy into force by taking “suitable measures.” Secondly, the ancient and good tradition of caution in papal diplomacy was followed in that care was taken to state repeatedly that Pedro’s accusations against Arnaut Amalric and de Montfort were, after all, only charges not yet proved. Rome knew very well by long and no doubt often bitter experience how impossible it was to get full and accurate knowledge of affairs at a distance. The slow and fitful communications of the time made infinitely difficult the decisions and operations of a centralized system like the Papacy.

However, it was rare even then that agents on the spot were able so completely to oppose the will of their distant master. Even as the formidable January letters were being written by the scribes of the Lateran, the Council (called in obedience to the Pope’s orders of the previous autumn to proceed with Raymond’s reconciliation) was meeting on the “dark and bloody ground” of Lavaur prepared to go clean counter to the spirit of its instructions. It consisted only of the papal legates and agents, and about twenty Gascon and Languedocian bishops. Raymond feared to put himself in de Montfort’s power by coming. Therefore, in the absence of the accused, and in the teeth of the Pope’s express wish, the Council proceeded to declare that his testimony in his own behalf would have been worthless in any case. Since his return from Rome where, so the Council solemnly held, the Pope had treated him much better than he deserved, he had failed to restore Church property formerly stolen by him, had persecuted bishops and abbots and had not shown the slightest sign of dismissing his bandit-mercenaries or of banishing heretics. Since he had sworn to do all these things, the Council formally held that the oath of such a hardened perjurer was worthless and should not be received, even should he offer to give it. Raymond’s counter proposition, made for him by one of his notaries, that Theodisius and the Bishop of Riez should cause the oath to be administered to him at Toulouse or at some other place not held by de Montfort’s troops, was not even discussed. The decision of[Pg 139] the Council, so the commissioners reported to the Pope, forbade its being considered. They ended their written report by turning Innocent’s own phrase against him and solemnly stating that “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” of the matter was contained therein.

Raymond thus disposed of, King Pedro next addressed the Council. He wished to discuss, he said, the restoration of the fiefs of the three Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and of the Viscount of Bearn. Arnaut Amalric demanded written proposals under the royal seal. King Pedro thereupon asked for an armistice while the documents were being drawn up, during which time the Crusaders “were not to do evil” to their opponents. “I will not cease from doing evil,” replied de Montfort, “but for a week I will abstain from doing good, for it is not doing evil to pursue the enemies of Christ. I consider that, on the contrary, a good work.”

As far as promises went, the Aragonese proposals were fulsome enough. All four accused nobles were prepared to give full satisfaction to the Church, and asked only the restoration of their lands. If restoration was refused in Raymond’s case, then at least a guarantee was asked as to the legitimate rights of his son who was to be brought up a good Catholic under the guardianship of King Pedro. Meanwhile, Raymond himself would do penance by crusading in the Holy Land or Spain. For the four nobles, the King of Aragon said he had come to ask mercy rather than justice; more especially as the Crusade in Spain made it more necessary than ever that Christians should not fall out among themselves.

The Council may or may not have known that this programme had already been proposed by Pedro to the Pope. Neither the Council nor Pedro could possibly know that the Pope had already accepted it. In any case it was clear enough that, in case of its acceptance, its value would depend entirely on the King’s willingness to enforce its terms upon the four nobles, with whom he had already shown his sympathy. Besides, every cleric sitting at Lavaur was steeped in the bitterness of a long, fierce, and still doubtful struggle. Therefore, they refused the Aragonese proposals. The Pope, so they truly told the King, had expressly reserved to himself the final decision in the matter of Raymond’s reconciliation with[Pg 140] the Church. Therefore, since the excommunicated count refused to appear before them and take the preliminary steps, they were powerless; and in actual fact the papal commissioners might not have been safer in going to Toulouse than Raymond would have been, even with King Pedro beside him, in venturing to Lavaur. As for the other three nobles, Bernard of Comminges was believed to have stirred up the Toulousains to oppose the Crusaders in arms. Raymond Roger of Foix, they reminded the King, was a notorious patron of heretics and despoiler of churches, and had failed to keep even the recent convention agreed to in his name by Pedro himself. Gaston of Bearn had protected the assassins of Castelnau, persecuted the Church, and fiercely opposed the Crusade. He maintained bandit-mercenaries who had violated the Cathedral of Oloron, defiled the consecrated Host and parodied the mass. Even so, should Foix, Comminges, and Bearn come for absolution and submit all would be forgiven them. The Council took pains to preface their refusal to treat on the Aragonese terms with a paragraph full of personal compliments and courtesies to the King. Nevertheless, they ended with a warning, reminding him of the honours he had received from the Pope, of the oaths he had taken to suppress heresy, and the suspicion which must fall upon him if he continued taking the part of excommunicated persons accused of so grave a crime. If he was not satisfied with their answer (which was quite likely inasmuch as they refused him everything he asked) the Council would lay the whole matter before the Pope.

Remained the task of persuading the Pope to sustain the Council, as he was by no means eager to do. Accordingly, advice was rained upon him from every corner of Languedoc. From Lavaur the Council itself despatched letters by the hands of agents of Arnaut Amalric and Count Simon. The letters reminded Innocent that he himself had proclaimed the Crusade and afterwards entrusted de Montfort with its command. The crimes of the Count of Toulouse were paraded. Had he not asked help of the excommunicated Emperor Otto, and not only asked but received it (in some measure) from the notorious Savary de Mauleon, who commanded in Aquitaine for the excommunicate King John of England?[Pg 141] Had he not committed the abominable crime of insulting all Christendom by sending an embassy to ask aid from the Sultan of Morocco? Should the enemies of religion, by their appeal to Pedro, succeed in “thwarting” the Pope, so that the axe might not be laid to the evil tree of Toulouse; then indeed Christianity in Languedoc was ruined. Another symphony on the same theme was furnished by a second regional council, composed of the higher clergy of eastern Languedoc and the valley of the lower Rhône country, which met at Orange under the presidency of the Archbishop of Arles. Orange rivalled Lavaur in its violent words against the “Toulousain tyrant.” Solos were contributed by the Archbishops of Aix and Bordeaux, and by the Bishops of Bazas, Périgueux, and Beziers. The tone of these prelates varied somewhat, from His Grace of Aix (the immediate neighbourhood of his cathedral city had as yet seen no fighting and he was comparatively moderate in consequence), to the Lord Bishop of Beziers who called Toulouse “a nest of vipers” which must be utterly crushed. But through all variations of tone, the same motif was heard: Tolosa delenda est. The house of Toulouse must be destroyed.

At Rome, the diplomatic struggle must have been bitter. It was not a light thing to ask Innocent publicly to eat his words, and to act on the assumption that the Aragonese version of matters was a mere tissue of lies. On the other hand, I repeat, any central authority in the Middle Ages was far more at the mercy of its agents on the spot than is the case to-day with rapid transit and the telegraph. For the Pope to sustain the Aragonese and disavow Arnaut Amalric and his supporters would have been to go clean counter to the expressed opinion of practically every important Churchman north of the Pyrenees within a radius of 200 miles of Toulouse. Nevertheless, the issue was so evenly balanced that for five months, while the agents of Aragon and of the Crusade continued to set out their respective positions, no decision was reached.

While the whole future of the Crusade thus hung in suspense, Paris seemed for the first time ready to move. Philip Augustus hoped to round off his successes against the Plantagenet by taking from him England[Pg 142] as well. But before a French army could cross the Channel, the fullest possible diplomatic assistance from the Papacy was desired. Therefore, in March 1213, the King of France called a general assembly of his barons to decide what force should follow his son, Prince Louis, crusading to Languedoc. To work up sentiment, the zealous Bishop Fulk of Toulouse and Guy de Vaux-Cernay, Bishop of Carcassonne, journeyed to Paris, the latter having appointed the future St. Dominic to administer his diocese in his absence. To oppose them, came the Bishop of Barcelona, as Pedro’s ambassador, armed with Innocent’s January letters putting an end to the Crusade and disavowing the legates! Here was a pretty complication. Philip Augustus knew how to be shifty himself on occasion, but even he must have been puzzled as to the true state of affairs in Rome. However, it was decided that a large force should move south under Prince Louis. Only Innocent’s own command received about a month later, that Philip should take up the Pope’s quarrel with John by sending the young Louis to invade England, prevented the French Monarchy, then and there, from taking its part in the Albigensian Crusade.

At last, in Rome, the die was cast. About June 1, Innocent wrote in his usual vigorous tone to Pedro, Simon, Arnaut Amalric, and Fulk of Toulouse. The Pope had found, he said, that the ambassadors of the southern lords had lied to him. He, therefore, disavowed his January letters, withdrew his protection from the citizens of Toulouse and from the Lords of Foix and Bearn; until such time as Fulk might absolve the Toulousains, and Arnaut Amalric the three nobles, after due and complete submission in all cases. Pedro was reminded of the favours he had received from Innocent, and blamed for having shown so little wisdom and piety as to have protected heretics and favourers of heresy, more dangerous than the heretics themselves. He was ordered not to attack de Montfort and, finally, was warned that strong measures would be taken against him, darling of the Church though he was, should he disobey. The extraordinary spirit of the great mediæval Popes, their enormous sense of power and their bold determination to use it to the uttermost, vibrates in the letter. With[Pg 143] the Emperor and the King of England both excommunicated and defying the Church, Innocent nevertheless threatens to move against the foremost champion of Christendom against the Mohammedan! As before, he made one reservation. He granted the Aragonese request for an additional new legate, and notified King Pedro that he was sending the Cardinal Robert de Courcon to act in that capacity. But this concession was but a drop in the bucket. The new papal policy left the Aragonese practically no choice between war and abandoning Languedoc to de Montfort.

Before the Pope’s decision was known, the first Standard Bearer of the Church had chosen war. Without breaking openly with the Pope, he decided that it was worth risking much to save Raymond, who had himself married one of Pedro’s sisters and had married the heir of Toulouse to another. It is characteristic of the man and of the time that, even while he was ordering a general mobilization of his forces against the Crusade, he was at the same time obtaining from Innocent the renewal of a papal bull of the year 1095 which provided that no interdict could be laid on the dominions of his house except by the Pope in person, thus blunting the spiritual sword in the hands of the redoubtable Arnaut Amalric. Meanwhile he formally took Toulouse, Foix, and Bearn under his protection and began to bestir himself mightily to raise troops, calling upon his lieges to pawn their possessions and follow him to the rescue of his brother-in-law whom clerics and “Frenchmen” were seeking to despoil. Conformably to the immemorial traditions of Europe, Catalonia was already, as it still is, inclined to be anti-clerical over against devout Aragon. Accordingly, although the Aragonese held aloof and showed little spirit for the war, the Catalans swarmed out briskly so that by springtime Pedro had a large force equipped, as the “Chanson” expressly says, not only with pack transport but also with wheeled transport as well, and ready to march.

All these preparations were pushed on through the late winter and early spring. Towards the end of spring, when mobilization was complete, there seems to have been a pause. The anti-crusading party in Languedoc were anxiously waiting for Pedro, as an extant troubadour[Pg 144] poem vividly shows, but the Aragonese delayed. No doubt before he moved, he preferred to know how he stood with Innocent, who was so long in coming to a decision. Should the Pope’s verdict be favourable to the King, then he would certainly not have to use as much force, perhaps he might not have to move at all. On the other hand, should Aragonese diplomacy lose at Rome, then Pedro must win some substantial military success quickly, so as to present Innocent with an accomplished fact as a basis on which to treat. At last came two abbots; charged by de Montfort and the legates to show the King the papal letter of June 1, in which Innocent came out flatly against Aragon. The King answered the two abbots by promising to obey the Pope. De Montfort sent a knight, Lambert de Thury by name (to whom he had entrusted the castle of Puivert about fifteen miles from Quillan on the road to Foix), with a letter in which he told Pedro, “without any of the ordinary salutations,” that the Aragonese must withdraw his protection from the Languedocian nobles, “on pain of being proceeded against like all other enemies of the Church.” To which Pedro returned no answer, except to threaten the life of the messenger, and crossed the Pyrenees with the greater part of his large force, leaving the rear echelon to follow as fast as it could and proclaiming that he was acting under orders from the Pope in taking up arms against the Crusade.

Pedro’s intervention promised to be decisive. For four years, in the face of heavy odds, Count Simon had snatched success out of the jaws of hostile circumstance. But now the odds were so overwhelming that only one result seemed possible. In the summer of 1213 any man (no matter what he desired in the matter) estimating the chances of the future would have told you that de Montfort and his little band of Crusaders would be wiped out.

We have seen that everyone, except perhaps de Montfort himself, expected to see the Crusade annihilated. The event proved them wrong. It is fair, therefore, to speak of the rest of the war and the final surrender of the house of Toulouse as the sequel to the amazing action of Muret. For although that final surrender was postponed sixteen years, without Muret there would have been no surrender at all.

Besides its immense result, the campaign of 1213 culminating in the battle of Muret, is interesting as one of the very few conflicts between men of European stock in which a small force has broken and destroyed a force many times larger than itself. That the men of the time realized both the importance and the extraordinary nature of the action is proved by the abundance of record concerning it. Despite this fact, no student of mediæval war will be surprised to learn that the reconstruction of the battle itself remains difficult. It is strange, however, that the evidence as to Pedro’s line of march is almost altogether lacking.

It seems fairly certain that the Aragonese concentrated at Lerida. They could not have marched by the great coast road of the Romans, from Barcelona via Perpignan (a town of Pedro’s) to Narbonne, and then west by Carcassonne on Toulouse, inasmuch as de Montfort strongly held the Carcassonne country. Therefore, to march by this, the natural low-grade route of peace-time, would have exposed the King to the probability of having to fight before his junction with his Languedocian allies. Eliminating the main coast road, there remain two possibilities, the Somport and the Cerdagne, and between them there seems to be no direct evidence whatsoever.[Pg 146] To move by Huesca, Jaca, the Somport, and so into friendly Bearn by Oloron, would have put it out of de Montfort’s power to harass the march. A phrase in Vaissete, repeated by Luchaire, to the effect that the king “entered Gascony” appears to tell in favour of the Somport hypothesis. So does the fact that the Aragonese entered Toulouse before moving on Muret. Had he moved by the Cerdagne, Muret would have been directly on his line of march to Toulouse. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to tell in favour of the Cerdagne. In the first place, Belloc states that the Somport was disused (except locally we may imagine) after “... the new civilization of the Middle Ages had set in with the twelfth century....” The southern side of the Somport, which the army would have had to mount, is excessively steep. Moreover, the bulk of Pedro’s army, as we have already seen, was not Aragonese but anti-clerical Catalan. For the Catalans, the Cerdagne was by far the shortest line into Languedoc.

To move by the Somport would have compelled them to an enormous detour, and, as matters stood, speed was all-important. Their commander could not long keep up any shred of pretence that he had the Pope’s approval of his actions, and must therefore make haste. The choice of Lerida as the point of concentration tells in favour of the Cerdagne. Had the Aragonese intended to move by the Somport, a concentration at Huesca or even at Jaca would have been more natural. Moreover, there is no great difficulty in assuming the Cerdagne route, by the upper Segre to Puigcerda, the Puymorens Pass, and the upper Ariege on Foix. The whole of the upper Tet basin and also the head waters of the Aude were in Roussillon, which was Aragonese land. It would have been virtually impossible for de Montfort, even were he warned in time, to march from the Middle Aude country through hostile territory by Axat, Mont-Louis, and Saillagouse to cut in on the right of the Aragonese column. The forces in being, and friendly to Pedro, in Languedoc put such a move out of all reason. Further on, when Aragon had joined Foix, de Montfort had a garrison at Pamiers, which might harass the flank of their column moving northward. Still, Pamiers could have been avoided by going from Foix west on St. Girons[Pg 147] and the upper Garonne valley, and, in any event, Aragon and Foix were in great force, and marching to the large and friendly city of Toulouse, so that, granted any kind of reasonable care for security on the march, there was little to fear from the Pamiers garrison. It would seem, therefore, as if the weight of probability, slight as it is, tells in favour of Pedro’s having marched by the Cerdagne.

Whatever his line of march, the Aragonese effected a junction with his allies, and together they sat down before Muret on September 10. The place was held for de Montfort by a garrison of thirty knights and seven hundred poorly armed infantry. The Languedocian barons were in high spirits. A small garrison of de Montfort’s in Pujols, eight and three-quarter miles east-south-east of Toulouse, had been cut off and massacred. The militia infantry of the commune of Toulouse were available for the attack on Muret, for the garrison of that town threatened Toulouse closely on the south-west as Lavaur did on the north-east. The choice of objective was wise, inasmuch as it made the militia available, as well as for the main reason: that is the importance of disengaging Toulouse (the Languedocian base) from the nearest Montfortist garrison.

By contrast with the vagueness of our knowledge of Pedro’s movements, those of de Montfort are known in detail. The crusading leader lay at Fanjeaux with a small force including thirty knights. Then as now, the early summer saw the high-water mark of the French energy, and by September the greater part of the forty-day Crusaders of that year had turned homeward. Although we know (from the interception of a private letter of Pedro’s) that de Montfort had some sort of intelligence service at work, nevertheless, his information seems to have been defective, so that he was surprised by Pedro’s move, perhaps because of its speed. When word came that the Aragonese was in Languedoc in arms, de Montfort at once sent his wife, the Countess Alice, to overtake certain temporary Crusaders who had just started homeward and, if possible, persuade them to return. The energetic countess made such haste that she gathered up at Carcassonne several hundred of the departing Crusaders, including the Viscount of Corbeil and that William des[Pg 148] Barres who had commanded a “battle” (i.e., unit) under Cœur de Lion in the Third Crusade, including the bloody repulse of Saladin at Arsouf twenty-two years before. Even when these reinforcements had come in, de Montfort’s mobile force was small. He had about two hundred and sixty knights, and six hundred “sergeants,” that is cavalrymen heavily armed like knights but not of noble blood. King Pedro and the southern lords were known to be in great force. Most mediæval commanders, when gravely inferior in numbers, were accustomed to decline battle from behind walls, but Simon was an extraordinary man, and, moreover, he was driven by political necessity. Only the terror of his name made it possible for his small forces to hold down his thousands of unwilling southern subjects. To lose a strong place like the Castle of Muret might prove fatal to his prestige and be the signal for a general insurrection. Furthermore, he had not only boundless faith in his cause, but also a hearty contempt for the King of Aragon as an opponent. He knew that the Aragonese and the Languedocians were not accustomed to acting together, and would therefore have difficulty in deploying for action, especially if suddenly attacked. He therefore decided to take the field.

His decision made, on September 9 (as Pedro and the southern lords were marching on Muret, but before news of the move had come in) de Montfort moved west from Fanjeaux on Saverdun, making a slight detour to the Cistercian Abbey of Boulbonne, near Mazeres. There he dedicated his sword, laying it for a time on the altar while he prayed. When the sacristan of the abbey asked him in wonder why with his handful of men he was attacking so famous a chieftain as the Aragonese, Count Simon drew from his pouch an intercepted letter from Pedro to a mistress of his, the wife of a Languedocian baron, in which the King had written that it was for her sweet sake that he was fighting to drive out the “French.” “I do not fear this king,” said de Montfort, “who opposes the work of God for the sake of a harlot.” Already he was expecting an attack on Muret, the most exposed of his garrisons. During the hot afternoon, couriers, who had ridden that day upwards of twenty miles from Muret, brought word that the place was attacked. The little crusading army pushed on, reaching[Pg 149] Saverdun at nightfall. Here a council of war was held, at which de Montfort was for pushing on that night to Muret, which was ill provisioned, but yielded to the opinion of the clergy with him, who urged that the men and horses were fatigued from marching some 35 miles in forty-eight hours, on top of the 17 miles that de Corbeil and des Barres had already done from Carcassonne to Fanjeaux.

No less than seven bishops, Fulk of Toulouse, Arnold of Nismes, Bernard of Beziers, Raymond of Agde and Peter of Comminges (together with the future St. Dominic) were present, an imposing array with which it was doubtless hoped to impress King Pedro. On the morning of Wednesday the eleventh, de Montfort confessed, and made his will, directing that it be sent to Rome for confirmation in case of his death. Mass was said, and the Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges were again formally excommunicated, together with the Toulousains and all who might oppose the Crusade. Significantly, the King of Aragon was not mentioned by name, and to him Bishop Fulk despatched a mounted courier asking safe conduct for the clergy who were with de Montfort in order that peace might be made. Having crossed the Ariege at Saverdun, the little army moved north up the left bank of that river. About ten miles on their way, at Hauterive, the courier sent to Pedro returned with the refusal of all that Bishop Fulk had asked. Along the twelve miles between Hauterive and Muret, the march was delayed by marshy country which had been made more difficult by recent rains. Fierce Languedocian summer showers drenched the advancing column, one being so severe as to drive many men to shelter in a little wayside church which their leader had entered to pray. When the shower had passed the advance was resumed, and towards evening the massive red brick ramparts of Muret came in sight. No enemy had been seen during the day, but now, in full view of the enemy so that their own numbers could be closely estimated, the Crusaders crossed the bridge over the Garonne and entered the place unopposed. The lack of opposition surprised de Montfort, Antony says.

Under mediæval conditions, Muret was naturally strong. The general shape of the town is a right[Pg 150] triangle with a short base. The Garonne flows north-east along the perpendicular of the triangle; the winding Louge flows in a general direction east along the hypotenuse and falls into the Garonne at the apex of the triangle where the castle then stood. Adjoining the castle was the old town or “bourg.” The new town or “ville” occupied the space between the “bourg” and the base of the triangle. The road from Toulouse crossed the Louge on a bridge and entered the “ville” by the Toulouse Gate which was pierced in the wall of the northern hypotenuse side near the north-west corner. The Sales Gate opened through the wall of the base near the right angle. On the eastern side, a roadway ran along the Garonne bank under the wall from the south corner of the town past the bridge over the Garonne to the bridge of St. Sernin, which crossed the mouth of the Louge under the walls of the castle, at the apex of the triangle. At the right angle, i.e., the south corner of the town, an outwork or chatelet protected the Sales Gate and the entrance leading to the road along the Garonne bank. The defences of the castle were strong, those of the “bourg” less so, and those of the “ville” were weak.

The Garonne at Muret is unfordable, about a hundred and fifty yards wide, and flows rapidly between steep banks averaging over thirty feet high and nearly forty feet just below the mouth of the Louge. The Louge is a good sized brook between fifteen and twenty-five feet across; fordable in all seasons, except just at its mouth, but a first-class military obstacle because of the height and steepness of its banks, nearly forty feet, as we have seen, at its mouth, and over fifteen just above the town. Half a mile up, its banks are low and gentle and it is no obstacle at all. From a point about three-quarters of a mile west of the town a low ridge runs a little east of north. This ridge (called near the town “the Hill of Perramon”) is not over fifty feet high and of a very easy slope. Between it and the Garonne the ground is quite flat. About a mile north of the town lies a slight marshy depression called in the local dialect “Les Pesquies,” i.e., the fish-pond or fishery, and from this patch of swamp a tiny rivulet runs east to the Garonne, between banks all of ten feet high and fully thirty degrees in slope at the top—an obstacle impossible for charging cavalry.

Pedro, Raymond, Foix and Comminges had made camp on the hill of Perramon. Under cover of the fire of six mangonnels (i.e. catapults) they had promptly attacked the walls in the neighbourhood of the Toulouse Gate, forced the defences of the “ville” and driven the garrison of thirty knights and seven hundred poorly armed infantry into the bourg and the castle. The assault seems to have been the work of the Toulousain militia infantry, the knights and Catalans disdaining siege work. No sooner was the “ville” occupied than word came of de Montfort’s approach. Thereupon Pedro, in high glee, ordered a retirement outside the walls, reckoning that if the Crusaders would only enter the place they would be caught in a trap. The place could then be besieged on all sides and the war finished at one blow. Hence the unopposed entry which surprised de Montfort.

The allies spent the early hours of the evening in consultation. Raymond proposed to entrench the camp so as to secure it against a cavalry charge, and give to the defenders the opportunity to shoot at the Crusaders without fear of being ridden down. Such tactics had at least enabled the Toulousain to bring off his army safely from the unsuccessful siege of Castelnaudary two years before. To the sporting instincts of Pedro, however, this seemed mere cowardice, and he not only rejected it but allowed one of his barons bitterly to taunt Raymond for having made the suggestion. The idea was dropped. Raymond was so completely in Pedro’s power that we do not even hear of his resenting the insult offered him. Two monks now appeared, sent by Bishop Fulk of Toulouse to treat either with the Aragonese, or with his own Toulousain flock. The Toulousains promised an answer and detained the monks. This matter disposed of, Pedro began a night of revelry. Many of the barons of Languedoc, who were completely in his power, had put their wives and daughters at his disposition, and he debauched himself so strenuously that at mass, in the morning (so his own son writes), he was so exhausted that he could scarcely stand for the reading of the gospel.

Even had he thought of the military position seriously, the King had no reason to hurry matters. All his own[Pg 152] troops had not yet joined, and in all probability he knew of the shortage of provisions in Muret, which must soon sap the strength of his opponents. That de Montfort would lead his little band to the attack never entered Pedro’s head.

De Montfort, on the other hand, saw clearly that he himself must attack. The same political necessity that had drawn him to Muret made a quick success desirable; the shortage of food in the town made it imperative. He had had four years in which to estimate Pedro, and must have felt reasonably certain that the sportsman king would conduct operations haphazard. His own great inferiority in numbers might be neutralized if he could effect a partial surprise. Possibly he had this in mind when, on the morning of the 11th, he ordered that the Toulouse Gate, which had been forced on the previous day, should be neither closed nor barricaded. The enemy might be tempted to attack it again and be thereby prevented from giving their whole attention to the proposed countermove. Possibly it was the bishops who wished to show that they did not consider diplomatic relations broken off. The ruse, if ruse it was, succeeded. The savage Count of Foix and certain Catalans charged mounted into the town by the open gate, but were driven out by the Crusaders, under Count Simon himself. He had seven hundred infantry, and even mediocre infantry (provided they kept their heads at all) had the advantage of mounted men cooped in the narrow and winding streets of a mediæval town. The unsuccessful attack served the further purpose, of forcing the consent of the clergy to the rash plan, as they considered it, of a sortie. Bishop Fulk, nothing daunted when the Toulousains sent back his two monks with the message they could do nothing with King Pedro, had intended to go barefoot at the head of the clergy present, to beg peace in the very camp of the besiegers.

