The Friar of Carcassonne (24 page)

The inevitable at last occurred at the governor's palace of the Cité. As Philip mounted the monumental stairway, an exasperated Patrice yelled out from the bottom, “Lord! Lord! Have pity on your wretched city which suffers so!”

The king turned and addressed his sergeants, gesturing toward Patrice and his men: “Throw them out of here!” Disgusted, Patrice got on his horse and rode down to the Bourg.

The townspeople awaited the good news of his royal interview. Instead, Patrice ordered them to rip down the garlands and banners and tear them apart, to give this king no sign that his subjects bore him any love whatsoever. Carcassonne was soon as bare as its surrounding orchards and vineyards. The queen subsequently made the conciliatory gesture of visiting the men of Albi held in custody in the Cité, but no move was made to release them. Still, that the queen of France had visited these prisoners, convicted sympathizers of heresy, was remarkable in and of itself, proof that the monarch still believed what Bernard Délicieux had argued. The problem lay in the fact that the king was not going to do anything about it at this time.

Further indignities followed as the cavalcade set off again toward Narbonne, then Béziers. Witnesses at Bernard's trial tell a strange tale of two large silver vases, paid for by civic subscription, that were to be offered to the king and queen as a token of the city's gratitude. They had not been ready in time for the monarchs' stay at Carcassonne, but the silversmiths delivered them to the townsmen during the journey eastward. At Béziers, Queen Joan accepted hers. Philip did not—and then ordered his lady to give back her vase. The men of Carcassonne now looked, as one historian notes, “ridiculous.”

The humiliating cavalcade continued, toward Montpellier and Nîmes. Hélie Patrice, Arnaud Garsie, Peire Pros, Bernard Délicieux, and their frustrated allies tagged along, vases clanging in their luggage, hoping against hope. Bernard was not permitted to address a single word to the king.

Guillaume de Nogaret finally took the Franciscan aside. Clearly the king's minister must have had a good deal of respect and compassion for his fellow southerner, and perhaps he was tickled that the friar had so successfully indulged in Nogaret's specialty—giving the Church grief. His customary behavior would certainly not have included divulging the thinking of the king's inner circle, yet with the Franciscan he opened up. Guillaume may actually have liked Bernard.

It's over, he told the friar. The king would not be moved, and he could not be persuaded to defy the Dominican pope. The struggle with Boniface had brought the king to the brink of disaster—as Noga-ret, of all people, knew—and now was not the time to pick another fight. The moment called for reconciliation. Wait, he advised Bernard, until circumstances became more favorable.

What had been understood implicitly was conveyed explicitly to Bernard by the most powerful man in France, aside from the king himself. The men of Carcassonne and Albi made their farewells and rode home through the barren landscape, disheartened, dejected, but pensive.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

INTRIGUE IN THE ROUSSILLON

O
NE DAY SHORTLY AFTER EASTER IN
1304, two robed figures on horseback picked their way southward alongside the Mediterranean Sea. Once past the border town of Salses, they had left the kingdom of France and come within sight of their destination, Perpignan, home to their Catalan cousins and capital of the Kingdom of Majorca. The red city slumbered in the warm spring sunshine. Beyond its church spires and russet warren of brick dwellings, in the distance, the sculpted line of the Pyrenees stretched into the clouds. The tallest peak, the Canigou, still had the snows of winter on its majestic summit. At its foot lay the well-watered plain of the Roussillon, its fertile bounty a source of amazement for visitors from arid Languedoc.

Within the travelers' pack was a letter bearing the seal of the consuls of Carcassonne. It was addressed to a prince of Majorca. The consuls were asking him to place their city under his protection. If the prince showed himself willing to be their lord, they would gladly slip the traces of Capetian France. Secession was its goal.

Bernard Délicieux was the letter's bearer and author. He and a fellow friar sought the third of four sons sired by King Jaume II of Majorca, Prince Ferran, a man renowned for his warrior prowess and possessed of an ambition thwarted by his status as a younger brother. Brother Bernard was offering him the kingdom he craved. In so doing, he was also committing high treason.

