Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (29 page)

What we should probably make clear at this point is that this particular war was being waged according to very different rules from the normal ‘chivalric’ encounters. Although the conflict was on French soil, it had been designated a holy crusade, so that the Cathars were considered sub-human heretics, on a par with the Saracens in the Holy Land. Therefore, they had not been accorded the mercy which might normally be expected by defeated opponents, even when they surrendered. Thousands of civilians had been massacred after the capture of the town of Béziers in 1209; after the fall of Lavaur in 1211 some four hundred Cathars had been burned alive on a huge pyre, the castellan and eighty knights hanged, and the castellan’s sister murdered by being thrown down a well-shaft and stoned to death. The southerners had retaliated in kind, and French soldiers captured during Simon de Montfort’s siege of Toulouse had been paraded through the streets, their eyes gouged and tongues ripped out before they were hacked to pieces. So Count Centule was very much taking his life in his hands by approaching Louis’s camp.

The opinion of the bishop of Saintes, readily stated, was that all those who had defended Marmande, including the count, should be put to death. According to the
Song of the Cathar Wars
Louis replied, ‘since it is the Church who brought me here, her law shall not be challenged. The count is in dispute with the Church, so she may do what she likes.’ But both Peter de Dreux and the count of St Pol leaped to their feet and protested that it was not right to execute a nobleman who had given himself up for mercy. The archbishop of Auch pointed out that the count, although he had been defending the town along with the heretics, was himself an orthodox Catholic, and that he could be exchanged for other prisoners who had been captured in earlier encounters. And so Centule was spared his life, along with four other nobles. But everyone else was not so lucky, and the population was massacred, as the
Song of the Cathar Wars
graphically describes:

Clamour and shouting arose, men ran into the town with sharpened steel; terror and massacre began. Lords, ladies and their little children, women and men stripped naked, all these men slashed and cut to pieces with keen-edged swords. Flesh, blood and brains, trunks, limbs and faces hacked in two, lungs, livers and guts torn out and tossed aside … not a man or woman was left alive, neither old nor young, no living creature … Marmande was razed and set alight.

The author of this part of the text was a supporter of the southerners and on occasion in his work he exaggerates for effect. But in this case his account is backed up by William the Breton, supporter of the opposing side, who tells us that ‘All the citizens were killed, along with their wives and their little children; every inhabitant, to the number of five thousand souls.’

Louis, it has to be said, does not come out of this episode with any great credit. From a modern perspective it is almost impossible to fathom how he could hear a discussion on how it would ‘disgrace’ him (in the words attributed to the count of St Pol) to execute an enemy combatant, and then stand by while a massacre of defenceless citizens – civilians, including women and children – took place. This was in marked contrast to the clemency he had often shown to defeated opponents in England. His silence is deafening: in neither account does he appear to command the massacre explicitly, but there is no doubt that he could have prevented it if he had chosen to. But it is dangerous to view historical actions though a modern lens, and here we have to remember two things. First, that thirteenth-century ideas of religion were very different – forgiveness came only after repentance, and even then was only for good Christians who followed the Church’s doctrine, not for those who had departed so radically from the orthodox teachings. No less a personage than St Bernard of Clairvaux, the influential twelfth-century abbot and Doctor of the Church, had declared that the killing of heathens and heretics was not ‘homicide’ but ‘malicide’: the killing of evil. Therefore, not only was it permitted but it should be actively encouraged as an act of cleansing (this link with purification is one of the reasons why burning was a common method of execution for heretics). Secondly, we should also recall that although thirteenth-century noblemen saw other knights as ‘one of them’ even though they might be on the opposing side (they could be captured and offered for ransom rather than killed, and killing a knight once he had surrendered would be a ‘disgrace’), they saw commoners differently. Thus, the massacre of the citizens of Marmande served multiple purposes: it rid the world of some five thousand heretics (or at least heretical supporters – the evidence suggests that Marmande was not, in fact, a hotbed of heretical activity), it deprived the enemy of resources and it acted as a warning to terrorise other towns in the region into submission. All this does not, from a modern viewpoint, excuse Louis’s horrific actions, but it does go some way towards explaining them in context.

