The Friar of Carcassonne (11 page)

Most important was the inquisitor himself. He had to be a man of discerning probity and great integrity, given the power invested in him to ruin lives. Most were honest; a few were not; none was perfect. The belief that an inquisitor acted out of malice or dishonesty, beliefs that gripped Carcassonne in the time of Bernard Délicieux, completely undermined his legitimacy.

This is not to suggest that the enterprise was a fraud, a nest of extortion and spite hiding behind the robes of sanctimony. Inquisitors sometimes scored remarkable successes. In Toulouse in 1240, one Raymond Gros, a prominent Cathar Good Man, defected to the side of orthodoxy, giving up a trove of names that would, through careful police work, eventually eviscerate the remnants of heresy in that city. In Italy, even greater strides were made: two Cathars, Raynier Sacconi and Peter of Verona, not only betrayed their coreligionists but themselves became inquisitors. Peter was murdered for his pains in 1252 (thereby becoming St. Peter Martyr), but not before his and Sacconi's understanding of heretical beliefs strengthened the hand of other inquisitors in the entrapment of suspects.

Peter's assassination, which helped lead a scandalized Pope Innocent IV to authorize torture, underscored the dangers run by inquisitors, especially in the early days. In Languedoc, utter exhaustion, induced by the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade, turned to incredulity when the first inquisitors arrived on the scene, as if adding insult to injury. In Albi, in the spring of 1234, inquisitor Arnaud Cathala escaped within an inch of his life when a mob attacked him as he attempted to disinter and burn a dead heretic. In a war-weary land finally free of violence and the mass bonfires of the type seen at Lavaur, the grotesque spectacle of digging up the dead and burning them violated not only the newfound peace, but also a taboo that had nothing specific to medieval France. In most human societies, whatever the burial or crematory customs that obtain, a modicum of respect is accorded the deceased; this new activity seemed as diabolical and indecent as the so-called heresy the inquisitor so loudly denounced.

In Toulouse of the same year, similar indignities outraged public sensibility. In an infamous incident, an old woman on her deathbed was tricked into admitting her heretical beliefs, inspiring the Dominican bishop of the city to have her lashed to her bed, hauled through town, and thrown on a bonfire. A Dominican chronicler witnessed the event and joyfully claimed it proof of divine intervention, or perhaps the action of the late St. Dominic himself, whose very first feast day was being celebrated on that afternoon of August 8, 1234. The friars, after dispatching the poor woman, returned to table for a hearty lunch, while one of their number was left behind to preach a
sermo generalis
to the dumbfounded crowd, which had just witnessed a harmless old woman at the very end of her natural life subjected to a cruel and inhumane death.

Within a few months these Dominican hounds of the Lord had themselves been hounded out of town. Certainly, many Toulousains had something to hide, but the near unanimity of their opprobrium attests to widespread disgust at inquisitorial activity. Prior to quitting the city, the Dominicans had been, in effect, ostracized—no one showed up at their services, no tradesman supplied them with food or labor, no passerby greeted them in the streets, save to hurl epithets or rocks and refuse. The autumn of 1234 marked a dangerous moment of civic truculence in both Toulouse and Albi. That the Dominicans, albeit with the pope's support, eventually dared return within a few years speaks not only of the disorganized nature of the resistance to them but also of the implacable, sincere determination of the friars to do God's dirty work.

The countryside was even less welcoming. In 1242, in the small settlement of Avignonet, a morning's ride to the west of Carcassonne, two inquisitors and their party were set upon in the middle of the night and massacred. One of the inquisitors was Guillaume Arnaud, a feared Dominican; the other, Etienne de Saint-Thibéry, an unlucky Franciscan who had been appointed alongside Arnaud to allay fears among the populace of Dominican ferocity. Etienne was to be the good cop, but he did not live long enough to perform that function.

The perpetrators, from the Cathar stronghold of Montségur, had believed that by killing the inquisitors they would kill the inquisition. This was to misunderstand the Dominican hydra: within a short time replacements appeared, and the action of the murderers proved, disastrously for them, to be the last straw for the Church. Money and an army were raised to reduce the almost impregnable mountain fortress of Montségur, a citadel of Catharism that previous prelates had quailed at the thought of attacking. The killing at Avignonet had provided the political will, and in March 1244, after a ten-month siege, Montségur surrendered and more than two hundred Good Men and Good Women were consigned en masse to the flames. Those not condemned to the stake were then interviewed by inquisitors.

Languedoc licked its wounds and kept quiet. The Good Men vanished into thin air. The inquisitors, undaunted by their initial reception in the region, busied themselves with investigation, honing technique and expertise. They became sedentary, summoning suspects to headquarters rather than venturing into isolated and dangerous villages. King Louis IX had the Wall at Carcassonne constructed, and its dark chambers slowly filled with prisoners of conscience. Burnings were few, but inquisition registers grew, each passing year yielding a fresh harvest of names to retain and cross-reference. Many unfortunate families were undone, with the “doctors of souls,” as the inquisitors came to style themselves, dispensing cruel remedies for salvation in the hereafter, heedless of their consequences in the here and now. An active inquisitor, Jean Galand, conducted thorough investigations in the Cabardès, the rugged hinterland to the north of Carcassonne. Smoldering resentment glowed deep in the dark night.

In the 1280s, three lawyers of Carcassonne appealed to the king to halt the depredations of inquisition in Languedoc. The two laymen in this impudent trio represented the new social order: literate clerks fed up with the Church's disruptive role in civil society. They feared an unsympathetic hearing in Rome, so they turned to their sovereign to set matters to rights. The inquisition, they argued, was harming his subjects, weakening his kingdom, causing unrest. They demanded that the king's agents in Languedoc cease helping the inquisitors undermine the peace and prosperity of his loyal province.