The events of the winter had pushed Bernard and his allies to this extremity. Following the disastrous disputation in Toulouse, the humiliation of the calvacade, the insult of the silver vases, and, in the end, the explicit advice delivered by Guillaume de Nogaret, the men of Languedoc desirous of lifting the yoke of the Dominican inquisition knew that they could no longer look to their king for help. Philip the Fair was determined to preserve a situation and an institution they could not abide. The corruption, the corvine pecking at the body of an agonized Languedoc, had to be halted another way.

The scheme seems to have been first mooted a month earlier, during King Philip's visit to Montpellier. The great university city was, at the time, a part of the kingdom of Majorca, surrounded by Capetian holdings, so its suzerain, King Jaume II, journeyed north from the Roussillon to extend his hospitality to the French monarch. Philip was the Majorcan king's ally in keeping the armies of Jaume's cousin, the mighty king of Aragon, safely south of the Pyrenees, away from the kingdom of Majorca—thus France's friendship mattered greatly to the Catalan monarch. From Perpignan, Jaume had traveled to Montpellier amid the requisite pomp to welcome his distinguished visitors, accompanied by his court and his family, including Prince Ferran.

Testimony at Bernard's trial—the source of the scarce information concerning the nebulous plot—states that the Franciscan was seen twice conferring with the thirty-year-old prince during Philip's visit to Languedoc. On the second occasion, at Nîmes, in the company of Hélie Patrice this time, the parties appeared deep in conversation, saying “sinister words.” By then, presumably, the spurned silver vases were being rerouted south, to Perpignan, and not north to Paris.

In Carcassonne, a few of the consuls reacted with horror when informed of their allies' intentions to secede from France. They refused to go along with the scheme. The same reaction, only stronger, occurred in Albi, to which Arnaud Garsie had returned to rally support, albeit unsuccessfully. The Albigeois knew their detested bishop was still in trouble with his hierarchy and that his expulsion from their midst would be only a matter of time (it occurred in 1307). With Bishop de Castanet defanged and the Dominicans of Albi demoralized, no inquisition troubled the city on the Tarn. Other towns they approached, such as Limoux and Cordes, had turned them down, too. Thus the Carcassonnais were on their own in this new adventure.

When Bernard rode into Perpignan on that spring day, he found the Palace of the Kings of Majorca—a stunningly beautiful Mediterranean fortress-residence that still stands—to be empty of its royal occupants. They had decamped to their country quarters, at Saint-Jean-Pla-de-Corts (in Catalan, Sant Joan de Pladecorts), in the shadow of the Pyrenees. Bernard would have to travel there, a half day's ride, to meet with the prince. He and his companion, whose identity is uncertain, set out again, riding south, in all likelihood past the town of Elne. There is no record of Bernard stopping to see Bishop Raimond Costa, to thank him for the use of his Carcassonne townhouse as the breeding ground for so many anti-inquisitorial initiatives. Equally absent is a record of Bernard's confiding the strategy underpinning this audacious plot to any like-minded cleric. That can only be conjectured.

The idea must have been not to raise an army—there were so few in on the plot—but to spark an insurrection. Like medieval Bolsheviks, Ferran and his handful of conspirators were to somehow seize an important choke point, and from that action a chain reaction of rebellion would begin, its end result the ejection of the French from the lands of Languedoc. That happy outcome would not be easy to accomplish, but an attempt had to be made to reverse the return to the wretched status quo: the inquisitor working hand in hand with the royal seneschal. Historians have judged the plan “silly” and “hopeless,” but the mere fact of entertaining such a scheme—and then acting on it—speaks volumes about the desperation of the men of Languedoc at the mercy of the inquisitors.

Bernard knew just how deep resentments ran toward the French and the inquisitors; he had toured Languedoc more thoroughly than any foreign royal functionary. From that knowledge he must have concluded that the seditious enterprise could work. The French had struggled mightily to subdue Languedoc during the Albigensian Crusade eighty years earlier, having done this with reinforcements from all over Europe. Subsequent armed repressions in the region during the thirteenth century had been effected through the use of local Languedoc muscle, paid in the king's coin. Turn these men, he no doubt thought, and the French presence in Languedoc would be exposed as a paper tiger.