Now de Montfort, heated with directing the repulse of Foix and the Catalans, strode into the priory and demanded permission to sally out and fight. Meanwhile the southerners, in preparation for a new attack, began a heavy fire of all sorts of projectiles. When missiles began to fall upon the priory roof over their heads, the clergy abandoned all idea of negotiating and gave Count Simon leave to attack.

This permission granted, the crusading leader, who was on foot, made for the castle where he had left his horse. On his way he entered St. Sernin, where the Bishop of Usez was saying mass, and prostrated himself before the altar. As he rose, the supporting strap of one of his chainmail leg-pieces broke, but, quite neglecting the evil omen, he merely had it replaced and continued on his way. His horse had been brought out to him on the high castle terrace, but, as he tried to mount, two more discouraging portents took place. First the saddle girth broke. He calmly had it repaired and again put his foot in the stirrup. Just as he swung into the saddle, the horse jerked up his head and struck him on the forehead so that, for a moment, he was stunned. Some Toulousains, posted in observation north of the Louge, raised a mocking yell to which he defiantly shouted back, “You mock me now, but I trust in the Lord and I hope right well to cry after you this day as far as the gates of Toulouse.”

We may fairly assume that the Toulousains were out of easy bowshot—say a hundred and fifty yards off. Their gestures could therefore be seen and their mocking cries heard, whereas Count Simon’s exact words could not come to them clearly: had they been understood they might have jeopardized his intended surprise.

Mounted at last, Count Simon rode down to the Ville and formed his nine hundred horsemen on the spacious market-place, the “mercadar” making three squadrons or “battles” each, we may safely assume, of about three hundred, i.e., one hundred knights and two hundred sergeants. The first displayed all the banners of the host, so as to concentrate the enemies’ attention upon it. It was commanded by William d’Encontre, accompanied by de Montfort’s half brother, the veteran William des Barres. The second was under Bouchard de Marly and included a handful of knights who had sworn an oath to kill King Pedro. De Montfort himself commanded the third. When formed, he addressed them and explained the proposed manœuvre, stressing the need to file out by a gate not closely observed by the enemy, so that, while deploying, their horses should not be exposed to missile weapons: the men themselves would have nothing to fear thanks to their chainmail armor with its quilted lining.[Pg 154] His orders were to charge and fight as a unit and on no account to break ranks in order to attempt some individual feat of arms.

Finally, before moving out, they were solemnly blessed by the bishops. Early that morning mass had been said, and all the soldiers who had not previously done so had made their confessions and received the Host. Fulk, in his mitre and vestments, held out a fragment of the true cross for each man, in turn, to dismount and kiss it.

This ceremony, of course, dragged so that the enthusiasm of the troops began to suffer until Bishop Peter of Comminges, with a more practical spirit than his brother of Toulouse, cut matters short by gently taking the relic into his own hands and held it up in sight of all present, promising to those who should fall the glory of martyrs and the remission of purgatory. Afterwards, when the little column had moved off, the clergy made for the church, and throughout the engagement continued to implore the throne of grace in behalf of the Christian arms with such fervor that “... they might be said to have howled rather than prayed.”

It is impossible to establish the numbers of the force which the Crusaders were about to attack. Pedro had mobilized a thousand knights, all of whom had not yet come in, but the number of his “sergeants” we do know. There are no figures as to the men brought by the Languedocian nobles, although we do know that two years before at Castlenaudary, their forces had heavily outnumbered de Montfort at a time when Pedro was not in the field. The calculations of different authorities vary widely. In cavalry alone, the Crusaders were certainly outnumbered at least four to one.

The southern infantry strength, including both feudal infantry and communal militia, has been estimated at forty thousand. No figures seem to exist for the Toulousain militia, but they were undoubtedly in considerable force. On the other hand, the morale of the allies was below the superb morale of the Crusaders; and there was friction between Languedocians and Spaniards, as we have seen.

The reconstruction of a mediæval battle is a matter of the greatest difficulty, as every scholar knows who has attempted such a task.

Even when (as in the present case) half a dozen contemporary accounts are at hand, nothing approaching a technical description of the action is to be found in them. Occasionally, as in the chronicle of Jaime of Aragon, which enumerates the different errors committed by the troops under his father, we get a flash of true military appreciation, but never more than a flash. Irrelevant but picturesque incidents, such as the series of mishaps suffered by de Montfort in mounting, are dwelt upon, while the fundamental points of an action are left vague.

The historian is therefore compelled to test his authorities by minute study of the terrain, by an examination of local tradition, and by all he has of common sense combined with military judgment.

With respect to this matter of military judgment yet one more difficulty appears, i.e., our complete ignorance of mediæval minor tactics. In most other respects, our ignorance is qualified. We know that our European ancestors of seven and eight hundred years ago could and did move large armies from France to Palestine, both by land and overseas. Therefore we are compelled to credit them with a considerable degree of discipline and an effective commissariat and intelligence service; to deny such obvious conclusions is merely to make a fool of oneself. We are well informed concerning their fortifications and siege work, which played so important a part in their wars. But as to the details of their tactical formations and especially as to the regularity of those formations we know nothing at all. Hence it is possible for highly educated veteran soldiers of to-day to argue that there was, for instance, no generally understood and practised method of passing from column to line and back again!

Accordingly it is not surprising to find that scholars disagree fundamentally over the Battle of Muret, and that no full reconstruction seems possible.

Nevertheless, after comparing all the evidence now available, an accurate outline of the action can be fixed. This I shall now attempt.

The Crusaders went out by the Sales Gate. The evidence seems to show that they traversed the chatelet or outwork, and left the fortifications by the eastern gate through which they had entered the town. They then[Pg 156] followed the road between the eastern wall and the river, marching all the time with the least possible noise as to avoid attracting attention. Evidently the first part of the movement (i.e., the passage through the outwork) was a feint at retreat deliberately shown to the enemy in order to mislead him, and the second (the march along the river bank) a concealed move, in order to obtain the effect of surprise. The column followed the route by which they had come until the bridge over the Garonne was reached. Then, instead of turning to the right and crossing it, they went straight ahead, passed under the walls of the castle, and (still unobserved by the enemy) crossed the St. Sernin bridge at the mouth of the Louge. As soon as the first squadron had crossed, it deployed to the left and charged down upon those of the enemy (i.e., part of the Toulousain militia reinforced by certain Catalan knights, under the Count of Foix) who had that morning unsuccessfully attacked the Toulouse Gate. William d’Encontre and William des Barres surprised them completely, and scattered them in a few moments, “like dust before a gale.”

The technical phases of this part of the action seem never to have been considered by historians. Inasmuch are they are of some interest in themselves, and furthermore, shed light upon the flagrant indiscipline in the southern army, they are worth a moment’s consideration.

The known elements of the problem are these: first the undisputed facts that the surprise was complete and that the successful charge was made only by some three hundred horsemen; second, the weight of evidence in favour of the route just described as that of the sortie.

The time element involved remains to be computed. The full distance from the Sales Gate, past the town, over the bridge, and up the abrupt ramp leading to the plain, is nearly 700 yards. From the numerous mediæval gates extant, together with the extant brick remains of the northern abutment of the bridge in question, we may be certain that the formation was a column of twos. We may be almost equally certain that the gait was a walk, for (in the first place) it would have been nearly impossible to trot up the final steep ramp, (secondly) silence was desired, and (thirdly) to trot through such a long narrow space would have exposed the cavalry to the risk[Pg 157] of a serious snarl in case a single horse fell or behaved badly—in which case the whole operation would have been compromised. Assuming the gait to have been a walk, we are entitled to reduce the distance occupied by each horse to three yards, leaving a bare one foot between nose and crupper. The length of the entire column must therefore have been at least 450 × 3 = 1,350 yards, nearly double the distance to be traversed, and the length of each squadron must have been 450 yards. Before falling out to eat and drink, we may be sure that the Toulousains and Catalans must have retreated at least 150 yards north of the Toulouse Gate in order that so large a target as they would present might be out of long bowshot. Therefore the head of the crusading column would come into full sight practically as soon as it topped the ramp and gained the plain, and historians who assume that the deployment could have been made out of sight of the Toulousains and Catalans have simply never troubled to walk over the battlefield. Assuming a walking gait to be four miles per hour, i.e., 117 yards per minute, the rear of the first crusading squadron would be in the plain almost exactly four minutes after the van had come in sight of the enemy in front of the Toulouse Gate. The greater part of the 600 yards separating the Crusaders from the enemy would almost certainly be covered at a trot of say eight miles an hour, before breaking into a gallop for the final shock. Two minutes, plus the time necessary for deployment, must therefore be added to the original four. In all, nearly ten minutes must have elapsed between the first observation of the Crusaders by Foix’s command and the delivery of the crusading charge.

Inasmuch as Foix’s men far outnumbered the first crusading squadron, the fact that they were unable (when their seven minutes’ grace was up) to make even a few moments effective resistance shows their discipline to have been wretched. We know that they had committed the imprudence of falling out to eat and drink, that most of the Catalan knights had put off their armour, and that no proper measures of security had been taken. Nevertheless, it seems that the Crusaders should at least have been delayed a few moments. Not one of Foix’s Catalan knights was killed!

Meanwhile, the main body of the besiegers was getting to horse, crying “Aragon,” “Foix,” or “Comminges,” according to their allegiance. The Spaniards formed, but the formation was ragged. In part this may have been due to haste, although they must have had over twenty minutes in which to get in line, assuming a minimum of ten minutes from the disclosure of the operation to the deployment of the second crusading squadron, and an additional minimum of ten minutes for the second squadron to catch up with the first and for the two together to do the mile which separated them from Pedro’s people. In part it certainly resulted from the folly and indiscipline of the Spanish knights; every important man among them (so Pedro’s son King Jaime tells us) wanted to fight his own battle with the enemy, making strict alignment and combined action impossible. Furthermore, as we learn from other chronicles, Pedro himself exercised no effective command, but yielded to his chivalric enthusiasm by exchanging armour with one of his knights and posting himself in the front ranks—a piece of generous but unmilitary folly surprising in a soldier of his considerable experience since it lost him all control over his forces in reserve. The Aragonese were facing south astride the Seysses road about a mile out from Muret, with the Pesquies marsh covering their left.

Having broken Foix’s command, the first crusading squadron had to wheel half right in order to strike Pedro. By spurring hard, the second, with a straighter course to follow, was able to catch up, and both together went at the Aragonese, sweeping before them some of Foix’s routed horsemen. Count Simon’s orders on no account to engage in individual jousting but to charge boot to boot were so well obeyed that the shock was simultaneous all along their line. It was so violent that the Crusaders plunged into the horsemen opposed to them “like a stone dropped into the water.” Pedro’s people stood firm and closed round them, hiding them from the third “battle,” and the melée swayed back and forth with a din “as of countless axemen hewing down a forest.”

De Montfort, with the idea of charging in on Pedro’s left, worked rapidly north and east around the marsh until he found himself blocked by Pesquies ravine,[Pg 159] which the chroniclers describe as a “fossatum” (i.e., a ditch or trench). Cut in the steep banks of this obstacle was a narrow path, blocked at the farther end by a strong Aragonese combat patrol or covering detachment. Such covering detachments were familiar enough, as we learn from the “Siete Partidas” of Alfonzo the Wise of Castile, written about 1260, in which they are called alas or citaras. If it be objected that Pedro was in no mood to think of such details as posting this detachment, we may fairly imagine some grizzled knight of Aragon who knew enough to take on the job by himself with his own immediate followers.

To go from line to column and try to force the narrow path in the face of opposition was a bad business, but de Montfort had no choice. Time was passing, he had the marsh on his left and the ravine stretching away on his right. At the head of his men he crossed the ravine and set his horse to scramble up the farther bank. In this unfavourable position, as he struggled to protect himself from the blows he could not yet hope to return, he broke his left stirrup leather—the third time one part or another of his equipment had played him false that day. With great dexterity he kept his seat and, reaching the summit of the bank, unhorsed the nearest enemy with a blow of the fist to the jaw—the Spaniard must have been wearing not a closed pot-helm but an open-faced steel cap. This man seems to have been the detachment commander, for when his followers saw him fall they broke up and fled on the instant. Their flight exposed to Count Simon the left flank of the Aragonese main body. He got his three hundred across, deployed them, and charged.

All this time the first two crusading squadrons had been fighting hard. Although their close formation and the fury of their charge had carried them deep into the ranks of their enemies, still these last had not broken, but closed in around them. Strict order and alignment had gone and the fighting was man to man. The knight who had taken the part of Pedro could not equal his master’s prowess, and Pedro himself forgot caution, and cried out: “I am the King.” Whereupon those who had sworn to have his life closed around him and killed him, despite his valor and his skill in arms.

Whether the King fell before or after de Montfort’s[Pg 160] charge is uncertain—those who killed him were with the second crusading squadron. In either case his fall and the flank charge decided the day, and a general rout ensued. The 500 knights of his household, unsupported by the rest of the leaderless mass of horsemen, fell almost to a man around his body. The southerners paid a bitter price for Pedro’s chivalrous folly in jamming himself into the fighting and thereby giving up all attempt to direct operations. Raymond and the Count of Comminges seem never to have been engaged at all. We hear of them only as fleeing from the field. Count Simon, on the other hand, was as wise in victory as he had been furious in attack. While directing or, more probably, permitting the pursuit of the fugitives by his first two squadrons, he kept the third squadron (his own immediate command) well under control, and followed the pursuit at a distance so as to intervene in case of a rally. After a short pursuit, as soon as he judged that the fleeing enemy horsemen were incapable of renewing the battle and were making for Toulouse, he recalled the pursuers, and at the head of his three squadrons returned towards Muret.

Meanwhile the Toulousain communal militia had altogether misconceived the result of the cavalry action. Only a part of these troops had taken part in Foix’s unsuccessful attack and subsequent rout at the hands of the first crusading squadron; and of that part only those north of the Louge had actually endured the crusading charge and the rout. Those between the Louge and the Garonne had merely retreated, hastily enough, no doubt, in order to conform to the flight of those north of the brook. By far the greater part of them, therefore, were quite fresh. At first they barricaded themselves in their camp, fearing they would be attacked. But townsmen in mediæval warfare were apt to suffer from rashness; one of many examples is the behaviour of the Londoners at Lewes in 1264. It has been supposed that dust may have hidden the cavalry flight from the Toulousains, or there may have been clumps of trees to block their view. Knowing de Montfort to be heavily outnumbered, they believed a rumour of his defeat, sallied out from their camp and beset the town from all sides.

In Muret, Count Simon’s victory was already known[Pg 161] by messenger. Bishop Fulk, therefore, sent to tell his obstreperous flock of this, and offered them mercy, but they would not believe, and wounded his parlementaire. Startled at the sight of the Crusaders, returning victorious, and about to fall upon the rear of their extended formation, they broke up in a panic and were slaughtered far and wide. Some made for the camp and were killed there, others ran for the boats which had brought up their siege material and were now anchored about a mile north of the town.

A few of these last escaped so, but most were butchered on the high banks by de Montfort’s people.

In 1875 a flood of the Garonne undercut and brought down much of the bank, revealing an immense mass of their bones opposite Saubens, and about 700 yards upstream from that village. Other skeletons are scattered about to the north of this spot; to this day they are turned up sometimes by the spade and the plough.

The total losses of the vanquished were enormous, while the victors lost only one knight and, at most, eight “sergeants”—a fully-armed man in a position to defend himself was already in 1213 so completely protected by his chainmail armor. Infantry normally accounted for most mediæval battle casualties, and, of course, the dismounted and wounded knights of the losing side could be massacred if the victors so chose, as they emphatically did on this occasion.

On the other hand, de Montfort shed tears over Pedro’s dead body—“like a second David over a second Saul.” The King had never been excommunicated, accordingly his corpse was allowed burial in consecrated ground at the hands of the Hospitallers, who asked permission so to do.

Muret wiped out Aragon as a factor in Languedocian politics. Raymond, with his son, later Count Raymond VII, fled the country and made for the court of England. Apparently, one of his last acts was the capture of his bastard brother Baldwin, who had gone over to de Montfort, and was now surprised and taken prisoner. Raymond promptly had him hanged. There was even a story that the Count of Foix himself tied the noose. A few months earlier King John had done[Pg 162] homage to the Pope, and was now preparing, with Otto, to seek a military decision against Philip Augustus, whose vassals he was corrupting with might and main. He received Raymond kindly, and presented him with 10,000 marks, but could give no other assistance until he had settled accounts with the King of France. Raymond swore him homage, and seems to have stayed in England for some months. Meanwhile de Montfort triumphantly crossed the Rhône and mastered much of Raymond’s “Marquisate of Provence” to the east of that river. Merely to keep his hand in, he indulged in a small war in the county of Foix. With Pedro dead, there was no one capable of taking the field against the Crusade.

There were, however, three limitations to de Montfort’s success. The first was military; his force was so small that he could not think of doing anything against the city of Toulouse itself. The citizens felt so safe that they began by offering only sixty of their number as hostages to Bishop Fulk, instead of the two hundred which he demanded, and when he accepted the offer of sixty they refused to furnish any at all. De Montfort made a military demonstration up to the walls, but when the gates were kept closed against him he did not even attack. The second limitation was political, the Pope was by no means prepared to set up an altogether new secular authority in Languedoc, and was now determined to bring peace to that unhappy country. The third was also political; the cities which had given him a certain welcome as the maintainer of public order, now that order was restored were restive at the continued presence of “Frenchmen,” whom they heartily disliked.

The appointment of Cardinal Peter of Benevento as legate had been the one concession made to Pedro in Innocent’s harsh letter of the previous June which had pushed the unfortunate king into war. On the arrival of the new legate it became ironically evident that if the hot-headed Aragonese had been less hasty, he might have won the game in peace and security. For Cardinal Peter, unlike all his predecessors, began by following out the Pope’s policy and not that of the party of violence. He held an audience at Narbonne, at which the Counts of Foix and Comminges and a host of the smaller dispossessed[Pg 163] nobles were allowed to abuse de Montfort. Innocent had given the cardinal-legate his orders in three bulls, dated January 20, 22, and 25, 1214. The first denied de Montfort’s claim to the Viscounty of Nismes, pending an inquiry. The second permitted the Count of Comminges and Viscount Gaston of Bearn, guilty as they were, to be reconciled with the Church on their due and complete submission. The third prescribed that the city of Toulouse should also be reconciled, upon full submission, and should then be put once more under the papal protection. De Montfort’s right to govern the lands he had conquered was recognized, but only as “provisional administrator” pending the decision of the Œcumenical Council, which was to meet at the Lateran in 1215. Moreover, Innocent wrote to Count Simon on January 22, commanding him to obey the legate and especially to surrender the young King of Aragon, whom the crusading leader had received as his ward at the Council of Narbonne three years before. Should de Montfort refuse on some pretext, then, wrote Innocent in his usual high tone, the legate was to carry out verbal orders which had been given him—a threat all the more menacing from its vagueness! In much the same terms the clergy of Languedoc were assured that the Holy See proposed to show no pity to any who refused to obey the new legate. The Pope was determined to call a halt, and Cardinal Peter entered fully into the spirit of the orders given him.

All the guilty parties surrendered unconditionally. Raymond made act of submission in April, turned over all his remaining dominions to the legate and even included a promise to exile himself anywhere the Pope might designate. On returning from England, he and his son lived for some time in Toulouse, with their wives, as private persons. Peace now seemed assured.

Thus checked, the indomitable de Montfort had another string to his bow. As before he had played off the Languedocian clergy against the Pope, so now he used the papal nuncio at the Court of France. This man, Robert de Courcon by name, had been vigorously preaching the Albigensian Crusade. While Peter of Benevento was temporarily absent escorting Pedro’s son to Aragon and organizing the regency there,[Pg 164] de Courcon might fairly claim to be the principal representative of the Pope in France. With the usual independence of mediæval agents at a distance from their master, the nuncio at Paris proceeded to go clean counter to that master’s wishes. In June he had a conference with de Montfort at the latter’s camp, and in July he confirmed the leader of the Crusade by a solemn charter in the possession of all the lands in the Albigeois, the Agenais, Rouergue, and Quercy, already conquered or to be conquered from heretics and favourers of heretics!

The Crusaders whom de Courcon had persuaded to take the field began operations on their way south by capturing the castle of Maurillac in Auvergne. Here for the first time we hear of the burning of Waldensians, that is of heretics not obviously enemies to society. After the fall of the place, seven of them refused to recant before de Courcon and were accordingly burned ... “with immense rejoicings by the soldiers of Christ.” The event is significant, and we shall return to it.

The reinforcements thus brought in enabled de Montfort triumphantly to promenade the Agenais, Rouergue, Quercy, and even the Perigord. So great was his prestige that, in July, he married his son Amaury to the heiress of Dauphiné. Meanwhile Philip Augustus broke Otto and John of England on the decisive field of Bouvines so thoroughly, that neither of them was afterwards a factor in the affairs of Continental Europe. No wonder de Courcon, the papal nuncio at Paris, was emboldened. For the first time the French monarchy was free to take up the Albigensian business. On December 7 a courier from Rheims arrived with letters from de Courcon calling a council of nobles and high ecclesiastics of Languedoc to meet in Montpellier on January 8. De Montfort’s party had decided to renew the sentence of deposition passed upon Raymond by the Council of Lavaur, this time by a more imposing body. Cardinal Peter of Benevento, on returning from Spain, had to content himself with taking the presidency of this assembly which was determined to go against the entire spirit of his actions.

The Council of Montpellier throws into high relief the sharp cleavage of opinion in Languedoc. Montpellier[Pg 165] was the most Catholic of the southern cities. As has been seen in the last chapter, its lord had been the first in the region to take official action against heresy. The orthodoxy of the place had never been questioned. Nevertheless, the popular feeling there was so bitter that de Montfort could not even come within the walls to attend the meetings of the Council for fear of being mobbed. He was forced to stay at the House of the Templars, outside the walls, and there confer with those who came to him. One day he did enter the town with his two sons and an escort of a few knights, in answer to a special invitation from Cardinal Peter. Whereupon the citizens moved at once, quietly armed themselves and manned the gate by which he had entered and the street by which he was expected to pass. Some even entered the Church of St. Mary in which the Council sat. Count Simon, whose worst enemy had never called him coward, was glad enough to be smuggled away through back streets.

On the other hand, the Council itself was Montfortist to a man. After legislating copiously on the reform of the clergy, the local abuses in laying tolls, repression of heretics and those who should favour them, &c., it decided unanimously to depose Raymond and set de Montfort in his stead. Cardinal Peter, however, on the plea that his instructions gave him no power to do so, refused to obey the Council and hand over the parts of Raymond’s lands, especially Toulouse and Montauban, which had surrendered to him as Innocent’s representative and not to de Montfort. The decision, he truly said, had been expressly reserved for the coming Lateran Council. Whereat the Montpellier assembly promptly sent off the Archbishop of Embrun to Rome to ask the Pope to recognize de Montfort as lord and even as king (“dominum et monarchum”) over the lands of the heretics!

The castle of Foix and the citadel of Toulouse known as the “Château Narbonaise” had received papal garrisons, the latter under the command of Bishop Fulk. The dispossessed knights, known as “faidits,” were given the privilege of moving freely about the country on condition of going unarmed, with but one spur (!), mounted on palfreys but not on war horses, and avoiding fortified[Pg 166] places. Rome showed no signs of relaxing her grip, but was unmistakably beginning to show mercy and, above all, was refusing to support de Montfort in the more ambitious of his designs.

With matters in this state, a new turn was given to the situation. In April, 1215, Prince Louis, the heir of France, afterwards Louis VIII, set out for Languedoc. If de Montfort seriously intended to make himself a king, he must have feared the activities of the French monarchy. In the slight correspondence between them, Paris had made it quite clear that Count Simon was distinctly a vassal and agent of the Capets. But it seems more probable that Simon preferred to govern his unwilling southern subjects with the aid of the crown of France and not in opposition to it. In any case, he went clear to Vienne to meet Louis, who had mobilized his forces at the muster ground of 1209 at Lyons, and welcomed the prince with every appearance of joy. With Cardinal Peter it was very different. As representative of Rome he had nothing to hope from Louis, inasmuch as all opposition had ceased; and much to fear, as the prince might follow his father Philip’s policy of vigorously asserting the independence of lay authority in its own sphere by seizing on places like Toulouse and Foix, which were governed by papal troops, and by disposing of them in the name of the French crown.

However, it was soon seen that Louis by no means possessed his father’s force of character and penetrating intellect. The young prince had pleasing manners and personal courage, but was of a mild nature, not physically robust, and in no way fitted to set the river on fire. He promenaded Languedoc between de Montfort and Cardinal Peter, visiting in his forty days St. Gilles, Montpellier, Beziers, Narbonne, Carcassonne, Fanjeaux and Toulouse, and then went home without having exchanged a blow or a high word with anyone.

But when he reported to his father, in the presence of the peers of France, many of whom were Raymond’s kinsmen, as to de Montfort’s high hand in the south, Philip Augustus broke up the Council and withdrew to his private apartments saying, “I hope that before long Count de Montfort and his brother Guy will die at their work, because their quarrel is not just.”

Prince Louis’ peaceful pilgrimage produced two important results, the destruction of the walls of Toulouse and Narbonne, and de Montfort’s installation as “commendatory” lord of Toulouse and Foix. It was the prestige of being accompanied by the heir of France which directly enabled Count Simon to bring about the demolition of the defences of the two strongest cities of Languedoc. In the case of Narbonne, we do not know the reasons for the order, although it seems reasonable to suppose that public opinion in the place, as in the other neighbouring cities, was so bitter against the “French” that it seemed wise to make it defenceless. Arnaut Amalric, now Archbishop of Narbonne and claimant (in competition with de Montfort) to its dukedom, protested but without effect. The Narbonese, as well as the Toulousains, were forced to pull down their own walls, or (more probably) to make breaches in them, for thorough demolition was almost impossible to a time possessed of no means of destruction except fire and human muscle.

