The Friar of Carcassonne (18 page)

Hundreds, if not thousands, of French perished, many of them great lords—including the aloof Jacques de Châtillon and Pierre Flote, the king's chancellor, who was trampled to death. The Flemish had decided to dispense with the medieval custom of sparing the great in the hope of a large ransom. The grisly event came to be known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs, so called for the five hundred of these items retrieved from the fallen noblemen. The prizes, far from being melted down and transformed into yet more adornment for the ample bosoms of the Flemish burghers' wives, were instead hung in a church of Courtrai as a sign of thanksgiving. At his home in Anagni, Pope Boniface VIII ordered all the town bells to peal in joyful cacophony. His mighty enemy had been mightily humiliated.

The tidings from Flanders sent shock waves through the Kingdom of France. Rumors flew fast, far, and wide—the most fantastic of them holding that the terrifying Pieter de Coninck, his patronym the Dutch word for “king,” was now King Peter of Flanders. Less fanciful but no less astounding was the realization that the Capetian juggernaut had been tripped up by a rabble of commoners. A rich acquisition was slipping through the fingers of the most powerful French monarch since St. Louis, and Philip the Fair seemed unable to salvage the situation. Although he personally and courageously led the fight two years later, winning a tactical victory near the Flemish town of Mons-en-Pévèle, he eventually had to let Flanders go, holding on to only the prizes of Lille, Béthune, and Douai. Much of the north had, in effect, resisted incorporation into Philip's kingdom.

For the agitators of Languedoc, lessons lay in abundance on the sodden ground of Flanders. However different the circumstances in the north and south, the Flemings had demonstrated that the kingdom of France was not an adamantine entity, immune to division and schism. And although no Lilies and Claws clashed in the alleyways of Toulouse and Carcassonne, there were similarities between the two extremes of Capetian territorial ambition. Like the Flemings, the southerners, too, had links to England—neighboring Guyenne was an English possession and trade ties were strong. The south also bordered the power of Aragon, just beyond the Pyrenees; talk of enlisting its aid to regain independence was not idle jabber. In addition, the people in the south, like the northerners, had a lingustic bone to pick with their overlords, for they spoke not the
langue d'oïl
of France but the
langue d'oc
of the Midi.

Philip was shaken by the reversal in Flanders, knowing it to be a setback of an unusual magnitude. Important lessons could be drawn from the episode, the foremost of which was the folly of siding with the Lily oligarchs in their struggle with the Flemish guildsmen and laborers. He realized he could not neglect local grievance and factional friction in the distant reaches of his kingdom.

With Pierre Flote dead on the battlefield of the Golden Spurs, the mantle of power passed to Guillaume de Nogaret, a man of the south. Nogaret, soon to become wholly occupied as the king's attack dog in the conflict with Boniface VIII, no doubt counseled his master to tread cautiously. The king could, and would, organize a military campaign to try to repair the damage in Flanders, but his advisor urged him to remember that sedition thrived elsewhere. He need only repeat the vile words of Bishop Bernard Saisset. Nogaret had grown up among such people and understood the deep unhappiness in the south exacerbated by the inquisitors. It may be an overreach to assume that Nogaret, his family's Cathar baggage his biggest liability, advised the king to go even easier on heresy to keep the south calm, but that was the de facto result of the Bruges Matins. The king was willing to let the remaining Cathars remain unmolested in return for a precious few months of stability.

If Nogaret had indeed met with and taken the measure of Bernard Délicieux in Paris just prior to the Bruges Matins, he could not have been surprised by the subsequent developments in the south, for the astute friar had taken away several important insights of his own from the uprising in Flanders. Like others in his camp, he would have viewed the event as a mixed blessing: on one hand, it distracted attention from the cause of Languedoc even more, but on the other, it focused the king's mind on the frightening reality of revolt. But the most important element imparted by the weaver of Bruges would not have eluded a student of politics as gifted as Délicieux. The Flemish guildsmen had attacked French and Flemish supporters of the merchants; the ordinary men of the town had struck a blow against the interests of the consuls, the governing elite. In the end, the riot had been sparked by class resentment, the type of civic hostility rife in the elbow-rubbing familiarity of the medieval city. After two centuries of rapidly increasing trade and wealth, there were now many conflicting, important interests in the life of any city. De Coninck knew how to exploit such divisions in his native Bruges. Brother Bernard would prove to be equally expert in stirring the resentments lying dormant in the breast of Carcassonne.

*
Evoking the monastic hours, the name given the Bruges revolt echoed a similarly termed massacre of the French twenty years previously in Palermo, the Sicilian Vespers.

1303

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE SERMON

F
OR CARCASSONNE, THE PRECEDING FOUR YEARS
had been a whirlwind sown by Bernard Délicieux and the inquisitors, a confusing period of strife, sudden action, and long spells of uneasy calm. Looking back, the townsmen may have had difficulty in making sense of it all, in finding some meaning behind the upheaval and, more important, some spur to clarity and future action.

The signing of the secret accord of 1299 offered Bernard Délicieux the chance to dispel the uncertainty. Of all the events to have taken place during the quadrennium at the turn of the century—ambush at the Franciscan convent, inquisition at Albi, appeal on behalf of Castel Fabre, audience with the king—the occurrence to have the greatest consequences for Carcassonne came first. In skillful hands, the accord was made to seem an injustice, a nefarious agreement pitting rich against poor. Bernard Délicieux found in it the same basis for class resentment that had brought revolt to Bruges.

