The Friar of Carcassonne (17 page)

Castanet's men ordered the mob to disperse. No one moved. The standoff grew tenser, as shouts of “Death!” echoed louder through the square. Clubs were raised, the mob advanced. The bishop's men at arms, greatly outnumbered, unsheathed their swords, ready to wade into the townspeople. Then, at a sharp word from their master, Castanet's men lowered their weapons. Another order, and the phalanx of bodyguards parted. The mob now had a clear path to the bishop. He waited for death, his face a mask, daring them to come and kill him, a bishop of the Holy Church.

The moment passed. Resolution began to falter. No one had the courage to strike the first blow. The crowd eventually melted away and the bishop regained the Palais de la Berbie.

The Dominicans of Albi did not receive such a gift of faintheartedness. From overhead the outer doorway of their convent, the portraits of St. Dominic and St. Peter Martyr were torn down by a mob, to be replaced by likenesses of the architects of the friars' humiliation: the king's envoys, Jean de Picquigny and Richard Leneveu, and the consuls from Albi and Castres, Arnaud Garsie and Peire Pros, who had traveled north for the momentous audience in Senlis.

The change in portraiture hardly constituted the only insult, for the period following the decision at Senlis passed as an unrelieved calvary for the Dominicans of Albi—the prolific memoirist Bernard Gui recorded their tribulations for posterity. Their convent became an eyesore, its herb and vegetable gardens uprooted and destroyed. Windows were smashed in the night. The friars scarcely dared venture out of the convent's protective confines, so enthusiastically were they manhandled, pushed, shoved, and taunted in the narrow streets of Albi. Whenever their prior summoned the king's officers to view the latest outrage, they did nothing, except perhaps suppress a smile. The Order of the Friars Preachers became, effectively, a prisoner in the pink city on the Tarn.

Following Brother Bernard's triumphant return to Languedoc from Senlis, the Order of the Friars Minor appointed him to a convent in Narbonne. If the transfer of the famous friar was meant as a diplomatic sop thrown to the Dominicans, it was entirely unconvincing. Bernard enjoyed a freedom of movement that could be granted only by the Franciscan leadership in Languedoc. Not content to rest on his laurels, he set about increasing his renown as the scourge of the inquisitors by going on extensive preaching tours to the smaller centers of Languedoc and Périgord. His public excoriation of the inquisition, now done with complete impunity, appalled the Dominicans and their allies, who heaped abuse on him from their pulpits.

Despite this renewed activity, Délicieux's campaign had, in fact, stalled. No amount of stirring oratory could hide the simple reality that the inquisition had survived to fight another day. It was hobbled, not eliminated. Men and women still suffered in the Wall. Cruel and punitive Christianity, of the kind promoted by the Dominican Moneta of Cremona, still overshadowed Bernard's vision of the Franciscan ideal. He needed still more help, and that, he knew, could happen only if he could convince Philip to take more drastic action.

Accordingly, in the early spring of 1302, Brother Bernard made the arduous journey north once again, picking his way up the Rhône Valley, then through the downs of Burgundy to the forests of the Île de France. With him rode the consuls of Carcassonne, Albi, and Castres, who had accompanied him the previous year to Senlis, and a delegation of women of Albi, the lonely wives of the men wasting away in the Wall. Such a voyage was a costly proposition—clearly the townspeople who raised the money to pay its expenses thought that King Philip had not gone far enough in punishing the inquisitors of Carcassonne and the bishop of Albi. Bernard had intended to bring along Jean Fresquet, a jailer of Albi willing to bear witness to the crimes of Bishop Castanet, but the man had died suddenly that spring under circumstances that were never fully elucidated. The people of Albi, however, had no doubt that Fresquet had been murdered on Castanet's order, yet another black mark on the soul of their bishop.