Further, Prince Louis’ support of de Montfort contributed largely to de Montfort’s assumption of temporary authority over Toulouse and Foix, because it increased the crusading leader’s influence with Cardinal Peter and thus helped to bring the new legate over to the party of violence. Another influence, working to the same end, was the considerable success of the Archbishop of Embrun, who had been sent to Rome by the Council of Montpellier. He returned with a papal bull crammed with praise of Count Simon, expressing the hope that he would not weary in well-doing, and authorizing him to hold, provisionally, the lands sequestrated by Cardinal Peter. Since a mediæval “commendatory” enjoyed the revenue of the lands he administered, the worst of de Montfort’s difficulties, his lack of money, was over for the time being. Although he had no definite possession of all he sought, still his prospects were of the best.

During the year Count Simon suffered but one check when, on July 2, Innocent decided against him and in favour of Arnaut Amalric for the Dukedom of Narbonne and announced his decision in a letter full of severe rebuke. But what was that, compared with so many successes?

On November 11, the Lateran Council met. It was an impressive assembly, including seventy-one patriarchs and metropolitans, four hundred abbots and bishops, and a huge number of delegates holding proxies for bishops who were unable to come. The Patriarch of Jerusalem was there, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, as the Greek Orthodox Church (for the first and last time since the ninth century) was in full communion with Rome, owing to the occupation of Constantinople by the short-lived “Latin Empire” which the iniquitous fourth Crusade had planted there. According to the well-known laws which govern human assemblies, this august body was impotent for effective deliberation, and at the mercy of the manipulation of its leaders, because of its great size. In general, its function was not so much to make decisions but merely to register decisions made before it had convened. In its three sessions, on November 11, 20 and 30, the Council passed all the decrees submitted to it, no less than seventy in number, which had been resolved upon, as we should say, in committee. Indeed, in every matter but the Albigensian, Pope Innocent seems to have been in complete control.

On the three stock subjects of faith, Church organization, and discipline, the Council affirmed transubstantiation, settled the order of precedence of the Patriarchs in the order Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, required sacramental confession once a year, and followed the usual mediæval practice of legislating interminably against the irregularities of the clergy. Those in orders were forbidden to act as surgeons, since operations cause the shedding of blood. Trial by combat was forbidden. Trial by ordeal was virtually abolished by forbidding any religious ceremonies in connection with such trials, thus depriving them of all reason for being, since they depended on religious sanction for their whole moral force. Decrees were passed against “incontinence, drunkenness, hunting, attendance at farces and stage plays,” on the part of the clergy. Other decrees regularized the procedure and penalties against heretics and their protectors, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter. In the political field, the Council confirmed the election of Frederic II, son of Henry VI, as Holy Roman Emperor, and attempted to decide the future of Languedoc.

Every principal actor in the Albigensian drama was present, except de Montfort who was represented by his brother Guy. Arnaut Amalric, Archbishop and Duke of Narbonne, Fulk and Guy, bishops, respectively, of Toulouse and Carcassonne, and Theodisius now Bishop of Agde, represented the Languedocian clergy. Over against them on the lay side were the two Raymonds, the Count of Comminges, Count Raymond Roger of Foix, the boldest and most energetic of them all, and a minor noble, Bermond of Anduze, a son-in-law of Raymond’s, who pretended to have rights over the Toulousain inheritance.

Two hearings of the matter in dispute have been reported to us. The scene of the first was the court of the Lateran Palace, presumably either of classic style, or showing the slim circular pillars, delicate round arches and varicoloured stone inlay work of the Cosmati school. Innocent presided, and with him were all the curia. Raymond Roger of Foix, the centre of all eyes with his handsome person and ruddy face, spoke first. He denied his own guilt and that of Raymond of Toulouse. They had only defended themselves, he said, against brigands come to rob them under a pretence of crusading. The younger Raymond, so he maintained, had never even been accused of any crime. He himself, upon Innocent’s express request, had handed over the Castle of Foix, with its mighty ramparts, to Cardinal Peter. If the place, now held by de Montfort, was not given back, then no faith was to be put in solemn treaties. Fulk of Toulouse replied fiercely, recalling Raymond Roger’s crimes, his persecution of the Church and his protection of heresy, the Crusaders he had mutilated and massacred. Raymond Roger replied more fiercely still. A Toulousain knight sprang up, shouting that if they had known that so much fuss would be made over mutilated Crusaders, then even more would have lacked eyes and noses; at which those listening groaned and murmured as a shocked audience will. The Count of Foix then attacked Bishop Fulk. Not content with the lying songs and bitter satires he had written as a troubadour, the Bishop of Toulouse, he said, had caused more than five thousand deaths, including children, behaving himself more like Antichrist than like a Roman legate. Innocent mildly answered that[Pg 170] Raymond Roger had stated his own case well, but had “a little” understated the Church’s case against him. Last, a representative spoke for the heir of Beziers and Carcassonne, son to that Trencavel who had died in prison in 1209, claiming that as the father had been assassinated by de Montfort and the Crusaders, the Pope, to “save his own honour,” must return the viscounty to the son. “Justice shall be done,” replied Innocent and retired to his private apartments.

The scene now changed to Innocent’s garden, no doubt some sort of formal garden with clipped plants, for the sure Italian taste changes little. The Pope knew that the great majority of the Council was dead against him with regard to Languedoc. Raymond Roger’s violence had certainly not been calculated to attract wavering churchmen, if any still wavered. But to Innocent that violence showed clearly as the fruit of great wrongs inflicted in the name of the Church over which he ruled, the Church which he passionately desired to have prevail as the arbiter of right and the doer of justice. His sense of his own personal honour, too, was as keen as any in that knightly age. Therefore he was troubled and sought to put his trouble from him among the growing things. Thither the Languedocian bishops, and others of their opinion, pursued him. If Simon had the land, they were saved, they said. If Raymond were returned to power, they and the Church in Languedoc were ruined. At first Innocent resisted, reminding them of the injustice of taking his lands from a Catholic noble like Raymond, and saying that while de Montfort might keep the lands taken from heretics, at least the rights of the widow and orphan must be preserved. But they pressed upon him indignantly, first Fulk speaking, then Theodisius, then the Archbishop of Auch, insisting that such a settlement would give de Montfort nothing, since the Pope held all three counts for Catholics; whereas de Montfort deserved much. They themselves had preached against Raymond as wicked and detestable, to restore him would be to disavow them altogether. Everything must be given outright to de Montfort. Indeed, they dared to say, it was impossible to take from him that which he possessed, for they would be there to defend him. Still Innocent held out. He[Pg 171] reproached them with their cruelty, their refusal to compromise, the savage sermons in which they had so far exceeded his will. A few supported him, among them the Abbot of Beaulieu, who was present as Ambassador from John of England, and (for a wonder) Arnaut Amalric. That fierce old man had forced the Pope’s hand more than once in de Montfort’s interest. Now, full of his quarrel with his former friend, he told Innocent to take no one’s counsel but to go his own way. Nevertheless, the voices raised in support of the Pope’s opinion were so few that, at last, Innocent consented that Raymond should be deposed and Simon be Count of Toulouse. The Council so voted in a decree and went home, having legislated in the name of a united Christian Europe, at the apex of the Church’s power.

Although beaten on the main point of Raymond’s deposition, Innocent nevertheless continued to do what he could to limit de Montfort’s triumph. It was said that he told Raymond that something would soon be done for him. The younger Raymond, a high spirited and attractive young man of eighteen, was entertained as the Pope’s guest in Rome for some time after the Council adjourned. Even the terms of the immediate settlement, which were published in a papal decree on December 15, were by no means a blanket endorsement of de Montfort’s ambitions. Raymond was assumed to have been found guilty of heresy and of despoiling the Church. All that part of the Toulousain fief held by the Crusaders was made over to de Montfort with the title of Count of Toulouse. And yet, with the usual papal policy of reservations, it was stipulated that the new settlement was not to override the rights of any Catholic man or woman; which might well have been made a ground, had Innocent lived, for Raymond’s return.

Besides this general reservation, there were four lesser specific ones. De Montfort was to hold his dignities on condition of swearing homage to his proper overlord, the King of France. Thus, if the crusading leader had ever seriously hoped to make himself an independent sovereign, the hope was denied him. Raymond’s wife was to retain the lands of her dowry. Raymond himself, although condemned to exile, was to have an annuity of 400 marks a year payable from the revenues of his former[Pg 172] possessions. Most important of all, the younger Raymond was confirmed in possession of so much of the Toulousain fief as was not in the hands of the Crusaders, that is to say Nismes, Beaucaire, and the “Marquisate of Provence” to the east of the Rhône. Finally, a papal letter of December 21 put in question the legitimacy of the measures taken by de Montfort against Raymond Roger of Foix, directing the Bishop of Nismes and the Archdeacon of Conflans to take over the Castle of Foix and hold an inquest to decide whether the place should be returned to its original owner, which was later actually done.

Innocent’s letter reopening the matter of Foix was the great Pope’s last recorded act in Languedoc. Six months later, too soon for him to hear of the anti-French reaction there, he lay dead in Perugia, in the full vigour of middle age, for he was not yet fifty-seven. He had lived only for his passion to make the papacy and (through the papacy) the Church, supreme; and he had raised the See of Peter to a height of unquestioned power which it had never before, and has never since, attained.

Shortly after the young Raymond’s departure from Rome, the two Raymonds reappeared in the unconquered part of their diminished holdings. There they found the people, especially the townsmen, so hot against the “French” that it seemed possible to continue the struggle. Beaucaire, Avignon, Tarascon, declared for their former lords, and Marseilles showed sympathy with his cause. The elder Raymond went off to Spain in the hope of recruiting reinforcements there. In Beaucaire the castle was held by a garrison of de Montfort’s, put there no doubt during his operation east of the Rhône after Muret. The citizens now rose and besieged this garrison, and de Montfort accordingly moved to relieve it.

On the way to Beaucaire, Count Simon appeared before Narbonne, and there the quarrel between him and his old ally Arnaut Amalric came to a head. The walls ordered to be destroyed the previous year must have been patched up after a fashion, for Arnaut ordered the gates shut against de Montfort. The time, I repeat, controlled no agents of demolition except fire and human muscle. Still, the new defences were weak, for the Crusaders promptly broke in and, having entered,[Pg 173] threatened Arnaut Amalric himself with violence for opposing them. The redoubtable old man excommunicated de Montfort, publishing the sentence twice over, and interdicted all the churches of the city as long as the excommunicated leader of the Crusade should remain in the place. Whereupon the Christian warriors stoned the archbishop’s palace and the champion of Catholicism joked about the anathema laid upon him, and even showed himself at mass as usual!

After this exchange of compliments at Narbonne, de Montfort moved on Beaucaire, where the inhabitants had declared for Raymond, and besieged the place. The situation was complicated, as the citizens were at the same time besieging the garrison of “Crusaders” in the castle on its bluff over the Rhône. Repeated assaults by de Montfort failed for want of a sufficient number of catapults and other siege machinery. Meanwhile, in the castle, the woodwork of the roofs and hoardings (i.e., wooden galleries projecting outward from the tops of walls and towers so as to command their base) was badly damaged by the catapults of the men of Beaucaire. Nevertheless, the castle garrison held out stoutly, catching the battering ram with a noose of rope which prevented the heavy ram from being drawn back to gain momentum for its blow and keeping the sappers from the base of the walls by lowering burning bundles of tow and sulphur by means of chains from the battlements. Presently word came that Toulouse was about to declare for Raymond. Whereat de Montfort, in a fury, raised the siege of Beaucaire, abandoning his siege machinery and much of his equipment in his haste to meet the new danger.

In angry haste he concentrated all the force he could move from the Razes country on the upper Aude, the Carcassonne district, the Lauraguais region between Toulouse and Carcassonne, and the Toulousain district itself. Then, his concentration made, he promptly appeared before the town more like an enemy than like a rightful lord returning to his own. Now Toulouse, like most important thirteenth-century towns, was a “free city,” a practically independent little republic, whose elected magistrates were accustomed to sit in conference with their nominal feudal lord and follow his lead by[Pg 174] their own consent rather than be commanded by him. Accordingly, they asked de Montfort to enter peaceably, unarmoured, and mounted on a palfrey. He replied fiercely that message after message had told him of their conspiracies and treasons against him, and that he would put off neither his hauberk of mail nor his helmet of Pavian steel until he had taken hostages of the flower of the city.

After more high words, the magistrates were inclined to yield, and prepared to confer with de Montfort outside the walls, but were restrained from putting themselves in his power by public opinion, which began to run high. About this time a number of squires, young gentlemen, and pages from de Montfort’s army, entered the town and began to break in and pillage. This was too much. A typical mediæval riot started. Men of all ages and classes, and even women, seized whatever was handy that might serve as a weapon. Barricades of furniture, stakes, and barrels sprang up before every house, and piles of stones and beams appeared on the balconies ready to be thrown down on the heads of the “French.” Battle was joined to the cry of “Montfort” on one side, “Toulouse! Beaucaire! Avignon!” on the other, and matters became so hot that de Montfort’s people, forced to give way under the rain of missiles from the houses, could scarcely make good their retreat over more barricades thrown up to cut them off. Seeing that the place could not be held, Count Simon ordered it to be set on fire in several places. The “French” had become scattered, and the energy of the Toulousains put them in danger of being crushed, so that they had to concentrate and cut their way through in deep columns. By nightfall only the citadel, the “Chateau Narbonaise,” was still in de Montfort’s hands. He himself was “full of rage and anxiety” at the heavy losses his troops had suffered.

On the following day, however, Bishop Fulk persuaded the Toulousains to submit, and give not only hostages but also a huge ransom of 30,000 marks. De Montfort accepted the hostages and the ransom, and then pillaged the place once more, “destroyed” its fortifications (after he had officially demolished them in the previous year), filled up the ditches and disarmed the inhabitants. The uneasy peace lasted through the rest of the year.

The new Pope, Honorius III, was of a mild nature, so that even had he wished, he would hardly have been able to struggle against the extreme party in Languedoc. Instead, the new legate whom he sent there—a Cardinal Bertrand of San Giovanni e Paolo—was more bitter than any of his immediate predecessors.

Now that the party of violence had nothing to fear from Rome, the Crusade was again preached, so that new Crusaders appeared in Languedoc in the spring, and with them a small royal force sent by Philip Augustus. With these reinforcements de Montfort was operating east of the Rhône when, for the second time, word came that Toulouse had declared against him. This time it was not a matter of suspicion and secret conspiracies. The citizens had joyfully welcomed back the two Raymonds and massacred all Frenchmen who failed to gain the shelter of the Château Narbonaise. The counts of Foix and Comminges and many nobles had rallied once more to fight the “French.” De Montfort’s wife, the Countess Alice, and one of his sons were in the Château Narbonaise, which held out, although seriously threatened by the Toulousains. Messengers were sent to tell Count Simon that he must make haste to relieve the garrison. This he did, and in the month of September began the third siege of the capital of Languedoc.

The trace of the walls of Toulouse in 1217-1218 is known throughout most of their length. On the south they left the river at the corner of the present Rue des Renforts, and extended in a fairly regular curve until they struck the line of the present inner boulevards just east of St. Etienne. They then followed, roughly, the Boulevard Lazare Carnot and the Rue Dutemps, divided the capitol and its grounds, and met the river in the neighbourhood of the Place St. Pierre—a circumference of about a mile and three-quarters.

The bits of their foundation which still exist are built in small square stones, with occasional binding courses of brick, in the manner of the later Empire and the Dark Ages. Throughout most of its length the wall is flanked by round towers at the regulation Roman intervals of about seventy yards.

The fortress known as the Château Narbonaise stood near the intersection of the present “Allée St. Michel”[Pg 176] with the Rue des Renforts. It was rectangular in plan, of no great extent, with a tower at each corner. Instead of forming a part of the city walls, it stood outside them, commanding them the more easily through being considerably higher. The Porte St. Michel, through which ran the road to Narbonne, pierced the city wall just opposite the castle’s north-western corner, so that the castle dominated it completely.

Within the place the intense local patriotism of the mediæval commune was again blazing high. Everyone worked fiercely, digging ditches and setting up palisades and wooden towers to fill the gaps made in the walls by the recent “demolitions.” Even at night the work was continued by torchlight.

The first party of Crusaders to arrive was commanded by Guy de Montfort, Count Simon’s brother. Dismounting, and cutting off part of the shafts of their lances to make them more manageable in street fighting, the “French” men-at-arms attacked the place. An entrance was forced, but, as in the previous year, the assailants could not maintain themselves in the streets of the town, finding themselves always confronted by new barricades and exposed to a hail of missiles from the houses. Guy and his men ended by taking refuge in the Château.

The Toulousains had fought so savagely that when Count Simon himself appeared and proposed another general assault, Guy and those who had seen the new spirit of the citizens finally persuaded him not to do so. The crusading leader, with all the scorn of a knight of the Middle Ages for townsmen in arms, at first made no preparations for a regular siege, but merely completed his concentration and terraced the walls of the Château Narbonaise with emplacements for catapults to fire upon the works which the Toulousains had thrown up to confront it. But despite this heavy “artillery support,” the attack which he delivered was repulsed with loss, and Guy was wounded. Clearly a regular siege was necessary, and Count Simon called a council of war and resigned himself in sombre anger to listen to the advice of his barons and clergy as to how such an operation might be made good.

Throughout the true Middle Ages it was extremely difficult—in fact, almost impossible—to contain, that is[Pg 177] to hold continuous lines all around, one of the first-class cities of the time. The sudden, spontaneous expansion of Christendom, reflected especially in the size of those cities, had been accompanied by no adequate corresponding increase of public powers, and by no system of banking and floating credit. Therefore, it was almost impossible to raise and maintain an army of sufficient size for such an undertaking. Very few mediæval commanders would risk attacking, let alone laying regular siege to, a first-class city. In this case the circumference of the defences to be attacked was over 1,600 yards on the right or east bank alone plus a bridgehead on the left or west bank. In the council of war Bishop Fulk pointed out that it would be useless to blockade the city proper if the bridgehead were not blockaded also. The double task was accordingly undertaken.

Having contained the bridgehead, De Montfort’s main task was to make it as difficult as possible for the city proper, on the right bank, to communicate with the open country. Even if he could not make good his blockade, he might be able to annoy the citizens so much that they would end by surrendering.

Throughout the siege both sides continued to receive reinforcements. The Count of Foix, together with certain Aragonese and Catalans, joined the besieged, so that it was possible to make an active defence with continual sorties. De Montfort’s reinforcements seem to have come in more slowly, and to have consisted mainly of mercenary troops. At first de Montfort himself took station on the left bank opposite the bridgehead, so as to hinder communication between the town and the friendly country to the south-west. Shortly after the arrival of Foix and the Spaniards, he was forced to return to the right bank by a vigorous sortie, against the Chateau Narbonaise, and the entrenched camp of the Crusaders which was growing up around it to the south of the town. Throughout the late autumn continual sharp skirmishing went on south of the town in the space between the walls and the entrenchments of the camp. During the winter the Crusaders attempted a surprise attack at dawn, and broke into the city, but were repulsed with nothing gained. With the spring both sides were reinforced. De Montfort was forced to[Pg 178] withdraw the lines of his entrenched camp some distance further from the town, abandoning many of the shelters he had constructed. The besieged thereupon began attacking the Château Narbonaise, when a high flood of the Garonne not only cramped their operation but hindered their communications with their bridgehead so that Count Simon was able, by long and obstinate fighting, to win the bridgehead altogether. Further, with the reinforcements which kept coming in, he was able to extend his entrenched lines from the Château Narbonaise (which stood on the river bank above the town) to a point opposite the great church of St. Sernin. But he could not close the space between St. Sernin and the river bank below the town or prevent the movement of boats on the lower river. Further, while the morale of the besieged was as high as ever, and their defences were always being made stronger, in de Montfort’s camp the strain was beginning to tell. The legate taunted him to madness with his failure to get a decision. Money to pay the numerous mercenaries was running short. In vain Pope Honorius alternately threatened and pleaded with the Kings of France and of Aragon, the Count of Foix, the younger Raymond, the citizens of Toulouse, Avignon, Marseilles, and anyone else who occurred to him. Clearly, either matters must be brought to a head, or the siege raised.

De Montfort was not the man to admit himself beaten. He determined on a decisive assault by means of a large “cat,” a movable wooden gallery with a steep roof covered with raw hides to prevent fire. Under such cover the defences might be approached and sapped. At the first attempt the “cat” was injured by stones from catapults. Strengthened, it was moved forward a second time, “moving with jerky little steps,” as an eye witness reports. Without waiting for it to reach their lines, the besieged began a general sortie. De Montfort himself was at mass when this news was brought to him. “I will not go,” he said, “until I have seen my Saviour.” Not until after the elevation of the Host did he take command. Then he concentrated his men and had driven the Toulousains back to their walls, when a stone from a catapult worked by women struck him on the head. He fell and died in a few minutes, his face all[Pg 179] bloody and black where the helm had been driven in upon it. A few days after a final attack was made and repulsed, upon which the siege was raised.

Despite de Montfort’s apparent failure his work was decisive. The eight years during which he had maintained himself in Languedoc had not only seen many “Frenchmen” assigned to lands there, they had also seen the moral and political prestige of the southern nobles damaged beyond repair. Toulouse had definitely lost any chance she may have had of rallying the south about her to make head against Paris. Languedoc with her wealth, her culture, and her indifference to the moral unity of Europe, was destined to go under. The great tolerant southern houses were to be swallowed up by the “most Christian” kings of France, who represented the new, vague, but enormous idea of the nation. De Montfort, dead and apparently beaten, had changed the course of history.

The next six years of the Crusade (1218-1224) saw only small wars. They are marked by a single brief and inconclusive campaign, commanded by Louis of France.

The permanent effect of de Montfort’s work did not at first appear. His son Amaury could not fill his place. Philip Augustus promptly permitted Prince Louis to lead another crusading army, with Cardinal Bertrand, the new papal legate, at his side. At Marmande a massacre was achieved fit to rejoice the heart of any mediæval Crusader, but Toulouse successfully resisted another siege, and the army returned home having accomplished nothing. In fact the desultory fighting which went on after its departure ran somewhat in favour of Raymond. Amaury’s strength was mainly in his possession of Carcassonne, on account of its great natural and artificial strength under the conditions of the time, together with its powerful strategic position commanding the highway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But Simon’s son had so little of the ability of his father that he could not prevent Raymond from winning back, bit by bit, much of his old domain. In 1220 Raymond retook Lavaur and slaughtered every man in it except a handful who escaped by swimming down the Agout. The Crusaders had no monopoly of massacre.

Meanwhile Pope Honorius tried every means at his[Pg 180] command to push matters, but without success. A new legate, Conrad of Porto by name, set up a military order patterned after the Templars and Hospitallers under the name of “Knights of the Faith of Jesus Christ,” but the new foundation achieved little. In the following year Honorius published a sentence of excommunication and exhereditation against the entire Toulousain House, and raised enough money to set on foot another expedition under Prince Louis. But the Prince turned his army against La Rochelle and took that city from Henry III of England, so that the net result of the Pope’s effort to settle Languedocian affairs was just nothing.

Early in 1222, four years after his father’s death, Amaury de Montfort recognized his position as hopeless and offered all that he possessed or claimed in Languedoc to Philip Augustus. This brought on a year full of diplomacy. Amaury urged Honorius to support his action, and the Pope did so, pointing out the deplorable state of religion in Languedoc, where heresy was openly preached and seemed ineradicable. Philip refused, the obstinate caution of the Capets strong in him. Even the offer of a twentieth of the entire income of the Church in France together with all manner of indulgences did not tempt him. Next Amaury made his offer to Thibaut, the powerful Count of Champagne, but again King Philip blocked matters by refusing to exempt Thibaut from service to the Crown in case of a break with Henry of England. In August Raymond died. His son, succeeding him under the title of Raymond VII, promptly wrote to Philip Augustus to ask his suzerain’s help towards the removal of the Pope’s sentence of excommunication and exhereditation against himself. In December, Amaury repeated his offer to the King, and again the King refused.

The confused and indecisive negotiations of 1222 had at least the result of convincing both the new legate and the King of France that Languedoc must be stabilized, and that promptly. The legate saw that heresy was again on the increase, favoured by the confusion born of the long war. The King felt himself near his end—he was suffering from continual fevers—and he feared that after his own death Louis, with his amiable character and weak health, would find himself drawn into the Languedocian business by the clergy and would die too[Pg 181] of the fatigue of it, so that the kingdom would be left in the hands of a woman, Louis’ wife, and of an infant, who was to be St. Louis. Accordingly, when the legate called a council at Sens for the purpose of reconciling Amaury and Raymond VII, Philip asked and obtained a change of meeting place to Paris in order that he himself might be present. He was in the provinces, down with another attack of fever, but felt so deeply the need of a definite settlement that he risked the fatigues of the journey, and died on the way. True to his policy of supporting the de Montforts, but cautiously and without identifying himself with their cause, in his will he left Amaury thirty thousand livres.

Within a few months after Philip’s death, the first of the events his wisdom had foreseen actually came about. Amaury’s financial position had become so bad that in January 1224 he patched up a provisional treaty with Toulouse and Foix, used most of Philip’s legacy to pay off his garrisons, and definitely evacuated Languedoc. The Archbishop of Bourges, together with the Bishops of Langres and Chartres, asked Louis to grant him the reversion of the office of Constable of France, and, with this understanding, for the third time he offered his Languedocian possessions and claims to the French Crown. In February the offer was accepted.

With the acceptance of Amaury’s offer by the French Crown begins the last or monarchical phase of the Crusade, which lasts three years (1224-1227). In it the small war continues—varied by a single major operation, a second campaign under Louis VIII, the amiable son of the wise and crafty Philip Augustus, which operation fails. Despite this military failure, the war ends in a political decision against the House of Toulouse.

