The Albigenses Crusade

PROVENCE in the twelfth century was the most civilized, in the widest sense, of any country in Christian Europe. It was also one of the richest. Civilization and wealth were still the privilege of the sunlands, the cradle of Western culture. West and East met and mingled, each complementing the other, on the shores of the Mediterranean. The Rhone valley was the great artery which carried the merchandise unloaded in the ports of southern France to the misty north: sumptuous webs, Cordovan leather, weapons tempered at Damascus and Toledo, enamels, African ivory, and spices, to which the Middle Ages were very partial (French cookery, dating from the seventeenth century, has lost the taste, but the provision dealer is still called an épicier). From as far back as Carolingian times, the men of the north wondered at the pomp of Provence. Theodulus, Bishop of Orleans, one of the missi dominici of Charlemagne, reports his astonishment at the wealth of the inhabitants of Marseilles, and at the rich gifts they offered him:

One presented me with precious stones and Eastern pearls. . . . another brought me handfuls of gold coins with Arabic lettering on them . . . another said to me: “here are Saracen draperies of richer hue and the most delicately woven there may be . . .” another presents me with ensamples of Cordovan leather, some as white as snow, others red . . . another proffers carpets.¹

The towns of Marseilles, Aries, Avignon, Brignoles and Grasse, grown rich through trade and at the height of their prosperity, were free cities governed by their own consuls and “capitouls.” Toulouse, the “rose,” the “flower of cities,” as it was called, bore an oriental appearance, with its bazaars in the Rue de la Pourpointerie, its many fountains adorned with mosaics, and its baths copied from those of Granada. Its wealth was said to rival that of Byzantium. The richness of Provençal land excited the covetousness of the needy, rude and barbarous populations of the north.²

Provence excelled in mental culture no less than in material prosperity. When the brilliant civilization of the Western Caliphate suffered devastation at the hands of the Almoravides, and the schools and libraries of Cordova and Toledo were sacked by the barbarians, many refugees sought shelter in Provence. Some of them set up a school of medicine at Montpellier which became a center for the dissemination of Arabian science; a whole new city arose to accommodate the students who flocked from every quarter. At Narbonne the famous brothers Aben-Ezra and their collaborators set themselves to lecture upon scientific and philosophical subjects, and to translating the Arabic books. “It was Provence,” says Munk, “which supplied almost all the translators and commentators of the Arabian philosophers. Averroes would perhaps have remained unknown to the Christian world had not his works been acclaimed by the Jews of Provence.”³

Although the ancient Roman provinces were among the first of Gaul to receive the faith, the influence of the Church never went as deep in Languedoc as it did in the Kingdom of the Franks, where it rested upon the support of a central power that, in turn, derived from the Church the sanction of its authority. The Languedoc country during a span of three centuries had been occupied by the Arian Visigoths, founders of the kingdom of Toulouse. Arianism was the form of the Christian religion adopted by the great majority of the Germanic peoples. Its distinctive trait was a rigorous monotheism which refused to identify Christ with God and rejected the cult of the saints, whose numbers the Orthodox and Catholic Churches were at pains to multiply. This simplified form of Christianity came near to triumphing over the Orthodox and Roman Churches despite the official decision of the Council of Nicea. It was the conversion of Clovis, for purely political ends, that saved the Catholic Church. It was the Franks who, after having rescued the Roman Church from the Lombards, laid the foundations of its temporal power, extended its sway over Germany, and later imposed it on Spain. In spite of the conversion of the Visigoth King Recarredus in 589, the kingdom of Toulouse remained profoundly averse to Catholicism. The political particularism which characterized the people was intensified by their traditional opposition to the religion of the French.

When the kingdom of Toulouse passed directly from the rule of the Visigoths to that of the Muslims, who controlled it during a period of more than half a century and who brought about important developments in its agriculture, irrigation and industry, the men of Toulouse felt more closely drawn to their new masters than to the common enemy, Catholic France. The difference between the uncompromising monotheism of the Arians and that of Islam was in truth but a slight one. This substantial identity was doubtless one of the causes, and not the least, which kept the relations between Christians and Muslims in Spain free from religious bitterness. In the East, the persecuted Arians and Paulicians sometimes joined the Muslims against the Orthodox and Catholics.⁴ The people of Languedoc, who had been withdrawn during a period of close on four centuries from the tutelage of the Roman Church and had been exposed to other influences, manifested little of the fervor which animated the populations of France, the eldest daughter or, as it might more accurately be called, the mother of the Catholic Church, which, as Guillaume de Puy-Laurens puts it, “has always fought the wars of God”—semper consuevit gerere bella dominica.⁵

Saint Bernard paints a dark picture of the state of mind prevailing among the populations of southern France:

The churches are empty, the people have no priests; the priests are not shown the respect which is their due. The Christians deny Christ and their temples resemble synagogues. The sacred character of God’s sanctuaries is ignored, and the sacraments are not accounted holy. Feast-days are not observed with due solemnity. Men die in their sins and their souls are carried off, alas, before the awful judgment-seat without their being reconciled with the Lord and provided with the holy sacraments. Children do not learn to know Christ and the grace of baptism is not conferred upon them.⁶

The tale of Aucassin et Nicolette, though it has come to us in the language of Picardy, probably derives from a Provençal original, and gives a faithful picture of the disposition of the people of Provence in the twelfth century. “In Paradise what have I to win?” exclaims li biax, li blons, li gentix, li amorous Aucassin.

