The Friar of Carcassonne (22 page)

The blistering missive had its desired effect. The good burghers of Languedoc opened their purses to fund Picquigny's defense. But by October 29, the date of this letter, news may already have reached Paris of what had transpired in Rome four days earlier. Contrary to custom, a new pope had been elected with remarkable dispatch, prompted by the unprecedented insult administered to the papacy at Anagni. The process had taken but eleven days.

The new pontiff called himself Benedict XI, in tribute to Benedetto Caetani, the late, great Pope Boniface VIII. Prior to his elevation to Christendom's highest perch, Niccolò Boccasini had lectured in theology and written commentaries on the Psalms, Job, Matthew and Revelation. He had then gone on to other, more prestigious positions. For the previous seven years, he had been the Master-General of the Order of Friars Preachers. The new pope was a leader of the Dominicans.

Other startling news quickly followed. Although the nature of Brother Bernard's conversations with the king in October of that year has not survived the passage of time, we do know that at one point Philip informed Délicieux and Picquigny that their oft-extended invitation had finally been accepted.

The king wanted to see for himself what was going in Languedoc. King Philip and Queen Joan would come to Toulouse on Christmas Day, 1303.

1304

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE KING AND QUEEN IN LANGUEDOC

T
OULOUSE SPREADS ITS PINK EMBRACE
over both banks of the river Garonne. The capital of Languedoc in the time of Bernard Délicieux, the modern city still has an immense old quarter filled with a hodgepodge of half-timbered houses, medieval towers, and Renaissance mansions. Its basilica, St. Sernin, is the largest and loveliest Romanesque church in southern France. Across town and nearer the river, its splendid Gothic grace notes given their finishing touches in Brother Bernard's day, rises the Church of the Jacobins. Now a public monument, the sanctuary possesses a quiet cloister that was home to meditative Dominicans and an impossibly lofty nave that soars high above the golden casket of Thomas Aquinas.

This is not to suggest that Toulouse's history has been as harmonious as the city appears at first glance. Like its lesser sisters in the region,
la ville rose
has had its moments of tensions and unrest. Early in the thirteenth century, Toulouse had been a protagonist in the Albigensian Crusade, stoutly resisting occupation by the invading northerners and, on one memorable afternoon in 1218, catapulting a rocky payload directly through the skull of the French leader of the Crusaders then besieging the city. That murderous event, and others of its kind, is remembered in a profusion of giant tableaux executed by history painter Jean-Paul Laurens and hung in the city's grand Capitole, the town hall from which the
capitouls
—consuls—once governed their prosperous fellow citizens.

In a great city with such a long and checkered history, there cannot help but be layers of memory on any given street. One such place is the southern entrance to the old town, where the Narbonne Gate once stood. So called for the road leading to the Roman provincial capital of Narbonne, by medieval times the gate stood in the shadow of the similarly named Château Narbonnais, a hulking, impregnable fortress astride the city's fortifications that lodged the family of the most powerful lord of the moment. That château is long gone, its inhabitants replaced by the Parlement, a dispenser of the king's justice—Martin Guerre, the famed identity thief, was tried here—and nowadays of French republican law.

Across a small triangular plaza from the modern Parlement building stands a modest medieval house, of an unremarkable reddish brown color punctuated by curious half-moon windows on its upper floor. This is the Maison Seilhan, so named for the man who gave this dwelling in 1215 to St. Dominic. The building then became the headquarters of the inquisition in Toulouse. The ordinary Dominicans lived near the Church of the Jacobins; their persecuting brethren practiced their nonroyal, nonrepublican form of jurisprudence here.

The layering of memory increases in complexity as the triangular plaza, called place du Parlement, gives way to a slightly larger and more regular square, place du Salin. The
salin
refers to the salt tax, which was collected here by agents of the king housed in the Maison du Roi, on the square's north side, well in sight of the inquisitor's offices. The Gothic royal house, however, has been a Protestant church since 1911, a metamorphosis that no doubt would have the defenders of the faith across the way tearing at their tonsures in confusion.

Yet distant posterity has not been altogether unkind to inquisitor Bernard Gui and his fellows. In 1988, the Maison Seilhan—which had undergone many uses over the centuries, including housing a spice shop—was purchased and lovingly restored by a group associated with the modern-day Dominican order. The rehabilitation of the house of the inquisition did not go unnoticed. Several years later, on a traffic island close to the Maison Seilhan, a signpost was installed bearing an inscription that reads, in part (in French):

Homage

To the precursors of the Enlightment

Victims of obscurantism

Who studied or taught at Toulouse:

Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619)

Italian philosopher, burned alive on this spot for atheism on

    
February 9, 1619

Etienne Dolet burned in Paris (1509–1546)

Michel Servet burned in Geneva (1511–1553)

Giordano Bruno burned in Rome (1548–1600)

They prefigured free thought and reason

The matter in the sky is no different from that of a man or a beetle

    
(G. C. Vanini,
Amphitheatrum
)

This showdown in the present is discreet, a faint but distinct echo of the resentments associated with the area ever since the Maison Seilhan became home to the inquisitors. Indeed, the traffic thunders through the two squares, heedless of past commotions. Such a carefree passage was impossible on Christmas Day, 1303. On that occasion, King Philip IV of France rode through the Narbonne Gate, past the Château Narbonnais on his right and the Maison Seilhan on his left, amidst a scene of indescribable chaos.