The citizens of Narbonne (royalist like all townsmen because of the internal peace and order the Crown stood for) were promptly assured by a letter from the King that he would lead a Crusade which should march three weeks after Easter. In dealing with the Pope, Louis made conditions. Rome was to give him one of his own prelates (the Archbishop of Bourges) for legate instead of the Italian Cardinal Bertrand of Porto, indulgences were to be the same as for a Crusade to Palestine, any of his vassals who might refuse service[Pg 182] were to be excommunicated, and Roman diplomacy was to do its utmost to assure him peace with all other possible foreign enemies. Finally, the Church was to give him twenty thousand livres of Paris per year out of its revenues during the Crusade, which was to begin and end when Louis chose. It was a formidable list, but the Church could hardly find any conditions too hard.

At this point matters were held up by another of the innumerable shifts of purpose in the Roman Curia. Henry III of England was Raymond’s kinsman. Moreover, Bordeaux and all the lands still left to the Plantagenet in Aquitaine would be dangerously isolated should the county of Toulouse become French Crown land. Accordingly, English influence at Rome was exerted in Raymond’s favour. The young Count of Toulouse himself caused his own ambassadors to promise full obedience to the See of Peter, and through them made exceedingly handsome “presents” to all who might possibly have influence with the Pope. These tactics succeeded so well that Honorius wrote favourably to Raymond, promising to send a new legate (Cardinal Romano of St. Angelo) to arrange matters; and wrote to Louis saying that the Emperor Frederic II’s proposed Crusade was so important that no other crusading indulgences could be issued for the present. The papal letter to the King went on to say that if Louis would but keep on threatening Raymond, the Count must end by giving in. The veteran Arnaut Amalric was directed to lead the local bishops in pressing Raymond VII to make no reservations in his offer of submission to the Church. The legate formally withdrew the Albigensian crusading indulgences and warranted Raymond VII as a good Catholic at a “parliament” in Paris. Louis disgustedly washed his hands of the whole matter, wrote to the Pope that he, Louis, had been played with and tricked, and that Rome might do what it liked without his help so long as his own rights as lay sovereign were not infringed. The French force which was already on foot was used to capture some of the Aquitanian castles still held for Henry III of England.

For a time it looked as if the peace would stand.[Pg 183] Under the tutelage of Arnaut Amalric, Raymond VII agreed to enforce anti-heretical legislation as thorough as even the grim old Cistercian could desire. With the Count of Foix and the Bishop of Beziers to confirm his signature, the young Count promised banishment, confiscation of goods and physical punishment of heretics, dismissal of all bandit mercenaries, internal peace and order, restoration of Church privileges and an indemnity of twenty thousand marks to be used partly for repayment of damage to ecclesiastical property in Languedoc during the fighting, and partly (in case the Pope obtained a formal and complete renunciation of the Montfortist claims) to Amaury as compensation. If all this was not enough, Raymond VII agreed to put himself entirely in the Church’s hands, reserving only his allegiance to the King. All of which was agreed to by an Ecclesiastical Council, which Arnaut Amalric attended, at Montpellier in June. Amaury vainly protested, before this decision was taken, saying that Louis was about to act and that the whole Church would be scandalized by such compounding with the House of Toulouse. Unlike his father, Raymond VII made some attempt to confirm promises with deeds, for he restored the See of Agde to Theodisius. Everything seemed to point to confirmation of the settlement by the Pope and an end to the whole Albigensian war.

Again, as had so often happened, Rome reversed the decision of the Languedocian Church, only this time the local clergy were for peace and it was the Curia that was for war. Toulousain promises had too often proved broken reeds. Heresy was again raising its head; another public debate like those of the years just before the Crusade had even been held, and heretical “bishoprics” were multiplying. All this must have been well known at Rome. Moreover, not a few of the local clergy had increased their possessions during the war and had no wish to go back to the status quo. Finally, Louis sent Guy de Montfort to oppose the settlement. From October, 1224, until after the new year Honorius refused to move.

When at last the Pope’s decision was made it was hostile to Raymond. Cardinal Romano of St. Angelo was again sent as legate to France to threaten the young[Pg 184] Count and to try to patch up a truce so that Louis might be free to use his whole strength in Languedoc. During this year, nothing happened. Raymond VII, who had permitted the Dominicans to preach in Toulouse against heresy, and welcomed the Franciscan Saint Anthony of Padua, offered a national Church council at Bourges such unreserved submission that the council could not bring itself to condemn him, but broke up without giving a decision. To meet the situation, Cardinal Romano the legate ordered each archbishop to take counsel with his suffragans and give him written decisions to transmit to Louis and the Pope. The strictest secrecy was to be kept in the matter of these decisions. Anyone who revealed them was to be excommunicated on the spot. Clearly such a system would enable Pope and King to do exactly as they pleased. Raymond could not flatter himself that the attack would be delayed much longer, especially as the English had decided to leave Louis free to weaken himself by taking on the difficult job of breaking the high spirit of a district removed by so great a distance from his base of operations. Further, old Arnaut Amalric, who had helped play the Toulousain game ever since becoming a Languedocian Archbishop himself, chose this unfortunate moment to die, and to be succeeded in the Archbishopric of Narbonne by Peter Amiel, a bitter enemy of the young Raymond.

In January, 1226, a grand parliament of the kingdom was held in Paris. An address from the nobles was presented to Louis asking that he undertake the Crusade. This he accordingly did, with the reservation that he must be free to break off the campaign when he should so desire. Raymond’s full submission at Bourges two months before had prejudiced many French nobles in his favour, but nevertheless nearly all of them took the cross with their King. The one interruption to the proceedings was the Pope’s action in ordering those of the nobles of Aquitaine and Poitou who had changed their allegiance from English to French to change back again. The action of the Pope was entirely defensible on moral grounds but had been brought about (so the chroniclers say) by liberal use of English and Toulousain money at Rome, as any trouble between the two crowns at this time[Pg 185] would benefit Toulouse enormously. Louis promptly went to work to show even greater liberality to the Curia; the Papal orders were suspended, and the preparations for the Crusade were resumed. At a parliament held on March 29 orders were issued to concentrate at Bourges on May 17. Service was to be for the duration of the King’s stay in the South, instead of for forty days as before. The ruinous effects of short enlistments had been as much of a curse to former Crusades to Languedoc as to Washington in the American Revolution. Raymond VII was supported only by the Count of Foix. Comminges had made his peace, and Louis had taken diplomatic precautions to prevent any intervention from Spain. Everything pointed to a complete conquest of the South, except the delicate health of the King, on whom the whole enterprise depended, since his presence in the field was necessary to keep the army together.

On the appointed day, the army mustered at Bourges. Louis was deaf to the pleas of the numerous clergy who begged of him remission of the heavy tithe laid on them. He further swelled his war-chest by accepting money payments instead of field service from certain nobles not keen for the expedition. Even after these exemptions had been granted, the army was enormous for the time. There were fifty thousand knights and mounted men-at-arms, and “innumerable” infantry it is said. The line of operations was on Lyons, and thence down the Rhône, as in 1209.

There was no resistance until Avignon was reached on June 10. There the citizens refused the “French” entry and manned their walls, although they promised not to harass the army in its march if they were left in peace. The place was within the Holy Roman Empire, but Cardinal Romano, the legate, urged Louis to destroy it inasmuch as it had remained ten years excommunicate and impenitent for tolerating Waldensianism, so the King laid siege to it. The incident shows how easy it was to influence Louis and draw him away from the central matter in hand, and also, very significantly, how Waldenses were now attacked as readily as Manicheans. The siege dragged on throughout the summer and into the autumn. Raymond of Toulouse cleverly seized his opportunity to move up and lay waste the country from[Pg 186] which the besieging army must draw food and forage. Disease and a plague of flies in the French camp made matters worse. On top of this Pierre Mauclerc, Louis’s second cousin, quarrelled with the King and left the army. Philip Augustus had made this man Count of Brittany by marrying him to the heiress of that fief, and now that she was dead he was out to marry the heiress of Flanders and was angry when Louis thwarted him. So he went off, after serving for forty days, and began strengthening his castles and intriguing with the disaffected Counts of Champagne and of La Marche in Poitou, both of whom were supposed to have an understanding with Raymond. But Louis, although easy to persuade, was not easy to discourage. He stuck to it until, after three months’ siege, Avignon surrendered on September 10. The citizens had been brought very low by the long blockade. They therefore consented to pay ransom, demolish or dismantle their fortifications, and accept from the legate a bishop pledged to suppress heresy.

After the long delay at Avignon the army was at last directed against Toulouse. Almost all the Languedocian cities, including Nismes, Narbonne, Carcassonne, Albi, Beziers, Marseilles, Castres, and Puylaurens had already declared for Church and King. But, just as the end seemed in sight, the hardships of the campaign forced Louis to turn homewards, sick with dysentery. At Montpensier, in Auvergne, on November 8, he died. Within a little over three years after Philip Augustus’s death, his fear had been realized: the kingdom he had given his life to build was in the hands of a woman and child.

Despite this perilous state of affairs, the ideas of centralization and nationality had been so quickened that their growth was hardly checked. At first, to be sure, there was confusion, during which Raymond was able to recover some ground. Louis’ widow, the able and pious Blanche of Castille, was busy getting her 11 year old son, Louis IX, crowned at Rheims. Meanwhile the Counts of La Marche, Champagne, and Brittany intrigued busily with each other and with England, and prepared for open rebellion. Blanche’s position was so difficult that operations on a large scale in[Pg 187] Languedoc could not be continued. Nevertheless the ground already won was held by the royal troops, under the energetic Humbert of Beaujeu who had been left in command in the theatre of war by Louis when he turned homeward to die. As long as Humbert’s force was kept “in being” in the South, the crusading tithes on Church property continued to flow into the royal treasury. During Lent in the year 1227, a local Church council at Narbonne excommunicated those who had broken their oaths sworn to Louis and ordered stricter persecution of heretics, showing therefore that some oaths had been broken and that persecution was not being carried on as faithfully as it might have been. Throughout the year the fighting swayed back and forth. Humbert de Beaujeu, with Archbishop Peter Amiel, of Narbonne, and Bishop Fulk, of Toulouse, at his side, took the castle of Becede, massacred the garrison and joyously burned some heretics. Raymond VII, for his part, recovered the town of Castel Sarrasin on the middle Garonne, but was not strong enough to keep the royalists from laying waste the countryside clear up to the walls of Toulouse.

Both sides were weary of war. The drain on the royal resources was serious, especially in view of the hostile attitude of the three northern Counts, and the Church tithes came in slowly and caused endless friction to collect. On the other hand, Raymond saw his position in the eyes of the world steadily going from bad to worse as his overlord continued to make war against him in the name of the Church. Clearly, if he could save anything at all by submission, he had better make haste to do so. Finally, the third party to the matter, the papacy, had also become anxious for peace in Languedoc. In March, 1227, the mild and aged Honorius III had died and been succeeded as Pope by Gregory IX, equally aged but far harsher than his predecessor. In spite of his eighty years, Gregory was determined to oppose the Emperor Frederic II, who had been growing ever more powerful and readier to oppose the Church ever since his guardian Innocent III had died. For a collision with Frederic, the Church must concentrate all her strength. The Languedocian business, therefore, was better out of the way.

With all three parties to the dispute equally determined upon a settlement, there remained only the question of ways and means. Raymond VII had no son and only one daughter, Jeanne. To betroth her to one of the younger brothers of the King would assure the ultimate reversion of the entire Toulousain heritage to the Crown. The Church would back the Crown in obtaining a settlement favourable to the King of France, granted that strong and systematic measures were taken against heresy. A papal letter of March, 1228, to Cardinal Romano the legate, shows that the proposed marriage was the heart of the negotiations. A second letter, of October 21 in the same year, renewing the crusading indulgences, shows that pressure upon Raymond was necessary in order to make him accept the terms proposed. To the same end, it seems that there was further devastation of Toulousain territory. In December Raymond gave in, and named Count Thibaut of Champagne as his agent with full power to negotiate in his behalf. In January, 1229, the parties in interest, including representatives of the municipality of Toulouse, met at Meaux and signed a preliminary agreement. On Holy Thursday, before the great western doorways of Notre Dame de Paris, was enacted the last scene of the long drama. There Raymond came before the legate, bare-footed like his father twenty years before at St. Gilles and clad only in his shirt. He then walked the length of the church to be “reconciled” as a penitent before the high altar. This done, he yielded himself the King’s prisoner in the Louvre, until such time as his daughter and five of his castles should be in royal hands, and five hundred “toises” (over a thousand yards) of the long-suffering walls of Toulouse should be demolished. The end had come.

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[Pg 189] 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[Pg 190] 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.

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.

That resistance had not been in the name of heresy against Catholicism, but only in defence of some measure of toleration from the State to the heretical bodies. Tolerance was not even expressly stated as the motive of those who resisted the Crusade, but only implied by their conduct. The point is worth noting. Not one of the southern lords who resisted the Crusade was himself a heretic. None of them, except Raymond Roger of Foix, was ever proved to have so much as taken any particular interest in heresy as a fad, an object of curiosity. Pedro of Aragon was the Pope’s vassal and “First Standard Bearer of the Church.” Raymond VI of Toulouse had been all his life a Catholic, and died with all the consolations of religion, having on the morning of his sudden death gone twice to the church of La Daurade in Toulouse to pray. After his death the honour of burying his remains was disputed for years between the Parish of St. Sernin and the Knights Hospitallers of Toulouse. Those who resisted the Crusaders fought so that they might not be compelled to suppress the heretics[Pg 192] among whom they lived, and especially that they might not be deprived of power and possessions by North Frenchmen who came to seize their lands in perpetuity as a reward for bringing about suppression of heresy.

Nowhere else in Europe was there regular armed opposition. In Italy, which was (after Languedoc) the stronghold of mediæval Manicheanism, the heretics of Orvieto had caused a riot and the assassination of a zealous Catholic magistrate in 1199-1200. In Viterbo, a few years later, the citizens elected certain heretical magistrates, and it needed harsh words from Innocent before they would consent to disqualify them. But compared to the Albigensian business this was child’s play. In Languedoc the battle was fought and won.

But in order to hold a country it is necessary not only to conquer it, but also to organize it. After the conquest force is no longer needed on a large scale, it still plays its part, but only in the enforcement of decisions arrived at by some form of law. And although force plays a greater part in the conflicts of ideas than is theoretically admitted nowadays, nevertheless it is not the chief instrument of those conflicts. The chief instrument is, of course, persuasion. At the end of the Albigensian war there was no longer organized opposition in Europe to the enforcement of judicial decisions against heresy, and these judicial decisions were made by the Inquisition. Meanwhile, before the fighting had ceased, there were already in existence two powerful new bodies organized for the use of persuasion in the cause of the Church, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who may be grouped as the Mendicant Orders.

From the beginning, Francis and Dominic agreed in this, that they uncloistered the monk. Instead of withdrawing their friars from the world, they launched them into the midst of it to strive, by precept and example, to win souls. In particular St. Dominic enlisted his “Friar Preachers” to preach against heresy, and St. Francis to preach the love of God after a fashion that did away with that grimness of early mediæval religion which had nourished the over-ascetic heresies such as the Manichean.

It is hard not to linger over St. Francis of Assisi. A true Italian and a child of his time, it is not surprising[Pg 193] that he sometimes seems to us extravagant. When we hear of him rolling naked in a rose bush to drive away the temptations of sex, or having himself dragged through the streets and beaten, as penance for having eaten a morsel of chicken in Lent, we are as much puzzled as repelled. We may even lend an ear to doctors who tell us that there is a perversion of the lusts of the flesh called Masochism, in which the subject derives pleasure from pain. The saint himself repented at the end of having caused his body to suffer as he had done; “I have sinned against my brother the ass,” he said as he lay dying. And yet, all in all, he remains the most Christ-like of Christians. His tenderness to mankind was all-embracing, and went out beyond man to the beasts, and even to natural objects. To him all nature was a fascinating little sister, to be laughed at, petted and caressed. The sun was our brother: to him he wrote a canticle. The birds were our little brothers: to them he preached as they clustered around him. Even the wolf, whom the saint turned from his evil courses, was “Brother Wolf.” Death was but “our sister, the death of the body,” and the very devils were “God’s warders.”

This spirit was the precise opposite to that grimness in the religious feeling of a century before. To the men of the early twelfth century, for instance to Abelard, the claims of religion were inexorably stern. They could no more be reconciled with any sort of human affection, than could the unyielding round arch adjust itself to vault the irregular compartments of nave and ambulatory. In human feeling, as in architecture, the result was ugly distortion, and it was precisely this distorted feeling that produced Manicheanism. Clearly, if God was good and loving and the world utterly vile, then God had not made the world. The Devil had made it, and was by that act co-equal, if not for the time being, superior, in power to God Himself. Not so, said St. Francis, the earth is the Lord’s, and it is beautiful. Only pride, both pride of possessions and pride of intellect, stands in the way of happiness. So he joyously married his “Lady Poverty,” and once refused to let a hesitating novice possess so much as a breviary. Under the busy brushes of Giotto and the other painters of the Franciscan legend, the Holy Family, without ceasing to[Pg 194] be a symbol of the faith, became also the emblem of innocent and happy domestic life.

St. Francis did not begin the humanizing of religion. The change had already begun before the middle of the twelfth century with the cult of the Virgin. There is a legend that once, when St. Bernard was praying to her, and had come to the words, “Show that thou art the mother,” Our Lady appeared to him and from her breast dropped on his lips three drops of the milk that had nourished the Saviour. That is already far from the atmosphere of Abelard and Heloise. Already, in St. Bernard’s time, the north-French architects were beginning to break up the unyielding Norman and Lombard round arches into the pointed form, and the same period was evidently trying to resolve the distortion of religion and human love. St. Francis enormously enlarged and deepened the new current of religious thought. The climax was reached after his death in the story of the Miracle of Bolsena. Here, in 1263, a priest without faith in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Host, saw the wafer which he himself had just consecrated covered with drops of blood. About half a century before, in neighbouring Orvieto, a zealous Catholic magistrate had been murdered by the Manichees. Now the Church insisted that God gave His very self to be the food of all men, even to the poor, the serf, and the humble.

St. Dominic was of a different temper, and attacked the problem in a different way. Dante calls him—

and praises him for wisdom, whereas he praises St. Francis for “seraphic ardour.” Instead of being above all a poet and mystic, like the Poverello of Assisi, St. Dominic was an organizer and statesman. There was a strain of ecclesiastical anarchism in the early Franciscan Order; certain “spiritual” Franciscans of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century rebelled against religious authority as no Dominicans have ever done. Where the Italian saint puts an example ahead of precept, the Spaniard put precept ahead of example. To him the weakness of the Church was that not enough of her clergy[Pg 195] knew thoroughly her doctrine and were able to teach it. For him, as for the prophet Hosea, the “... people were destroyed for lack of knowledge.” His order was vowed to learning. Indeed, it was a Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, who has left us the most complete and harmonious of all human attempts to analyse the universe. Instead of attacking in flank by destroying the mood out of which the ultra ascetic, and in particular the Manichean heresies grew, St. Dominic attacked heresy in front by direct argument. His “Preaching Friars” observed strict poverty, not so much as a good in itself, as did St. Francis, but rather in the spirit of the soldier who lightens his pack the better to take the field. As they went to and fro, begging their bread, they escaped the poor man’s envy which dogged the footsteps of the wealthy bishops and the abbots of the older orders. Thus they were equally free to debate with the philosophers in the turbulent universities, or to set forth the Faith in words of one syllable to simple folk.

The organizers, those carpenters and stonemasons of history, are obscure by contrast with its artists and sculptors. Just so the personality of St. Dominic (at least in the Protestant world) has been overshadowed by that of St. Francis. Even the Church which they both served canonized Francis within two years after he was dead, and waited thirteen before canonizing Dominic.

But if the Poverello of Assisi had more poetry in him, the Spanish gentleman had more statesmanship. The organization of the Franciscan Order fluctuated violently and finally settled down into a copy of the Dominican. According to the first Franciscan Rule, that of 1221, a Friar is not bound to obey his superiors when that superior commands him to do something against the “life,” a proposition so impossible in practice that it survived only two years. On the other hand, down to 1240, the Head of the Franciscan Order was undisputed Cæsar, nominating lesser officers and legislating either without any Chapter (i.e., Assembly) or with a Chapter composed exclusively of officers appointed by himself. This again worked so badly that in 1240 the organization was changed so as to add elected representatives of the Chapter General, and to make the nomination of lesser officers a function of the Chapter General so constituted;[Pg 196] both of which features were typically Dominican, and had been part of the first Constitution of that Order.

As with the constitution of their Order so with the Higher Learning. Here too the Franciscans found themselves compelled by force of circumstances to abandon their own founder’s distinctive teaching and follow the lead of the Dominicans. Whereas St. Francis himself feared and hated learning, even before his death some of the greatest scholars in Christendom wore the Franciscan habit.

To the subjects of representative government and of learning I shall return for a moment at the close of the chapter in the attempt to estimate the permanent value of the thirteenth century achievement. The point I now make is that, in both respects, St. Dominic builded so much better (at least for his generation) than St. Francis that the Franciscans themselves soon adopted Dominican methods. And this was true not only in regard to learning and representative government, but also with regard to the Inquisition.

Both of the mendicant orders were formed, as a modern would say, “for service.” They were democratic in constitution: the Dominicans had been so from their origin. Indeed it has been claimed with some show of reason that it was the Dominicans who first brought representative government from its original home near the Pyrenees into England. They addressed themselves particularly to the poorer and the less fortunate of mankind. Whereas the older orders of monks had retired to the wilderness, or at least to the country, the mendicants laboured chiefly in the fast growing towns characteristic of the new and sudden mediæval rise out of the Dark Ages. It is always in towns that the human struggle for life is sharpest and the results of defeat most provocative of pity.

Although the ministrations of the friars were often very different in kind from those of the “social worker” of to-day, inasmuch as they were concerned first of all to bear witness to the Faith whereas the average “social worker” is concerned chiefly with conferring material benefits (I suspect that is why he, or she, does not accomplish more), still social worker and mendicant friar have this essential in common in that the purpose[Pg 197] of both was to “do things” for the poor. Alas! in the garden of “social service” a serpent lies in wait for poor erring humans, and his name is Tyranny. Those who are the objects of ministrations, being human, too often receive them unwillingly and prefer their own ways. And those who would minister, being equally human, when they see their good works (as they think them) rejected by those whom they would benefit, too often seek forcibly to compel acceptance.

Of course such people believe that they know better than the rejectors (who are, in practice, the more independent and self-respecting of the poor) what is good for the latter. But the student of history shakes his head sadly, in the knowledge that the innumerable oppressors of mankind have all believed that they could govern people better than those whom they oppressed could govern themselves.

The connection of St. Dominic himself with the Inquisition (using the word loosely to cover all legal and judicial action against heretics), although much disputed, is clear. The evidence consists of two documents of St. Dominic’s own, and a tradition, written down in its present form sixty-seven years after his death, which has been accepted by all students of his life, including those who hold that he had no connection with the Inquisition whatsoever. The first document is a licence to a citizen in Toulouse to board a certain converted heretic in his house until St. Dominic or the Cardinal Legate should give orders to the contrary. The second enumerates the provisions of the penance imposed upon another converted heretic.

Although this last has already been quoted in another chapter, nevertheless it may be well to repeat it here. “Until the Lord Legate (Arnaut Amalric) shall otherwise ordain” the unhappy man is to fast forever “from flesh, eggs, cheese and all which comes from flesh except at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas, when he shall eat some to protest against his former errors.” He is to keep three Lents each year, “fasting and abstaining from fish, unless from bodily infirmity or the heat of the weather he shall be dispensed.” As make-weights, he is to be beaten with rods upon his bare back, three Sundays running, by his village priest; he is forever to wear a[Pg 198] distinctive dress marked with crosses to designate him as a former heretic, hear mass every day “if possible” and vespers as well on festival days, recite seventy paternosters a day and twenty in the middle of the night. How this last provision was to be enforced unless some almost equally unfortunate soul stayed awake to watch him is not stated. Finally, once a month he is to show the parchment on which all this is written to the village priest.

So much for the documents. The tradition is that the Saint secured the release of a certain heretic who had been convicted and sentenced to be burnt, acting on the strength of his own personal belief that this particular culprit would eventually repent. Twenty years after, the tradition goes on to say, the man did repent, and died in the odour of sanctity, clad in Dominican habit.

For our purposes, the point of all three pieces of evidence is that the power to loose implies an intimate connection with the power to bind. The President of the United States and the Governors of States, who have the pardoning power, are themselves the chief executive officers of the nation and the States, and it is their sworn duty to see that the laws are enforced. In St. Dominic’s case, the verdict is conclusive. Virtually every reputable scholar of the present day is agreed upon the point, including Roman Catholics writing under the nihil obstat and imprimatur of Cardinals and Archbishops.

Among these last, Giraud sums up the verdict neatly: “Comparing with all these documents the canon of the Council of Verona, renewed in 1208 by the Council of Avignon, which orders that apostates who, after being convicted of heresy by their Bishops or their representatives, should obstinately persist in their errors, should be delivered over to the secular arm, it would seem that it must be concluded that, by virtue of the delegated authority of the Cistercian monks, St. Dominic was to convict the heretics; and that, in convicting them he delivered them up, indirectly but surely, to execution, unless he suspended, by an act of clemency, the action of that docile instrument of the Church, the secular arm. Doubtless he did not himself pronounce the fatal sentence; but during their trial he played the part of an expert in the matter of orthodoxy, or even of a juror,[Pg 199] transmitting to the court a verdict of guilty while capable at the same time of signing a recommendation to mercy.”

It is, of course, true that the “bloody-minded Dominic,” that favourite scarecrow of old-fashioned Protestant historians, never existed. Not only the Bollandists and Lacordaire but also the whole weight of modern scholarship agree on this point. Even Lea, almost always accurate on points of fact even when he is most exasperating in his utter lack of the realizing imagination so necessary to a modern historian of the Middle Ages; even Lea, I say, admits that the miracles ascribed to St. Dominic are almost all kindly ones, and that the Saint was by no means notable among his contemporaries for ferocity against heretics. Nor was he the “founder of the Inquisition,” although he was a worker in it. It was the force of circumstances and, in particular, the fact that both mendicant orders were particularly dependent upon the Pope (and correspondingly independent of the local clergy) that afterwards pushed forward first the Dominicans and then the Franciscans into prominence as Inquisitors.

