The Friar of Carcassonne (25 page)

Bernard, waiting at his inn for a feast of wildfowl promised to him by his princely host, was accosted by a man sent by the king. The newcomer informed him that His Majesty was mightily displeased with the Franciscan for speaking to his son without first presenting himself to the king and making a formal request for such a meeting. Bernard hotly replied that he had met with sons of far more important kings and hadn't needed anyone's permission.

The king's emissary told Bernard that he and his companion had to leave Saint-Jean-Pla-de-Corts immediately. The king did not care about the late hour. And the next day, he insisted, they were to leave the kingdom altogether. Despite the order to quit the kingdom as quickly as possible, the Franciscans should have been thankful that King Jaume did not have them both thrown in a dungeon. Their status as clergymen may have stayed his hand, but so too would the reputation of his family have weighed on the king's mind.

His last hope crushed, Bernard obediently left Saint-Jean as commanded and found shelter in the neighboring town of Le Boulou. The years of revolt had come to an end. The following day he rode north, and within the week had returned to Carcassonne with the bad news for the conspirators. If word of this debacle spread north to Paris, Bernard and his confederates knew, they were dead men.

At about the same time, on April 16, 1304, His Holiness Benedict XI had, from his residence in Viterbo, sent a bull entitled
Ea nobis
to the head of the Franciscans in Languedoc. It read, in part:

We have heard reports about Fr. Bernard Délicieux of your Order, saying such things as we must not and shall not allow to go unpunished . . . [wherefore] we order you, under pain of excommunication, deprivation of your office and of the right to hold any future office should you fail to execute this mandate, to arrest, to place under close guard, and to bring personally into our presence Fr. Bernard Délicieux.

*
The French Catalans of the Roussillon refer to the “foreigners” north of the Corbières—i.e., Languedoc—as
gavatx
(pronounced “ga-batch”), meaning “rustic oafs.”

Part III

The Time of Repression

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SURVIVAL

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1305, Geoffroy d'Ablis received an unexpected visitor. His secretary announced that Guilhem Peyre-Cavaillé, from the town of Limoux just a few leagues south of Carcassonne, was at the door of the inquisitor's headquarters in the Cité. The name was familiar: Peyre-Cavaillé had been picked up on suspicion of heretical leanings in late 1304 and held in the Wall until the following spring, then released. Proof of guilt needed to be ironclad for a new proceeding to take place, given the probity embraced by the inquisition in the wake of the disastrous
rage carcassonnaise
of recent years.

Peyre-Cavaillé surprised the inquisitor by claiming that there were indeed heretics abroad in Languedoc, but not of the kind the Dominicans had been picking off in Carcassonne and Albi, wealthy townsmen with sentimental ties to the faith of their fathers. The heretics of whom he spoke formed an established Church, run by a dozen or so well-trained and much beloved Good Men, who in the past five years had rekindled the flame of old. They had followers by the hundreds, in the meadows, villages, and mountains, men and women, noble and peasant, who had conscientiously supported and concealed them as they went about their missionary task. Peyre-Cavaillé knew this for a fact because he had managed their affairs and organized their travels—a refusal to pay him back all of his expenses motivated him to talk to the inquisitor.
^*
The people broke bread with these Good Men, housed them in their attics and hayricks, gathered for their sermons, and, when the end came, entrusted them their souls. The creed of the Cathars, alive and well, had spread its message of hope and love far and wide.

The inquisitor, like other Dominicans on learning the news, recalled the bitter fight with Bernard Délicieux. The Franciscan had been the focus of their fear and fury, to the exclusion of all else. In their view, while they had been occupied beating Brother Bernard back, the servants of Lucifer had gone about their diabolical business, unmolested by the justice of the Lord. This was what the actions of the foolish Franciscan had sown: a harvest of heresy, hardy and perennial in the ever-fertile fields of error that blanketed this corner of Christendom.

The Cathars' leader was Peire Autier, formerly a prosperous notary in the mountain town of Ax, in the county of Foix, south of Toulouse. Some time in the 1290s Autier grew dissatisfied with his comfortable life, in much the same way as Francis of Assisi had tired of his. Autier then traveled to Italy with his similarly disillusioned brother to find salvation. In corners of Lombardy and the Piedmont, where the fervid stew of politics surrounding partisans of emperor, pope, guild, and merchant militated against a sustained effort at religious repression, the Cathar Church had survived and still clung to a semblance of structure, its hidden hierarchs instructing and confirming Good Men and Good Women as in the days long gone. The Autier brothers from Languedoc, men in their fifties, yearned to stage a rebirth of the faith in their homeland before the embers of belief had gone cold. They stayed and studied in their Italian retreats for two to three years before being conferred the
consolamentum
, the sacrament making them Good Men and the spiritual equivalent of Jesus' apostles.