In the spring of 1304, the Flemish rebels still stood defiant on the battlements of their cities. Even if the revolt in Languedoc did not succeed as decisively as its forerunner in Flanders, a king made desperate by two rebellions might be more inclined to negotiate—or rather accede to the anti-inquisitorial demands of the south. For Bernard, there was also the distinct probability that the long arm of a Dominican pope might soon reach out to snatch him, with Philip's consent. He surely thought that to act boldly was more sensible than to submit meekly. However much he took risks, Bernard would not have courted death—as he did by riding to meet Prince Ferran—had he thought himself engaged in an enterprise automatically doomed to failure.

Saint-Jean-Pla-de-Corts sits on a small rise overlooking the rushing river Tech, now the southernmost watercourse in mainland France. Just beyond the stream rises the green wall of the Albères, the last range of the Pyrenees on their march to sudden, almost operatic conclusion as rocky cliffs plunging into the bright blue sea. When Bernard glanced up at the Albères, he would have known that less than ten years earlier the negotiations to end the latest war between Majorca and Aragon had opened in a chapel at the mountain range's Perthus Pass. They were concluded in Italy with the signing of the Treaty of Anagni.

Of King Jaume's summer palace, little remains in the present day: a few roofless enclosures, their ancient wooden beams once supporting elegant upper stories; a solid royal chapel turned art gallery; and tawny medieval fortifications into which villagers have burrowed all manner of dwellings over the centuries. The hamlet is quiet, the motes of dust drifting lazily through the air illumined by the stark sunlight. Visitors are remarked, as they would have been seven centuries ago, especially if they were Franciscans speaking the
langue d'oc
and venturing into the royal precinct of the Catalans.
^*
These friars would have been recognized as men of learning, only heightening curiosity as to the purpose of their visit.

Bernard and his companion called in at a local church and found lodging. The prince and his father the king were out hunting wild boar, still one of the principal inducements behind leaving the cramped streets of Perpignan for the verdant woods of Saint-Jean. On their return, Ferran slipped down to the Franciscan's hostelry for a meeting. Bernard, fifteen years later at his trial, claimed that he then tried to dissuade the hotheaded prince from going through with the scheme. He also claimed to have destroyed the consuls' letter before reaching Saint-Jean-Pla-de-Corts by tearing up the document, digging a hole, stuffing the parchment fragments into it, covering up the hole with dirt, and then peeing on the spot. Why he would go to such absurd lengths to destroy the letter, if indeed he had had a change of heart, must remain a mystery. Or he is simply not to be believed. His recollection of this visit to Saint-Jean-Pla- de-Corts changed over the course of his trial, subject as he was to the attentions of aggressive interrogators.

Two Catalans who testified at Bernard's trial stated that King Jaume had got wind of the plot by the time the friars arrived. How this happened is unknown: perhaps, on receiving reports that the famed Bernard Délicieux had been sighted in Perpignan and had met secretly with his impetuous son, Jaume astutely put two and two together. More likely he had been tipped off. One of the many consuls of Carcassonne or Albi horrified by the proposed revolt—and by what would be the fearful, bloodthirsty roar of the vengeful French monarch—probably got word to the Catalan king of the dangerous game his son was playing.

Whatever the source, the king knew. The next afternoon, after having ridden out on the hunt with the prince once again, Jaume forsook his habitual siesta and instead called for Ferran to attend him in his royal apartments. The prince arrived as summoned. His father then proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him. Whether Ferran admitted or denied the Carcassonne scheme is unknown; regardless, the king went berserk. Sounds of his rage echoed down the stone corridors. A footman rushed in and restrained the king from clubbing his son senseless. The royal chamberlain, late to the scene, saw a flushed and battered Ferran stagger down a hallway, clumps of hair his father had just torn out falling from his shoulders. The king had administered a brutal lesson on just how vital to the kingdom of Majorca was its alliance with France.