The Albigensian struggle brought the Papal, as distinguished from the Episcopal, Inquisition into being. Formerly the bishops had had sole jurisdiction in matters of faith. Naturally, their policy against heretics varied widely, so that, as we have seen in Chapter II, the secular government and even the local mob often acted on their own responsibility. Evidently the bishops were not in a position to deal with heresy on a large scale. Attempts to hold them to their work, such as the Imperial-Papal decree issued from Verona in 1184 (see Chapter II), remained dead letters. In Languedoc, where both local government and mob were unwilling to act, the local bishops did not even try to do anything. Accordingly, as we have seen, Arnaut Amalric and the other legates whose activities we have followed, were sent by Innocent III to deal with the situation by virtue of authority derived directly from himself as Pope without reference to the local bishops—quite in the spirit in which President Cleveland sent federal troops to quell the Chicago riots in 1894.

Besides the need for a strong hand in Languedoc—the[Pg 200] chief cause of the establishment of the Papal Inquisition—there was a second cause which helped to keep alive the newly founded institution even after military and political support of heresy in Languedoc had ceased. This second cause was the need felt for order and regularity. We have seen, in the first chapter, how order and right reason in all things were the goals of the fresh, buoyant spirit of the time, and how vast an event was the rediscovery of the Roman law, with its enormous logic. The intellectual appetites of newly-awakened Europe seized eagerly upon law as an object of study, at the same time that the practical necessities of an expanding, intensely “progressive,” society made the regular administration of law one of the chief concerns of statesmen. To such a generation, it was intolerable that so weighty a matter as that of variations from the faith should be dealt with haphazard. In justice to those accused of heresy, and to the Christian commonwealth as a whole—which our forefathers considered much more—the serious business of judgment in such cases deserved to be entrusted to the best qualified persons who could be found. Here were the Dominicans, and after them the Franciscans, learned in theology, independent of local prejudice, not apt to be terrified by local influence, men who had given up everything so that they might better serve the Church. Even though they shrank, as they sometimes did, from the heavy responsibilities, fatigues, and personal danger of acting as Inquisitors, the higher authorities of State and Church combined to draft them into the service.

In one sense, then, it was a high desire for justice, for the replacement of lynch law in heresy cases by a regular system of procedure, which dictated the establishment of the Inquisition (that is the Inquisition as a new instrument largely separate from the older Church courts of canon law administered by the bishops). At the same time, there are three facts which seem to show a baser mind in those who co-operated in the gradual formation of the new institution. The modern man is struck by the fact that the manner of examination seems to offer insufficient guarantee against the possibility of grave injustice to the accused; second, the use of torture to compel confession. Finally, the modern man is appalled at the extreme penalty by fire.

The main feature of the legal processes of the Inquisition is the wide power of the Inquisitor. Instead of acting, as our judges do, merely as referee between opposite sides, with a separate government official for prosecutor, the Inquisitor was the prime mover of the whole proceeding. Of his own motion he sought evidence and examined witnesses and accused. In this there is some resemblance to modern French procedure, and in a slighter degree, to the procedure in American courts-martial which makes the judge-advocate at once prosecutor and guarantor of the rights of the accused. The method is derived from the Roman law. It was practised, in the times with which we are concerned, by the “advanced” secular governments of the day such as the Capetian and Plantagenet monarchies. Certain Italian municipalities also seem to have made use of it. Besides being known to contemporary secular justice, it was familiar to the educated men of the time who were steeped in classical memories.

Under the Inquisition, matters went somewhat as follows: The Inquisitors travelled about through the territories committed to their charge preaching sermons against heresy, especially in places where it was known to exist. In these sermons a “time of grace” was promised, during which time all heretics who should come in and confess their fault were to be admitted to mercy and reconciled with the Church. Meanwhile, the faithful were asked to give information as to local heretics. When the time of grace was up those accused of heresy were arrested by armed servants of the Holy Office and examined by the Inquisitor.

The evidence for the prosecution was usually furnished to the accused, but in most cases the names of the witnesses who had given it were concealed. This was a departure from the contemporary procedure at canon law before the bishops. The argument in favour of concealment was that it was the one way of protecting the witnesses against reprisal by the friends of the accused in case of conviction. Public security, it must be remembered, was not what it is to-day. The best chance of having the indictment quashed was for the accused to prove that the witnesses were his mortal enemies. The inquisitor would, therefore, ask him[Pg 202] whether he had any such, and if he had anyone who (unknown to him of course) had testified, then the evidence in question was stricken out and the whole case against him received a damaging blow.

When the evidence was in and the prisoner had testified as to his mortal enemies, then the crucial point of the examination was reached. It was the business of the Inquisitor to satisfy himself as to the guilt or innocence of the suspected heretic. There being no organized jury system, the ideal way of establishing guilt was to get the accused to confess. Confession was therefore sought by all imaginable means, by prolonged theological discussion with those capable of it, by efforts to entrap an unwary prisoner into unintentional admissions, or by adjourning the inquiry in obstinate cases so that the passage of time, sometimes even of years, in prison might give the wretch full chance to think matters over.

The Inquisition differed from all secular justice in that it was penitential, that is, it aimed to persuade those who had committed certain sins to confess their fault and submit themselves to the loving chastisement of Mother Church. The Inquisitor was in the unique position of a judge who was always trying to turn himself into a father-confessor.

When there was a strong presumption, but no conclusive proof, against a prisoner who obstinately refused to confess, the Inquisitor was in difficulties. His responsibility was even more than that of a modern judge because only the germ of a jury system as yet existed. The Inquisitor could, and usually did, summon experts (periti) or “good men” (boni viri) to deliberate with him, and it was the custom for him to follow their verdict, except when he thought it too harsh. This rudimentary jury was made up of men learned in the civil or canon law, usually mendicant friars. Its weakness was that it was extremely difficult to get together qualified persons often enough to give real consideration in each individual case. Indeed it was physically impossible to do so when a large number of cases required review, as would happen in the centres of heresy where the peril to the Faith was greatest. Ignorance of the prisoners’ names lessened their usefulness, for, as Vacandard ably puts it, “... tribunals[Pg 203] are to judge criminals and not crimes, just as physicians treat sick people and not diseases in the abstract.” Therefore, to ease the conscience of the judge in deciding doubtful cases, torture was introduced to force confession when the evidence was not conclusive.

References to the use of torture are rare in the abundant records of the Inquisition. Whether this is because its use was so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity (and so unreliable a means for the discovery of truth) that the recorders shrank from mentioning it on paper, will never be known. Mediæval men in general were nothing if not frank, and yet the verbal equivocations of the Inquisition were many, as we shall see. Unfortunately, Roman precedents were in its favour, although the Roman law forbade torture to be used except against slaves. Roman freemen were liable to torture only in the case of a crime against the Emperor. The men of the Middle Ages seem to have thought of it as a substitute for the ordeal, which was going out of fashion, as we have seen. Torture was introduced late. Lea finds it mentioned in secular law, “... in the Veronese code of 1228 and in the Sicilian Constitutions of Frederick II in 1231,” and thinks that “... the references to it show how sparingly and hesitatingly it was employed.” In the Inquisition it was first recognized by Innocent IV in 1252.

A certain amount of restriction, to which secular courts were not liable, was placed upon the Inquisitors in their use of torture. No torture could be used by them which would imperil the life or limb of the victim, and this stipulation did amount to something, for the secular judge was free to invent and use any refinement of cruelty he could think of, and as often as he cared to. But it did not amount to much. The Inquisition was free to tear the joints of its victims from their sockets by means of the rack, or by the strappado. This last was a rope-and-pulley arrangement which was attached to the wrists of the victim. His wrists were bound behind his back, so as to dislocate the shoulder joints by raising him to the ceiling, letting him drop and then bringing him up with a jerk in mid-air. Fire and water were also permitted; the feet might be scorched after smearing them with fat; or the “water-cure” might be used until the stomach was horribly distended and the prisoner almost strangled.

At first there was reluctance about allowing the Inquisitors themselves to be present during torture. Priests, and the inquisitors were all priests, incurred “irregularity” by looking on at such scenes. But since this prohibition delayed business, it was virtually removed by the leave granted by Pope Alexander IV in 1260, and reaffirmed in 1262 by Pope Urban IV, for the Inquisitors to dispense one another from irregularity incurred by witnessing torture. Thenceforward it was the custom for the Inquisitor himself to be present during the torture.

Another check on the use of torture, the prescription that no prisoner should be twice tortured, was gotten around by equivocation. A second torturing was merely called a “continuation” instead of a “repetition” of the first. Furthermore, witnesses might be tortured indefinitely, and it was one of the chief objects of the inquisitors to get prisoners to denounce heretics still at large. Often mercy would be promised, on condition of giving evidence against others. In any case a heretic who denounced other heretics became at once a witness to their guilt and might be tortured as many times as was desired.

Another equivocation appears in the form in which confessions, made under torture or not, were drawn up. “Usually,” writes Lea, “the procedure appears to have been that the torture was continued until the accused signified his readiness to confess, when he was unbound and carried into another room, where his confession was made. If, however, the confession was extracted during the torture, it was read over subsequently to the prisoner, and he was asked whether it were true. In any case the record was carefully made that the confession was ‘free and spontaneous,’ without the pressure of ‘force or fear.’ In case a prisoner refused to confirm a confession made under torture, the learned doctors of the Inquisition differed as to what should be done with him. Some held that he should be set free, with a certificate that nothing had been proved against him, others that he should again be tortured until he again confessed!”

After conviction came sentence. Upon repentant heretics, erring children conscious of their fault and welcoming the loving chastisement of Mother Church, the inquisitor himself passed sentence in the form of penance. In theory, there was no difference between the[Pg 205] penances imposed by any confessor and those of the Inquisitors, and, in practice, the only penance peculiar to the Inquisition was the wearing of crosses. Even imprisonment—the extreme legal penalty for the rare heretics of the earlier Middle Ages—was a part of the monastic penitential system. As late as the thirteenth century, sentences of imprisonment were more common than any other form of punishment.

When the sentence was for life the theory that such severity was no more than a salutary measure of penance was certainly strained. If such a prisoner broke jail, his guilt was supposed to be that of rejecting the wholesome correction designed by the loving-kindness of the Church to effect his spiritual well-being! However, there are so many records of prisoners serving life sentences who were released for good behaviour while in prison that it is possible to argue that usually none but “hard cases” failed to have the balance of such sentences suspended.

Obviously, the idea of punishment as a penance did not apply to those who refused to repent. Therefore the Inquisition itself, being an institution of the Church, could not punish such cases. But it was the root of the whole matter that heresy was a crime not only against the Church but against the State. It was the business of the Inquisition merely to determine whether suspects were or were not heretics. If, after conviction, one repented, the State originally had nothing to say. The Inquisition, acting for the Church, would then impose penance, as we have just seen, as upon any other repentant sinner. With the obstinate heretic the Church could do nothing. Therefore such prisoners were “relaxed,” that is turned over to the secular authorities, with the formula that the justice of God could do nothing more for them, inasmuch as they persisted in rebellion against it, and that, therefore, only the justice of man had power over them. In many of the later sentences the formula goes on, in accordance with the canonical sanctions, to ask the State to impose only such punishment as will not endanger life or limb, or cause the shedding of blood. As a matter of law, the coercive power was recognized as belonging only to the State.

The State, on the other hand, recognized the exclusive power of the Church to determine what was heresy and[Pg 206] who was heretical, recognized the inquisitors as experts in such matters, accepted their verdict without question, and promptly proceeded to pass and execute sentence. It was a part of the formula of “relaxation” that heretics should be punished “as they deserved (animadversio debita).” This elastic phrase could be variously interpreted in accordance with the different local laws. Always it meant confiscation of the goods of the condemned. The Popes, from Alexander III, held that to confiscation banishment should be added. Confiscation was part of the penalty for treason which the Holy Roman Empire had copied word for word out of the old Roman law. Therefore, says Pope Innocent III, heretics deserve to have their goods confiscated even more than traitors, inasmuch as they betray the majesty of God Himself who is obviously greater than all earthly sovereigns. The great Pope mentions the fact that, under the Roman law, traitors lost their lives as well as their property, and that heresy involved treason against God, the King of Kings, but did not follow out his premises to their logical conclusion. Not until years after his death is there even a hint that the Church as a whole desired the death of a sinner, even when he was a heretic.

This comparative mildness was never universal in fact and gradually disappeared even from theory. We have noted, in the second chapter, the curious spectacle presented by the eleventh and twelfth century, on the one hand many of the higher clergy mindful of the Christian tradition of mercy, and on the other the laity and lower clergy insisting upon death for the impenitent heretic, and generally death by fire. We have now to note the slow progress by which lynch law became written law. Even before the Albigensian Crusade there had been at least two instances of burning alive formally set down as the penalty for heresy. One was the law enacted in 1194 by Count Raymond V, of Toulouse, at the very storm centre of the trouble. The other was the law of Pedro II, in nearby Aragon in 1197, against the Waldenses. Under Raymond V’s law, the Toulousains later claimed that they had “burnt many.” But even if their claim be accepted as true (whereas it seems doubtful) at any rate the practice was not continued. Pedro of Aragon decreed burning alive only for those Waldensians and other heretics who[Pg 207] should fail to leave his dominions by a certain day, so that his reference to the stake was hardly more than a threat intended to enforce the real penalty, that of banishment. De Montfort himself, at the parliament he held in Pamiers in 1212 to consolidate his position in the south, decreed no more than banishment and confiscation as penalties for heresy. More important than any previous law is one enacted for Lombardy in 1224 by the Emperor Frederick II, by which heretics were either to be burnt or to have their tongues cut out, in the discretion of the judge.

It is quite in keeping with what we know of the subject in general that the first ecclesiastical recognition of death as the normal legal penalty for heresy should be an indirect one. A council sitting in Toulouse in 1229, the year of Raymond VII’s final surrender, after remarking as usual that “due punishment” is to be inflicted upon heretics, casually goes on to say that “... heretics, who, through fear of death or any other cause except their own free will, return to the faith, are to be imprisoned by the bishop of the city to do penance, that they may not corrupt others” (Vancandard). After this, examples multiply, under the influence of Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX. It so happens, however, that not until 1252 did any Pope formally insist upon the death penalty for heresy throughout Latin Christendom. This was the act of Innocent IV in the same bull “Ad Extirpanda” which authorized torture. Thenceforward the Inquisition was virtually complete.

The institution spread rapidly throughout Europe. England was an exception, for curiously enough in view of the inveterate eccentricity of the English mind, there were no heretics there until much later. There was not even a provision for burning heretics until, in 1401, Parliament passed the statute “de heretico comburendo.” It is less surprising to find such regions as far off as Scandinavia without heretics, and consequently without inquisitors. In the mountains of Bosnia, Catharistic Manicheanism became the State religion and persisted until the coming of the Turks, when the heretics welcomed the newcomers and went over to Islam. Bosnia had been a backwater in Europe ever since the Roman roads from the Adriatic to the Danube decayed in the Dark Ages—even to-day it has many Mohammedans.

Outside of Bosnia, there was no place in Latin Christendom that harboured heretics where the inquisitors did not make an end of them. The Manicheans were completely uprooted, although their extraordinary hunger for martyrdom would have made them completely victorious if the crude folly of to-day on the subject of “making martyrs” had truth in it. In Languedoc they lingered until the fourteenth century. The Waldensians were reduced so low that the confiscations of their property were not even enough to pay the expenses of the Inquisitors, let alone any surplus for the State. For all practical purposes they too were wiped out.

Resistance never amounted to more than the murder of an inquisitor here and there—which affected the activities of the institution not at all, for new recruits filled every gap. The Inquisition thus completed the task begun by the Albigensian Crusade of preserving the moral unity of Europe. Seriously threatened in the early thirteenth century, that moral unity remained unbroken until the great cataclysm of the sixteenth.

The question posed by the Inquisition to the student is twofold. First, was the moral unity of Europe worth preserving or no, and second, were or were not the means by which the Inquisition helped to preserve it worse than the disease in the long run? Naturally, if it is decided that the end sought was of little value, then it is probable that anyone so deciding will also disapprove of the means used to attain it. But the contrary does not follow. It is by no means impossible that anyone experienced in life may decide in any given case that, although the end proposed was good, nevertheless the means by which it was attained were evil.

On the first point, the answer is prompt. Emphatically, the mediæval world was worth preserving. In fact, with Periclean Greece, the Empire under the Antonines, and possibly the world of the Victorian age, the thirteenth century marks one of the culminating points of human history. It is true that the word “mediæval” is still popularly used in derision. But, on the other hand, such usage is recognized as hasty and superficial by virtually all educated men acquainted with the period. The Middle Ages attract us by the excellence of their arts and handicrafts, by the vividness and picturesqueness of their life,[Pg 209] their spontaneity of feeling, their absence of hypocrisy, the order and clarity of their intellectual life, above all by their freedom from serious internal strain. From our world of alternatively drab and garish machine-made ugliness, haphazard and inconsequent thinking, and torment of chronic industrial civil war, we look back upon them with regret. In the literature of the thirteenth century we see the European mind happy and creative ... as it is to-day uncertain and near despair. We see our typical institutions, such as representative government, sounder and more vigorous than they are to-day. Such eager worshippers of the spirit of our own time as H. G. Wells and Henry Adams, to name only two at random, bear their testimony. The confession of the volatile socialist Wells is interesting. In 1914 he casually wrote of “... the finished and enriched normal social life of Western European in the Middle Ages....” I have taken Wells as important merely because (with his human sensitive-plate of a mind capable of so many discordant impressions) he puts the thing so neatly. With such men as Chesterton and Belloc in England and Cram in America the appreciation of mediævalism is the very core of their thinking. It would be easy to weary the reader with examples. The Middle Ages draw us if we but look at them.

The weakness of the Middle Ages lay in four things. First, there was insufficient organization of public powers and of communications, a subject discussed elsewhere in this book. Second, there was very little “natural science,” i.e., detailed knowledge of the properties of the material world. Thus it was ignorance of medicine and sanitation that brought about the great fourteenth century calamity of pestilence, the “Black Death” which gave the mediæval system a shock from which it never fully recovered. Third, there was cruelty, and fourth, there was the contrast between the vast assumptions made by the Church and the shortcomings and weaknesses of man himself—layman and churchman alike. Both cruelty and the claims of the Church are intimately connected with our subject.

The cruelty of the Inquisition appears most in the use of torture and in the executions by fire. Questions as to the form of procedure and withholding names of witnesses[Pg 210] are subordinate. It is well enough for a modern civilized government, strong in the perfection of communications and of all public powers, to safeguard elaborately those accused of crime. Mediæval conditions were in many ways like those of frontier regions where the criminal can easily slip away. When this is so, justice must make herself swift and terrible by “rough and ready” methods. Otherwise she does not exist. In their franker moments, lawyers will usually admit that nine-tenths of the clients they defend are “as guilty as hell.” The elaborate safeguards of our procedure are defensible only on the theory that it is better to err by letting many culprits escape rather than by punishing one innocent man. And this theory, in turn, is tenable only on the assumption that no serious harm is done the community by the escape from punishment, through the legal safeguards aforesaid, of a considerable proportion of criminals. Where, on the other hand, the life or death of the community is felt to be at stake, then matters must take a different course. Perhaps as good an example as our own time can furnish is that of military justice. Clearly it is supremely important to keep up the discipline of an army. Accordingly, courts martial are given wide latitude. And yet the almost unanimous opinion of those competent to judge is that, when administered by experienced officers, miscarriages of justice under the court-martial system are exceedingly rare, and that, on the other hand, such a procedure as that followed in the civil courts would be destructive of all proper discipline; the maintenance of which, after all, is the necessary end sought. With reference to the Inquisition, besides the temporal welfare of the community, there is also the doctrine of exclusive salvation to be considered, as we shall see in a moment. The wide latitude allowed Inquisitors undoubtedly produced cases of injustice, but probably no system permitting the “disputatious wrangling of lawyers” (as the Inquisitorial manuals put it) could have answered the purpose.

In accusing the Inquisition of physical cruelty in examinations and executions, the modern world does not come into court with absolutely clean hands. Even leaving out of account Russia and Asia does not altogether mend matters. For instance, cruelty appears, more or[Pg 211] less frankly, when the white man is in contact with those he considers lower races.

With respect to the examination of prisoners, Kipling’s fictitious hero, the lovable Mulvaney, flogging his captured Burman with a cleaning rod to find out the whereabouts of the bandit-friends of the sufferer, may serve as a fictitious example of the sort of cruelty frequently practised by civilized armies operating against savages. The American Army in the Philippines, instead of falling back on such primitive methods as flogging, took over the water torture from the natives there, who in turn had learned it from the Spaniards. In fact, it was one of the favourite tortures of the Spanish Inquisition of late mediæval and early modern days. The officer who introduced the “water cure” into the American Army happens to be known to the writer, who can warrant him a most kindly man who would not hurt so much as an insect, except in line of duty. It is a well-known fact that the American mind is more hospitable than the British to new and unfamiliar ideas. Even in the great modern cities, in which (by a curious reversion) degraded, criminal, types analogous to the savage appear, torture in the examination of prisoners is not altogether unknown. I refer to the police “third degree.” Here the facts are not public property, but there is good reason to believe that torture in various forms is used in examining prisoners to force them to confess and to name their accomplices. Into the merits and demerits of these practices it is unnecessary to enter here. The point is merely that the world has not yet found a way to dispense altogether with the use of torture in the examination of prisoners.

A real difference, nevertheless, remains between the modern and the mediæval use of torture in examinations. To-day it is furtive, then it was an acknowledged, customary thing. And while this difference is partly a matter of our greater security, and partly a matter of hypocrisy born of our characteristic, almost feminine, modern disinclination to face disagreeable facts; still it is true that there has been a real change in the minds of men of European stock with reference to this matter of torture. We are revolted by cruelties which not so very long ago seem to have been taken almost as a matter of[Pg 212] course, so much so that, as we have seen, they permitted even priests to be present in the torture chamber. Our nerves are more sensitive than those of our ancestors, as Nietzsche and Huysmans have pointed out, but that does not altogether account for the moral change involved.

With respect to burning alive the position is somewhat similar. Here also we have a conspicuous modern example occurring in a region where the white man finds himself confronted with great numbers of men of a race which he feels to be inferior to his own. I refer to the lynching of negroes, usually those accused of rape upon a white woman, in the Southern States. Here the combination of rape and race feeling has produced a condition very like that found in Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when heretics, instead of negro rapists, were similarly burned by mobs. Here again, together with striking resemblances, there are also important differences. The practice shows no signs of becoming a formal written law. On the contrary, there is formidable, organized protest against it, even in the communities concerned. Whereas in the early Middle Ages only a part of the higher clergy can be found in opposition, and even then not in particular opposition to burning alive, but opposed in general to any death penalty for heretics.

The striking contrast between the mediæval attitude, after burning alive had become written law, and modern feeling on the subject, has been discussed in the second chapter. Belloc uses the fact of this contrast as an illustration of one of the chief difficulties of history, that is the elusiveness of the “time spirit” of past ages, the fact that they took for granted certain primary assumptions which seemed to them too obvious even to be worth recording. Considering it, he remarks upon the distortion which this unseizable spirit of the time ... “appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time, our own.”[32] His first illustrations of this truth are drawn from the French Revolution, from which he proceeds to a discussion of burning alive in the Middle Ages and early modern period, which has, in part, been quoted elsewhere in this book.

Frazer in the “Golden Bough” has a passage reinforcing Belloc’s contention as to the symbolic and quasi-sacramental spirit in which burning alive was regarded. Fire was the sovereign remedy against witchcraft. It was customary to burn objects to prevent their being bewitched, or objects or animals which had been bewitched, so that the contagion might not spread, or, finally, to burn the witches themselves. Our contemporary Southern lynchings by fire should warn us against over-subtlety. Further, it is true that burning alive had been the Roman punishment for high treason as well as for sorcery, and was in grisly conformity with the Church’s traditional abhorrence of bloodshed—it shed no blood. Still it is possible that the Middle Ages saw relationship between witchcraft and heresy, since both were connected with ideas of intensely harmful spiritual forces—were, in short, favourite offspring of the devil himself.

Certainly, later on, the burning of criminals became a solemn ceremony by no means accompanied by hatred of the victim. This is proved by the examples of those strangled before burning, like Savonarola. It is proved even more strongly by the celebrated case of Gilles de Rais. This case has been referred to in the second chapter, but it is so pertinent here that it merits fuller repetition. Gilles was a Breton nobleman and had been one of the lieutenants of Joan of Arc, but later fell into sorcery, sexual perversion, and all sorts of refinements of cruelty. When the Inquisition condemned him to be hung and burned alive, on charges of worshipping demons, he suffered a violent change of heart. Among other edifying signs of contrition, he begged the people whose little boys he had kidnapped, then debauched, and then tortured to death by hundreds, to pray for his soul. Whereupon they marched in procession, vehemently praying for the eternal salvation of this monster with his taste for extremes in both directions of the spiritual life. After which he was duly executed. “We are far from American lynch law here,”[33] as M. Huysmans remarks in recounting this scene. It is possible, in the light of such case, to believe with Belloc and Frazer that what seems to us the atrocious cruelty[Pg 214] involved in burning alive may have been merely incidental to other considerations uppermost in the minds of those who ordered such things. To himself, man is an inscrutable mystery.

