The Friar of Carcassonne (29 page)

On June 28, 1318, Bernard stood up and sternly proclaimed that the three men before him were not qualified to judge him: “I will not respond to the question . . . because the commissioners are simple men of a lowly station . . . I hereby demand that my judges be strong and powerful officials, cardinals who knew of the inquisition affair during the time of My Lord Pope Clement.” Bernard also said to their faces that they were stooges in the service of his enemies in the cardinalate, particularly the late king's Dominican confessor, Nicolas de Fréauville, whom he had accused in the Toulouse disputation almost two decades earlier of treasonous activities with the Flemish. These so-called commissioners, Bernard insisted, were unworthy of judging a man of his eminence and sorely lacking in knowledge of what had transpired in Languedoc at the turn of the century. Shrouded by ignorance and inexperience, they could not be trusted to render a fair verdict.

The friar's foes, in their scrupulous preparations to bring down such a towering figure with as little commotion as possible, had forgotten one other thing: Bernard knew he was a big fish, and had astutely identified the weaknesses in the pope's position. Anything less than the appearance of impeccable fairness worked in Bernard's favor. He had supporters everywhere. A hasty trial conducted by his enemies' flunkies would not look good at all, no matter how well prepared the paperwork. He demanded to be tried by his peers, churchmen of distinction, in the place where his actions were known, in Languedoc.

The commissioners, showing their own resolve, did not buckle before the great man's scorn. They excommunicated him on the spot. To return to the body of Church, Bernard had to agree to cooperate, which, apparently, he did. The historical record then goes dark, with very little in the way of documentation until the hearing of witnesses in Avignon the following spring.

Despite his grudging cooperation in the face of excommunication, Bernard had nonetheless fired a loud warning shot. Pope John XXII heard it. One can imagine an annoyed but admiring shake of the papal head on learning of Bernard's insults. Even after months of torture and a year of solitude in the darkness, fed on the meagerest of fare, the friar of Carcassonne was yet a shrewd, dangerous adversary. The seventy-five-year-old pope from Cahors, a no-nonsense town of cash and credit, realized that exceptional men would have to be found to take him down.

The trial was moved to Languedoc. Lest anyone at that destination dare forget what the pope expected, his letter preceding the transfer stated at the very top:

Whereas inaction before those who cause harm to others must rightly be odious to all men of good sense, the sanction of justice here must be most severely pursued against those who, although having submitted to the vows of an Order, acted as wolves in sheep's clothing and wore the raiment of holiness and good works all while seeking the destruction of others through hateful machinations.

Thus condemned in advance, Bernard was taken from Avignon under guard in late August. His traveling companions, prepped on the nature of the charges against him, tried to elicit damning admissions from him in the course of casual conversation, which they would later repeat at his trial. Bernard, freed from the cold stone of his cell and able to breathe in the warm air of his beloved homeland, became expansive, voluble even, as the journey progressed. He freely admitted to being a Spiritual, versed in Joachite prophecy. He explained to his escort, by means of describing a figure in a book, how John XXII was fated to die soon. He did not take the bait and declare the inquisition corrupt, but he did not hide his feeling that many inquisitors had behaved corruptly. When an interlocutor questioned him about rumors of corruption on his side, about how Jean de Picquigny had accepted bribes to work with the Bourg, Bernard snarled at the man: “You lie through your teeth! Picquigny was a honest man!”

In early September, an initial audience of the full court was held in Castelnaudary, a town between Toulouse and Carcassonne. The setting proved unsatisfactory, perhaps because a great number of witnesses still to be called resided in Carcassonne. It was, after all, the scene of the crime. The entire retinue—one lone accused man surrounded by a host of hostile guards, notaries, lawyers, and judges—then decamped to the city on the Aude. Bernard was probably not thrown in the Wall there, where he would have had a poignant reunion with the surviving men of Albi, who had never been released. In 1305, when the seditious plot of the Carcassonnais had been uncovered, these poor pawns had been transferred from royal custody in the Cité back to the Wall, where all would eventually die.