The agreement had never been made public, which was the root cause of all the mischief to follow. The people of Carcassonne, doubtless encouraged by Bernard and his allies, began to ask what exactly was the nature of the agreement between consuls and inquisitors. Instead of its being recorded in the customary manner, the document had been kept under lock and key for four years in the home of Gui Sicre, a prominent consul of the Bourg. This, in itself, raised hackles and, more dangerously, suggested that the consuls were afraid to disclose its terms. The mere existence of the accord proved that they had collaborated with the loathsome inquisitors, perhaps agreeing to some sinister quid pro quo to be triggered at any time against the less wealthy townsmen of the Bourg. The great consular families had profited from the inquisition, their lesser members serving as notaries, suppliers, and legists for the unjust hounds of the Lord. Perhaps, ran the speculation, the accord was less an olive branch than a heavy club, passed from complaisant consul to corrupt inquisitor.

The normally querulous gossip of the town turned into louder and louder rumors of betrayal, as
la rage carcassonnaise
reared its head once more. Brother Bernard had returned to Carcassonne by early 1303, his residence in the Narbonne convent a forgotten fiction. In addition to fanning suspicions about the accord, he reminded his many admirers in the Bourg that the Wall still stood, that its prisoners still suffered, and that the inquisition was merely dormant, not dead. While the hated Foulques de Saint-Georges had been replaced in Toulouse and Nicolas d'Abbeville's stormy tenure at Carcassonne had concluded, in their place had come Geoffroy d'Ablis, who, the remaining Cathars and Waldenses of Languedoc were soon to learn, would prove to be the most effective inquisitor ever to hold that position in the Cité. As if sensing the building storm, King Philip sent a letter in the spring of 1303 to his subjects in Cordes and Albi, vowing to keep an eye on the newly installed inquistors for signs of overreaching. It was a markedly faint promise. Its moderate tone may have pushed Bernard over the edge, reminding him that talk of revolt was not enough to move the king forward, that he would have to place revolt squarely in the regal lap.

The decision was not as extreme as it might sound to modern ears. Riot and murderous assault were by no means uncommon in the rough-and-tumble medieval city. The pedestrian discipline on the Ponte St. Angelo during the Jubilee was so unusual that the greatest poet of the era, Dante, chose to remark on it through parody in his
Divina Commedia
. The grand civic processions on holy days, with clerics, nobles, consuls, traders, and guildsmen parading in their finery, also displayed a certain discipline, which was hard-won but extremely fragile in the face of seething jealousy and status envy. People pushed to get ahead, but in the medieval iteration of this timeless tendency there was far less inhibition involved—and often a good deal of fisticuffs. The threshold of the intolerable, the moment when the ordinary person feels compelled to take action, may have been more easily reached in the medieval period than in its successors. Certainly, in Brother Bernard's Languedoc, where a judicial whim might have resulted in one's dear departed mother being dug up and burned in the market square, the intolerable could come calling at any moment.

Yet Bernard and Carcassonne presented a special case. The intolerable for him came not from royal exaction or municipal infighting but from the abuse of power within his own Church, posing the problem of how to lay rough hands on its perpetrators. Nothwithstanding such exceptions as the Avignonet murder of the inquisitors in 1242 and the soon-to-be-enacted Outrage of Anagni in the fall of 1303, the clergy was not considered fair game for the marauding mob. As early as the tenth century, the Church sponsored a Truce of God movement, which, while enjoining boisterous fellows to sheath their swords on certain holy days, carried a further proviso demanding that they refrain from turning their murderous enthusiasms on men of the cloth. Over the years the taboo had held—Henry II's harsh penance over the killing of Thomas Becket points to how strongly the prohibition was felt. Even in the enraged Languedoc of Bernard's day, the men of Albi had had many compelling reasons to string up their reviled bishop or chuck him in the river, yet, when presented with the opportunity, they backed down.

Thus, to reach the untouchable churchmen of the Cité, Bernard had to start with the people of the Bourg. That would open the last stage of the friar's campaign, begun with the ambush at the Franciscan convent. Its culmination, he hoped, would entail dragging in the king, in the person of Jean de Picquigny, Philip's special representative in Languedoc, to quell a revolt by shutting down the inquisition definitively. As a strategy, it was fraught with the danger of matters getting out of hand, but Brother Bernard knew that he had to strike while the inquisitors were weakened.

In 1303 Hélie Patrice, a man of Carcassonne with no previous appearance in the historical record, came to play an important role in the friar's plans. Patrice had become the leader of the Bourg at some point after the turn of the century, having somehow ousted the urban elite from the consulate—the signatories to the accord of 1299—and taken power. Though the circumstances and date of this coup are unknown, what is certain is Patrice's undisputed ascendancy during the long hot summer to come. The inquisitor Bernard Gui contemptuously called Patrice “the little king,” in a telling echo of that other meddlesome “king,” Pieter de Coninck of Bruges. The Dominican's epithet for the new leader was backed up by testimony at Délicieux's trial, in which witnesses described the high-handed tactics and royal pretensions of Patrice during his tenure as the chief local magistrate. One can reasonably infer that this mysterious leader might well have climbed to prominence from the underrepresented, resentful lower rungs of the class order. If so, his antipathy to the wealthy consuls further aided Bernard Délicieux in his struggle. This reflexive hostility, the friar saw, could be harnessed, put to good use in ending the Dominican monopoly on the inquisition and freeing the unfortunates locked up in the Wall.