Leaving the bloody and smouldering ruins of Marmande behind him, Louis and his host set off for Toulouse, still in the hands of the southerners. The people there were naturally frightened, but the atrocities of the war had been such that they were almost inured to terror by now, and even the fate of Marmande did not persuade them to surrender. Instead it made them even more determined and they organised their defences, led by the younger Raymond who had taken charge of his family’s campaign from his ageing father. He had a substantial garrison of knights and sergeants, as well as the civilians, and they prepared to withstand yet another siege.

The continuation of the
Song of the Cathar Wars
ends abruptly at this point, with a wish that the Blessed Virgin should defend and protect the inhabitants. But despite the huge and complex preparations on both sides, the siege was to prove an anti-climax. Louis arrived and began the assault on 16 June 1219; his troops surrounded the city and cut it off from reinforcement or resupply, and launched several vigorous assaults on the walls. But unfortunately for him, a specific aspect of feudal custom was about to throw a spanner in the works. The standard period of military service which was owed to an overlord was forty days per year: this meant that there was what might be termed a ‘campaigning season’ in the late spring and summer, when being on the road was more practical and the all-important harvest season was not interrupted. This limited period of service had not been the case for crusades to the Holy Land, for the obvious reason that the journey times were immense: those heading for Outremer, as the lands across the sea were known, simply accepted that they would be gone for months or even years, and they took a personal decision to travel. But the present campaign was somewhere in between the two: it was a crusade, yes (and those taking part in it were able to claim their indulgences for fighting in the army of God), but it was on home soil against rebellious vassals of the king. Therefore many of the lords and knights argued that forty days should be their default service here too, and in late July they simply packed up and went home.

With a dwindling number of men, insufficient to break down the mighty defences of Toulouse, Louis was forced to abandon the siege: it was lifted on 1 August and he headed back north. This rather sudden departure caused much celebration in Toulouse, and confused a number of chroniclers, who attributed it to anything from a secret agreement between Louis and Raymond to Louis coveting the southern lands for himself and therefore being unwilling to expend his energy on conquering them for Amaury’s benefit. Roger of Wendover resurfaces at this point, describing ‘a great famine among the French army … dreadful mortality both of men and horses’, and blaming this for Louis’s decision to depart. But this is one of the instances in which Roger gets his facts mixed up, confusing this encounter with the earlier siege of 1218 in which Simon de Montfort was killed, so his account cannot be deemed reliable. It seems clear that it was simply the lack of men that forced Louis’s hand: he was enough of a military leader to know when a victory was possible and when he was facing a lost cause. To put it bluntly, while he was restlessly driven, lived for campaign and did not have much else to occupy his time, other lords were not so keen and did not want to be away from their lands for long periods.

The net result of Louis’s withdrawal was the one which could be expected: Amaury de Montfort lost the gains he had made. The crusade was not over yet; the carnage in the south would remain a festering sore on the map of France and Louis would be back.

* * *

All around him, Louis’s friends and boyhood companions were succeeding to their inheritances. Theobald had, of course, been count of Champagne since his birth; he reached his majority in 1221. Peter de Dreux had been duke of Brittany since his marriage to the heiress some years before; his elder brother Robert succeeded their father as count of Dreux in 1218. Guy de Châtillon’s father, the count of St Pol, died in 1219, and in 1222 his mother (who was countess in her own right) ceded the title to him. But Louis was still in his father’s shadow. How was he to occupy himself?

