The Friar of Carcassonne Read online

  News of the inquisitor’s announcement rocketed up the Franciscan hierarchy. Alarmed provincial leaders huddled in meetings, trying to decide what action to take. The accusation was as serious as could be made: the convent at Carcassonne stood charged, implicitly for the moment, with encouraging heresy. According to the taxonomy established at Tarragona sixty years earlier, the brothers were favorers, perhaps even supporters, of Catharism. They could be locked up in the Wall. No doubt the Dominican leadership was rubbing its hands in glee at the discomfiture into which the Franciscans had been thrown.

  Time was of the essence. The Franciscan hierarchy decided to appeal directly to the inquisitor, however unusual or unprecedented that might be. When the inquisitor, as an administrator of God’s justice, delivered his sentence, it was taken as a matter of faith to be just and deserved. Appeals were rare (partly because defending a heretic cast a cloud of suspicion on the defender), but an appeal to Nicolas d’Abbeville and his colleague Foulques de Saint-Georges had to be made; some face-saving compromise had to be reached, to avert the grievous harm the Friars Minor faced. Two men were designated by the Franciscan leadership to engage with the Dominicans. From Carcassonne word then came from the brothers that a third man was needed—the prior of the convent, Bernard Délicieux.

  On July 4, 1300, the three Franciscans crossed the Aude and made their way up the Trivalle and through the gate of the Cité to the house of the inquisitor. They came unannounced but not unprepared—Bernard had seen to that. They were eventually ushered inside, a tactical error by the Dominicans. The inquisitors were under no obligation to receive the Franciscans, either cordially or frostily, but once they were confronted with Délicieux and his confrères, an official proceeding can be said to have begun. Certainly that was the light in which Bernard chose to cast it. Thus on the basis of this meeting, an appeal, a transcript of the discussion and further explanations in writing, could be required.

  Bernard began to lay out his case. Foulques must have strained to keep his cool in the presence of the man who had jeered at him the previous winter. Bernard likely reasoned that to arrive at a conviction of Castel Fabre his beloved Dominican brethren had used Registers X and XI, compiled some years earlier by Jean Galand, inquisitor at Carcassonne. If Délicieux did mention these documents in the discussion, the color would have drained from the faces of his Dominican listeners, for much of the agitation of the past fifteen years had cited the registers as a cause of grievance.

  Nicolas d’Abbeville cut him off and told the Franciscans they were not welcome and that they had no business being there. He quit the room abruptly, leaving the friars to be evicted from the premises by Foulques. This rudeness was, significantly, grounds for appeal—the irregular termination of the meeting needed to be explained, the proprieties of procedure respected.

  The Franciscans returned to their convent and conferred with their fellow friars. No doubt sympathetic lawyers were summoned from the Bourg for advice. Some time toward day’s end, Bernard and his companions left the lower town and made their way back up to the Cité. They knocked on the door of the Holy Office. It swung open and Foulques de Saint-Georges stood before them. They asked him for a transcript of their interview with the inquisitors earlier in the day. Foulques informed them that no such document would be drawn up and that they would not be allowed inside again. He shut the door in their faces.

  The next step required the writing of a formal, notarized appeal regarding the inquisitor’s actions at the meeting and the charges against Castel Fabre. A duly empowered notary was fetched from another town. No such official in Carcassonne had sufficient backbone to brave the ire of the inquisitor. Bernard dictated, scribes transcribed, the notary awaited with his seal. Copies were made for distribution.

  Bernard Délicieux stated what had been whispered for years: Registers X and XI contained outright fabrications. The registers, the appeal argued, had been used and abused thoroughly, to cow the poor people of Carcassonne and its countryside into submission and to imprison and torment the innocent. Even for one as headstrong as Bernard, this was a stunning accusation to make in public, given the aura of menace surrounding the Holy Office.

  In the case of the late Castel Fabre, the appeal maintained that the two men alleged to have hereticated him, Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès, never existed. They were men without a past, a trade, a residence, having left no trace of their passage. They had been invented by the inquisition to bring down Christian men and women with concocted tales of mysterious Good Men moving wraith-like through the vineyards to spread the sickness of heresy. If they had ever, or still, existed, Bernard demanded the inquisitors show proof.

  At his trial two decades later, Bernard repeated the charges to the closed faces of the judges in front of him. Two former supporters, called as hostile witnesses, remembered Bernard saying at the time of the Castel Fabre incident that the inquisition always found those who adored the heretics and never the heretics who had been adored. Clearly, the Franciscan believed that the registers contained a mountain of lies.