Finally, we come to the question of the claims of the Church. It is not my purpose to debate the propositions involved, but merely to state them as they affect the moral problem of the Inquisition. Obviously, the Church’s sole reason for being is the belief that she has, in the Christian revelation, something of supreme and unique value for mankind. The Athanasian creed, whether or not it is to be taken as pronouncing the damnation of the heathen and of “heretics in good faith,” certainly must be interpreted to mean that those who “culpably persist” in heretical belief cannot be saved. In the Middle Ages, Christian scholars expanded this irreducible minimum so as to make the Church’s teaching include the damnation of both the heathen and of all heretics, more especially as the possibility of heresy existing without a definite renunciation of the Catholic faith by the individual heretic hardly occurred to people in a society universally Catholic. As we have seen, the Church was the cement of that society. Marriage was one of her sacraments and had nothing to do with any civil ceremony. Break the Church, therefore, and you broke up family life. To deny her right to sanction an oath was to destroy the all-important feudal oath of allegiance. Therefore men accepted without hesitation the idea that to counterfeit the faith was worse than to counterfeit earthly coin, to betray God through heresy was viler than to betray an earthly sovereign by committing treason. This note is sounded again and again in the grim formulas establishing torture and the stake. Since human justice fiercely punished the lesser crimes against men, how much the more it ought to punish the greater crimes against God. Given the savage criminal law of the time, given also the Athanasian creed tracing back to our Lord saying: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and he that believeth not shall be condemned” (St. Mark xvi), and the logical sequence is complete.

Nevertheless, even in times of clear, logical thinking such as the Middle Ages, men seldom act from logic[Pg 215] alone. To act so is the mark of the fanatic, and although the fanatic often is powerful, still most men are not fanatics, and no society can long be ruled by fanaticism pure and simple. After some years of study and reflection upon the point, my own conclusion is that the Church and the Governments of the thirteenth century were determined in their action not only by the formal logic of the situation but also by the peculiarly repulsive nature of the Albigensian (“Catharan,” or Manichean) heresy, the leading heresy of the age.

Whatever might have happened, it did happen that the laws repressing heresy were codified by the acute legal minds of the new time under the stress of a particular heresy of a most hateful sort. Symonds has recorded two Milanese epitaphs, dating from the mid-thirteenth century. In one an archbishop is praised for having “... cut the throats of the heretics (... jugulavit haereses).” In the other a Podesta (chief executive magistrate) of the city is also praised because “He did his duty and burned the Catharans (Catharos ut debuit ussit).”[34] Historians seem to have failed to notice the connection of the two sentiments. Whether or not heresy in general would have been as rigorously stamped out had the particular Manichean, Albigensian, or Catharan heresy never existed is mere speculation. The striking fact is that the time that could praise an archbishop for having cut heretical throats thought of heresy as typified by this particular sect. Another illustration is a well-known story of St. Thomas Aquinas. It seems that the greatest of Christian philosophers, one day seated at dinner with St. Louis and his court, suddenly rolled out (no doubt in a deep voice corresponding to his massive frame), “I have a conclusive argument against the Manicheans (Conclusum est contra Manicheos).”[35] Many students have smiled over the feeling of the courtiers; for our purposes the point is that no such contemporary anecdote has come down to us concerning Waldenses, Arnaldists, or any other of the numerous heresies of the time. Theologians taught that all heresy was sin, hence anti-heretical[Pg 216] legislation, and the corresponding task of enforcing it. The enormous force of the attack upon the Albigenses came because the average Christian, once face to face with them, decided that duty was pleasure.

It is true that the huge engine first set in motion by anger against this inhuman sect was soon turned against all heretics, and the fact will surprise no one who has the remotest knowledge of practical politics. The historian, when he plots the course of the ship of State, is at ease in his study. But the ship herself, when that run was made, was blown upon, this side and that, by the fiercest passions of man, and is so to-day. Rare, indeed, are the officers and crew that, when those gales are at their height, can hold the vessel steady. More often her course is as viciously jagged as that of lightning. It is not for the American, with our treatment of the South and the negro question since the Civil War before him, to cast a stone at the thirteenth century.

In thirteenth century Languedoc, as in nineteenth century America, war made an end of nice distinctions. At the time of the Conference of Pamiers, in 1207, before the Crusade had begun, Peter de Vaux-Cernay could distinguish clearly between Waldensians and “heretics” par excellence: that is Manicheans. In 1226, nineteen years later, we find a Cardinal-Legate of the Holy See persuading Louis VIII of France to attack the city of Avignon because there were many Waldenses there, and this in spite of the fact that it was a fief of the Empire. From the first the theory of the Church had been that heresy itself, and not any one particular kind of heresy, however repulsive, was the enemy. Before the Albigensian Crusade is ended, we find that this theory is being worked out in fact.

What, then, are we to say of the statesmen and their peoples who encouraged or permitted the adoption into law of this sweeping theory promulgated by the Church? Clearly the men of the thirteenth century saw no moral problem in the matter, but only the doing of a necessary task. No other assumption can account for the success with which the difficulties in the way of the new inquisitorial institution were gotten over. For instance, there was the exceedingly delicate question of the precise relation of inquisitors to the local bishops. Had there[Pg 217] been the slightest desire on the part of the secular governments to hinder the Inquisition, it would have been easy to play off one against the other, for it was a poor mediæval ruler who could not get some of his bishops to support him on practically any proposition. We hear of nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the thorny point of Inquisitorial versus Episcopal authority is triumphantly solved, in practice, without any serious hitch whatsoever. It is the same with popular resistance. At long intervals we sometimes hear of little riots, or even of the murder of an inquisitor here and there. But such things are the rarest of exceptions to the rule. This is easier to understand when we realize that only in the few centres of heretical resistance were inquisitorial activities of a drastic nature. Thus in Roussillon, just over the border from Languedoc, the atmosphere changes altogether. Here the minute research of the indefatigable M. Brutails has brought to light only four sentences of the Inquisition.[36] All are directed against robber barons, of the pestilential tribe whose activities we have noted. What happened to two of these wretches is not clear. Those whose fate is known suffered only the penalty of having their dead bones dug up and solemnly burnt, forty years after death in one case. The severities of the Inquisition, enormous though they bulk on the voluminous pages of Lea, were infrequent and local throughout thirteenth century Christendom as a whole. Furthermore, these infrequent and local severities were normally exercised against the “Albigensian” heretics who were deservedly detested. Not until two hundred years later—in the fantastic and stagnant close of the Middle Ages—do we find anything like a reign of terror. Nevertheless, the underlying idea of the whole business is so alien from us that we can scarcely understand it.

Even to approach understanding of such a thing, it is necessary to speak in parables. Let us, therefore, imagine a scene among the shades. The ghost of a thirteenth century scholastic is in converse with other ghosts, an ancient Roman, a sage of Hindustan, a mandarin from China, and an American citizen.

“Government is government,” say these last four, “and religion is religion. For men to agree, in general, to live peaceably with each other and to obey law, they need not also agree concerning divine things, and this is proved by what we ourselves have seen and known. If anyone offend against law let him be punished. But let him worship any God, or no God, as pleases him, granted only that he offend not the religious feeling and sense of decency of his neighbours, particularly if a great majority of them be agreed upon such matters.”

To whom the scholastic: “From you of the East and of old Rome these words mean little. No law of natural right informed your States. When did any one of you maintain that there was a God in whose sight all men were equal? Instead, you held to slavery and to the deepest inequalities among men. We strove more greatly than you because we sought to build upon eternal justice. In our eyes, it was justice that every man should enjoy the whole fruit of his labours, saving only a tax, as it were, paid to those who fought, judged, or governed. And in order that such justice might prevail it was needful that the Church be strong to lay down, precept upon clear precept, what was every man’s duty to his neighbour.”

“The conquered Saracen, in Spain and Sicily, was but an exception, to tolerate him did no harm. A graver exception was the Jew, for the weakness of men made it convenient that he be permitted usuries anathema to Christians. Nevertheless he was a race apart. But that the sword of the gospel should lose its edge, being blunted and chipped away by the unblessed interpretations of men calling themselves Christians, was to us a thing intolerable. For among such a babel of tongues we feared that men would listen to none, but would follow their own greeds and lusts, wheresoever these last might lead, until the strife among them ceased only from weariness.”

After he had done speaking there is a little silence. Then the American answers and says: “It is true that men must agree, after a fashion, as to that what is right, and it is true that this is hard. But faith is faith and men are facts. Moreover, since we speak of faith, there is a civic faith which seeks to bind men together upon the earth, no matter whence they came there and whither[Pg 219] they shall go. But faith or no faith, men as citizens must sink or swim together, and if they cannot agree about the things of this world, they will certainly perish. About God they can never agree, therefore let them differ as peaceably as they can.”

“But is it not true,” says the scholastic, “that you have failed? For shades lately come hither out of the sunlight, say that more and more, in the upper world, there is strife in the cities between rich and poor. There are so many, even in your own country, who are called free and yet own nothing.”

“That is so,” replied the American, “but a friend of mine came here only the other day, and he said that they had not failed yet.”

FOOTNOTES:

[32] “On Anything,” Hilaire Belloc, p. 72 et seq.

[33] Huysmans’ “Là-bas,” p. 439.

[34] “The Renaissance in Italy,” by John Addington Symonds, publ. Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1904. Footnote to p. 129 of Vol. I of the treatise on “The Catholic Reaction.”

[35] “Mont St. Michel and Chartres,” Adams, supra, p. 348.

[36] “Etude sur la Condition des Populations rurales en Roussillon.” Pp. 297, 298.

I have deliberately left out of the imaginary discussion with which the last chapter closes, any reference to Prohibition. Had the scholastic pressed this point, as an instance of religious persecution by law, the American must have been forced to treat the Prohibition movement as an exception, a parasitic growth which has fastened itself upon the Constitution. He would then have had trouble in sustaining the argument. In the world of shades, or in any other place where there is time to pare down matters to their essentials, the determining factor of religious persecution in the Prohibition movement must be admitted.

As has been stated in the preface, it was the shock of recognizing this fact (through contact with Prohibition agitators during a term of service in the New York State Assembly) which led the present writer to study the establishment of the Inquisition as the one comparable instance of so drastic an interference of religion with politics. In all the long story of Christendom there is no third instance of religious persecution so systematic or on such a scale. The foregoing study was at first undertaken in the belief of the writer that the mere account of the political and military struggle leading up to the establishment of the Inquisition would, by itself, be enough to enable the reader to see for himself the true nature of “Prohibition.” However, during the unavoidable delays of the last few years, this original belief has now been abandoned. As a result of many conversations on the subject, the writer now believes that the real forces responsible for Prohibition are sufficiently misunderstood, especially among Protestants, as to make it desirable to show in an epilogue the essential connection between sectarian Protestantism and Prohibition, the true[Pg 221] nature of Prohibition as sectarian-Protestant, religious persecution, and finally, the resemblance and divergencies between Prohibition and the thirteenth century Inquisition.

When written history begins, all civilized and semi-civilized people, and many savages besides, are found drinking some sort of fermented liquor, wine, cider, or one of the many kinds of beer. Back of written history, tradition has it that the practice was from immemorial time. No people had handed down a story of an early past when such liquor was not an integral and familiar part of each day’s diet, usually with meals. It is true that the Greeks said that Bacchus-Dionysus came from Asia, bringing the Vine, the youngest of the Gods, and that some scholars have held that this indicated the memory of a time when the primitive Greeks were wineless wretches. The argument, however, will not hold water. For, in the first place, even if we imagine an early time before the Greeks drank wine, there is nothing to prove that they did not know some other sort of fermented stuff, as the Gauls did before Rome conquered them. And, furthermore, people in the Iliad and Odyssey drink wine but seem to know nothing of its God; it was familiar but it was not yet holy.

Besides being everywhere, fermented liquor was everywhere used in much the same way. It was an article of daily diet, so much so that no meal was complete without it. At feasts and festivals it was drunk more freely. Drunkenness was extremely rare. The Old Testament assumes that people had to “rise up early in the morning” and “continue until night” before wine would “inflame them,”[37] and denounces those persistent enough to do so. It was the Greek custom to mix their wine with water, several parts of water to one of wine. Schliemann speaks of an inscription recording a law of one of the Ionian cities which prescribes penalties for drinking neat wine. One of the early Babylonian codes of law prescribes severe penalties against the keeper of any wine shop (an Englishman would call him a “publican,” an American a “saloon keeper”) in which a disturbance occurs. The reader should be warned, however,[Pg 222] that the danger of disturbance was no doubt quite as much due at that early time to the presence of numbers of men not known to one another, as it was to the drinking that went on there. At all events, the Hebrew and the Greek examples are enough to prove the attitude of the earliest historical time toward the instances of drunkenness (apparently rare) which they saw. No sooner had the keen Greek mind developed itself and begun to analyse than it laid down the general principle of temperance as one of the chief virtues. In the particular case of fermented drinks which we are now considering, Belloc has neatly remarked that “It has been noticed (also from immemorial time) that if a man drank too much of any of these things he got drunk, and that if he got drunk often his health and capacity declined.”[38] So much for the historical background.

Given the ancient use everywhere of fermented drinks, given also the recognition of the rare evil of habitual drunkenness, it is instructive to note that before the sixteenth century there is (with one exception) no record of the habitual use of distilled liquors in Europe and the Near East, and (again with one exception) no record of the idea of the sinfulness of drink.

First as to distilled liquors. Distillation of beverages was known in ancient China. The earliest European navigators to visit Tahiti found it practised by the savages there, which would indicate the probability of its great antiquity in that stagnant, primitive society. The word alcohol itself is of Arabic origin, like many similar words, such as alembic, algebra, &c. The sweet, aromatic, liqueurs made by mediæval monks (Benedictine by the Benedictines, Chartreuse by the Carthusians, &c.), are hardly exceptions to the rule inasmuch as they are essentially cordials rather than beverages. Brandy (burnt-wine, brant wine, brandevin, brandy wine) was known in France from the fourteenth century but seems to have been drunk chiefly as a cordial, as it still is in that country to-day. At all events, the scanty references to it indicate that it was little used. The one considerable exception is the use of whisky (usquebaugh, pronounced whiskybaw) among the highland Scotch and the Irish.[Pg 223] With these people whisky was traditional. The ancient Irish epics of Cuchulain and Finn are full of references to it, as the Homeric poems of references to wine. While the debate over the date of the Irish epics may cheerfully be left to specialists, it is certainly clear that they long antedate the sixteenth century. Like wine, beer, and cider among the other nations of Europe, whisky among the Irish certainly dates from before the commencement of written history. But, in Europe, before the sixteenth century, to Ireland and the Scotch highlands its use was confined.

That the use of fermented liquors was sinful was an unknown idea, quite as unknown as we have seen the use of distilled liquors to have been. Previous to the sixteenth century, we find ascetic individuals or select orders renouncing wine, but always, like true ascetics, either with the idea of making their abstention a distinguishing mark, or with that of renouncing pleasures lawful or even necessary to the community at large for the sake of special practice in self-control. Thus among the ancient Hebrews certain men would dedicate themselves to be “Nazarites to the Lord,” and as such would vow never to drink wine or to cut the hair or beard. The wine cup was no more evil than the scissors, abstention from both was merely the distinctive sign of a peculiar dedication. Just so, ascetic Christians would renounce wine except in the sacrament; St. Dominic is an instance. He was teetotal for years, although he finally gave up the practice. Here the idea was that of complete devotion to the service of God. Even entirely lawful and proper pleasures were to be freely laid aside by an individual in order that all fleshy desires, as such, might be “mortified,” and that the soul should not risk being swerved even by a hair’s breadth (through an instant’s delight in “creatures”) from complete and utter devotion to the Creator. Ascetic Christians were even more apt to give up eating meat than drinking wine. And, of course, none but the most frantically heretical Christians ever maintained that there was anything sinful about eating meat as such. Such renunciations were merely two among many forms of self-imposed “discipline.” In the same spirit a devout layman, like St. Louis, might abstain from marital intercourse during[Pg 224] Lent. Apart from the practice of a general asceticism, the ancient and the mediæval worlds knew of but one great example of fear and hatred for wine. That appalling exception was the doctrine of Mohammed.

Within Christendom itself, however, the theological and moral influence of Islam was slight. The only one of the various Mohammedan innovations in morals which had even a brief and partial echo among Christian men was the Prophet’s prohibition of images. With regard to the point under discussion, the use of wine, Mohammed’s teaching failed to commend itself to our ancestors. Instructed in Christian tradition, with the marriage in Cana and with the sacrament continually before them, the teetotaller fanaticism took no hold upon them. The chroniclers speak of it merely as an oddity, like the Jewish taboo against pork—which the Mohammedans also copied.

So matters stood until the great sixteenth century break with tradition. When the convulsions of the religious wars had ceased, Scandinavia, the Northern Germanies including Holland, and especially England, were seen in definite opposition to what was left of the moral unity of Europe. The break was different in degree, for England preserved the essential catholicity of her national Church, although well-nigh smothered under a mass of Protestant innovations, whereas the Northern Germanies lapsed altogether. Nevertheless at the time the break seemed final in England as well. There had been no such sharp change of direction, no such conscious rejection of the immediate past, since Constantine accepted the Faith. It might even be said that the sixteenth century break was the greater of the two, for the sixteenth century innovators despised their ancestors as the early Christians had never despised the pagans. With the theological debates which determined this capital change we are not here concerned for their own sake, but only for the effect which the acceptance of the Protestant dogmas produced upon the morals and therefore, in the end, upon the social structure of Christendom.

The Catholic possessed and, of course, still possesses an inclusive, reasoned, scheme of ethical teaching. This ethical scheme had been taken over by the Church from[Pg 225] the ancient Greeks, and especially from Aristotle. To the Aristotelian ethic had been added (like a superstructure which enlarges rather than disturbs the original design of a building) the Christian theological virtues and their attendant vices. Under this broad scheme, serious moral offences were classified under one or another of the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lust.

This ethical structure, composed jointly by the Greek genius and the Christian revelation, Protestantism has so destroyed that the average Protestant of to-day, even when educated, cannot so much as tell what the seven deadly sins may be. Few Protestants, if forced to think by Socratic questions, will fail to agree as to the reality of all seven. Nevertheless, in practice, Protestants have ceased to consider most of them as sins at all. Let the reader who may be inclined to doubt so sweeping a pronouncement merely take the trouble to question a few of his friends. If he prefers to approach the matter through general rather than particular instances, let him consider for a moment the industrial society of to-day, together with the universal and bitter quarrel between “capital” and “labor” which has arisen in that society. Then let him remember that modern industrialism had its birth in England—a country Protestant in manners and morals where the essentially Catholic character of the national Church itself has been so much ignored and misunderstood. Let him further remember that, outside of England, the industrial system has taken deepest root in the Protestant Northern Germanies and in the Protestant United States. In spite of its material success, it has been but partially imitated in Catholic countries from these Protestant models. After reviewing these obvious and indisputable facts, let him recall that for centuries not one out of a hundred Protestants, even among the educated, has ever been clearly told that such things as avarice, sloth, and envy are sins. Then let him deny, if he can, the ruin that Protestantism has made in what was once the symmetric structure of Christian morals.

In place of inclusive, reasoned, ethical principles, the Protestant set up fragmentary taboos. On account of his rejection of Christian tradition, he was driven to build[Pg 226] upon the Scriptures alone. In none of the canonical books could he find the ethical principles of the New Testament, with their implications, built up into a coordinated manual of ethics. Moreover, the early, formative Protestants vastly preferred the Old Testament which showed the ancient Jews in the taboo stage of morals, to the specifically Christian traditions of the historic Church. Taboo is the stage in which morals are not a matter of reasoned general principles of conduct, but consist merely of disconnected prohibitions of specific acts. Of course, Catholicism has its taboos, such as abstinence from meat on Fridays, but these are marks of distinctive religious observance rather than general rules of conduct. In his Bible, which he had stripped naked of tradition, the Protestant found the ancient Jewish taboos impressively codified, by contrast with the Christian principles scattered through the New Testament. With his profession of Christianity, his rejection of Christian tradition, and his intimate admiration for the ancient Jews, his ethical course was clear. That part of Catholic morals which was not capable of expression in hard and fast taboos he would not actually disown but would gradually allow to be forgotten. So it has been with reference to avarice and envy, for example. Accordingly we see the great prizes of power and social distinction awarded as the result of successful avarice in the pursuit of wealth; envy rampant, and sloth unashamed both in the “ca-canny” labourer who restricts his output, and in the rich who are no longer held by custom to perform any service or duty in return for the economic power lodged in them. On the other hand Protestantism concentrates its moral fervour upon the element in traditional Christian morals which can be even approximated through taboos. Hence illicit sexual intercourse and excess in eating and drinking are particularly condemned. As time went on, since the ill effects of over-eating were less immediately obvious than those of drunkenness, this last has come to stand alone with adultery and fornication as the targets for Protestant moral attack. To-day educated Protestants will sometimes tell you that a Christian life consists chiefly in refraining from women other than one’s wife and from drink!

Of course this attitude is a reversal of the sound[Pg 227] European tradition which thought of the sins springing from an excess of natural sensual desire as far less repellent than the mean and despicable sins, culminating in treachery, which derive from a perversion of man’s spiritual nature.

But Protestantism went even further than this. At its very beginning, Luther, in his “Address to the German Nobility” (A.D. 1520), had proposed the non-observance of “... All saints’ days, with their carousing, except Sundays.” And no sooner had Protestantism reached its most highly developed form, under Calvin, than it began an organized warfare against popular festivals and all the decorative side of life. The zealots who were its spear-point conceived the idea that God could be worshipped only with the mind. To quote Chesterton on Puritanism (the English form of Calvinism): “It is better to worship in a barn than in a cathedral, for the specific reason that the cathedral was beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship.... Therefore it is wicked to worship by ... dancing, or drinking sacramental wines, or building beautiful churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep.”[39]

Naturally, in the absolute divorce of beauty and holiness, it was to be expected that beauty must be thought essentially evil. Moreover, with such a system, it was necessary for the Puritans not only to get rid of beauty but also to do away with amusement so that (out of working hours) the people might have nothing to do but contemplate their theology and seek confirmation of it in their Bibles.

Of course, so bald and repulsive a fanaticism seeking to impose its tyranny upon Christian men could not, by itself, have made its way. Even the anger then running throughout Europe at the scandal given by ecclesiastical authority would have been insufficient as a cloak for such enormities. But behind the zealots were the mercantile class, into whose lap the adventurers were already beginning to pour the gold of the Indies. These “economic men” saw their chance. The masses, with their festivals[Pg 228] and their pleasures taken from them, would not only have more time to listen to sermons, they would also have more time to work. For it was beginning to be the unspoken creed of these men that the poor man, who must gain his bread in the sweat of his brow, existed mainly that they might “get rich quick.” With their influence, the merchants furnished the driving force behind the fanatics. In England Protestantism was not long in developing into Puritanism under the powerful influence of Calvin whose God, as Wesley said, had the exact functions and attributes of the Devil.

Inspired by such a divinity, the Puritans began operations. The theatre, dancing, card playing, &c., were abhorrent to them. Moreover, and here is the essence of the whole matter, they accounted it righteousness to do their best to compel other men, indifferent or hostile to their extraordinary beliefs, to live after their sombre fashion. To the black shame of Puritanism, with its glorification of private judgment, it has never been content when in power with telling its votaries to practise its own peculiar kind of righteousness and leave others to their own consciences. In this, as in many things, the Puritan is closer in spirit to the Mohammedan than he is to the historic Church. Indeed the correspondencies between Puritanism and Mohammedans, with respect to images, ceremonies, divorce, drink, &c., deserve more study than they have received. At its utmost, the Church has claimed jurisdiction only over those of the household of faith. Puritanism seeks to impose its taboos even upon the stranger within its gates.

Puritanism contains, furthermore, an essential element of hypocrisy. To a certain extent this is due to its founder Calvin himself. For auricular confession under secrecy, or for the general confession, he could only substitute the activities of “... good men ... to be chosen from the different quarters of the city whose duty was to report evil doers to the ministers, for admonishment or exclusion from the Supper” ...[40] meaning the sacrament. Comment on such a smelling committee is needless.

Besides, the typical Puritan hypocrisy is derived from the prominence of the mercantile element present in Puritanism from the first. A wealthy man advocating Puritan taboos in order to promote asceticism among his workmen may or may not profess Puritanism, but he very seldom feels called upon to live up to it himself. Of course, with the command of privacy which wealth gives, it is easy for him to avoid open scandal.

In addition to the inveterate Puritan habit of setting members of a congregation to spy upon one another, and second, the prominence which Puritanism gives to economic motives as seen by the merchant or trader, there is also a third cause making for hypocrisy among the Puritans. That is the influence of reason (in alliance with the dimly-felt inheritance of centuries of Catholicism) demonstrating the insignificance of the transgressions which it is Puritanism’s great effort to reprove, in comparison with the baser sins. Therefore, we find many Puritans who are essentially decent people and useful members of society, all the time slyly violating the taboos, such as the drink taboo, to which they subscribe in words. Certainly all societies and religions have their hypocrites, but as certainly the hypocrisy of Puritanism excels them all.

It may be objected that it is far-fetched to assign sixteenth century Protestantism (with its English development of Puritanism) as the cause of twentieth century industrial strife. Why then did not the industrial strife develop sooner, more particularly why did it not develop in the times when the Protestant philosophy (or, if the reader prefer, the Protestant “dogma”) was far more lucidly and more intensely held? In any case, how can a system set up largely by merchants and traders be held to have caused the envy and sloth which cause and accompany our industrial strife?

The answer is that Protestantism happened to appear just at the beginning of the modern increased command over nature which for three hundred years has gone on opening up new lands for colonization and at the same time has improved the technique of agriculture and increased the quantity of the products of industry. All this has resulted in three centuries of increasing expansion unparalleled in history. At the beginning of this[Pg 230] period the Protestant dogma had been established, to the effect that a man’s private judgment in matters of religion was superior to corporate religious authority. Inevitably, such teaching bred loneliness in the soul. But, for the most part, men still felt themselves to be members one of another, because the continuous expansion had lightened the pressure of competition between classes and individuals. Any man in the more thickly settled regions who might be dissatisfied with his lot saw the frontier beckoning. Expansion, as in the twelfth century, made for a buoyant temper in the mind, but, unlike that of the twelfth century, this temper was too contemptuous of the past (because of the sixteenth century break with tradition and also because the expansion was without precedent); whereas the twelfth and thirteenth centuries felt that they were only partly reconquering the Roman order. Hence the naive faith in “progress” as such, which culminated in the late nineteenth century, and the equally naive illusion that physical science of itself would somehow make for happiness.