The progress of the king and queen to their southern possessions was stately in the late autumn of 1303. The king made this journey only once in his thirty-year reign. The towns on the monarchs' itinerary had received them with the deference due their exalted rank. None of the swank that had greeted them two years earlier in Flanders was on display, just a dignified solicitude toward this feared lord and his much beloved lady. They undertook the extended tour to dispel fears of further weakness in the wake of the Flemish debacle. The king would attend to Flanders; his people need only support and trust him. There may also have been the matter of a much-needed ordering of the royal establishment. Perhaps as a result of Philip's preoccupation with the late pope, or, more likely, through the usual human frailties, corruption seems to have run deep in the king's administration. In the months and years to follow this tour, several senior officials were dismissed and replaced, and the chancery in Paris regularly issued royal ordinances promising to root out abusive practices. The Dominicans were not the only irritants in the provinces—other grievances could spark revolt.

The orchestrated stateliness of the tour evaporated instantly once the royal party reached the great city on the Garonne. Philip installed Queen Joan in the Château Narbonnais before heading into town on Christmas Day. At once, he was met by a near hysterical mob, the handiwork of Délicieux. The people of Albi, Cordes, Carcassonne, and other towns had been recruited to join with the Toulousains in calling for action. They cheered vociferously, yelled out their desire for justice, begged the king to put an end to their woes.

Bernard had used near-riot to good effect before, by making Jean de Picquigny's return to Carcassonne the previous August frighteningly raucous. Now it was Philip's turn to receive the same treatment. The commoners pressed in on their king, waving clubs and jostling his escort. The clamor deafened, the horses reared. Whether the crowd welcomed or threatened was at best ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so.

The king was not amused. A biographer of the great Capetian monarch states that Philip had two religions, Christianity and sacred kingship—and that the latter was more important to him than the former. Thus Philip could indeed really believe that the pope was a heretic, the Templars traitors, the inquisitors dishonest, the Lombards treacherous, the Jews extortionate, if the action of any of these parties somehow impeded the exercise of his divine office. Such a view accorded a great place to the dignity of the king's person, which had been seriously ill-used by the Christmas scrum in the streets of Toulouse. Bernard's rabble-rousing tactic had clearly been a mistake. The king was shaken and furious, not intimidated.

Philip's ministers called a meeting in early January 1304 to hear all sides in the ongoing struggle for the soul of Languedoc. This was not to be an audience of one. Dominicans, Franciscans, bishops, royal officials, and a delegation from Carcassonne and Albi led by Délicieux were invited to a large hall in the Château Narbonnais. However grandiose the setting, the atmosphere cannot have been relaxed. The king was surrounded by his counselors, including Guillaume de Nogaret, who had directly joined the royal tour after making historic mischief in Italy. Thus, the churchmen in attendance had to put up with the presence of two notorious excommunicates, Nogaret and Jean de Picquigny.

Picquigny was invited to speak first. He reiterated what he had told the king the previous October when he and Bernard had traveled to Paris: the inquisitions at Albi and at Carcassonne were corrupt and unjust, and he had been unreasonably excommunicated. He had just done his duty as a loyal officer of the crown and moved to correct what was a serious and dangerous situation. There were some in the Dominican order who had proved unworthy of the responsibilities given them by their superiors. The king's subjects were restive, unhappy.

At this point he was interrupted. Brother Guilhem Peire de Godin, the head of the Dominicans in Languedoc, stood to speak. The king nodded. The friar read from a document obtained from the desk of none other than Jean de Picquigny. It was a letter addressed but not yet sent to the king, a letter of unusually violent language, warning—even threatening—the monarch that unless he acted decisively against the inquisitors, the people would rise up as they had in Flanders. As one witness recalled at Bernard's trial: “[Picquigny] had found the whole country to be in a very bad state because of the bishop and the inquisitors, and that unless his lordship [Philip] came down to the country to remedy the situation, the people of the country would make themselves a king the way the Flemings had.”

The allusion to De Coninck and his rebellious allies sent a scandalized murmur through the hall. Some things were best left unsaid. The king could not have been pleased. Only a week or two previously, just a few steps from where this disputation was being held, he had been accorded a nearly rebellious reception in the streets of Toulouse—and now his officer had the temerity to invoke the disgraceful treason of Bruges and the Golden Spurs! Philip's famously impassive demeanor turned icy. Faced with his master's dark countenance, Picquigny set about making excuses, claiming the letter was merely a draft and that the inflammatory clause about Flanders was the result of a clerical error by an inexperienced scribe.

Picquigny continued his presentation, but it was effectively over. He had lost the king's attention and, no doubt, his own eloquence. The purloined letter had dealt a body blow from which he never recovered. As if he had displeased an even greater power, within eight months Picquigny was dead, succumbing to some sudden malady, an excommunicate to the end. At the time he was in Italy, desperately trying to make his case to the papal curia. He died disconsolate, not knowing that he would be posthumously pardoned four years later.