Chapter II: Languedoc and the Albigenses (2)

It is one of man’s deepest instincts to defend that which he holds sacred, and to the man possessed of a religion, nothing is so sacred as his gods. What can be more natural than to wish to punish offences against the gods? Limborch has a long account of “Persecution among the Pagans.” For us it will be enough to remember that Athens itself put Socrates to death on the charge of teaching men not to believe in the gods of the city. And this in spite of the fact that Bacon truly says, “... the religion of the heathens consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their church were the poets.”[17]

Roman tolerance was born of the necessities of ruling over many races, none of whom except the Jews had an exclusive, “Jealous” God. Almost all the other people of the Empire were willing to accept the gods of strangers as differing from their own merely in name. Naturally, when one fanciful story about a god or goddess was as good as another, the educated man cared little about the whole body of myths. As an administrator, this same educated man was easily able to be “tolerant” to all religions because he cared little or nothing for his own, and was, in reality, indifferent and therefore not “tolerant” at all in the strict sense of the word. St. Paul’s Gallio, so much maligned by fools but so worthily celebrated by Kipling, is a fine specimen of the type. Such a man was devoted solely to the public interest. His feeling would not be as clear cut as our national patriotisms: “Rome” was almost the whole civilized world, so that the chance of her perishing was unthinkable. Nevertheless, she could still be an object of affection; her government represented the definite benefit of order. Devotion to her was not vague emotionalism like that of our internationalists of to-day. After a fashion she could be worshipped.

On the other hand when any religion or religious practice seemed to threaten the government upon which order reposed, the Roman magistrate struck at once. The rediscovered Roman law, remember, was to be a great force actively informing the twelfth century.

In adopting Christianity, Europe exchanged a religion in which one god, or one story about a god, was about as good as another, for a religion which claimed a definite, historical founder who had left behind him a corporate teaching body, the Church. To such a body, the out-and-out pagan or disbeliever is an open and possibly generous enemy. Whereas he who proclaims himself a fellow Christian, but meanwhile falsifies the Church’s doctrine by twisting and altering it to suit himself, is a traitor, a snake in the grass compared to whom the heathen is an angel of light.

Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential, of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. She must, therefore, contend especially against the heretic, the enemy from within, who would disfigure the faith by which she lives; and she has done so, from the “false teachers” and “heretics” whom St. Paul so often urged his flock to avoid, down to the poor creatures who would reduce her Saviour to the stature of a “social uplifter” or the walking delegate of a labor union. To keep the faith is a perpetual warfare.

Make what you will of the body empowered to interpret and define Christian doctrine and of the means of defending that doctrine when defined: the necessities of some sort of definition and authority will remain as long as the Christian name endures.

Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “... Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”[18] Later, he would find Christian Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors, including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences, and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force. Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare, our imagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin, Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19] Even in those sleepy days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the refutation of heresy.

But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple, would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein defined) he cannot be saved?

Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day. But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; in the modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture indeed.

But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they repented, although too late to be rescued.

The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner of the punishment we shall in a moment return.

We hear of the execution of heretics here and there throughout Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them, as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned.

If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic, there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion, as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities. Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law, methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience.... You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses, sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ... a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate even in words ... the framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous instances ... Savonarola is one in point ... that the judges often appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead. The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain could have existed, but it did exist.”[20]

It is possible to go even further than the passage quoted above. For, if the culprit had died, it was thought worth while to dig up his corpse and at least burn that. Certainly, then, it would seem as if there was something almost sacramental about burning the heretic.

Study of the discussion of witch-burning in the “Golden Bough” suggests the idea that heretics were burned, as witches were, because it was believed that fire was the one adequate means of purifying the community from the pollution which they had brought upon it. If this is so, then heretic- and witch-burning is connected with the most primitive superstitions, not only long before Christianity, but before the possibility of any systematized religion.

On the other hand, burning alive conformed after a grisly fashion to the letter of an old saying that “the Church abhors bloodshed.”