For in Paradise go none but such folks as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower continually before the altars, and in the crypts; and such folk as wear amices, and old clouted frocks, and naked folks and shoeless, and covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst, and of cold, and of little ease. These be they that go into Paradise; with them have I naught to make. But into Hell would I fain go; for into Hell fare the goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars, and stout men-at-arms and all men noble. With these would I liefly go. And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers, or three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold, and the silver, and the cloth of vair, and the cloth of gris, and harpers and makers, and the prince of this world. With these I would gladly go, let me but have with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady.⁷

In Provence—from of yore an intermediate borderland between contrasted worlds, whence Latin civilization had looked out upon savage Europe, and whence in turn, in the twelfth century, Europe, from the depths of the barbarism into which it had relapsed, viewed the civilization of victorious Islam, enriched with all the legacies that Christianity had lost—the forces which were contending for the future faced one another. On the one hand, the dawn of a new age was piercing the night of five centuries, and heralding the Renaissance; on the other, the medieval Church, supported by the France of the crusades, of St. Bernard and St. Louis, regarded the gleam of a new day as a menace to its power.

White monks and black monks pounced upon Provence, determined to master the indifference of the people, and to denounce the harborers of heretics and unbelievers. Even a Pope, Urban II, went out of his way to preach to the men of Toulouse. Folquet, Bishop of Toulouse, in conjunction with the Bishops of Foix, Albi and Béziers, addressed a protest to Rome against Provençal impiety. He had at one time practiced the calling of a troubadour, but after an attempt on the virtue of the wife of Barral des Baux, Lord of Marseilles, he had been expelled from the city and had taken orders. A Castilian monk, Dominique de Guzman—mensongier Castella, “the liar of Castille,” as Peire Cardenal calls him⁸—had founded the order of the Predicant Friars and had flooded the country with them. Rosaries, adopted from the Muslims, were distributed among the people. Finding, however, that persuasion had little effect on their minds, St. Dominic sounded the note of menace.

Many troubadours raised their voices against ecclesiastical tyranny. The Church was not, in the Middle Ages, a purely spiritual power. It was also the dominant force in politics, in economics. In the course of centuries, every form of power and wealth had accumulated in its hands. It held the reins of Europe, gave the law, made and deposed kings, and dictated their politics. The medieval Church disposed of the irresistible lever which in our day is represented by money. It was the greatest landlord in the world, held the best land, profited by every privilege and immunity. When the monks of Cluny arrived in Spain, they comported themselves as though in a conquered country. From their principal seat at Sahagun, they issued decrees forbidding the inhabitants to bake their bread elsewhere than in the convent’s ovens; they prohibited the gathering of fuel, the selling of wine till the monks had sold theirs. Similar regulations affected all the necessities of life; the monks claimed absolute priority; no meat, vegetables, cloth, footwear could be bought until the needs of the monastery had been fully met.⁹

Dogmatic issues formed, then, but a relatively small parcel of the causes which set the people against the Church; it was much rather the eternal question of domination by economic power, and all the abuses to which it gives rise. Moral corruption, in the broadest and in every sense, is inseparable from such absolute power. Pope Innocent III denounced the vices and the corruption of the monastic orders, and brought charges against them which few lampoonists would have ventured to advance. “This state of things,” he concludes, “affords heresy great encouragement.”¹⁰

Long after the troubadours, Dante and Petrarch were to express themselves in language very similar to that of the Provençal poets, whom indeed they copied in this as in so much else. “The priests have made them a god of gold and silver,” Dante said—Fatto v’avete Iddio d’oro e d’argento. “Their robes trail over the quarters of their hacks, so that two beasts are in one hide.”

And the lover of Laura was to sing:

Avaricious Babylon hath her beggar’s poke full filled with wrath of God bred of fell vices rank, so that it bursts.

Peire Cardenal, though a puissant and deeply pious lord—he was the first troubadour to indite religious poetry—could not contain his indignation:

I am in the fashion framed, that I ever did hate injustice and cherished right. Set they who will their hearts upon other treasures; to my deeming is justice precious before every other good. Whereby have I drawn upon myself relentless hate from them who enstyle themselves right-thinking. Let them then hate me! Me it nothing recks.¹³

He caused his jongleurs to sing fiery sirventes against the clergy

High felons are they who sell God, and men undo! They colour their perfidy under the cloak of honest seeming, they preach unto men, telling them they are to lead holy lives. But never shall I hold my peace and stand aside from discovering their villainies, for it were impiety to do so; he who shieldeth a robber is no less guilty before God than is the robber. And robbers are they, who over us rule . . . abounding in covetousness, and spare of kindness, affable of mien, but monstrous of heart. The clerks cannot suffer that any but themselves should wield authority in this world. . . . Kites and vultures are not keener to scent out carrion, than are clerks and Predicant Friars to nose riches to be squeezed . . . Nor is their pope a whit less guilty than they themselves; he would enrich the rich, but of the poor makes no reck. To be the world’s universal legatee is the goal of his ambition . . . Yea, and the whole brood of clerks by dint of theft, and hypocrisy, and sermons, by force or felony, by God’s help or the devil’s that which they seek they get!¹⁴

At Toulouse, Guilhem Figuiera, a man of the people, exploded in invectives against Rome:

Rome! head-fount of evil and of all our ills! False and perfidious Rome, arch-cheat and liar! wherein the world’s roguery gather, swarmes and crawls! . . . Thou breedest all wars and woes . . . thou gnawest the flesh and bones of simple folk, and the blind leadest to the pit. . . and tramplest under foot God’s commandments. . . Such Rome be thy high deeds! . . . Lamb-like in thy demeanor, wolfish in thy rapacity; thy talons dig so fast what thou holdest that it may never be wrested from thy grip . . . Crowned viper that, with the devil for thy cronies rulest to no other end than lucre. . . And if thy power be not full soon destroyed, it will be all y-do with the world, which lies crushed and cut-throated, and brought by thee to the uttermost brim of undoing. May the Justice of God smite thee down, crime-laden Rome!

Skeptical Provence was the natural refuge of all heretics. From the ninth century, when the Adoptionist heresy spread from Toledo, where it originated, over Languedoc, down to the first foretokenings of Protestantism, medieval heresies were primarily inspired by revolt against the spiritual and material tyranny of the Roman Church. The doctrines and beliefs, often grotesque, which became substituted for the Church’s dogmas represent the feeble attempts of the human mind, crushed and ill-equipped for rational effort, to shake off the yoke of that tyranny.