From what we can gather from the available evidence, Louis was not exactly kicking his heels, but he was not overtly associated with royal power either. He had still not been crowned as ‘junior king’, and neither had he been named count of Artois – all his acts from this period, including those relating to Artois, list him as ‘Louis, eldest son of the lord king of France’ (the same style he had used in England) rather than as count. He did play some administrative role in Artois, which was useful practice for eventual government: we find him engaging in day-to-day tasks such as confirming a grant of land, or the assignment of a dower, or a peace treaty between two vassals. However, he did this without having Artois as his principal residence; we can tell from the various charters and acts which contain names, dates and places that he was more often in royal residences elsewhere, such as Paris, St Germain, Compiègne and Fontainebleau. Louis also kept himself busy administering the county of Boulogne while his half-brother Philip Hurepel was a minor (we will remember that Philip Hurepel was married to Matilda, daughter of Renaud de Dammartin, who was still in prison following his defeat at Bouvines, and that Renaud had been forced to resign his county to her). And Louis and Blanche did their duty to guarantee the royal line: three more sons, of whom we shall hear more in the next chapter, were born in quick succession in 1219, 1220 and 1222.

In March 1222 there came a renewed appeal from the pope to King Philip regarding the Albigensian crusade. Amaury de Montfort, perhaps tired of fighting a bloody and endless war which had taken up most of his life since he was in his early teens, and which had cost him his father and younger brother, had been offering his lands and claims to Philip since the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, Raymond VI of Toulouse had died and his son Raymond VII had declared himself the loyal subject of Philip and asked to be reinstated as count of Toulouse, to the lands which had been taken from his father and awarded to Simon de Montfort some years before. Raymond was another young man – around twenty-five at this point – whose entire existence to date had been dominated by the conflict and who might justifiably be dreaming of a different and more peaceful kind of life. A decision would have to be made. Over the summer the cardinal legate, Bertrand, travelled to Languedoc to mediate, and he arranged for an assembly to be held once all parties were in a position to travel to Paris.

However, in September 1222 King Philip, now fifty-seven, began to suffer from bouts of a violent fever. This may or may not have been linked to the serious illness of his youthful crusade to the Holy Land, which had affected his life ever since, but it was debilitating enough for him to stop what he was doing and to draw up his testament. In this he salved his conscience by apportioning vast sums for the recompense of lands unjustly confiscated, for the Christian cause in the Holy Land, for widows, for orphans, for lepers – and no less than £10,000 for his long-suffering wife Ingeborg (who would go on to outlive him by thirteen years). The fever was described as quartan, meaning that the worst attacks happened every fourth day. In between these times Philip managed to continue with his duties as best he could. His doctors advised him to go on a diet and to abstain from wine, but – ever the
bon viveur
– he refused. After all, everyone had to die of something, and making his life miserable would not ease his last months or years. But this still provided no opening for Louis to take over any kingly duties: Philip would hold the reins of power fast in his own hands until his dying breath. Both William the Breton and Roger of Wendover note that the onset of Philip’s illness was accompanied by the ill omen of a ‘fiery-tailed comet’ – the tendency in medieval chronicles to link important events with phenomena which must at the time have seemed supernatural is often taken as metaphorical, but in this particular case it is possible that Roger and William were depicting astronomical fact: one of the appearances of Halley’s comet is calculated to have taken place in September 1222.

In July 1223 an assembly of bishops was in Paris discussing the Albigensian question. Philip, who was at Pacy-sur-Eure in Normandy, decided to try to travel to Paris to join them. However, he had made it only as far as Mantes (some 35 miles or 55 km away from the capital) when he was struck by another severe bout of fever and had to stop. This time he knew it was serious: both Louis and his son young Louis were summoned to his side. The deathbed scene would remain etched in the mind of the little boy in later life, and Louis, too, was emotional. A chronicler named Conon de Lausanne was in Paris at this time (he was later present at Philip’s funeral), and he describes the scene eloquently. Louis’s final reward from his father was in the form of simple words: ‘My son,’ said Philip, ‘you have never caused me any trouble or pain.’