Cardinal Newman has left us an interesting passage combining extreme hatred for the heretic, or rather for the heresiarch (i.e., the active preacher of heresy and corrupter of the faithful), with the typical modern sensitiveness to the sight of physical pain:

“Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs I had said: the latter should meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter; and so far as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable toward himself. I cannot deny that this is a very fierce passage; but Arius was banished, not burned; and it is only fair to myself to say that neither at this nor at any other time of my life, not even when I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a Puritan’s ears, and I think the sight of a Spanish auto-da-fé would have been the death of me.”[21]

It would be a study in itself to work up the evidence as to the toughness of the mediæval mind with respect to disagreeable ideas and to the actual infliction of pain. To-day, in America, we have our lynchings, and we have the ugly stories of torture inflicted in revolutionary Russia. But, on the other hand, we have a crew of drivellers against capital punishment, and many people can hardly bear the idea of hell. As Zarathustra puts it, of the God of the Christians:—

“When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.”

“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother.”

“There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22]

Whereas in the Middle Ages—

“The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23]

With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover (like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he cheerfully risked being roasted eternally.

As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between mediæval and modern as follows:—

“Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the papers say about the execution of those condemned to death; they reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man. What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado, roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan. These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24]

Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part, although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.

With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse, and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people of Albi prevented the bishop and a neighbouring abbot from imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126 we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In 1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more.

The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate.

The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it. To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist, a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentrics found in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order. Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose ground.

Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one important occasion.

The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage ... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’ replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites, whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25] One has a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels.

Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi, after preaching to a throng which packed the cathedral, he called upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,” St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip. After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing precisely as if he had never come.

In 1165, at Lombers near Albi, we find Catholic priests publicly debating against representative “Albigenses” in the presence of Pons, Archbishop of Narbonne, and sundry bishops, besides the most powerful nobles of the region, Constance, sister of King Louis VII of France and wife of Count Raymond V of Toulouse, Viscount Trencavel of Beziers, and others. When the verdict went against the heretics, no action whatsoever seems to have been taken against them: it was a mere tournament of words, “a matter of public interest” as we should say. Two years later the heretics openly held a council at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The president came all the way from Constantinople to attend, delegates from Lombardy were present, “bishops” were elected for various vacant sees, and a committee was appointed to settle a disputed boundary between the “dioceses” of Toulouse and Carcassonne. Clearly we have here to do with an organized religious body, emphatically a “going concern,” acting fearlessly in the open.

With the year 1178 we get the first suggestion of vigorous direct action against the heresy. Count Raymond V of Toulouse wrote to his brother-in-law, Louis VII of France, deploring the progress of heresy and the abandonment of orthodox religion throughout his lands, and connecting this condition with an alarming increase of brigandage and public disorder. The King of France had just made peace (or rather truce) with Henry II of England, so that the long struggle between the French Monarchy and the Angevin house was at rest for the time being and the two kings were free to combine against heresy. The other great chronic political controversy, between the Papacy and the “Holy Roman” Empire was also inactive, Pope Alexander III having got the better of Frederic Barbarossa and his anti-Pope. Accordingly, the Pope was free to spur on the kings to action. At first it was proposed that Louis and Henry march into Toulouse with a joint army. But, finally, it was decided merely to send to Toulouse a mission of high clerical dignitaries with power to act. Lea suggests that the enthusiasm of the kings had cooled off during the long time spent in preliminary discussion. Mother Drane holds that the Pope preferred peaceful measures.

When the mission reached Toulouse they were insulted in the streets. Nevertheless, they went on to draw up a long list of heretics, and finally determined to make an example of a rich old man named Peter Mauran who seems to have been one of the first citizens of Toulouse. They proceeded against him under the canon promulgated by the Council of Tours, which prescribed imprisonment for convicted heretics and confiscation of their property. After much palaver and wordy shuffling by the accused he was adjudged a heretic. To save his property he recanted and offered to submit to such penance as might be imposed. Accordingly, “stripped to the waist, with the Bishop of Toulouse and the Abbot of St. Sernin busily scourging him on either side, he was led through an immense crowd to the high altar of the Cathedral ... (and) ... ordered to undertake a three years’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to be daily scourged through the streets of Toulouse until his departure, to make restitution of all Church lands occupied by him and of all money acquired by usury, and to pay to the Count five hundred pounds of silver in redemption of his forfeited property.”[26]