The teachings of the Cathars, a name etymologically equivalent to “Puritans,” are imperfectly known to us through contradictory and often manifestly distorted accounts. But modern researches have clearly shown that the heresy of the Cathars, so far from being the doctrine of a petty local sect, was affiliated with similar kernels of resistance scattered throughout Christendom, and deriving in direct continuity from the earliest years of the Church. The Cathars were connected with the Paulicians, disciples of Paul, Bishop of Samosata, and Patriarch of Antioch in the third century, who had aimed at rationalizing to the utmost the dogmatic edifice with which Christian ethics were associated.

Like Arianism, from which it is scarcely to be distinguished, the Paulician teaching survived the opposition of the official Church and the decisions of the Council of Nicaea, and had in fact thereafter grown and extended. The headquarters of the sect were in Constantinople, and branches existed in Thrace, Bulgaria and Dalmatia. Its Bulgarian affiliations gave rise to the designation of bougres, applied by the French monks to the Cathars. A number of Paulicians betook themselves to Hungary, Germany and Italy, where they were known as “publicani” and “patarini,” and whence they spread to Provence and Spain. In 1167 the head of the Paulician Church, Nicetas, after visiting the churches of the Balkans and Dalmatia, held a synod at Toulouse, where he consecrated five bishops, or “Prefects.” Sicard Cellerier was appointed Bishop of Albi.¹⁶ The popularity which was enjoyed in Spain toward the close of the tenth century by the doctrines of the “Brothers of Purity,” which show a striking similarity to theirs, may, as some think, have had something to do with the expansion at the same epoch of the Catharian movement in Provence.

In spite of the divergence of their beliefs from those of the Orthodox and Roman Churches, the Cathars regarded themselves as Christians. They repudiated the authority of the Old Testament, but they revered the Gospel, interpreting its miraculous elements, such as the Resurrection and the Ascension, in an allegorical sense. They celebrated a form of Christian communion, in which a loaf was symbolically shared, in accordance with the Gospel description of the Lord’s Supper. The Cathars, it seems, were believers in Manichaeism, a very ancient conception which postulated two principles, that of Good and that of Evil, but there is no evidence that these were personified. The Cathar faith took much greater account of the moral than of the dogmatic aspect of religion. To follow the way of life set forth in the Gospels was the leading aim of their persuasion; they practiced fraternity, charity, poverty, renunciation and tolerance. They were commonly known in Provence as “the good men.”

Their views and example made a great impression on the masses of the people. Goodness and gentleness make more converts among the generality of men than the doctrine of metempsychosis. Any opposition, moreover, to the tyranny of the Church enlisted sympathy. The higher ranks of the clergy challenged revolt by the defiant arrogance of their bearing and luxury. The Papal Legate, Pierre de Castelnau, attired in crimson silks and velvet and belted with rubies, kept the state of a ruling monarch. He was mysteriously assassinated near the Abbey of Saint Gilles. On the other hand, the pretense of humility and poverty of Saint Dominic and his Predicant Friars, which were intended to rival, in the eyes of the people, the virtues of the Cathars, while their pursuit of endowments and inheritances went on apace, deceived no one.

The teaching of the Cathars spread with astonishing rapidity; it became established at Avignon and Lyons, and reached as far as the Alps; it sowed the seed from which the sect of the Vaudois was to spring. The papacy saw in it a threat to the entire edifice of its power. The Bishop of Citeaux declared that if it were not dealt with promptly, there would not be a single believer left in Provence in two or three years’ time. One of the first patrons of the “good men” was no other than the troubadour-prince, Guilhem of Poitiers, Duke of Aquitaine. The counts of Toulouse and the lords of Languedoc, without identifying themselves with the sectaries, showed themselves, in general, well disposed towards them. Great ladies like Giraude de Laurac, sister of the powerful Count Aimeric de Montreal, and the two sisters of Raimon Rogier, Viscount of Carcassonne, devoted themselves to charitable works and announced their conversion to the Catharian faith. One of the principal seats of the “good men” was the neighborhood of Albi; hence the designation of “Albigenses” which was applied to them in France.

When Pope Innocent III, who had been educated at the University of Paris, proclaimed the crusade against the Albigenses in 1209, he provided an opportunity for which the covetous feudal barons of the north had long lain in wait. Eudes, Duke of Burgundy, Herve, Count of Nevers, Gaucher, Count of Saint-Pol, Guillaume des Barres and Simon de Montfort divided among themselves, in anticipation, the rich fiefs of Languedoc and insisted upon being promised them before joining the crusade. Armies were levied by the Archbishops of Rheims and Bordeaux, and by the Bishops of Sens, Clairmont, Rouen, Lisieux, Autun, Chartres and others; Theodosius, Archdeacon of Notre-Dame in Paris, assumed the command of the engines of war. This host of more than 500,000 men was reinforced by German horsemen and a horde of truands or vagabonds under their “king.”

The crusaders hurled themselves upon Béziers, a wealthy and flourishing city of 60,000 inhabitants, which the Count of Toulouse, Raimon “the Old,” a man of irresolute and wavering disposition, refused to defend, and they killed all the population regardless of age or sex. “It is thought that no such brutal massacre has ever been planned and perpetrated,” says Guillaume de Tudèle. “They slaughtered clerks, women and children so thoroughly that not one, I believe, escaped.”¹⁷ “They killed in this town alone fully 60,000 men and more,” says Guillaume le Breton, in the High Chronicles of France.¹⁸ Seven thousand persons who sought sanctuary in the church of Sainte-Madeleine were butchered there; six thousand were burnt alive in the Church of Saint-Nazaire. The monks who tolled the knell while the carnage was proceeding, were in turn put to the sword. (Some of the clergy were indeed in sympathy with the Cathars.) “They made a huge slaughter of both catholics and heretics, for they could not distinguish between them,” says Saint-Aubin d’Angers.¹⁹ It is from the Cistercian monk, Céssaire d’Heister-bach, that we hold the report of the notorious order issued by his superior, Arnaud, Bishop of Citeaux: “Kill, kill! God will know his own!”²⁰ The crusaders were promised a remission of several centuries of Purgatory for each ten thousand slain.