For his captors, however ardently they wished that fate for Bernard Délicieux, the Wall was in all likelihood not the place to confine their celebrated prisoner. For one thing, escapes from that prison were not unknown, especially for high-profile captives with rich and powerful friends. In the days of the Autier revival, four Good Men had managed to escape the Wall through the judicious greasing of palms. Although all were eventually recaptured and burned, and the prison's corrupt wardens replaced at the behest of Pope Clement's investigators in 1308, the lesson had been learned—no chances were going to be taken with Brother Bernard.

Further, the trial was to take place in the Cité, in the bishop's palace. Between that residence and the fortress of the seneschal stood the headquarters of the inquisition. The baleful registers were hung high on the inner wall of a great round tower of the fortifications there. Its neighboring tower, square in shape, also belonged to the inquisitor; it contained several chambers and, at its base, a handful of cells replete with manacles and other restraints. In the center of this area the torturer plied his trade. As the friar was expected to be available at almost all times during his trial, holding him here was only a matter of convenience, as well as security. This was Bernard's home in Carcassonne for the last public act of his life.
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The trial at Carcassonne began on September 12, 1319, and concluded on December 8. For the very first session in the Cité, Bernard was seated in front of his judges. Originally Pope John had named three to preside, but one, the archbishop of Toulouse, had begged off, claiming an administrative burden too great to permit him to do a thorough job. He was politely allowed to shirk the difficult task of tackling Brother Bernard. That left two.

Of those two, neither was a Dominican. One was an intimate of the pope's, Raimond de Mostuéjouls, the bishop of St. Papoul, a diocese to the northwest of Carcassonne. He was a reliable, efficient servant of the pope. The other judge came from farther south, from the shadow of the Pyrenees. His diocesan see was Pamiers.

Bernard Délicieux sat down on that first day under the steady gaze of Jacques Fournier.

The people of Carcassonne began their autumn of unease. Brother Bernard was back among them at last, but now, for the first time, he was unseen and unheard. Visitors arrived from far and near, summoned to testify at the solemn trial being held in the Cité. The inns of the Bourg reverberated with rumor, as strangers from Perpignan, Albi, Castres, Limoux, and Alet told of what they had seen and what they had said. More common in these months of September and October was the sight of men of Carcassonne crossing the bridge over the Aude and then mounting the path of the Trivalle to the gate of the fortress-city that led to the bishop's palace. Dozens from the Bourg were called to remember days nearly twenty years distant. As they took their oath to tell the truth, they had to meet the eyes of the defendant, Bernard Délicieux, present in the hall. Almost daily, then, a small drama of reunion took place, between enemies, acquaintances, friends. For some, revenge hung in the air, for slights suffered at the hands of Bernard's allies so long ago, but so too did compassion, for a great man brought low, ensnared in the awful gears of ecclesiastical justice. Yet this was no inquisition trial. Bernard saw who accused him, heard or read some of their testimony. He knew what the charges against him were. And he was allowed to defend himself, repeatedly, and in writing. Whether the trial was legitimate in the first place is another question entirely.

The charges against him can today be grouped under four headings: adherence to the Spirituals, treason against Philip the Fair, the murder of Pope Benedict XI, and obstruction of the inquisition.

The first became inconsequential. Although the effective cause of his arrest—Bernard had traveled to Avignon in 1317 to defend the Spirituals of Languedoc—support for them was not what the judges were attempting to pin on him. The Spirituals were being fiercely denounced by then as heretics, and Bernard freely admitted to being sympathetic to their cause, but he had to confess to crimes that were uniquely his, separate from the intra-Franciscan fracas that was rocking the Church. Punishing him solely for that would have set him up for martyrhood among a dissident faction of the Order. Besides, one can suspect that Fournier and Mostuéjouls, respectively a Cistercian and a Benedictine, had little time for the self-inflicted woes of the self-important mendicants. As such, his belonging to the Spiritual movement occupied almost no time during the three-month proceeding.