  The appeal was completed after a few days of work, and Bernard and his entourage trooped back up to the Cité and knocked on the inquisitors’ door. This time there was no answer. That had been foreseen, for a hammer was produced and Bernard Délicieux, like Martin Luther two centuries later, nailed his appeal to the door. He then addressed the crowd that had gathered, at last using his tremendous gifts of oratory in the service of a wider cause. The problem, Bernard told his listeners, was no longer just the scandalous prosecution of Castel Fabre, but the scandalous abuse of power by the Dominicans of Carcassonne.

  The inquisitor’s masterstroke had turned out to be a blunder. Now everyone in the Cité and the Bourg, from the seneschal on down, had reason to suspect the inquisition. Bravery of the type displayed by Délicieux was unlikely to have been spurred by insincerity or frivolous gamesmanship, and it would resonate as far as Paris and Rome.

  The Franciscans returned to their residence in the Bourg, leaving their appeal to flutter in the hot summer wind. There was a reason no one had answered the door—the inquisitors had fled town and taken the registers with them, suggesting that Brother Bernard was not alone in doubting the veracity of their leather-bound compilation of accusation. The case of Castel Fabre was dropped.

  1301

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE BISHOP OF PAMIERS

  THE NEW YEAR DAWNED QUIET in the south of France. In Albi, Bishop Bernard de Castanet reaped the rich harvest of property from those he had so speedily condemned to life imprisonment. Having returned to Carcassonne some time after the Castel Fabre debacle, the inquisitors kept a low profile. They absented themselves frequently, no doubt consulting with their enviably untroubled colleagues in Toulouse and, according to Bernard at his trial, laboriously recopying and “fixing” the registers that had cast a pall of suspicion over them.

  They could not very well excommunicate the town again, for two reasons. The first arose from the accord of 1299. The leadership of the Bourg had lived up to the letter, if not the spirit, of its conditions: the new Dominican chapel had been built and the consuls, as promised, had not stood in the way of the arrest of the prominent citizens mentioned in the document. Bernard Délicieux had stood in the way, but that was not the fault of the consuls—and nowhere in the agreement did it say they had to help make these arrests. Second, at this delicate juncture the Dominicans charged with the inquisition at Carcassonne could not invite further attention to their procedures. Taking the drastic measure of excommunicating the town would have occasioned investigations and outside interference in the workings of the inquisition.

  For the moment, the Holy Office at Carcassonne was toothless, unable to do much. The city could breathe again. However welcome the lull, Bernard Délicieux was not satisfied. He had only to leave the confines of his convent and look east over the Aude. The Wall still stood. The wretches within still suffered, including the twenty-five unfortunates of Albi. And at any momen
t, given shifting winds of royal or papal favor, the Dominican machinery could start up again, unleashing the dread repression so at variance with his view of a Christian society. He had stalled the inquisition, not stopped it. For that he would need allies far more powerful than the people of the Bourg.

  The diocese of Pamiers, close to the towering Pyrenees, had been carved out of the diocese of Toulouse in 1295. That administrative change and consequent loss of revenue to his see would have angered Toulouse’s bishop, who may have had a hand in spreading rumors about the new diocese’s first bishop, Bernard Saisset. Whatever their provenance, the stories about Saisset provoked consternation and, in some quarters, hilarity. Famously, Bishop Bernard is reputed to have said that while King Philip the Fair was “more handsome than any man in the world . . . [he] knew nothing, except to stare at men like an owl, which, though beautiful to look at, is an otherwise useless bird.” In addition to delivering this memorable put-down, which implied that the king was a pretty boy exploited by his corrupt ministers, the bishop also characterized the monarch as a bastard, a counterfeiter, and a statue.

  All of this, however wounding, might have been taken as the harmless raillery of an old crank in his cups had not the bishop also ventured into political critique. As a scion of a proud Languedoc family, Bernard Saisset clearly resented the presence of the French in his homeland and volubly shared his low opinion of them with others. Of his enemy the bishop of Toulouse, a Parisian and thus automatically the target for withering scorn, Saisset said that he was “useless to the Church and to the country, because he was of a language that was always an enemy to that of our ancestors, and that the people of the country hate him because of that language.”