“Ye have decked your heads with caps of infamy, you Rome, and you Citeaux, at whose behest the monstrous butchery of Béziers was done,” cries Figuiera:

Carcassonne was defended by the nephew of the Count of Toulouse, Roger de Trancavel, a noted patron of troubadours, and held out for a long time against the assaults of the crusaders. It is said that jongleurs stood on the walls, hurling defiance at the enemy, and singing and playing on their viols. Simon de Montfort had to resort to treachery. He invited Viscount Roger to a parley, had him seized and cast into a “very strait” dungeon cell, where Roger was put to death shortly after. Fifty knights who had accompanied him were hanged; four hundred prisoners were burnt alive. The inhabitants, who had been promised their lives, were all expelled from the city, the men wearing only their breechclouts, the women in their shifts, “carrying with them nothing but their sins.” Most of them took refuge in Spain.²² A troubadour named Guillaume de Béziers, not otherwise known, escaped from the massacre and sang a planh on the death of his patron:

They have slain him, and never was so great wrong yet seen, nor so great a crime, nor a deed so iniquitous against God and Our Lord as was done by those traitors of Pilate’s sib, the recreant curs who did him dead.-

Smitten with terror, most of the neighboring towns, including Albi, opened their gates to the crusaders without resistance. The French “drive to flight all the men and women of the country and the neighboring towns who were there, all of them naked, their nature without additional cover,” reports Guillaume le Breton.²⁴

“Each step in the advance of the invading army,” says Luchaire, “was marked by a butchery.”²⁵ The ravaged countryside was turned into a desert; more than 300 towns and 200 castles were stormed or burned and all their inhabitants massacred. At Minerve, “many a caitiff heretic of evil brood was burnt and numbers of crazy female heretics, who squalled in the flames.”²⁶ At Lavaur, “there was so great a massacre,” says Guillaume de Tudèle, “that I believe it will be spoken of till the end of time.” Count Aimeric, Lord of Montreal, a generous patron of the troubadours, was hanged.²⁷ “Never was yet in Christendom so much baron and of so high estate hanged by the neck, together with so many knights at his side, for of knights alone there were more than four-score, and of the citizens as many as four hundred were burnt.”²⁸ As for the charitable Lady of the Manor, “Dame Giraude was het; she screamed and wept and squalled; they threw her down a well, and cast stones overthwart her.”²⁹

At Marmande, a town situated on the borders of Guyenne, which attempted to resist, the horrors of Béziers were renewed; “Barons and Ladies, little children and women stripped naked, were put to the sword . . . no living wight escaped.” Limbs and entrails “lay strewn about the public places as though blood and gobbets had rained from heaven.” The earth and river bank were “reddened.” The town was set on fire.³⁰ At Bram, Simon de Montfort “bote do one hundred men blind and lop their noses, save one who, the noble Dan Simon bade, should have one eye only plucked out, that he might bring the rest to Cabareth.”³¹ The crusaders fought among themselves over the booty and the women. The camp-followers carried off droves of girls, urging them on with pikes.

In the cloister of Becede, in the Lauraguais country, the deacon, who had shown indulgence to the heretics, was burnt, together with all the friars of the chapter. Pierre de Vaux-Cernai observes: “It was with great joy that our pilgrims again burnt a large number of heretics”—innumerabiles etiam haereticos peregrini nostri cum ingenti gaudio combusserunt³² The Cistercian monks drowned the shrieks of the victims, singing the hymn Vent Creator spiritus:

The troubadour, Bernard de Marjevois, sings:

Ah! Toulouse and Provence and the Land of Argence, Béziers and Carcassonne, such I but late knew you, and such do I behold you now! . . . The world is put to confusion; the bonds of law are broke; the troth of oaths is fouled. Whereso I wend me do I hear courteous men entreat of “Sire” those felon French who no pity ken saving they sight their gain. And you noble clerks, how shall ye be measured the meed that is deserving to you? Your praise surely be multiplied seeing that you have approved yourselves so excellent doctors. What noble ensamples you hold up before the people, what Christian teachings you bestow upon them! Aye! patterns of charity, and no whit covetous are you. So me God help if I speak unsooth!

Peire Cardenal, out of the anguish of his heart, exclaims:

Lies and injustice have joined battle against truth and right; and lies triumph!

On the occasion of negotiations broached by the Pope with a view to the conclusion of an alliance between the Emperor Frederick II and France, Peire Cardenal is moved to declare: “Italians, Lombards and Germans were passing fools did they accept the men of France and Picardy as allies or as masters; for these attend to nothing but to murder of innocent folk.”³⁴ Guilhem Anelier of Toulouse exclaims: “The clerks and the French have now approved themselves the villainest of all evildoers, and right it is to hate them.”³⁵ And another troubadour, who remains anonymous, proclaims: “The French and the priests wear today the crown of iniquity. And well it befits them! They are withal the most misers and traitors and despicable of this earth. They have foredone the peace of the world by their lies and their rapacity.”³⁶

The King of Aragon and the Count of Toulouse entered into negotiations with the Pope. Count Raimon, after having done penance at the Abbey of Saint-Gilles for the murder of Pierre de Castelnau, the Papal Legate, who had been killed by one of his squires, travelled to Rome and again made public amends at the Lateran Palace. A shudder of horror ran through the whole of Europe, outside France. The greatest of the German minnesingers, Walther von der Vogelweide, scourged the ferocity of the Church in his passionate lyrics and championed the cause of toleration.