The first two appeals, in 1280 and 1284, fell on deaf ears. The documents themselves have been lost. But by 1286, circumstances had changed. On returning from a losing campaign south of the Pyrenees, in Aragon, the forty-year-old French king, Philip the Bold, contracted dysentery in the autumn of 1285 and died. This calamity occurred in Perpignan, close to the schemers of Languedoc. Perpignan was not then a part of France, a particularity that was to play an important role in the career of Bernard Délicieux.
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The king's body was therefore moved from Perpignan to the nearest French city, Narbonne. The lawyers of Carcassonne, or their sympathizers in the nobility, may have seized the opportunity to attend the funeral in Narbonne in order to determine whether the dead king's successor, seventeen-year-old Philip the Fair, could be influenced to look favorably on a renewed appeal.

In 1286, the men of Carcassonne wrote a petition to the hated inquisitor Jean Galand and the young king, identifying the flaws in the inquisitor's ideal vision of what he was doing:

We feel aggrieved in that you, contrary to the use and custom observed by your predecessors in the Inquisition, have made a new prison, called the
mur
[Wall]. Truly this could be called with good cause a hell. For in it you have constructed little cells for the purpose of tormenting and torturing people. Some of these cells are dark and airless, so that those lodged there cannot tell if it is day or night, and they are continuously deprived of air and light. In other cells there are kept miserable wretches laden with shackles, some of wood, some of iron. These cannot move, but defecate and urinate on themselves. Nor can they lie down except on the frigid ground. They have endured torments like these day and night for a long time. In other miserable places in the prison, not only is there no light or air, but the food is rarely distributed, and that only bread and water.

Many prisoners have been put in similar situations, in which several, because of the severity of their tortures, have lost limbs and have been completely incapacitated. Many, because of the unbearable conditions and their great suffering, have died a most cruel death. In these prisons there is constantly heard an immense wailing, weeping, groaning, and gnashing of teeth. What more can one say? For these prisoners life is a torment and death a comfort. And thus coerced they say that what is false is true, choosing to die once rather than to endure more torture. As a result of these false and coerced confessions not only do those making the confessions perish, but so do the innocent people named by them . . .

Whence it has come about that many of those who are newly cited to appear, hearing of the torments and trials of those who are detained in the
mur
and in its dungeons, wishing to save themselves, have fled to the jurisdiction of other kings. Others assert what is false is true; in which assertions they accuse not only themselves but other innocent people, that they may avoid the above mentioned pains, choosing to fall with dishonor into the hands of God rather than into those of perverse men. Those who thus confess afterward reveal to their close friends that those things they said to the inquisitors are not true, but rather false, and that they confessed out of fear of imminent danger . . .

Likewise, and it is a shame to hear, certain vile persons, both defamed for heresy and condemned for false testimony, and, it is reported, guardians of the dungeons, seduced by an evil spirit, say with a diabolical suggestion to the imprisoned: “Wretches, why do you not confess so that you can be set free? Unless you confess, you will never leave this place, nor escape its torments!” To which the prisoners reply: “My lord, what do we say? What should we say?” And the jailers reply, “You should say this and this.” And what they suggest is false and evil; and those wretches repeat what they have been told, although it is false, so that they may avoid the continuous torments to which they are subject. Yet in the end they perish, and cause innocent people to perish as well.

The authors of the petition had every interest in painting as bleak a picture as possible of the inquisition at Carcassonne. Yet the document speaks eloquently across the centuries of the indignation felt by educated people at the excesses of fanatical persecution. To brook the power of the inquisitor took courage—and Brother Jean Galand was a formidable figure, having spent more than a decade actively torturing and imprisoning people. Of the trio of lawyers behind these appeals, two would spend years in the Wall. The third, Raimond Costa, possessed survival skills so astonishing that he later became the bishop of Elne, near the Kingdom of Majorca's capital, Perpignan, and thus was beyond the jurisdiction of the inquisitors in France. In this extraordinary environment of accusation and antipathy, defenders of Galand claimed that the appellants had tried to steal an inquisition register out of fear that they had been named as heretics.

Opinion is divided over whether this actually happened, but given the importance the registers would assume in stoking
la rage carcasson-naise
in later years, the story cannot be discounted entirely. Certainly if their names appeared in the register, the would-be thieves had good reason to make it disappear—or at least find out what had been alleged about them. In any event, the theft did not occur. The accusers' story held that when the bribed clerk of the inquisition had let agents of the Carcassonne agitation into Galand's private chambers, they discovered, to their dismay, that the inquisitor, away on business in Toulouse, had shrewdly taken with him the key to the strongbox that contained the register. Even if not true, that friends of the inquisition could credit their foes with such audacity reveals how toxic an atmosphere existed between the citizens of the Bourg and the inquisitors of the Cité.

Events in the following decade are as murky as Carcassonne's cri de coeur to the king is clear. The monarch eventually had the citizens' charges investigated and, in 1291, instructed his seneschal (his governor in the south) to have no further truck with the inquisitors. No royal official was to arrest anyone at the inquisitor's behest, except in cases of notorious heretics, such as a Good Man or Good Woman whose spiritual deviancy was common knowledge and established beyond a reasonable doubt. Agents of the king were to judge whether a suspect should be apprehended—the Dominicans were not to be taken at their word. Young Philip, his dramatic conflict with the pope still in the future, no doubt wished to appease his angry subjects. In keeping with the course he charted throughout his reign, he felt no qualms at swatting away buzzing intermediary irritants—in this instance, the Dominicans—that interfered with the direct relation he sought to establish between ruler and ruled. Philip did not want the inquisition halted—heresy had to be stamped out—but neither did he want the Dominicans sowing havoc in his kingdom.