The Friar of Carcassonne (12 page)

The whip hand now lay in the hands of the king's men in the south, many of whom hailed from the region (although the seneschal was usually from the north). A few came from families tainted with heretical connections, in a much more direct way than the heretical notoriety of their birthplace, as was the case with the powerful Guillaume de Nogaret. Given these dangerous ties of kinship and the king's explicit ordinance, there must have been little incentive to go the extra mile for the inquisitors. When, in 1295, Philip renewed his injunction, the inquisitorial enterprise stuttered further.

Soon events spun out of control. Few details exist, and those that do come largely from an important figure and prolific writer, Bernard Gui, future inquisitor at Toulouse, who was present at Carcassonne in these years, residing as an ordinary friar in the Dominican convent in the Bourg.
^*
Gui coined the term
rabies Carcassonensis
to describe the tumult of recrimination that characterized these shadowy years. The people of the Bourg must have scented blood and moved in to shut the infernal inquisition down. In 1297, as a riposte, the inquisitor Nicolas d'Abbeville excommunicated the entire town, thereby rendering it an outcast in Christendom, to be shunned by trader and wayfarer. One can imagine the consternation at court in the north at this costly upheaval. Philip relented a little; in the following year, he issued an ordinance urging more cooperation with the inquisitors. The Carcassonnais took their case to Rome, to the imperious Boniface VIII. He refused to countenance their complaints—perhaps because the huge bribe promised His Holiness by the townsmen had been withheld, a witness would claim under oath years later.

By 1299, exhaustion had set in and the two sides engaged in protracted negotiations that lasted months. The townspeople wanted the excommunication lifted, their transgressions forgiven. The inquisitor wanted to haul in the more notorious heretical sympathizers who had eluded him for years. Two of the lawyers behind the appeals of the 1280s were eventually handed over, and other prominent burghers were to be arrested once an agreement was reached. The deal was signed on October 5, 1299; its details were kept secret from the people of the town. They were informed only that by the terms of the agreement their sins of the previous few years had been forgiven and that they had been restored to the embrace of the Church. Another proviso obliged them to build a new chapel in the Dominican convent. The inquisitor Nicolas d'Abbeville, they were told, was being generous.

What the inquisitor obtained in return, from the consuls signatory to the document, was a secret list of twelve names, all of them important citizens, who were to be exempt from the amnesty. After years of tribulation and frustration, the inquisitor was ready to make a move against them. He had the accord to back him up. He could now get on with his job.

*
Perpignan was the capital of the ephemeral Kingdom of Majorca, a Catalan entity that remained independent from 1276 to 1349 and included the Balearic islands, the Roussillon, some regions of the eastern Pyrenees, the city of Montpellier, and a part of the Auvergne.

*
Gui is also the villain in Umberto Eco's
The Name of the Rose
.

Part II

The Years of Revolt

1299

CHAPTER FIVE

THE AMBUSH AT CARCASSONNE

S
OME WEEKS AFTER THE SIGNING
of the accord, probably at the same time as the first of the Jubilee crowds headed for its rendezvous on the Ponte St. Angelo, the inquisitor's Dominican deputy, Brother Foulques de Saint-Georges, accompanied by a representative of the king and two dozen of his sergeants at arms, marched out of the inquisition headquarters in the Cité and through a western gate. Below them was the Bourg.

In all probability they took the Trivalle down the slope, with the Wall and the King's Mill rising up on their left. They crossed the Aude and walked smartly through the narrow, congested streets toward the gate of the lower town's fortifications. People would have snatched children out of their way; eyes followed them from open windows, watching, waiting. The armed contingent's destination was the tabula rasa of today, then the Franciscan convent at Carcassonne. Within its walls, the Dominican Brothers Nicolas d'Abbeville and Foulques de Saint-Georges believed, two prominent heretical sympathizers had taken shelter. Their names figured on the list of the doomed dozen that the consuls of the town had given up in the secret agreement. In the inquisitors' view, the freshly signed accord not only provided a chance to clean up the last of the Cathar vipers but also gave the Dominicans a golden opportunity to humiliate the Franciscans. As this was the first initiative taken by Brother Nicolas after the agreement had been reached, its target suggests that the Order of the Friars Minor had been no friend of the inquisitors in the years of sporadic strife leading up to the truce.

The party arrived at the outer portal of the convent, knocked at it repeatedly, and demanded entry. The great door eventually swung open, and they streamed into the courtyard. A second locked door gave entry into the convent proper. The king's representative pounded on the door. The Dominican then read out, loudly, the names of those he sought.

After a silence, a bell began ringing frantically, and torches blazed into life atop the building. The men at arms looked at each other, bewildered at the growing bedlam: the sound of distant shouts, then footfalls, dull thuds, and metal clanks, soft at first, but getting louder and louder.

The soldiers in the courtyard turned to the outer doorway they had just passed through. In the street leading to it an armed mob ran toward them, converging on the convent. The leader of the sergeants bellowed for the outer door to be closed. It was slammed shut and made fast with a great wooden bolt.

Crossbowmen appeared on the roof. A rain of missiles whizzed down into the courtyard. Rocks were thrown from windows in the upper gallery. At one of them, hurling stones and bellowing orders, was the ringleader of the ambush, a friar of Carcassonne named Bernard Délicieux. The trapped men hunched over instinctively to protect themselves.