Innocent III was disturbed by the general indignation and tried to curb the zeal of the crusaders. It was rumored that he was seized with fits of horror and haunted by visions of blood and accusing phantoms. But in spite of the Pope and the truce he preclaimed, Simon de Montfort prepared to march on Toulouse. The prelates promised that the great city would suffer the fate of Béziers. The Bishop of Comminges, “a man of admirable sancity,” exhorted the crusaders. “On, in the name of Jesus Christ,” he told them, “and I stand warrant that whosoever shall lose his life in this glorious war shall obtain, without pains of purgatory, an eternal reward and the martyr’s crown.”³⁷ Count Raimon, in the end, determined upon resistance; his suzerain and brother-in-law, King Pedro II of Aragon, joined him with a large army. Peire Cardenal ventured once more to hope:

Now have we in Toulouse a Count Raimon, whom God direct. . . . None, French or clerk, shall overthrow him!

The King of Aragon was killed at the battle of Muret (1213), and Simon de Montfort set siege to Toulouse. But, by a stroke of chance which was recognized as a manifestation of divine justice, he met his death at the hands of a woman, who shattered his skull with a stone hurled from the ramparts.

The young Count Raimon VII, at the head of Spanish troops, reconquered most of the regions which had been occupied by the crusaders. The latter finally left a country wasted by eight years of carnage and pillage and returned home without having achieved the main object of the crusade, which was the annexation of Provence to France. This object was attained by Blanche of Castile, who, with the assistance of Romieu de Villeneuve, the astute minister of Raimon Bérenger VI, arranged the marriage of Marguerite, the eldest daughter of the Count, to the young Louis IX, and that of Beatrice, the youngest of the four Provençal princesses, to Charles of Anjou, the King’s brother. Dante wrote:

Four daughters had Raimon Bérenger, and each became a Queen; that was the doing of Romeo . . . But the men of Provence, who railed against him, had small cause to rejoice.³⁹

Provence was annexed to France.

A feature which cannot fail to cause surprise in the reading, but which is found in the most terrible convulsions of history, is that the course of frivolous life was not entirely brought to a standstill amid horror and desolation. In the castle of Burlatz, not far from Castelnaudary, where all the inmates were massacred, the Countess Constance, wife of Raimon Bérenger and sister of the King of France, and Adelaide, Viscountess of Taillefer, held what bears all the appearance of a Court of Love.⁴⁰ In the neighborhood of Narbonne, the troubadour Raimon de Miraval, a knight of limited means, went on composing love poetry and paid visits to local lords who continued, it appears, to lead the heedless life to which they were accustomed.⁴¹ The region of Narbonne, it is true, was spared by the crusaders. Terrified by the fate of Béziers and Carcassone, the Narbonnes had entered into negotiations with Montfort and the Papal Legate and obtained that they should not be attacked, provided they delivered all the Cathars dwelling in their midst. This they did, and handed over the “good men” naked to the authorities.

The work begun by the crusaders of Arnaud of Citeaux and Simon de Montfort was completed by the Inquisition. A system of terrorism, spying and denunciation, which lasted for a century and a half, extinguished the culture and the wealth of the lands of southern France even more effectively than had the massacres and destruction. The Holy Office, instituted at the instigation of Saint Dominic and of Blanche of Castile, operated at first in a fashion at once frenzied and hesitant. The high ecclesiastical authorities, as though panic-stricken by the powers placed in their hands, tried to curb the excesses of their representatives, whose fanatical fury roused the local populations to revolt. At Albi in 1234 the Grand Inquisitor was thrown into the river, and at Toulouse in 1236 the Cistercian monks were expelled from the city.

The young Saint Louis regulated and reinforced the organization of the Holy Office by means of the statute Cu pientes and supplied it with funds out of the royal treasury. He was fond of burning off the noses and lips of any of his subjects who were guilty of having used blasphemous language, and considered that no one except a clerk should dispute with a heretic, otherwise than “with a sword, which he should plunge well into the belly, as far as it will go.”⁴² Informers were granted immunity. Confessions were wrung from the accused by torture, which was officially instituted in 1252, but had been practiced long before that date. The prisoners who were not handed over to the secular arm, the formula by which condemnation to the stake was pronounced, were immured in “very strait” dungeons. There was not enough room in the prisons; forced labor had to be enlisted to build new ones.⁴³ The saints having got the better of the “good men,” “a precocious civilization which had seemed destined to guide Europe on the paths of culture, was annihilated, and the honor of the Renaissance passed from Provence to Italy.”⁴⁴

“So greatly is the world changed that I scarcely recognize it,” sighs Bertram d’Alamanon. “Formerly I was wont to make songs and divert myself, engaging in all the occupations befitting a courtly knight, visiting renowned ladies and culling pleasures. But were I to do so to-day, I should expose myself to malevolent strictures.”⁴⁵ And Guiraut de Bornelh recalls that of yore “minstrels went from one Court to another, richly apparelled and singing the praises of the ladies, while today we are afraid to utter a word and all honour is departed.”⁴⁶ “Jongleurs are no longer in request,” laments Guilhem Anelier. “Gone are the pick of the valiant barons. Where are the Courts, the frequentation of ladies and the pleasant pastimes, the joy and the gaiety? If you have a will to company and converse you will be stingily treated and reduced to penury, for no one thinks of ought but of keeping what is left him, and anxiety about money banishes smiles from men’s faces.”⁴⁷

Bishops and Dominicans thundered against the impious frivolity of the poets and their shallow glorification of women and guilty passions, while they illustrated their own views by dragging sick women out of bed and committing them to the flames.⁴⁸ While the Familiars of the Inquisition were rooting out heresy by fire, and the Archbishop of Narbonne was hunting down the last of the fugitives in the mountains and burning them alive, two hundred at a time,⁴⁹ the Bishop of Maguelonne was admonishing the poets that they had better give up their “vain ditties.”⁵⁰ “The religious authorities regard our art as a sin and are stern judges of those who engage in it,” cries the pious Guiraut Riquier.