The results of these measures were only temporary. After his return from Palestine, Mauran was three times elected chief magistrate of the city. In the same year in which he had first been tried, the Third Lateran Council cursed the heretics of Languedoc, together with those who favoured them, and included as heretics the marauding bands of wandering mercenaries who, when out of employment, drifted about as brigands. Further, the Council took the unprecedented step of declaring a Crusade against all these enemies of the Church and of proclaiming a two years’ indulgence to Crusaders. So that in 1181, Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux and Cardinal, was able to raise a military force with which he invaded the Beziers district and took the castle of Lavaur, capturing in it many prominent heretics. But two of the captured Albigensian “bishops,” upon recanting, were promptly given Catholic benefices in Toulouse, and, all told, Henry of Clairvaux’s little crusade was no more than a flash in the pan.

The Lateran Council’s curse upon bandits, lumping them with heretics, raises the question of how closely the anarchical side of Albigensianism may have been connected with public disorder. The twelfth century men were great bandit-slayers. Probably there were more bandits to be slain because there was more wealth worth robbing in Western Christendom than formerly. The mercenary soldier, a man without a country, hired by the princes of the time for their big or little wars, was not far from the bandit, even when in campaign. In England the name of King John’s mercenaries was hated and feared for generations. In his times of unemployment, when he was drifting about the country he tended to become the bandit pure and simple. Always he was unbound by social and conventional restraints and ties, wanting especially reverence for the Church, which was usually the chief protection for the property of that greatest and richest of mediæval corporations. We are told that one of Richard Cœur de Lion’s mercenaries, quite wantonly it would seem, once ... “broke off an arm of a statue in the Church of Our Lady at Chateauroux, whereupon the figure bled as if it were alive; and John (afterwards King John) picked up the severed arm and carried it off as a holy relic.”[27] But we are not told that the fellow himself was in the least abashed by the miracle, or that he was punished for his sacrilege. However, in twelfth-century Northern and Central France, when banditry became annoying, the bandits by no means had it all their own way. Their career was often short and ended by steel or rope. The community went for them mercilessly, much as men did in our own Wild West.

In Languedoc (as we have seen) with its wealth, its Jews, and its nearness to the Moslem, reverence for the Church was less. Further, it may well be that the nobles were more dependent upon mercenaries inasmuch as their vassals were less warlike. We shall find the unhappy Raymond VII refusing to dismiss his hired soldiers, no matter under what pressure. Finally, some heretics denied the moral right of all private property whatsoever; most of them attacked the Church for the great wealth which it possessed, and practically all would refuse to take oaths, and denied the moral force of them when taken, although the feudal oath of allegiance from the vassal to his lord was the chief bond of civil society. In silent witness to the difference these things made, we find many of the southern churches, especially the country churches, were fortified. Whereas in the North, in spite of all the continual quarrelling between priest and noble, the church building nearly always depended for its protection on its sanctity alone.

The churches of Languedoc were not fortified for nothing. Speaking of the bandits, Lea remarks that the chroniclers, who were themselves mostly Churchmen, “... insist that their blows ... fell heavier on church and monastery than on the castle of the seigneur or the cottage of the peasant.” Naturally, since they would get little plunder from the cottage and many hard knocks from the castle. “... They ridiculed the priests as singers, and it was one of their savage sports to beat them to death while mockingly begging their intercession, ... ‘Sing for us, you singer, sing for us’; and the culmination of their ... sacrilege was ... their casting out and trampling on the holy wafers whose precious pyxes they eagerly seized.”[28]

Exactly how much connection Albigensianism had with disorder we cannot say. On the face of it, such teaching tended rather to non-resistance. But in an age so direct, so extreme in brutality as well as in tenderness (as for brutality in speech a leading Albigensian argument against transubstantiation was that it involved the excretion of the body of Christ into latrines), in such an age, I say, it is improbable that the heretics greatly disapproved of anyone who attacked their enemies, the Churchmen. Even assuming that the godless mercenary-turned-bandit was not, strictly speaking, a heretic at all, he was certainly favoured by the atmosphere of heresy.