The treason charge formed the subject of Bernard's first of many appearances in the dock at Carcassonne, on October 2. Why the Church was trying him in this matter remains open to question. If King Philip had not given assurances that Bernard had been absolved, then Pope Clement never would have let the Franciscan leave the curia at Avignon to go to Béziers. One sees here the same reasoning behind the conflict surrounding Bernard Saisset: Délicieux was a churchman, ergo he had to be tried by a Church court jealous of its prerogatives. If, in the future, Philip's successors wished to resurrect the charges, the reasoning went, he could not be tried by royal justice. So he would be tried in Carcassonne about that matter now, by the Church. Added to that institutional scruple was the far weightier reality that Pope John wanted to throw everything he could at Bernard.

We know, from the narrative constructed of the events at Saint-Jean-Pla-de-Corts earlier, that Bernard confessed to his treasonous activity (his confession was supplemented by two witnesses to the stormy scene between King Jaume and his son). What retains attention in the story of his trial is the way in which the confession was extracted. In his first appearance, Bernard gave a patently unbelievable story about how he had broken up the plot, in what was a grave underestimation of the acumen of his judges. Many of the witnesses called from Carcassonne and Albi, including Bernard's former allies, had testified that this was not the case. Fournier must have been insulted. He ordered Bernard tortured—not severely, to avoid incapacitating him or causing organ failure, but tortured nonetheless. The notaries of the transcript duly noted his cries of pain and distress but did not specify the technique used. We can infer that on this or a subsequent occasion a few weeks later it may have been the strappado, being suspended from a beam with one's distended arms tied behind one's back, given a reference late in the transcript to Bernard's badly damaged hands.

In the event, Bernard confessed nothing to the torturer. But he did sleep on the matter and offer a partial confession on October 4. This, too, was dubious, but here the skill of Fournier and his colleague emerged—the treason discussion was shelved for the moment, and subsequent interrogations covered other matters entirely. In what would come to be a pattern in October and November, Bernard did not know what he was going to be asked about when he was unshackled and taken into the bishop's palace. The seemingly scattershot approach may have been unfair, designed to confuse and confound the accused, but when the prosecutor was judge no holds were barred. Bernard must at last have realized that he had gotten what he wished for: judges who were equal to his gifts.

In the thicket of interrogation sessions the matter of the killing of the pope arose on October 27 and November 17. The passing of a prominent personage in the Middle Ages almost always occasioned such suspicions, in the same way that secular courts usually got around to charging whoever was the enemy of the moment with sodomy, heresy, blasphemy, and the like. In this part of the charge sheet against him there were nonetheless several important pieces of circumstantial evidence. Three men of Albi—those who were deposed in Avignon in June 1319—claimed to have been in Bernard's presence in the spring of 1304 when he prepared a mysterious package to be sent to his friend Arnaud de Vilanova, then in Perugia locked in conflict with the Dominican pope, Benedict XI, resident there. Further, Bernard had said not long before the pope's sudden death that no bird could fly to Rome fast enough from Languedoc to see the pontiff alive. And, last, found in the possessions Bernard had entrusted to a notary of Béziers before leaving for Avignon in 1317 was a book of necromancy and spells, its margins covered in annotations by a reader. The Franciscan rule forbade such books, so he had transgressed.

As with the story of treason, Bernard made implausible denials. The book was not his, or perhaps it was. He may have read a few pages, but he had forgotten everything. And those notes in the margin could not possibly be his. Exasperated once again, on November 20 his judges ordered him tortured, and his screams were once again duly noted. Again he admitted nothing. On reflection, several days later he admitted to owning and marking up the magic book, but he vehemently denied having any hand in the death of the pope. He did not add the obvious—that the immensely learned Arnaud de Vilanova would hardly have needed a tutorial on magic from France to pharmaceutically terminate anyone he pleased.

The bulk of the interrogations concerned his actions against the inquisitors. These testimonies in the transcripts—the accounts given by the dozens of witness—breathe life into the ambush at the convent, the appeal of Castel Fabre, the audience at Senlis, the colorful sermons, the taking of the Wall, the disputation at Toulouse, the silver vases. What compels in considering the conduct of the trial is the way in which an ever-weakening Délicieux and an ever-vigilant Fournier—two great minds and consciences—dueled for almost two months.