Although the full effect of the evil has been postponed to our own day, nevertheless the indictment against modern industrialism is not new. Scarcely had the so-called “industrial revolution” ushered in the superlative degree of the evil spreading outward from the Protestant societies dominant in our world before the seamy side of the business was shown up. In nineteenth century England (the parent and, until yesterday, the centre of the system) industrialism was ably attacked by such men as Dickens, Ruskin, and William Morris. Still the protests were not effective in that, despite them, complacency remained the typical mood of the Victorian Age. The resulting destructive political movements and the strikes were already drearily familiar before 1900. Protestantism, in breaking down the corporate religious ties which made men members one of another, had released destructive forces in human nature which were beyond control. Incidentally, the action of these forces was precisely contrary to the “economic” intentions present in the mind of so many early Protestants! Before 1914 it was apparent that matters were becoming serious, and now the strain of the Great War has so increased the industrial friction inherent in our society[Pg 231] that such friction has become the chief problem confronting civilization.

Although the pressing nature of the problem of our chronic industrial civil war is now abundantly recognized, the nature of the problem itself is still incorrectly diagnosed. The “industrial revolution” is generally given as the root of the trouble, whereas the industrial revolution merely watered the evil seed sown broadcast by the sixteenth century moral change in Europe. So, also, the Prohibition movement is not seen in its true bearings as a result of the continuing activity of precisely the same spirit which brought about the sixteenth century moral change—that is, the alliance between a narrow religious fanaticism on the one hand and the avarice of the merchant and “captain of industry” on the other. The adoption of the American Prohibition amendment coincided closely in time with the close of the Great War which has brought industrial strife to a head. To those sufficiently instructed to know Prohibition and industrial strife as alike children of the Protestant spirit, the coincidence is a symbol and a warning.

To recapitulate: the sixteenth century Protestants proclaimed the supremacy of private judgment over corporate religious authority. Slowly but inevitably such doctrine, making religion not a corporate but a personal thing, has weakened the ties between man and man. Notice now, how from the resulting hedge between individuals and classes springs the evil forest of our discontents which darkens the Christian world to-day. In the countries where the great landlords and the mercantile classes, working under cover of the narrow enthusiasm of the fanatics, won their great sixteenth century triumph (that is in England, Holland and the Northern Germanies) that triumph resulted in the confiscation of Church property by the State and its prompt absorption, not by the mass of the people as in France after the Revolution, but by the aforesaid great landholders and merchants themselves. With the increased influence due to this addition to their wealth, they were able gradually to dispossess the yeoman farmers and, in trade and industry, to substitute unrestricted competition in place of the guild system; but the strain which would otherwise have[Pg 232] been promptly felt in the Protestant societies was relieved, as we have seen, by the great age of expansion. When the new discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought about in England the industrial revolution, that revolution took place in a society in which the mass of the people had already forgotten their old economic freedom. Already they were accustomed to see their economic life dominated by merchants and landlords (over whom they had no check) acknowledging no definite moral authority whatsoever. In the two hundred years since the process had begun, it had come to seem natural that a few should control the means of production, and that these few, the rich, should look upon poor men mainly as instruments for their own further private enrichment. It was because of the destructive sixteenth century moral change and in no way because of any quality inherent in the new machines that the discovery of these last has made so enormously for unhappiness and strife. It is true that the machines have enormously accelerated the long process which has already reduced the wage-earner from the Christian liberty his ancestors enjoyed to something very like serfdom. But the essential point to be grasped is that the machines have only accelerated the process, they did not bring it about and they have not changed its nature.

In all this, the Prohibition movement has been an integral part. Prohibition has its roots in the great sixteenth century victories of fanaticism plus greed. It appeared above ground because of conditions brought about by discoveries in physical science acting upon a society coloured by the Protestant victories, although in themselves these discoveries have no inherent connection with morals. It has won a great victory in America and is attempting to invade England at the present day, when the strain of chronic industrial war has become acute and world-wide.

The historical connection between Protestantism and Prohibition has been but little studied. Nevertheless its outlines are abundantly clear. Prohibition was not among the original Protestant taboos. Even the Puritans and, as far as is known, the Anabaptists (who together made up the “extreme left” among the sixteenth century sects) were not prepared to abandon Christian tradition[Pg 233] so completely as to hold fermented drinks to be sinful. But Protestantism par excellence, that is Puritanism (from its original belief that worship was only possible through the mind and never through the senses), began by divorcing religion from beauty, and went on to a hatred of the decorative side of life and especially of the simple pleasures of the populace.

The Protestant societies created modern industrialism with its masses of degraded proletarians. As discoveries in physical science intensified the evils of industrialism in general (although they did not create those evils), so in the particular case of drink the commercial distillation of “hard” liquor still further magnified the evil of intemperance. The sequence is clear in both the general and the particular case. Even in the sixteenth century, Protestantism had already produced proletarians and public drunkenness on so large a scale that the first laws against drunkenness are found under Edward VI, and under Elizabeth the first Poor Law establishing workhouses. Until Edward and Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had abolished the monasteries, which supplemented the guilds in what we should call “social work,” it had not been found necessary to build workhouses for the poor nor to jail poor men who got drunk. Certainly it is clear that want, and drunkenness as the habitual result of want, were on the increase. And yet hard liquor was not plentiful in England until the very end of the seventeenth century. A few whisky distilleries had been set up in England in Henry VIII’s time but beer had continued to be the daily drink of Englishmen, and wine that of English gentlemen.

It was not until 1689, when the Government abolished all restrictions upon gin-distilling, that hard liquor became plentiful in England, and then it became plentiful with a vengeance; the proletarianizing process had been going on for over a hundred years. To complete the sequence of Protestantism, proletarianism and hard liquor, came the doctrine of the inherent sinfulness of drink. This seems to have been first preached by the eighteenth century Methodists, who appear as a distinct schism from the Church of England in 1740. Thirty years later their teaching was familiar enough to be noticed in the theatre. In a drinking song in the first[Pg 234] act of Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer,” first played in 1773, we find the following lines:—

By the middle of the nineteenth century the other sectarian bodies, the Presbyterians, the Independents or Congregationalists, and the Baptists, had followed the Methodists in adopting the Mohammedan fanaticism of total abstinence.

The final step of all, that of attempting to compel everyone to be teetotal by means of Prohibition laws, was taken not in England where total abstinence was first preached in the name of religion, but in America. In England the sectarian “Nonconformist” has always been in the minority and after the brief seventeenth century Puritan supremacy the nation turned fiercely against them. In America, on the other hand, they were in a majority from the first. Virginia was settled by Anglicans and Maryland by Roman Catholics, but the other English colonies were Puritan almost to a man. The colony of Massachusetts Bay was an absolute Congregationalist theocracy from its foundation in 1629 for over half a century.

In England, during the short Puritan ascendancy there (1649-60), the sectaries had used the full power of the State to suppress popular festivals and the decorative side of life. It was forbidden to keep Christmas or Easter. At the other end of the scale, it was forbidden to bait bears, “not because the sport gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators,” as Macaulay has it in a famous phrase. In one of their culminating atrocities, the closing of the theatres, the Puritans displayed their characteristic hypocrisy. Instead of frankly avowing that theatrical performances offended their peculiar religion they gave as reasons for closing them the plague and the Civil War. But when plague and the Civil War had ceased, did they permit the theatres to reopen? By no means. Dancing and card playing they held to be cardinal sins. Their garments must be sad-coloured, although in this respect but little worse than men’s clothes to-day. Their “meeting houses,” which[Pg 235] they substituted for churches, were purposely made as bare as barns.

But there was one outrage which they did not attempt. They made no attempt to forbid the fermented drinks which immemorial tradition and the example of Our Lord himself permitted to Christian men. It is true that they refused to drink healths, for the practice added ceremony to feasting and they held it to be a cause of intemperance. Beyond this they did not go. Incidentally it should be noted that when the Puritans ruled England none but fermented drinks were known. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were curiosities until after the Restoration. At all events, fermented drinks were the one form of social pleasure permitted to Englishmen under Puritan rule.

In New England, Calvinism ran riot. In Europe it had been the creed of a minority living in the midst of nations firm in the traditions of Christendom. Therefore, while it had been bad enough in Europe, it had never felt itself omnipotent. In New England, on the contrary, Calvinism had isolated communities founded especially for its glorification, and the result was horrible. “Its records read like those of a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and locked up their keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing their wives on the Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the cart’s tail for kissing each other at all without licence from the deacons, the whole culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism and witch-burning....”[41] The picture could be supplemented ad infinitum by a study of the town records of the New England Puritans. For the elaboration of it, one of their own descendants, Brooks Adams, has written a book, the “Emancipation of Massachusetts,” in which they hanged, gibbeted and damned for ever, and to that book I refer my readers who may be curious in the matter. They were appalling people.

For the purposes of this study, the essential thing to remember is that the eighteenth century slackening of Puritan fervour in America was not death but sleep. Or,[Pg 236] to use another metaphor, when its stream appeared to be drying up, it was still running strongly underground. Such a man as John Brown, with his savage and almost crazy fanaticism, would have been perfectly at home in Cromwell’s army, or with Praise-God-Barebones and his ilk.

After the Civil War, American industrialism began to expand enormously. The “captain of industry,” the second partner to the sixteenth century alliance against tradition, was growing into a giant. Insufficient support in this quarter seems to have been a contributing cause of the failure of the first American Prohibition movement. This flourished for a time about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the work of pure fanaticism, and for a time it had great success. All the New England States, plus New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, and South Dakota, Passed State prohibition laws. But in a few years these laws began to be repealed. Finally, the Maine Law alone remained on the statute books ... and continued to be so often violated in practice as to be a laughing-stock to the whole country.

Naturally, the fanatics could not have won even their temporary successes without the aid of other sorts of men. From the first America had been a “hard liquor” country. Whisky and rum had been the national drinks, and drunkenness had been common. The saloon keeper, like most traffickers in Protestant countries, was but little restrained by public opinion. “Business was business.” Wine was a luxury for the rich, unknown to the populace, and beer seems to have been almost unknown. The frontier, with its tendency toward crudity of thought and its utter lack of social restraint, has deeply influenced the American mind, predisposing it toward rough-hewn solutions of any troublesome problem, thus reinforcing the dominant Protestantism of the country, with its reliance upon taboo. As yet the influence of Catholicism with its rounded, universal ethic was slight. But notwithstanding all these contributing forces, a short experience of Prohibition was quite enough for the unhappy States which tried it.

Not until after the early years of the twentieth century did the agitation again gather strength. In the interim,[Pg 237] new forces had appeared, some favourable, some opposed to the destruction of Christian liberty. On the surface, it appeared to many that liberty had been strengthened. Catholicism was growing, chiefly through immigration from Ireland, Italy and the Slavic countries. Immigrants from Germany began to brew beer, so that even the populace began to see there was a possible rival to hard liquor. California began to make wine. With the disappearance of the frontier, men believed that the crudity of mind bred by frontier conditions would soon be resolved into an appreciation of the necessary complexities of settled civilization. So far, this idea has since been proved mistaken, but, in itself, it was not ridiculous. Far sillier was another contemporary notion, namely, that the increasing ease and frequency of communication would bring about catholicity of mind and a decline of particularism and provincialism in general.

However, these gains for the cause of Christian liberty were by no means decisive. Although the influence of Catholicism had increased, it was by no means dominant. To this day, no Roman Catholic could be nominated for President by either of the two major parties. The Roman Catholic, the most numerous of the three Catholic communions, had not even the power which its members might otherwise have given it, because its Italian and Slavic members counted for little in the politics of the country as a whole. The Latins had an especially small foothold in public life. Beer and wine were still mainly thought of in connection with “foreign elements” in the population. The native-born drank whisky, and used the word “rum” as a generic term to designate both distilled and fermented liquors! Between them, the Protestant sects accounted for an overwhelming majority of the population, and their innate Puritanism in morals was unchanged. Their theologies were less insisted upon; most educated Protestants were abandoning the arduous labour of definition, and the fervour which had formerly gone into Protestant theological discussion was now beginning to be dissipated in vague humanitarianism. In part this Protestant energy (formerly employed upon the theology now fading from the human mind) was ready to be used for the enforcement of taboo.

Chesterton’s analysis of corresponding conditions in the British Isles is pertinent here. He remarks that “... it is a singular fact that although extreme Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilization, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilized part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays.... All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and makes an evil silence in the streets.”

“By the middle of the nineteenth century—this dim and barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilized mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a cheque book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was ‘seen’ going into a bank.... The sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one ... it is defended with sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply tested ... if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo....”[42]

By the close of the century a new and increasingly[Pg 239] powerful ally, industrialism, was coming to the help of American Puritanism in its opposition to traditional Christian liberty. After 1865 America began to concentrate her energies on building factories and railroads. For three hundred years there had been no universal religious organization binding all men together in a common morality. In such a society, the appearance of machine industry aggravated the evils of unlimited competition between individuals and classes. These evils, it should be repeated, were the direct result of the sixteenth century moral change, that is the breakdown of universal religious authority and the consequent weakening of moral solidarity between men. Machine industry neither created the evils of unrestricted competition nor essentially changed their character. But it did aggravate them enormously because it increased the size of the industrial unit and thereby reduced to a vanishing point the personal contact between owners and wage earners. Owner and industrial wage earner tended to look upon one another less and less as fellow beings, engaged for mutual benefit in common tasks, more and more as abstract commodities—if not as definitely hostile forces, “capital” and “labour.” Wage earners organized themselves into unions which were ultimately to develop great powers of economic obstruction, but, so far, no faculty for constructive reform of industry. Owners meanwhile cast about how they might make of “labour” a more effective instrument for their own enrichment.

It is but fair to say that the “captains of industry” were not altogether cold-blooded in the matter. They had conceived a horrible affection for the new and vast forces under their control, and in this they were imitated by their numerous admirers among people whom a European would call middle class. Such people not only permitted the mechanizing of life, they actively encouraged it. Consequently, as Henry Adams put it: “The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions, or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whisky or drugs,[Pg 240] without breaking his neck.”[43] That the worship of the new mechanical energies was ruining the nerves of wealthy and middle-class Americans and imperilling society as a whole was an idea only just beginning to dawn. Almost all educated people consented to the inhuman process and called it fine names like “progress” and “efficiency.”

Meanwhile, despite Henry Adams and his “typical American man,” the wage earner who constituted the great majority of the industrial communities did not take kindly to the perpetual speeding-up process. From time to time he took refuge from his monotonous machine tending in heavy drinking of hard liquor after a fashion unknown to the Catholic peasant societies of Europe, and this habit of his annoyed the captains of industry and infuriated the Puritans.

The solution adopted would have amazed our ancestors. We can only hope that, if record is preserved, it will scandalize our descendants. Instead of striving to restore a state of things in which normal men might be left in peace to get their living and enjoy the social pleasures natural to man, it seemed simpler and more desirable to the leaders of our time to attempt to destroy the social pleasure. As in the sixteenth century, the “business community,” to whom the chief end of man was to make money, joined hands with the fanatic to whom amusement was sinful.

Two other lesser factors came in, as if accidentally, and helped the Prohibition cause.

The first of these accidents was a shift of political power in the South. Until about 1890 the “quality,” i.e., people who had a tradition of wealth and social ascendancy, dominated Southern politics. “Politics” were “qualities,” so the saying went. Then came a change; the small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers gained control. The quality in the South are usually “Episcopalian,” and anything but Puritanical. The “plain people” are nearly all “hardshell” Baptists or “shoutin’” Methodists. Neither of these sects are Calvinists like the original Puritans, but both are aggressively Puritan in their[Pg 241] discipline. The Baptists are the indirect successors of the Anabaptists, the “extreme left” in the sixteenth century religious struggle. The Methodists began as a schism from the Church of England and, as we have seen, were the first Christians to preach total abstinence instead of temperance in drink. As a substitute for drink, and for the other forms of social pleasure condemned by their discipline, they find an outlet in their orgiastic worship. Hence the epithet “shoutin’.” Of all Christian sects, these two are among those furthest from tradition. The proportion of college-bred or otherwise cultivated men and women in either denomination is small. Even their ministers are usually uneducated. On the other hand, these preachers are industrious, zealous, and devoted, so that they wield great influence. Naturally, with such ministers, the mental effort required for ethical definition is not to be found and taboo luxuriates. “Drink” to these people means whisky in rowdy dives. In the first decade of the twentieth century the Southern States under their new masters began to go Prohibition.

Southerners, anxious to avoid the reproach of intolerance, will sometimes say that the desire to keep liquor from the negroes was the chief motive for Prohibition. Liquor, they will say, inflamed the negro’s passions and predisposed him to attempt rape upon white women. On the other hand, the presence of negroes had nothing to do with the situation described in the last paragraph, and such an authority as William Garrott Brown, himself a Southerner, has recorded his opinion that the race question had little to do with Southern Prohibition.

The same author tells us that the pseudo-scientific propaganda against drink was scarcely heard of during the Southern Prohibition campaigns. According to him they were conducted, and won, “... mainly by the devices of a methodist revival ...; by terrifying and rather coarse emotional oratory from pulpit and platform, interspersed with singing and praying; by parades of women and children, drilled for the purpose; by a sort of persecution, not stopping short of an actual boycott, of prominent citizens inclined to vote wet; ... and finally, by fairly mobbing the polls with women and children, singing, praying and doing everything conceivable[Pg 242] to embarrass and frighten every voter who appeared without a white ribbon in his lapel.”

“It is these methods, gradually perfected in campaign after campaign, that have won for Prohibition so many victories....”[44]

The present writer has been told by eye-witnesses of the use of similar methods in imposing Prohibition upon the North-Western States.

The second accident which played into the hands of the Prohibitionists was a new piece of political mechanism, the direct primary.

The traditional American method of nominating candidates for office was the “convention.” Conventions might be self-appointed, called together by the force of some wave of enthusiasm. Normally they were routine assemblies representative of the established parties in the various political subdivisions of the country, states, counties, cities, &c. Such an assembly would be elected by the party voters, would formulate a “platform,” that is a declaration of party principles and purposes, and would also nominate candidates to stand for election on the platform. If a platform were adopted to which any delegate could not bring himself to support, it was his moral duty to “walk out” of the convention and separate from the party. Consequently it was the aim of the platform makers to set forth such principles as would retain in the party as many as possible of those who usually voted its ticket, and at the same time attract as many votes as possible from “independents” and voters enrolled in other parties. In such a system minorities of “cranks” were at a discount.

The convention system was changed as one of the results of the change in the typical American mood away from boundless self-confidence to exaggerated self-criticism. Part of the new self-criticism was directed against the leadership of the various political parties. With the touching American faith in legal mechanism as a corrective of conditions unrelated either to legal theory or practice, it was proposed to make nominations dependent upon preliminary elections or “direct[Pg 243] primaries” in which the enrolled voters of the given party might express themselves independently of the party “bosses” (at least so it was naively hoped by those who fostered the scheme).

The failure of the direct primary to improve political conditions in general does not concern this study. But among its various effects, few of which its advocates had foreseen, it undoubtedly furthered the Prohibition movement by increasing the political importance of any organized group of “cranks,” i.e., people interested in one particular question of public policy to the exclusion of other matters. The Prohibitionists were an admirable example of such a group, but other active minorities, such as the suffragettes, have benefited enormously by the direct primary. In the first place, it proved well nigh impossible to get the average citizen to cast his vote in a direct primary, because in cases of contested nominations for minor offices the aforesaid average citizen knew little and cared less as to the whole matter. The cranks he regarded with an amused and contemptuous tolerance. He could not believe that the new nominating device could give power to such people. Hence the cranks of all sorts gained influence out of proportion to their numbers, and promptly brought that influence to bear upon candidates for office, and especially candidates for the minor offices, such as members of State legislatures. Under the convention system it was very hard to put Prohibition into a party platform, for such a course would have been immediately followed by secession on the part of many who were accustomed to vote the party ticket. But under the direct primary, a candidate for nomination knew that those who were cranks upon a certain matter would support or oppose him according to his attitude upon their pet subject without regard to his general fitness for office as compared with his opponents. Besides its immediate effect, the direct primary had an ultimate effect even more important in favour of Prohibition, inasmuch as it weakened the party as an organ of political thought. The convention had served as a forum for deliberation and protest. Deprived of this forum, the party names tended to become mere labels and the allegiance of the average voter to his party tended to become weaker as the party came to mean less[Pg 244] and less. Accordingly, the voter became more inclined to throw over his party from time to time, and again the cranks gained in relative importance. Even had the direct primary accomplished the dethronement of the “boss” (which it has not), the result would have been dearly bought by reason of the enthronement of the crank.

Yet one more characteristic of the American contributed to the curtailment of liberty. We have already mentioned his naive reliance upon the imaginary power of legal enactment to overthrow long-established custom. This fallacious belief arose somewhat as follows:—

Patriotism (which is almost the religion of us moderns) is born of two parents, first, attachment to people and places dear to us from long association; second, attachment to a certain spirit which is the sum of the thought and action of the nation as a whole.

In America, the comparative shortness of our national history and the nomadic life of so many of our people have combined to give local attachments a slighter hold than in Europe. On the other hand, the national spirit is correspondingly strong. From the beginning, every effort has been made to define, and thereby to intensify it. The nation consciously dates itself from the Declaration of Independence and, after that, from the adoption of the Federal Constitution. So powerful have these formulas been that in America, more than in any other country, it is possible to use almost interchangeably the words “national spirit” and “national doctrine.”

It is true that the chief points of this national doctrine are that men have certain inherent, natural rights ... predominantly the right to “liberty,” that they are equal in those rights, and in all other matters touching the law. Obviously this implies for instance that no citizen or group of citizens should be empowered to compel their fellows either to consume or to refrain from any given sort of food or drink.

On the other hand, the reverence paid to the written law, founded upon the Declaration and the Constitution, has resulted in widespread error as to the nature of law itself. The majestic formulas of the Declaration, and the governmental framework set forth in the Constitution, changed in no way the manners and customs of[Pg 245] Americans. Their power was derived from the response which they roused in the rooted instinct of men of European stock. The underlying spirit of Christendom breathed life into them. Unhappily the mass of Americans, cut off as they were from tradition—first by their Protestantism and secondly by the Atlantic—instead of recognizing the traditional source from which the strength of their national formula was derived, mistakenly believed that strength to be derived from the fact that these formulas had been made the basis of American statute law. Instead of recognizing in statute law merely the ratification of established custom resulting from the sum of human activities, they erroneously came to believe that human activities could be compelled to conform to statutes merely because these statutes were proclaimed to have the force of law, and irrespective of the fundamental laws of human nature and inexorable human limitations which underlay those activities. “Men do not make the laws. They do but discover them,”[45] says Vice-President Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. And in so saying he indicts one of the great failures of American thought.

Having thus considered the real forces making for Prohibition, it remains for us merely to mention some of the more prevalent bits of claptrap which formed the stock-in-trade of Prohibition advocates. There were such statements as that the “wine” at the marriage in Cana of Galilee was unfermented! When the present writer was serving a term in the New York State Legislature, this was solemnly urged upon him by a Prohibition lobbyist. The imaginary picture of the ancient Jews, and of our Blessed Lord, fiddling about with benzoate of soda or some such stuff needs no comment. There was pseudo-scientific gibberish on the subject of “alcohol”; it was sought to show that it was a poison. The comforting thought was at once suggested that it must be a very slow poison, inasmuch as all our ancestors for countless generations had daily consumed fermented liquors containing appreciable amounts of it. The argument was on all fours with the vegetarian claims as to meat being poison. It was also sought to show that[Pg 246] “alcohol” was incompatible with work; the same might have been said of sleep. There was a crop of wild statements having to do with the “working man,” considering him not as a fellow creature of like passions with ourselves but as a strange monster transmogrified by the middle-class imagination. It was alleged that “drink” caused the creature to beat his wife even upon occasions when she deserved nothing of the sort. It was claimed that when the “working man” was deprived of his chief recreation (which was admitted to be “drink”) the result would be increased prosperity and good temper in his family circle. The slightest acquaintance with Mohammedan countries would have been sufficient to disprove such stuff. These “working man” fantasies are eloquent testimony to the barrier built up between the classes of the community by centuries of Protestantism. Together with the rest of the Prohibition claptrap, they deserve to be recorded in triple brass in order to be the laughter, or the pity, of generations to come.

Our generation has made a fine art of anonymity and the use of “dummies” in finance. Therefore it is impossible at this time, and will probably remain impossible, to expose the true sources from which the twentieth century puritans got their propaganda fund. It is common knowledge that many, if not most, of the large employers of “labour” sympathized with the Puritan cause ... as in the sixteenth century. It is believed that the Rockefellers gave enormously, and the fact that they are the most prominent Baptist laymen in the country, if not in the world, makes the belief seem probable.

The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has not ended the Prohibition movement in America. So far, the task of enforcement has proved impossible. Probably there has been some appreciable reduction in the amount of fermented and distilled liquors consumed. Certainly the price of liquor has increased and its quality has deteriorated. No man can foretell the future: prophets are the jesters of posterity. Given the extreme difficulty of repealing a constitutional amendment (repeal would require a majority of two-thirds in the United States Senate, and again in the Federal House of Representatives, and after that a favourable vote in both branches of the legislature in three-fourths of the States)[Pg 247] it seems probable that the Eighteenth Amendment will remain upon the statute books at least for a considerable time. However, there is already one amendment, the fifteenth, intended to secure the franchise to the negroes of the South, which slumbers on the statute books. At present, the Prohibition Amendment is a farce throughout many populous States, and the burdened taxpayer is loaded with the salaries of enforcement officials. The position of these enforcement officials somewhat resembles that of the Viking pirates of the ninth century. They have an enormous territory which they can raid almost at will, and throughout which they can annoy the inhabitants. But they are so few that, even with the enormous powers of movement and communication at the disposal of a modern Government, they are unable to constrain the activities of the millions among whom they operate. Like the old pirates again, these officials can frequently be bribed into harmlessness. Meanwhile, it is still possible to believe, if anyone desires to do so, that the immemorial traditions of Christendom will yield to a written law backed up by a handful of officials.