His embassy weakened by the absence of a valuable witness, Bernard deployed his other strength. Once settled near the royal court, Brother Bernard took the women of Albi to meet with Joan of Navarre, queen of France.
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Her confessor, Durand de Champagne, was a Franciscan friar sympathetic to the cause of Délicieux and doubtless the instigator of the audience. Queen Joan comforted her visitors from Albi, listened as they evoked their conjugal plight, then sent them away with a sizeable cash gift, 1,000 livres. Bernard implored the queen to intervene with her husband, insisting that Bishop Castanet be punished more forcefully and removed entirely from the see of Albi, that the prisoners caught up in the shamefully hasty inquisition of 1300 be freed, that the Wall itself be shut down. At the very least, the Dominicans had to be deprived of the inquisition. Joan heard the friar out and, given his gifts of persuasion, must have been moved to compassion for her subjects in the south and a clear understanding of their grievances. Yet she alone could do nothing. At some point—the details are unclear—Bernard, the consuls, and the women of Albi were allowed into the king's presence, but the meeting proved inconclusive, save for a further cash gift to the women and a modest increase of the fine on Castanet. Nothing more would be done, as the king was preoccupied with other matters of great moment.

Bernard sent his disappointed allies home. He would see King Philip again, but at a distance, on the high altar of Notre Dame de Paris. Bernard had been delegated to attend the Estates General in place of the Franciscan provincial of Languedoc, a sign that his star was ascendant in the Order. In April, the friar sat in silence in the great nave as the assembly took up the matter of the king's row with Boniface and listened to the royal chancellor, Pierre Flote, hurl outlandish charges at the pope. The concerns of Languedoc had never seemed more irrelevant. A man of the south, Bernard Saisset, may have sparked the fracas, but it had moved far beyond the confines of regional or even national conflict. Guillaume de Nogaret hovered in the background, ready to launch his final, historic offensive against the pope, while Saisset himself was eventually forgotten and allowed to go to the safety of Rome, where a forgiving hierarchy awaited him. Even if on this occasion Délicieux did meet the king's ministers, which is more than likely given that news of his bravura performance at Senlis six months earlier had reached their keen ears, they would have told him the time was not right to take up the matter of the inquisition. The king had made enough enemies in the Church.

Brother Bernard embarked on the long journey back to the south, the friar of carcassonne | 105 probably some time in late April 1302. He no doubt was discouraged by the failure of his ambitious delegation in the halls of power and his own fruitless stay in Paris for the Estates General. Crippling the inquisition without freeing its victims did not solve the problem, Bernard and his allies knew, and allowing persecution to continue guaranteed future strife. The king had to be brought around to seeing things their way, to be coaxed along a path to action that then seemed strewn with impassable obstacles. A few weeks later, the road ahead came clearly marked from the other extremity of Philip's turbulent realm.

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Saisset was not held in the royal prisons. Gilles Aycelin, the archbishop of Narbonne, kept him under house arrest for the king.

*
As usual, Philip kept on the move to enjoy the hunt. In 1302, Bernard and his delegation caught up with the court in either Pierrefonds or Compiègne, the king's royal residences in Picardy, both a long day's ride to the northeast of Paris.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE WEAVER OF BRUGES

P
IETER DE CONINCK, A WEAVER
, lived in Bruges, an immensely wealthy town reliant on a steady supply of English wool to transform into Flemish cloth. Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres were the foremost weaving centers of Flanders, their blue dyes provided by the woad merchants of Languedoc, their bolts sold to the Italians in the fairs of Champagne.

Philip the Fair had laid his heavy hand on Flanders in 1297, after its count had had the temerity to plump for the English forces in the French king's struggle against them. The count's decision seemed reasonable enough, given the firm economic ties binding England and Flanders together, but for Philip and his court, English political influence had to be diminished, as rich Flanders was a milch cow that could do wonders for the Capetian treasury. The barrier of language mattered little—Philip's expanding kingdom encompassed a babel of peoples, as the remarks of Bernard Saisset about the Parisian bishop of Toulouse made clear. As well, a large contingent of speakers of the
langue d'oïl
(French) in Flanders welcomed the protection of Paris and, not incidentally, formed the wealthiest class of merchant burghers in the towns. They also wanted to curb direct English trade with the weavers, preferring to keep their privileged and lucrative positions as middlemen.