The Papal Legate made noble knights swear never again to compose verses.⁵² The admonitions of the monks, however, were sometimes couched in the language of the poets. The prior of Villemeir, a zealous Dominican, published a theological poem addressed to recalcitrant poets, in which the truths of the Christian religion were expounded. The enunciation of each article of faith was reinforced, in the text, by the following refrain:

If you refuse to believe this, turn your eyes to the flames in which your companions are roasting. Answer forthwith, in one word or in two; either you will burn in that fire or you will join us.

Those forcible arguments did not fail in their appeal. In the minds of the poets, inspired by holy terror, they speeded with marvelous effect the transformation in their “conception of love,” and imported to poetry a moral elevation worthy of Saint Dominic and Saint Louis. “The theory of love as a sin, which was invented by the Church, pervaded Provençal poetry,” says M. Anglade. “Poetry was denounced as a sin by the religious authorities, and underwent, accordingly, a transformation.”⁵⁴

The most ardent promoter of that reform, and the most untiring in his endeavor to raise poetry to a higher moral plane, was Guilhem Montanhagol. He had been among the first to take flight when the Inquisition was instituted, and had taken refuge in Spain. Montanhagol had even composed a sirvente against the monks and the French. But he returned sometime later to Provence and, turning his coat to conform with the exigencies of the time, applied himself to the cultivation of the refined tastes which the spectacle of burning stakes had inspired in the minds of the verse-makers. “The poet,” reports his editor, “exerted himself to reassure those who, terror-stricken by the prohibitions of the clergy, were giving up the cult of love.”⁵⁵ “Lovers,” declared the defender of this cult, “must continue to serve love, for love is no sin, but a virtue which makes the wicked good and the good better. Chastity itself is born of love and he who truly understands it can never be a bad man.”⁵⁶ This is the first instance of the use of the word “chastity” in Provençal poetry. Montanhagol develops his thesis with an inexhaustible prolixity. He says:

I mislike having to hear the morals of our day attacked by ill-disposed persons . . . He who would induce a lady to commit a sin does not truly love her, for no lover could ever desire the dishonor of her he loves. Love could never have ought in view save the honor of her who inspires it, and he who pursues any other end is false to the name of love. Lovers who prove themselves corrupt do not deserve the love of God, but the Lord will, on the other hand, bestow happiness upon those who desire only that which is good and honorable. Sooner or later they will have their reward—at any rate, they will have their guerdon in the other world.⁵⁷

The apologist of reformed love uses a dialectical device which has been much employed in our own day by social historians of morals. Like Father Lafiteau and the influential professors of social ethnology, he asserts that the principles which he upholds have been honored in all ages.⁵⁸ If they are not observed as generally at the present time as they formerly used to be, that is a result of modern corruption. “The knights of yore sought from their love no other guerdon but honour, and the ladies who inspired them by their beauty never did ought that they should not have done,” he declares. “But nowadays, honour is held in small account, and lovers are, to their shame, guided in their conduct by other principles.”⁵⁹ Despite his assurances as to the chaste ideals of the poets of former days, Montanhagol admits to the need of some revision and adaption of their style. A new treatment, if not a new conception of love is called for. “The troubadours of the period of heedlessness and frivolity,” he says, “did not exhaust their subject-matter to such an extent that we may not compose meritorious songs both virtuous and agreeable.”⁶⁰

This momentous change in literary taste was generally adopted “with the sole purpose of mollifying the severity of the clergy.” The adaption “was mainly imposed by necessity. If the love-song was to survive at all, it must conform to ecclesiastical requirements. The troubadours could not thenceforth sing of a form of love which did not have the sanction of Christian morality, and was not innocent of evil desires, and perfectly virtuous and chaste.”⁶¹

The principles governing this remarkable reform are set forth in a treatise of prodigious dimensions, containing 27,445 lines of verse, the Breviaries of Love, by Master Matfré Ermengaud. The excellence of platonic love is therein demonstrated in the scholastic manner, and is supported by quotations drawn from the troubadours. The largest amount of space is devoted to long chapters bearing the titles: “On the Baseness of Sin” and “On the Vileness of the Flesh.”⁶² In order to leave no room for doubt as to the purity of his principles, the poet abandons altogether the glorification of love and the praise of women, and sets forth on these subjects opinions of an orthodoxy which is beyond dispute. “Satan,” he says, “in his desire to make men suffer, inspires them with an idolatrous love for women. Instead of adoring their Creator, as they should, with fervent love, with all their hearts and with all the strength of their minds, they entertain guilty passions for women, whom they transform into divinities. Know therefore that whosoever adores them very certainly adores Satan and makes a god of that most false demon, Belial.”⁶³

This new conception of love received full expression in the works of the few poets who survived the ruin of their country, and in particular in the productions of Guiraut Riquier, “the last troubadour.” During a period of over twenty years he did poetic homage to Phillippa d’ Anduza, wife of the Viscount of Narbonne, celebrating her under the name of “Belh Deport.” The delicacy of the feelings expressed by the poet leaves nothing to be desired.