The spectacle is of absorbing interest to the student of history, who personifies the memory of the race. In his more sanguine moods he sees the gently sloping vineyards by Loire, he hears Rabelais roaring with laughter from his deep lungs, and he looks forward to a happy confounding of fools. Again he feels an antique paganism settle down upon him like a grey mist, and he remembers the vengeance of the Gods as Euripides has told it in the “Hippolytus” and, above all, in the “Bacchæ.” For the student of history knows that the forces of our human nature, which the ancients personified as Gods, are immortal. Man may persecute but cannot kill them, and under his persecution they become demons who turn and rend him, as Savonarola and the old English Puritans found. Even St. Francis’ death-bed was darkened a little by his memory of his own austerities. “I have sinned,” he said, “against my brother the ass.” And what were the voluntary sufferings of a monk or of all monks put together, as sins against “the Gods” of life, compared with the deliberate, forcible, attempt to teetotalize a whole nation?

As an assault upon human liberty, what was even the[Pg 248] Inquisition compared to the American Anti-saloon League?

In closing, let us recapitulate the points of resemblance and of divergence between the Inquisition and the Prohibition movement. Both were religious in their essence; the Protestant denomination made the second, just as certainly as the thirteenth century Catholic Church made the first. Both movements, being religious, were based upon beliefs transcending the human reason. In the case of the Inquisition the belief in question was the Catholic Faith; in the case of Prohibition it is belief in the innate sinfulness of distilled and fermented drinks. Both movements had a secular as well as their dominant religious side. A thirteenth century man careless of The Faith, even an infidel in personal belief, might have cordially approved of severities against heretics, because of the social dispeace which the presence of avowed heretics tended to cause. The infidel emperor Frederic II, with his drastic Inquisitorial legislation, is a case in point. Just so, it is possible for a man to be a sincere Prohibitionist, on account of some idea of the harmfulness of “drink” to the generality of mankind, especially to the “workingman,” although he regards its use by himself as beneficent. Indeed the tiny minority of Prohibitionists who believe themselves to be well educated are usually of this sort. Finally, as the Inquisition appears to be contrary to the spirit of Our Lord’s teaching, so the Prohibition movement is certainly contrary to His practice, at the marriage of Cana, at the Last Supper, and generally throughout his life.

On the other hand, in spite of so much resemblance, there are important differences between the Inquisitor and the Prohibitionist. In the first place, there is a profound difference as to intellectual integrity and candor. Catholic faith and morals were, and are, definite. From the time when the Church emerges into the full light of abundant historical record, in the first years of the third century, she has regarded their definition as one of her chief functions. Her corporate tradition declares that such was the case from her beginning, and the documents which survive from the first two centuries cannot, to say the very least, be made to contradict this conclusion. Protestantism, on the[Pg 249] other hand, was from the first a revolt against authoritative corporate definition. From the sixteenth century to the present time its theological and ethical vagueness has increased until a climax, it would seem, has been reached in the matter of Prohibition.

No clear statement of the Prohibitionist credo has ever been made and endorsed by even a majority of those engaged in the movement. An attempt has been made to say that “temperance” involves moderation in the use of that which is good and total abstinence from that which is harmful. But this attempt fails in two respects, inasmuch as it confuses temperance with the purely secular virtue of prudence which is nothing to a man’s salvation and therefore no possible part of the moral teaching of any Christian body, and inasmuch as it obviously conflicts with the corporate experience of mankind in calling the moderate use of fermented drinks “harmful.”

The contrast here is as great as that between civilization and barbarism itself. Certainly definition, like any other activity, can be carried to excess, as Pope Leo XIII recognized in his Encyclical on Scholasticism, wherein he mentions the “too great subtlety” of certain of the mediæval doctors. But, as certainly, it is the essential intellectual difference between civilized and barbarous man that the barbarian willingly accepts vagueness of mind, whereas the civilized man is continually striving to seize and formulate the laws which govern the universe about him in so far as his reason is in any way capable of comprehending them.

Secondly, there is another vast difference in the urgency of the social and political considerations making for the two movements. As we saw in the first chapter, mediæval man had built up a society in which all men had definite functions, and in which destructive competition between classes and individuals was reduced to a minimum. Despite insufficient checks upon cruelty and brutality, and despite the scantiness of its knowledge of history and of natural science, the time had produced a general level of craftsmanship as unknown since the sixteenth century as it was unequalled before the twelfth (the short best period of Greece only excepted). In promoting the happiness of mankind as a whole, mediæval society[Pg 250] seems never to have been equalled. Certainly the cheerfulness of the memorials which the thirteenth century has left us is unique. And in this society the Church was central and indispensable. To the educated mediæval man (who, while inferior to his modern colleagues in range of information, at the same time surpassed us in clarity and rationality)—to the educated mediæval man, I say, it was evident that to shatter the Church by attacking her Faith and Morals would be to shatter his balanced society altogether, and set men preying wolfishly upon one another. The common man, by a sort of instinct, was equally determined upon the point. And what is more, their fear was justified, as the last three centuries have abundantly proved, although the age of expansion has postponed to our own day the fulness of the evil of strife between man and man. Therefore the men of the Middle Ages were correct in resisting attacks upon the Church as attacks upon all they valued in civil society as well as in religion.

The secular case for Prohibition is not nearly so strong as the secular case for the Inquisition. It might be argued that industrialism is central and fundamental in our society, and that Prohibition, which is said to aim at “greater industrial efficiency,” therefore resembles the Inquisition in being the servant of the fundamental thing in the life of the community in which it has arisen. But even if the truth of this idea, so far as it goes, be conceded, still obstinate facts remain. Industrialism flourished before Prohibition. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether the attempt to abolish one of the chief pleasures of mankind will result to the advantage even of the industrial system. It is at least equally probable if the industrial labourer were to be really deprived of his liquor that his energy would decline because of a slackening in the zest for life characteristic of Christendom. Certainly the history and present condition of the Prohibitionist Mohammedans indicate energy far inferior to that of Christian men, merry with their beer, their cider and their wine. Even if an increasing energy on the part of the industrial labourer under Prohibition be assumed, still there is no assurance that he will concentrate that energy on his work. In such a case, it is at least equally probable that[Pg 251] he will find the dulness and monotony of his life, already devastatingly dull and monotonous, so increased under Prohibition that he will decide to expend a large part of his vigour in industrial strife or in revolutionary movements. For the ordinary modern man does not love industrialism as mediæval man loved the world which he had made. The thirteenth century guildsman would cheerfully fight for his guild and his customs, the modern man sacrifices himself to the life of the factory as heavily as the heathen Semites sacrificed men to Moloch. The Inquisition was a measure of defence. Its fires burnt in behalf of things which the mass of mankind saw and felt to be good. The Prohibition movement is an act of aggression, of questionable value even for its own ugly purpose. The one Prohibition counterpart of the twelfth century spontaneous popular lynchings of heretics was the bar-smashing activities of the virago Carrie Nation.

Last of all, there is, at the very least, a difference in the degree of contradiction to the teaching and example of Our Lord (as recorded in the Canonical Gospels), between the Inquisition and the Prohibition movement. So as to meet possible opposition half way, let us abandon the conclusions of the Rev. A. Vermeersch, S.J., who seems to hold that there was no contradiction between the Inquisition on the one hand and the doctrine and example of Our Lord on the other. The present writer must confess that the learned Jesuit’s forceful work is somewhat weakened by traces of a curious obliquity of mind, as when he defines “religious liberty” as “the liberty of the true religion!” For the sake of the arguments against the Prohibitionists, let us rest our case upon the conclusions of Vacandard, whose book is entrenched behind an array of “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur” from Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority equal in impressiveness to that displayed by Vermeersch. Vacandard calls the Inquisitorial forms of procedure “despotic and barbarous,” and flatly says that “severe penalties, like the stake and confiscation ... were alien to the spirit of the Gospel.” Nevertheless, the contradiction between Inquisitorial severity and the “spirit of the Gospel” must to some extent be qualified. The logical conclusion is irresistible that if (as all[Pg 252] Christians must) we assume Our Lord’s doctrine and example to be of inestimable value to mankind, we must admit that any attempt to pervert that doctrine and example so as to make Our Blessed Lord say and do as he did not is a more serious matter than any crime recognized by law. Furthermore, this argument from reason is, in a measure, supported by authority in the person of Our Lord himself because of the extreme bitterness with which he denounced the Pharisees for perverting religion.

On the other hand, the contradiction between Prohibition and the Gospels is complete and absolute. According to the Gospels, Our Lord spent most of his time in the society of men and women. Especially he hallowed, by his continual use of it, the adornment of social life by wine, so much so that his enemies called him “a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber.”[46] We find him working a miracle so that a wedding party, including himself, might be abundantly supplied with wine ... as if any wedding party since the creation would have cared whether or not they were indefinitely supplied with grape-juice. He did even more—he made wine a part of the Sacrament—the one ceremonial act which he prescribed. Bacchus-Dionysus also, so the pagan Greeks taught, had made wine a sacrament of fellowship, human and divine. In contrast with the dull and repulsive fanaticism taught in so-called Christian Protestant churches in the United States to-day, the traditional Christian, like the heathen worshipper of Bacchus, seeks and has ever sought communion with his God in the drinking of wine.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Isaiah, chap. v, verse 2.

[38] “This and That and the Other,” Hilaire Belloc, pp. 18, 19.

[39] Chesterton on Shaw, p. 43.

[40] “Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century,” by Henry Osborn Taylor, published by Macmillan Co., New York. 1920. Chapter on Calvin.

[41] From Chapter I of the “History of the United States,” by Cecil Chesterton, p. 31.

[42] Chesterton on Shaw, pp. 48, 49, 50.

[43] “The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography.” “Vis Inertiæ,” p. 445. Houghton, Mifflin Co., New York, 1918. Chapter XXX.

[44] “The New Politics, and Other Essays,” by William Garrott Brown, publ. Houghton, Mifflin, New York. 1913. Pp. 157-158.

[45] “Have Faith in Massachusetts,” Calvin Coolidge, p. 4.

[46] St. Matthew’s Gospel, ch. xi, v. 19.

The subject of the Inquisition has been worked over so often that it is doubtful whether renewed searching of the original authorities would yield great profit. The law of diminishing returns comes in.

The sources quoted in this bibliography are unequal in value. As interpreter of the Mediæval spirit Henry Adams comes first and after him Taylor. For Albigensianism and St. Dominic, Guiraud is best; and Vacandard for the mechanism and spirit of the thirteenth century Inquisition. On mediæval warfare in general there is almost nothing of value. Delpech is the best, supplemented by Dieulafoy as to Muret.

The one author who has gone over the whole subject, including the entire course of the Albigensian War, is Lea, whose vast learning and exactitude in matters of fact would have made him a great historian had he possessed a grain of imagination or the least spark of sympathy with the Middle Ages. In this respect Luchaire gains through citizenship in a Catholic country, but his book ends with Innocent’s death.

I have included a number of books used to illustrate particular points, and also a handful of old-fashioned Protestant historians whom the reader will value more for what their works will tell them about themselves than about their subject. Limborch is not so bad; his learning has evidently fought (and lost) a real battle against his partisanship.

“Life of St. Dominic and a Sketch of the Dominican Order.” Introduction by Most Rev. J. S. Alemany. P. O’Shea: New York.

“The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography.” Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston. Riverside Press: Cambridge.

“Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres,” Introduction by Ralph Adams, Cram Henry Adams. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston. Riverside Press: Cambridge, 1913.

[Pg 254]

“The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma,” Henry Adams. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston. Riverside Press: Cambridge, 1913.

“In St. Dominic’s Country” (Preface by Rev. T. M. Schwetner, O.P., S.T.L.), C. M. Antony. Longmans, Green and Co.: London and New York.

“The Emancipation of Massachusetts,” Brooks Adams. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston, 1919.

“La Bataille de Muret” (Pamphlet), Joseph Anglade. Edouard Champion: Paris, 1913. Edouard Privat: Toulouse, 1913.

“La Conquête de la Vicomté de Carcassonne” (Pamphlet), J. Astruc. Published August, 1912.

“Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa,” Dellon Aver. Etienne Roger: Amsterdam, 1919.

“The New Politics and other Papers,” William Garrott Brown. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.: New York and Boston.

“The Dominican Order and Convocation,” Ernest Barker, M.A. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1913.

“Les Dominicains dans l’Université de Paris,” Abbé Eugène Bernard. E. de Soye et Fils: Paris, 1883.

“Etude sur la Condition des Populations Rurales du Roussillon au Moyen Age,” Jean Auguste Brutails. Alphonse Picard: Paris, 1891.

“Etude sur l’Esclavage en Roussillon,” Jean Auguste Brutails (In “Nouvelle Revue Historique,” July-August, 1886).

“George Bernard Shaw,” Gilbert K. Chesterton. John Lane and Co.: New York and London.

“History of the United States,” Cecil Chesterton. George H. Doran and Co.: New York, 1919.

“Les Fortifications Romaines et du Moyen Age, dans le Quartier St. Michel, Toulouse,” M. J. Chalande. Imprimerie et Librairie Edouard Privat: Toulouse, 1914, (Pamphlet).

“Les Fortifications Romaines et du Moyen Age” (Pamphlet). Entre la Porte St. Michel et la Porte Montgaillard. M. J. Chalande (Pamphlet).

“St. Thomas Aquinas—A Biographical Study of the Angelic Doctor,” Fr. Placid Conway, O.P. Longmans, Green and Co.: New York and London.

“The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army,” F. L. Cheesman, M.A. Clarendon Press: London, 1914.

“Life of St. Dominic,” Augusta Theodosia Drane. Burns and Oates: London. Benziger Bros.: New York.

[Pg 255]

“The Spirit of the Dominican Order,” Augusta Theodosia Drane. R. J. Washbourne: London, 1910. Benziger Bros.: New York.

“Dominican Biographies.” Catholic Truth Society: London, 1912.

“Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas” (translation). 12 vols. Benziger Bros.: New York.

“Life of St. Dominic and Sketch of the Dominican Order.” P. O’Shea: New York, 1892.

“Les Institutions de Tauler, Religieux de l’Ordre de St. Dominique.” A. Tralin: Paris, 1909.

“La Tactique au XIII Siècle,” Henri Delpech. Alphonse Picard: Paris, 1886.

“La Bataille de Muret,” Marcel Dieulafoy. Imprimerie Nationale: Paris, 1899.

“Le Royaume d’Arles et de Vienne (1138-1378),” Paul Fournier. Alphonse Picard: Paris, 1891.

“Mystères de l’Inquisition et autres Sociétés Secrètes d’Espagne.” M. V. De Fereal.

“The Making of Western Europe,” C. R. Fletcher. E. P. Dutton and Co.: New York, 1912.

“Cartulaire de Notre Dame de Prouille,” Jean Guiraud (Preface by). 2 vols.

“St. Dominic” (translation), Jean Guiraud. R. and T. Washbourne: London. Benziger Bros.: New York, 1913.

“Les Bienheureux Dominicains (1190-1577),” M. C. de Ganaz. Perrin et Cie: Paris, 1913.

“Lacordaire” (translation), Count d’Haussonville. Herbert and Daniel: London, 1913.

“Francis and Dominic and the Mendicant Orders,” John Herkless, D.D. Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1901.

“Philip Augustus,” William Holden Hutton, Ph.D. The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1896.

“The Meaning of History and other Historical Pieces,” Frederic Harrison. The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1902.

“A Century of Persecution under Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns” (from Contemporary Records), Rev. St. George Kiernan Hyland, D.D., Ph.D. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd.: London, 1920. E. P. Dutton and Co.: New York.

“The Dark Ages,” W. P. Ker. Scribner’s: N.Y., 1904. Introd., pp. 6-8.

[Pg 256]

“Genius Loci, Notes on Places,” Vernon Lee. John Lane and Co.: New York.

“Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” Vernon Lee. John Lane and Co.: New York.

“A History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church,” Henry C. Lea, LL.D. 2 vols. Williams and Norgate: London, 1907.

“Superstition and Force,” Henry C. Lea, LL.D. Lea, Bros, and Co.: Philadelphia, 1892.

“The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies,” Henry C. Lea, LL.D. The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1908.

“History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea, LL.D. The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1908.

“An Historical Sketch of the Order of St. Dominic,” Father Lacordaire. P. O’Shea: New York, 1869.

“Vie de Saint Dominique,” Father Lacordaire. Librairie Poussielque: Paris, 1912.

“Letters to Young Men,” Father Lacordaire. London, 1903. “Cassock and Sword,” Charles Lenz, Ph.D.

“Innocent III,” Achille Luchaire. La Croisade des Albigeois, Rome et l’Italie. Librairie Hachette, 1907.

“Social France at the Time of Philip Augustus” (translation), Achille Luchaire. John Murray: London, 1912.

“History of the Inquisition” (translation). Philip A. Limborch: London, 1731.

“A History of the Holy Catholic Inquisition,” Introduction by Rev. Cyrus Mason. Henry Perkins: Philadelphia. Corey and Fairbank: Cincinnati, 1835.

“Histoire des Maîtres Généraux de l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs,” R. P. Mortier. Alphonse Picard: Paris, 1909.

“A Short History of the Crusades,” J. L. Mombert, D.D. News Printing Co.: New York, 1894.

“The Bloody Tribunal,” John Marchant, Gent. Golden Key, London, 1756.

“John Lackland,” Kate Norgate. The Macmillan Company: New York and London, 1902.

“A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages from the Fourth to the Fourteenth Century,” Charles Oman, M.A., F.S.A. Methuen and Co.: London, 1898. G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York.

“The Dominicans,” edited by Very Rev. Father John Proctor, S.T.M. R. and T. Washbourne, Ltd.: London. Benziger Bros.: New York, 1909.

[Pg 257]

“The Spirit of Romance,” Ezra Pound, M.A. J. M. Dent and Sons: London.

“Scholasticism,” Joseph Rickaby, S.J. Dodge Publishing Co.: New York, 1908.

“Brand of Dominic,” Rev. William H. Rule. Carlton and Phillips: New York, 1853.

“History of the Inquisition,” Rev. William H. Rule. Hamilton Adams and Co.: London, 1874.

“Averroes et l’Averroisme,” Ernest Renan. Calmann Lévy: Paris.

“What is Modern Romanism?” George Franklin Seymour, D.D., LL.D. Young Churchman Co.: Milwaukee, 1888.

“Mediæval Civilization” (translation), Dana Carleton Munro and George Clarke Sellery. Century Company: New York, 1904.

“Renaissance in Italy,” John Addington Symonds. 7 vols. Smith, Elder and Co.: London, 1904.

“Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece,” John Addington Symonds. 3 vols. Smith, Elder and Co.: London, 1907.

“Wine, Women and Song,” John Addington Symonds. Doubleday, Page and Co.: New York, 1907. G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, 1907.

“Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I,” William Stubbs, M.A. 2 vols. Clarendon Press: London, 1875.

“Constitutional History of England—in its Origin and Development,” William Stubbs, M.A. Clarendon Press: London, 1875.

“Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition,” Rafael Sabatini. Brentano: New York, 1913.

“Summa Theologia of St. Thomas Aquinas” (translation). Benziger Bros.: New York, 1914.

“History of the Inquisitions, including the Secret Transactions of those Horrific Tribunals.” J. J. Stockdale: London, 1810.

“Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century,” Henry Osborn Taylor. 2 vols. The Macmillan Company: New York, 1920.

“The Mediæval Mind,” Henry Osborn Taylor. Macmillan and Co.: London, 1914.

“Ancient Ideals,” Henry Osborn Taylor. The Macmillan Company: New York, 1913.

“The Empire and the Papacy,” T. F. Tout, M.A. Rivington’s: London, 1909.

[Pg 258]

“Life and Labours of St. Thomas of Aquin,” Archbishop Vaughan, O.S.B. Burns and Oates: London. Catholic Publication Society of New York, 1890.

“The Inquisition: A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church” (translation), E. Vacandard. Longmans, Green and Co.: London and New York.

“History of Languedoc,” Jean Joseph Vaissete. 16 vols E. Privat: Toulouse, 1872.

“Bullaire du Bienheureux Pierre de Castelnau.” At Villemagne. Librairie M. Valat: Montpellier, 1917.

“Dante and Aquinas: Being the Substance of the Jowett Lectures of 1911,” Philip H. Wicksteed. J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd.: London and Toronto. E. P. Dutton and Co.: New York.

“The Traditions of the European Literature,” Barrett Wendell. Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1920.

Transcriber’s Notes

pg i Added period after: Toulouse in 1217-1218 to illustrate its siege by De Montfort
pg ii Changed: Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church, Carcassone
to: Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church, Carcassonne
pg xii Removed unnecessary ) from: Flanders in the early eighteenth century).
pg 27 Changed: which has usually been called Albigenseanism
to: which has usually been called Albigensianism
pg 29 Changed: draining the country between the Cevennes
to: draining the country between the Cévennes
pg 46 Added quote after: general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.
pg 67 Changed: these people gave to extreme ascetism,
to: these people gave to extreme asceticism,
pg 60 Added period after: Plon-Nourrit Paris, 1913. Pp. 362-3, author’s trans
pg 63 Changed: went against the heretics, no action whatsover
to: went against the heretics, no action whatsoever
pg 63 Changed: The other great chronic political controvery,
to: The other great chronic political controversy,
pg 83 Changed: had been “hereticated” on their deathbed
to: had been “hereticated” on their death-bed
pg 95 Changed: chronicler Peter de Vaux-Cernaiy Raymond
to: chronicler Peter de Vaux-Cernay Raymond
pg 117 Changed: account of aid given by certain near-by
to: account of aid given by certain nearby
pg 120 Changed: Mediterranean end of the Pyrenées
to: Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees
pg 129 Changed: Pamiers, Foix, and the upper Ariège.
to: Pamiers, Foix, and the upper Ariege.
pg 144 Changed: De Montford sent a knight
to: De Montfort sent a knight
pg 150 Changed: The Garonne flows northeast
to: The Garonne flows north-east
pg 153 Changed: Toulousains were out of easy bow-shot
to: Toulousains were out of easy bowshot
pg 156 Changed: William d’Encontre and William des Barras
to: William d’Encontre and William des Barres
pg 158 Changed: his chivalric enthusiasm by exchangnig
to: his chivalric enthusiasm by exchanging
pg 164 Changed: Courcon had persuaded to to take the field
to: Courcon had persuaded to take the field
pg 167 Changed comma to period after: “French” that it seemed wise to make it defenceless
pg 171 Changed: swearing homage to his proper over-lord
to: swearing homage to his proper overlord
pg 173 Changed: After this exchange of compliments at Narbonne, de Montford
to: After this exchange of compliments at Narbonne, de Montfort
pg 176 Removed repeated word from: Guy and and his men ended by
pg 185 Changed: Louis promply went to work
to: Louis promptly went to work
pg 185 Removed extra period from: service from certain nobles not keen for the expedition..
pg 192 Changed: North Frenchmen who came to sieze
to: North Frenchmen who came to seize
pg 215 Changed: come down to us concerning Waldenses, Arnaldists
to: come down to us concerning Waldenses, Arnoldists
pg 254 Added period after: Riverside Press: Cambridge, 1913
pg 256 Added period after: John Lane and Co
pg 257 Changed: “Averroes et l’Averroisme,” Ernest Renan. Calmann Levy
to: “Averroes et l’Averroisme,” Ernest Renan. Calmann Lévy

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Two Maps in Pocket at End of Book.
	(1) Languedoc and Adjacent Lands in 1209.
	(2) (a) Town of Muret, 1213; (b) Battle of Muret, September 11,
		1213, 1st phase; (c) Battle of Muret, 2nd phase; (d) Battle
		of Muret, 3rd phase; and (e) Approximate Restoration of
		Toulouse in 1217-1218 to illustrate its siege by De Montfort.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Inquisition

THE INQUISITION

A POLITICAL AND MILITARY STUDY
OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT

CONTENTS.

DEDICATORY LETTER.

PREFACE.

CHAPTER I.
THE MEDIÆVAL RECOVERY OF CIVILIZATION.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER II.
LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III.
THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE CRUSADE.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IV.
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE—THE
EARLY WAR.

CHAPTER V.
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE.
MURET AND ITS SEQUEL.

CHAPTER VI.
THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THE
INQUISITION.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VII.
EPILOGUE ON PROHIBITION.

FOOTNOTES:

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

			PAGE
Dedicatory Letter			iii
Preface by Mr. Hilaire Belloc			v
————
Chapter	I.	—The Mediæval Recovery of Civilization	1
”	II.	—Languedoc and the Albigenses	28
”	III.	—The Preliminaries of the Crusade	70
”	IV.	—The Albigensian Crusade—The Early War	106
”	V.	—The Albigensian Crusade—Muret and its Sequel	145
”	VI.	—The Mendicant Orders and the Inquisition	191
”	VII.	—Epilogue on Prohibition	220
Bibliography			253

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Inquisition

THE INQUISITION A POLITICAL AND MILITARY STUDY OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT

CONTENTS.

DEDICATORY LETTER.

PREFACE.

CHAPTER I. THE MEDIÆVAL RECOVERY OF CIVILIZATION.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER II. LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE CRUSADE.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IV. THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE—THE EARLY WAR.

CHAPTER V. THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE. MURET AND ITS SEQUEL.

CHAPTER VI. THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THE INQUISITION.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VII. EPILOGUE ON PROHIBITION.

FOOTNOTES:

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

THE INQUISITION

A POLITICAL AND MILITARY STUDY
OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT

CHAPTER I.
THE MEDIÆVAL RECOVERY OF CIVILIZATION.

CHAPTER II.
LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.

CHAPTER III.
THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE CRUSADE.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE—THE
EARLY WAR.

CHAPTER V.
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE.
MURET AND ITS SEQUEL.

CHAPTER VI.
THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THE
INQUISITION.

CHAPTER VII.
EPILOGUE ON PROHIBITION.