“Traitors!” Bernard roared, urging the crowds to shout the same. The meaning was clear: those who cooperated with the inquisition betrayed the people of Carcassonne. There could be no better clarion of what the future held. The inquisitors may have signed an agreement with the consuls, but the disgruntled townsmen had at last found a dangerous leader, one who was fearless even before the power of the king—for Philip would soon hear that his agents had been called traitors. Willing to brave his displeasure was an unusual friar, heretofore a shadowy figure, a student in Montpellier, an obedient novice, then an accomplished, devout Franciscan whose talent, learning, and gifts at preaching had been recognized by the superiors of his Order. This exemplary friar clearly reveled in the risk, egging his Franciscan brothers to throw whatever they had at hand down at the soldiery, yelling up to the bowmen to keep up their fire, and, doubtless, cursing liberally at the trapped Dominican. This was the opening salvo of a campaign unlike any other in the history of the inquisition.

The day concluded as memorably as it had begun. Judging the courtyard to be a death trap, a sergeant lifted the bolt and swung open the friar of carcassonne | 67 the outer door of the convent. His men formed a wedge of slashing blades to protect the Dominican and the royal officer, hacking and fighting their way through the streets toward the river. As they reached the left bank of the Aude, the affray came to an end. The townsmen lowered their clubs and returned home, sated and no doubt immensely pleased with themselves. The party of the inquisitor, bloodied and battered but nonetheless alive to tell the tale at Bernard's trial twenty years later, crossed the river and staggered up the slope to the embrace of the Cité. Nicolas d'Abbeville's hope that the city had been pacified by his deal-making was shattered.

The next day dawned with the realization that this had been not a rabble led by lawyers of a possible heretical background, as in the past, but rather a riot incited by the Franciscans, the serene brothers of the Dominicans. The rivalry between the Franciscans, the Order of Friars Minor, and the Dominicans, the Order of Friars Preachers, had known verbal extravagance and invidious maneuvering, but physical outrage visited upon a Dominican in the precincts of a Franciscan sanctuary was something far more disturbing. It was akin to a Cathar Good Man swinging a broadsword or landing a haymaker—an act of violence once thought inconceivable.

None doubted who had masterminded the muscular pushback. The Dominican Bernard Gui would write that Délicieux was “the commander and standard-bearer of the army of the forces of evil.” Other voices of an appalled orthodoxy would pour on further vitriol, as this new obstacle, all the more terrible since Délicieux came from within the Church itself, had emerged to imperil the Holy Office.

Nicolas d'Abbeville, the inquisitor, pondered his options. The Dominicans were fully invested—professionally and spiritually—in persecution. Even Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the thirteenth-century friars, believed heresy to be a capital crime. To Brother Nicolas, doubtless, his Franciscan counterparts seemed not to be taking their mission seriously. Whether the Franciscans of Languedoc ran a safe house for targets of the inquisition is difficult to answer conclusively. Brother Bernard's subsequent actions and statements showed that he had no faith in the integrity of the inquisitor and the veracity of his registers, so to him any accusations of heresy were baseless, or at the very least compromised by what he saw as a culture of abuse that had grown up around the inquisition at Carcassonne.

Yet more fundamental and far more important than that objection was his approach to heresy in the first place. He was as dedicated as the Dominicans to its elimination, but the nature of his pastoral mission differed radically. Where the Friars Preachers wielded the heavy club of torture and imprisonment, the Franciscans in Bernard's mold relied on the force of example and good works to change hearts and win souls. Their founder, Francis of Assisi, had garnered a large following among the laity for his kindness to his fellow man and his distinctly un-Cathar-like love of God's creation. Although the brotherhood had grown into a complex, continent-wide apparatus, sometimes participating in inquisitions, most notably in Provence, there were many among the Franciscans who by century's end had revived the purity of Francis's example. These Spirituals, as they came to be called, were numerous in Languedoc, its long history of ostentatiously holy heretics acting as a magnet for like-minded men from the Order. They would show that a Franciscan could be as pure and poor as a Good Man. From Narbonne, in the 1290s, the influential theologian Pierre Jean Olivi dominated Franciscan intellectual circles in Languedoc and elsewhere, his philosophical works on the nature of poverty an overlooked landmark in medieval thought.
^*
On his death, in 1298, he was revered locally as a saint, and though his apostles later came to be considered heretical themselves, a man of such gifts could hardly fail to have shaped the outlook of his fellow Franciscans in the South.

Informed by Francis' example and inspired by Olivi's presence, the Friars Minor preached tirelessly, in an effort to persuade. God's work would be a long process, and if, during that time, those yet unconvinced and unconverted called for help, they would come to their aid, not only out of Christian duty but also in the hope that their actions would demonstrate the rightness of their faith. Given this admirable commitment to patience and piety, the Franciscans of Carcassonne may have sheltered some heretical sympathizers from the wrath of the inquisitor. A present-day specialist nicely characterized Bernard's viewpoint as widely at variance with that of the Dominicans: “He did not consider the Cathars as diabolical enemies but as Christians who sought salvation fervently, and whose choices, in the end, were not so different from his own.”