I deem myself richly rewarded by the inspiration I owe to the love I bear my lady, and I ask no love in return. Adorned with every excellence and every virtue, the lady whom I honour and who begets in me a love which is the deeper sith that the image of her which I carry in my heart has never been stained by an evil thought. Had she ever granted me her supreme favours, both she and I would have been defiled by the act.⁶⁴

The Provençal troubadours of the thirteenth century, who all, with the exception of Riquier, were utterly insignificant poetasters, vie with one another in displaying the modesty and renunciation of their sentiments. Their self-sacrifice is a passion. The lover makes a point of repudiating the happiness he had formerly been concerned to demand, and of disowning every intention of seeking it.⁶⁵ He declares himself sufficiently rewarded with a smile,⁶⁶ or a kind look.⁶⁷ Poets find extravagant ways of expressing the little which will bestow felicity upon them: the gift of a hair from their lady’s pelisse or of a thread from her glove fills them with rapture.⁶⁸ The wooer declares that he will be content if his lady deigns to treat him as her slave.⁶⁹ If it should be the fair one’s good pleasure to see him die, he will consider himself happy in obtaining so agreeable an issue to his martyrdom.⁷⁰

Prostrate at the feet of his lady, the lover grows more and more abject in his abasement; the flow of his tears is unremitting; the pitiless cruelty of his fair enemy waxes ever more remorseless. Conventional affectation attains new heights of incoherence; and no trope or conceit is too extravagant to serve the poet’s purpose. Their prolixity swells to a flood; what the troubadours had formerly indicated in four words is expanded into a string of stanzas. The lyrics which were limited in length, in accordance with the Arabian rule, to seven or eight strophes, now expand to long sequences of as many as a hundred stanzas.

A more fundamental change has now taken place: the verses which had been composed to be sung are now intended for reading. Canzoni, sonnets, ballads are now such in name only. Poetry and music have parted. Lyrical poetry is henceforth so-called by a figure of speech. It had entered upon a phase of complete decadence and dissolution. “Such is the final term of evolution to which, at the end of the thirteenth century, with Riquier and his contemporaries, troubadour poetry declined. In this form it became scarcely recognisable; yet but little sufficed to transform it.”⁷¹

The Italian troubadours, such as Lanfranc Cigala, Zorzi and Sordello, took their places, in the thirteenth century, among those who survived the decadence and reproduced their manner and conventions. With the zeal of neophytes, they improved upon the extravagances of their teachers. The renowned Sordello of Mantua was a friend of Montanhagol; he surpassed his master. The favor for which he implores his lady is that of granting him no favor at all.⁷² He protests: “My sense of honour being without peer, I would rather be her lover in hopeless service, than serve another who might be so indulgent as to invite me to her bed.”

Sordello’s extravagant delicacy astonished even his contemporaries; some had the bad taste to make merry over it.⁷⁴ Guilhem de Toulouse declares, in a tenson in which he engaged with the Italian poet, that he finds him incomprehensible: “You pretend to despise what everyone else desires.”

And Bertram d’Alamanon laments that his friend Sordello has taken leave of his senses.⁷⁶

The submission of troubadour poetry to ecclesiastical requirements went farther. The aim in view was now to set aside altogether its erotic aspect, and to give it an exclusively religious character. Love, which, in the songs of the poets, had turned into a personified abstraction resembling the Eros of the ancients, now came to be compared to divine love, the Holy Spirit, to God himself and to Christ. The lady in pursuit of whom the poetic passion of the troubadours had soared, became transfigured into the Holy Virgin and Queen of Heaven.

“Respect for women rises or falls in proportion to the veneration confessed for the Virgin, the mother of God,” writes a Catholic authority.⁷⁷ There is, it must be allowed, some truth in the contention. The independent character and the high social position of women in barbarous Europe were associated with an ardent adoration of the Virgin Mother. But the latter had not yet become Christian. In the versions of the barbarian tales, she appears as the fairy or enchantress who allures knights-errant, casts a spell over them and inspires them with a divine passion.⁷⁸

The cult of the Virgin, which was universal among the barbarous peoples, whether Celtic or Germanic, was at first combatted by the Church. But, as has happened with countless ancient cults and customs, the Christian Church adopted what she could not suppress. The ancient cult of the Virgin and Holy Mother was restored by being incorporated in the Christian religion. The Holy Virgin, celebrated by Saint Bernard and designated “the great goddess” by Albertus Magnus, had, by the time of the proto-Renaissance of the twelfth century, replaced the Trinity in the devotion of the masses. God the Father was terrible and unapproachable; Christ, gentle and tender as he might be, exercised the prerogative of a judge. The heavenly Queen alone was in a position to extend unalloyed compassion to sinners.

The Holy Virgin worked more miracles than the whole heavenly hierarchy and the saints put together. She had resumed the full exercise of her immemorial functions as the fountainhead of magical power. It was her privilege to interrupt the order of nature at any moment, and no occasion was too trivial to be accounted beneath her intervention. Among her prerogatives, the Holy Virgin controlled all medicinal and curative resources. A tale was told of a poor monk who found himself in the article of death owing to an ulcer of very suspicious nature, which had eaten out his nose and lips. He was “hideus et lais et comme mustres; et si a tant plaies et trus qu’il put ainsi comme une sete et cuide chascun qu’il soit etains et que l’ame s’en soit partie”—hideous and ugly and as a monster; and had so many sores and holes that he stank like a cesspool, and that each one thought he was spent and that his soul had departed from him. Having been abandoned to his fate by his fellow friars, he appealed to the Virgin on the strength of the fervent devotion which he had always shown in her service. Touched by his appeal, the Holy Lady descended in person from heaven and treated the case by applying milk from her breast to the fetid ulcers of the monk.