As the twelfth century neared its close Albigensianism must have seemed “the coming thing” in Languedoc. Although we hear of none of the greatest nobles of the region as having been “hereticated,” yet many individuals among their immediate families had been, especially among the women. In general, the heretics were enthusiastic and the Catholics uncertain and troubled. The Orthodox were still able (as in the affair of Mauran) to win “test cases,” but they must have felt that their hold was slipping.

From the point of view of those resolute to suppress heresy, the only real gain of the whole twelfth century was that both the canon and the civil laws on the subject had become more defined. Even as late as the middle of the century, we find St. Bernard calling the burning of heretics “excessive cruelty,” and favouring imprisonment as a maximum punishment.

The heresy made its only appearance in England in 1166. Henry II, the very man whom we have seen so angry against Becket as to threaten to turn Mohammedan, seems to have felt free to take a line of his own. He had them stripped to the waist, flogged, branded on the forehead, and turned adrift, strictly forbidding everyone to give them any aid and comfort whatsoever. This was effective enough in its way, as they must have soon died from hunger and exposure, but the point is that there seems to have been no recognized procedure to be followed.

This want had been partly met, in the last two decades of the century, by three laws.

In 1184, at the Diet of Verona, the “Holy Roman” Emperor, Frederic Barbarossa, and the short-lived Pope Lucius III, had conferred on heresy. Although in disagreement about many important matters, they seem to have agreed perfectly about the treatment of heretics. They published a joint decree. The Pope on his side directed that the bishops, who had always had jurisdiction in matters of heresy, should make, or cause to be made, an inquiry, or “inquisition,” into the possible existence of heresy in every parish where the presence of heretics was even suspected. Even those whose manner of living differed from that of the ordinary Catholic were to be questioned as to their faith. The accused were to be tried in the episcopal court and such as should be convicted (if they refused to “repent” and acknowledge their errors) were to be handed over to the secular authorities “in order that they may receive the punishment they deserve (animadversio debita).” This last formula was vague, perhaps intentionally so. All secular magistrates were to take an oath before the bishop that they would enforce the laws against heresy, and those who refused to act after having been duly called upon to do so were to be excommunicated. Furthermore, all Catholics were forbidden to do business with any city which might sustain a pro-heretical magistrate in failure to act.

The Emperor, on his side, was not behindhand. He decreed that any magistrate excommunicated for refusal or neglect to proceed against heretics should lose his office and be debarred from accepting another. All those convicted, or to be convicted, of heresy were put under the imperial ban, which meant banishment, confiscation of goods, destruction of their houses, public infamy, debarment from office, &c. There is no explicit mention of the death penalty. “Animadversio” had meant death in ancient times, and the twelfth-century lawyer was apt to be both a great pedant and a great imperialist. Nevertheless, the formula had become vaguer.

The other two enactments are those of secular princes, acting alone.

Count Raymond V of Toulouse, he whom we have seen appealing to his suzerain Louis VII of France against heresy, at some time during his long reign of forty-six years (from 1148 to 1194) decreed not only banishment but also death by fire for heretics. Probably this was done in connection with Henry of Clairvaux’s mission which condemned Mauran, or with the short “Crusade” of 1181. What action, if any, was taken under it we do not know. In 1209 we shall find the municipality of Toulouse writing to Pope Innocent III to the effect that “many” heretics had been burnt under it. But we must remember that the letter was written when the city was threatened by Montfort and his Crusaders, and its magistrates were correspondingly anxious to make a case.

The third of the three laws against heretics was enacted by King Pedro II of Aragon, who later got himself killed in his attempt to protect the protector of heretics, Raymond VI of Toulouse! In 1197 Pedro banished the Waldenses and other heretics from his lands as public enemies to himself and his realm, and announced that if any of them were found when the months of grace had expired, their goods were to be confiscated and themselves burned. Of course, this was only a threat, and in all human probability no one stayed to risk the stake. The significant thing is that the threat is made against the Waldenses as the heretics par excellence.

But, although it was a gain to have the legal machinery for punishing heretics, still the gain did not amount to much if there was no organized force capable of putting the machinery in motion. Except for the banishment of Mauran and the little Crusade which took Lavaur in 1181, no real action against the heretics of Languedoc had been taken. In 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier and condemned heresy in the strongest terms, but his thunders died away without an echo. No progress whatsoever had been made against heresy in Languedoc when, in 1198, Innocent III became Pope.