Philip had annexed the region outright in the Jubilee year of 1300. When he took Queen Joan for a state visit to Flanders the following year, so sumptuously attired were the merchant wives and maidens watching the royal procession from the balconies of their magnificent gabled houses that Joan is said to have complained, “I thought that I alone was Queen, but here in this place I have six hundred rivals.” As it was the first visit of a monarch to his new province, medieval etiquette held it as a Joyeuse Entrée—but here the joy was to be remarkably short-lived.

The atmosphere in the cities of Flanders was so explosive that the royal visit sparked off acrimony over who was going to get stuck with the costs of the festivities. The Flemings resented the traders and patricians not just for fawning over a foreign potentate but also for keeping their stranglehold on the communal governments of the towns. In the closing decades of the thirteenth century, the guildsmen of Flanders had risen regularly in revolt against the upper classes. The men ruling the towns, the men whose womenfolk caused the queen of France to marvel at their wealth, ignored the great changes that decades of broadening prosperity had brought. De Coninck and his ilk, for their part, demanded a say in their destiny; instead they were excluded from the public square, saddled with onerous taxes, and forced to watch the distasteful spectacle of conspicuous wealth being flaunted by a small, condescending elite.

Like Bernard's Languedoc, De Coninck's Flanders had not been immune to the spiritual ferment of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The mendicant friars had thrived there, imparting a sense that personal salvation was a matter that had to be attended to by the newly awakened sense of the individual. The guildsmen were not ants to be trod upon by their betters, or those who styled themselves as such. Many disagreed with even that: one itinerant preacher of Antwerp, echoing what must have been a popular sentiment, stated that the rich man, even if he be virtuous, was no better than a whore.

In unconscious imitation of the strife besetting their Italian trading partners, the cities of Flanders of the first decade of the fourteenth century saw the birth of organized, bitter civic factions given to brawling and mayhem, the patrician Leliaert, or “Lilies” (so named for the fleur-de-lis of France), and the guild-friendly Clauwerts, or “Claws” (after the paws of the heraldic Flemish lion). In the spring of 1302, in the midst of upheavals between Lilies and Claws in many Flemish cities, a distinctly obstreperous Claw magistracy seized power in Bruges. Jacques de Châtillon, a Flemish nobleman who served as King Philip's viceroy, raised a force of some one thousand men to occupy and punish the defiant town. He was, in the judgment of an eminent historian, “a violent and haughty man, a true representative of feudalism, harsh and disdainful toward the people, incapable of understanding the interests, aspirations and the power of the great cities subject to his government.” The French entered Bruges on May 17, 1302; De Coninck fled, knowing the fearsome Châtillon capable of terrible reprisal.

Fatally, the French did nothing on that first day. Tradition holds that they passed a long evening in well-irrigated revelry, content to put off their repressive chores until the morrow. De Coninck took advantage of the lull to steal back to the city in the dead of night, at the head of a troop of Claws primed for murder. The signal was given just before dawn on the eighteenth, and the Flemings stormed the houses in which the French were sleeping it off. The morning turned into a full-scale slaughter, known to history as the Bruges Matins.
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Very few of the soldiers sent out to chasten the city survived.

The Bruges Matins were only a prelude. An alarmed King Philip raised a feudal host to teach the lowly Flemings a lesson, calling on the greatest of his vassals to gather their men and ride north. The finest flower of French chivalry, as the doom-laden catchphrase has it, met the foe near the city of Courtrai (Kortrijk in Flemish) on July 11, 1302. The greatest nobles of Artois, Picardy, and Normandy, caparisoned in splendor, trotted out into the clearing before their ranks then broke into a deafening charge of heavily mailed rider and warhorse. They bore down on the the motley infantry of the Flemish towns, then faltered. In the Flanders fields muddied by rains and overflowing streams, destrier and knight flailed and fell, the thick muck riddled with waterlogged traps set by the Flemish. The French riders pulled from their floundering mounts were beaten and hacked to death. As in the First World War, the mud of Flanders had won.