The divine remedy proved instantly effective, and when his brother friars came with spades to bury him, they found the patient uncommonly animated.⁷⁹

The Holy Virgin always showed a particular indulgence and compassion towards female sinners. Thus it was related that the abbess of a certain convent found herself in a state of great embarrassment, as the indications of the good understanding which existed between her and the chaplain were growing more and more manifest; she was at her wits’ end how to cope with the impending disclosure. But the Holy Virgin came to her assistance, acted as midwife and brought her to birth, quite painlessly, of a sturdy boy, whom she entrusted to the care of a holy hermit in the neighborhood.⁸⁰

In another convent the portress-nun grew weary of the monotonous life she was leading and went off to the town one fine day, after placing her keys on the altar, and entered upon a more varied and vivacious career as a daughter of pleasure. But after spending some time in this mode of life, the one-time nun began to long once more for the peace and tranquillity of her former existence. She returned to the convent, knocked at the door and asked the sister who opened it if she remembered Sister Agatha, which was the name the repentant sinner had borne in religion. The new doorkeeper replied that she remembered quite well Sister Agatha, who had been a very worthy and saintly young woman. Surprised at this answer, Sister Agatha took a closer look at the new doorkeeper and recognized the Holy Virgin, who had replaced her in order that the escapade of her protégée should not be discovered.⁸¹

The Holy Virgin also comes to the aid of wives who have deserted the conjugal bed and conceals their absence by taking their places.⁸² “We must not suppose,” says the Blessed Alphonse de Liguori, “that such prodigies are extraordinary events; they are every day occurrences.”⁸³ On the other hand, the Holy Virgin does not show the same alacrity in coming to the aid of unfaithful husbands, which she evidently could not do by adopting the same expedient. A married woman who was jealous of her husband’s mistress prayed to the Holy Virgin to avenge the wrong done to her and do her justice. But Mary answered: “Justice! Chastisement! Doest thou seek them from me? No, go to others, for I will not grant what thou asketh; for know that this sinner recites everyday a salutation in my honour, and that by whomsoever it is recited it deprives me of the power of allowing him to suffer or to be chastised for his sins.”⁸⁴

A few of the troubadours, such as Peire d’Auvergne and Folquet de Marseille, had written religious poems, but they made no mention of the Holy Virgin. Peire Cardenal was the first to compose a canticle in honor of Our Lady.⁸⁵ Immediately after the institution of the Holy Office, an unprecedented flood of those hymns made its appearance. Peire Guilhem de Luzerna, Albert de Sisteron and Peire Espanhol competed assiduously in their production. Nearly three-quarters of the poetical works of Guiraut Riquier consist of songs in honor of the Virgin.⁸⁶ The oldest examples of his work are mere paraphrases of liturgical chants and have no relation to love-poetry.⁸⁷

The troubadours of the decadence took over the formulae and conventions of erotic poetry and applied them to religious poetry by the simple expedient of substituting the name of Our Lady for that of the object of their profane passion. Guiraut Riquier went so far as to reverse this proceeding: he gives the Holy Virgin the name under which he was in the habit of celebrating the Countess of Narbonne.⁸⁸ “I formerly sang of love,” declares the superannuated poet; “but I did not know, in truth, what love was, for that which I took for love was nothing but vanity and folly. Now love constrains me to give my heart to a lady whom I shall never be able to love and honour as she deserves. May love of her fill my whole being and may I obtain from her the reward for which I hope. I am not jealous of any who may aspire to the love of her I love and I pray, on behalf of all her lovers, that the desires of each one and all may be granted.”⁸⁹

The Provençal poets who were writing at the time of the French Inquisition were only too glad to vindicate their orthodoxy at so cheap a cost. The artifice which they used permitted them to exercise their talents in the reproduction of the accepted themes and formulae, and involved little substantial modification in their diction. Nor did it demand any change in their feelings and moral outlook, for poetry had completely ceased to bear any relation to real life. The time had gone by when princely troubadours or patrons of the poets sought to seduce the imagination or to charm luxurious leisures with flights of sensual fancy. The gulf between literature and life had grown deeper than it had ever been, and love-poems, whether addressed to a lady who really existed or to the Holy Virgin, “instead of regaling with the professed recital of highly personal disclosures, contained nothing beyond abstract reflections on the subject of love, and spun a web of insubstantial inventions having no bearing of any kind on real life.”⁹⁰

It is needless to suppose that the feelings entertained by master Guiraut Riquier toward the worthy Countess of Narbonne, to whom his poetic homage continued to be addressed for over twenty years, extended farther than the tip of his goose-quill. It is not difficult in the circumstances to “spiritualize” passion. Like the “last troubadour,” the troubadours Blacatz and Foulquet de Roman went on pouring forth their laments concerning the “cruelty” of the fair ones after they had passed the ripe age of sixty.⁹¹

The poets kept one conception of love for use in their literary activities, while patterning their relations with women on quite other notions. Sordello, whose extravagance on the theme of platonic love amazed his contemporaries, was no less renowned for his adventures as a libertine. He abducted at least two married women and was in perpetual danger from the ire of incensed husbands. Bertram d’Alamanon denounces him for changing his mistress more than a hundred times.⁹² Sordello himself could put aside, when he chose, all the fine phrases he used when expounding platonic love, and turn with remarkable versatility to compositions in quite another vein. He does not fail to repeat the ancient formula of his predecessors and to declare to his lady of the moment that he will die if he does not “enjoy her graceful form.”⁹³ The stanza which follows is perhaps the most astonishing production that has ever come from the pen of an apostle of chaste and pure love: “I do not wonder,” says he, “that husbands are jealous of one so learned as I am in the arts of love, for there is no woman, how prudish soever that is able to withstand the sweet persuasive power of my appeals. Therefore do I not blame him who complains of me and is aggrieved that his wife receives me. But so long as I have my pleasure of her body, I make little reck of her spouse’s grievance and complaints.”⁹⁴

The Italian troubadours adopted the fashion instituted by the piety and prudence of their Provençal colleagues. Cigala and Zorzi proved themselves hardly less prolific than Riquier in the composition of hymns to the Holy Virgin. Every lyric poet felt he was under the obligation of supplementing his profane works by compositions of this character. As with the other formulae of poetic tradition, the fashion, once started, persisted for a long time. Pulci, in the Morgante maggiore, strews with hymns to the Holy Virgin, his parodies of the liturgy; and the “divine” Aretino interlards the obscenities of his pornographic sonnets and of his guide to the prostitutes of Venice with canticles to Our Lady.