Why did Rome wait so long before moving in the Albigensian matter? The Curia must surely have known, for decades past, that things were steadily going from bad to worse in Languedoc. It has been suggested that all the moral forces and diplomatic skill that the Papacy could muster had been needed to make head against the redoubtable emperors, Barbarossa and his son, Henry VI. But this, at most, can be only half the answer. In the first place, the Curia had been and was entirely competent to carry on several major controversies at the same time, with the sure touch of a skilful juggler keeping three or four balls going at once. In the second place, even in the last fifty years, crowded as they had been, still there had been intervals of peace between Papacy and Empire. One such interval had been seven years long, and still the Papacy had made no move in Languedoc. Probably the answer is that none of the popes, not even Alexander III, and still less his short-lived successors, had possessed the tremendous energy and courage of the newly-elected Pope.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] “Rome Revisited,” in “The Meaning of History,” by Frederic Harrison. Publishers: The Macmillan Co., New York, 1902.

[6] “Some Types of Cities in Temperate Europe,” by H. J. Fleure, in the “Geographical Review,” N.Y., December, 1920, which compares cities like Arles, Nismes and Toulouse on the one hand, and the north-French cities on the other. The author mars an able discussion of the subject by imagining a strong “Frankish” influence in the north—derived no doubt from the tiny mongrel war band of Clovis, some 8,000 strong, including Thuringians and Bretons, by which that leader raised himself to be consul, by imperial commission, over a Romanized Gaul of millions! The point is that military, civil and ecclesiastical authority were alike integrally Roman in the high imperial time. In Northern France, during the Dark Ages, secular civil government seems to have disappeared. Therefore, the Roman military officers who had turned themselves into feudal lords, and the bishops who continued to take their orders from Rome, obtained greater relative importance.

[7] “Europe and the Faith,” by Hilaire Belloc. Paulist Press, N.Y., 1920.

[8] “Politics,” Heinrich Von Treitschke, trans. Publ. Macmillan 1916. Vol. I, chap. vii, pp. 245, 246.

[9] “Aucassin and Nicolette.” Passage translated by Henry Adams, in “Mont St. Michel and Chartres.” Pub. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1913. Chapter xii, page 233.

[10] “The Old Road,” by H. Belloc. Published by Constable and Co., London, 1911. Page 30.

[11] “History of the Inquisition,” by Philip Limborch, Professor of Divinity among the Remonstrants; Chandler’s translation, London, 1731. Reference page 44, vol. i.

[12] “Shelburne Essays,” Sixth Series, by Paul Elmer More. Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1909.

[13] “Mr. Britling sees it Through,” by H. G. Wells. Published by Macmillan, New York, 1917.

[14] “Italy and her Invaders,” by Thomas Hodgkin. Published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892. Vol. i, chapter III, p. 203.

[15] “Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” by “Vernon Lee.” Published by John Lane, New York. 1909. Pp. 47-49.

[16] See: Fragments of an “Ancient (Egyptian?) Gospel,” used by “The Cathars of Albi,” by F. P. Bodham and F. C. Conybeare, in the _Hibbert Journal_ of July, 1913.

[17] “Essays,” by Francis Bacon: “Of Unity in Religion.”

[18] I Timothy, chapter i, verse 20.

[19] “The Mediæval Mind,” by Henry Osborn Taylor, _supra_ “Carolingian Scholars,” in vol. i, chapter x, p. 217.

[20] “On Anything,” H. Belloc; Dutton, New York, 1910, p. 72, _et seq._

[21] “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” by John Henry Newman, chap. i.

[22] “Thus spake ‘Zarathustra,’” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. publ. Macmillan, New York, 1914, chap. lxvi, p. 318.

[23] “Mont St. Michel and Chartres,” _supra_, chap. xi, p. 218.

[24] “Là-bas,” by Joris Karl Huysmans. Published Plon-Nourrit Paris, 1913. Pp. 362-3, author’s trans.

[25] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 71.

[26] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 122.

[27] “John Lackland,” by Kate Norgate. Macmillan, N.Y., 1902, p. 21.

[28] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, pp. 125-6.