These highly literate and educated holy men, disguised as unlettered knife merchants, then headed homeward. They chose their time carefully, the winter of 1299–1300, when roads were overrun with pilgrims buoyed at the prospect of the Jubilee. Boniface VIII surveyed with satisfaction his flock surging across the Tiber, but his direst enemies, lost in the flow of the crowds, had soon forded the Rhône, the Aude, and the Garonne to meet with their followers. What transpired in the years to follow, Peyre-Cavaillé told the aghast Geoffroy d'Ablis, was a sturdy flowering of the faith, first in the mountains near Ax and Foix, where ties of kinship linked the Good Men to their followers, then in the downlands to the south and west of Carcassonne, respectively the Razès and the Lauragais, and then in important towns such as Limoux and Pamiers, and finally in the workingmen's neighborhoods at the gates of Toulouse itself. Peire Autier presided over a church, a growing number of people who had achieved the
entendensa del Be
, the understanding of the Good. And there was no secret to the flip side of this understanding. As Autier preached: “There are two Churches, one which flees and forgives, the other which fetters and flays. The Church which flees and forgives takes the right path of the Apostles. It neither lies nor deceives. And the Church which fetters and flays is the Roman Church.”

The meeting with Peyre-Cavaillé forged in Geoffroy d'Ablis a steely new determination. Circumspection in the conduct of inquisition was no longer an option: to act timorously was now a dereliction in the exercise of his sacred function. There had to be a return to the days of burning. From that moment on, and for the rest of his career, the inquisitor at Carcassonne mounted a ferocious offensive against spiritual dissent. He would soon be joined by inquisitors of even grimmer determination and greater talent than his own: the Dominican Bernard Gui in Toulouse and the Cistercian bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier. Together, d'Ablis, Gui, and Fournier became avengers of scandalized orthodoxy through a sustained and coordinated campaign of arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, torture, punishment, and execution. The indignities visited upon the inquisition by the
rage carcassonnaise
were but pinpricks in comparison to the injuries now in store for Languedoc.

Campaigns, like wars, have starting points. The inquisitor's began in September 1305. Summoned to Limoux by the treacherous Peyre-Cavaillé, two Good Men of the Cathar revival—one of whom was Peire Autier's charismatic son—fell into the trap set by Geoffroy d'Ablis. In the same period, squads of soldiery accompanied by Dominicans made raids on dozens of dwellings and manors in the countryside. One of the most remarkable moments in this opening salvo of repression concerned Verdun-en-Lauragais, a village of several hundred souls, where the entire populace was arrested and thrown into the Wall of Carcassonne. Restraint was no longer required. Contrary to what the king's churchman, Archbishop Gilles Aycelin, had smoothly assured Bernard Délicieux at the great disputation in Toulouse the preceding year, the king no longer placed a brake on the inquisition. There was no authority to oversee the Dominicans; there was only complicity.

D'Ablis knew also that the Bourg would offer no resistance whatsoever to his vigorous persecution. His enemies had been silenced by the royal seneschal. From a gibbet high above the waters of the Aude swung the lifeless bodies of Hélie Patrice and fourteen other consuls of Carcassonne. Found guilty of treason, they had been hanged on September 20, 1305, after being flogged mercilessly and then tied to horses, to be dragged facedown through the streets to the gallows. They would be left there for weeks, to edify the Bourg. Not everyone would turn his head in revulsion. In the words of an eminent historian: “As Bernard Gui observes with savage exultation, those who had croaked like ravens against the Dominicans were exposed to the ravens.”

Gui's happiness, however, was not complete. For among the eyeless corpses submitting to the pecking of the crows, there was no man of the cloth dangling in the wind, no Franciscan.

Remarkably, the return in force of the inquisition did not spell the end for Bernard Délicieux. Nor did the exposure of the plot to secede from France. Nor did the enmity of Pope Benedict XI. Given this array of menace, Bernard's itinerary from 1304 to 1310 can be seen as a feat of survival as unlikely as his brave but ultimately failed campaign to chase the inquisitors from Languedoc.

The most immediate threat was dealt with first. The Franciscans had proved dilatory in executing the pope's order to haul Délicieux to Rome, perhaps because the pontiff was a Dominican, but more likely because Brother Bernard was a valued and respected member of the Order, protected by senior friars and cardinals and revered by common man and wealthy burgher alike. When, at last, on July 6, 1304, the vicar of the Franciscan provincial of Aquitaine arrived in Carcassonne to arrest him, Bernard, guarded by Patrice's rough-and-ready militia of the Bourg, simply refused to go with him. Given his quarry's muscular entourage, the vicar thought better of insisting.

The next day, the heretofore hale Dominican pope dropped dead, at age sixty-three, of acute dysentery, in Perugia. Luck had intervened, spectacularly—too much luck, his enemies would say at his trial fifteen years later. Bernard had been heard predicting Benedict XI's untimely demise in the spring of 1304. Charged with the pope's murder, Bernard had to convince his judges he had no hand in the felicitous disappearance of his greatest enemy.

Whatever the truth behind the rumor, the sudden demise of the Dominican pope—and the subsequent vacancy of the Holy See—took the pressure off Bernard at precisely the moment when he needed to concentrate on an even graver threat: the wrath of King Philip the Fair. In the fall of 1304, ominous news came from Brother Durand de Champagne, Queen Joan's Franciscan confessor: the king had caught wind of the aborted plot to make Prince Ferrand of Majorca sovereign of Languedoc. Who informed Philip is not known, but the sheer number of people aware of the plot, not least King Jaume II, suggests he heard it from multiple sources.

On receiving this distressing intelligence, Bernard Délicieux went on the offensive. True to form, he urged a subscription from the burghers of Carcassonne, Albi, and other towns to fund a delegation. It would be headed by him and travel north to confront the king and beat down the accusations. The townspeople, many of them innocent of involvement in the plot yet terrified of indiscriminate royal vengeance, raised the funds for Brother Bernard's last mission to the north.