  While inflammatory, such words were not that unusual in Languedoc, even well into the twentieth century. Where Saisset departed from the norm was in openly hectoring the local lords of his region to ally with the Kingdom of Aragon and secede from France. This was treason. Many of the other customary medieval accusations of moral turpitude—heresy, simony, sorcery, fornication, and blasphemy—came to be leveled at Saisset, but there can be no doubt that his talk of secession was what first caused the king to sit up and take note.

  In 1301, Philip ordered two of his loyal servants, Jean de Picquigny and Richard Leneveu, to go to the south and investigate the matter. They were appointed as enquêteurs-réformateurs, posts that gave them authority greater than the seneschal’s. Leneveu was an important prelate of Normandy; Picquigny, a nobleman and experienced royal magistrate (vidame) from the great Picard center of Amiens. These men, viceroys in a sense, were precisely the type of grandee Bernard Délicieux had to meet in order to amplify his campaign against the inquisition. Bernard Saisset’s troublemaking had given the mischief-maker of Carcassonne the opening he needed.

  The post held by Picquigny and Leneveu was a Capetian innovation, having originated during the reign of the saintly and punctilious Louis IX. The first enquêteurs had been Franciscan friars. They had shaped the office and its duties—making sure the prerogatives of the king remained free from encroachment, seeking the cause of complaints from his subjects and working to redress them, and ensuring that the king’s agents in the provinces were fulfilling their duties in an appropriate manner. Given such sweeping powers, the opportunity for all kinds of personal treasure hunting was boundless; fortunately for Philip, and for the people of the south, the pair he sent to Languedoc in 1301 seems to have been irreproachable.

  By the middle of that year, Picquigny and Leneveu had found ample grounds to charge Saisset with high treason. They ordered him arrested and, in exercising secular authority over a man of the Church, set off the tremendous struggle between king and pope that culminated in the Outrage of Anagni. While adding further piquancy to the relation between Crown and Church that forms a backdrop to Délicieux’s agitation, the fate of Saisset matters less than the acquaintances made by the men sent to investigate him. For Leneveu and Picquigny took up with dangerous company.

  Leneveu, the Norman priest, hovered in the wings of the drama told two decades later at Délicieux’s trial, whereas Picquigny played a role front and center. Multiple testimonies speak with one voice: the great magistrate from Amiens fell under the spell of the friar of Carcassonne. Starting in the summer of 1301, Picquigny sought Bernard’s counsel on all of his major decisions. As he was a man of the world accustomed to wielding authority, his allegiance to the friar bespeaks the force of character Bernard Délicieux possessed. To have won over such a great man, the friar had to have been a formidable presence, and not just when he mounted the pulpit. His was a personality that impressed the great and the small alike and inspired affection and admiration, as is abundantly clear from the course of his career.

  Picquigny’s principal character trait seems to have been loyalty. He would stick with Délicieux throughout the turbulent years to come, but, above all else, he was a truly faithful courtier of King Philip’s, keenly interested in keeping Languedoc equally faithful to their monarch. Men of the south, he had seen in the matter of Bernard Saisset, harbored no great love for the men of the north. To keep the kingdom united, prosperous, and loyal, the people of the Midi had to know that the king’s justice was impartial and fair.

  This was an echo of the argument Bernard Délicieux would advance repeatedly to Picquigny against the Dominican inquisitors: they were untrustworthy, they abused their power, they had to be replaced—but, most important, they were endangering the Kingdom of France. The people of the south, Bernard argued, were deeply unhappy, primed for revolt at any moment, because of the depredations of the inquisition and the king’s acquiescence in its excesses. Whether Bernard cared a whit about the Kingdom of France is highly doubtful, given his subsequent actions, but he recognized in this argument a cogent and persuasive tool to shift the great power of the north to his side.

  He first traveled to meet Picquigny and Leneveu in Toulouse some time in early 1301, accompanied by the wives of the men of Albi who had recently been condemned to the Wall. Bernard would have other occasions to bring these lonely women along with him, in an effort to soften hearts and appeal, perhaps, to the dying embers of chivalry. The women, for their part, shared the enthusiasm of their kinfolk on the arrival of this providential man. His success at knocking the inquisitors off stride in Carcassonne had been noticed by aggrieved parties throughout Languedoc. The people of Albi and such towns as Cordes and Castres raised money for Bernard to keep up the fight and to agitate on their behalf. Neither the riot at the convent nor his deft defusing of the Castel Fabre bombshell would have inspired distant burghers to open their purses for him. Rather, they took heart in hearing that the inquisitors at Carcassonne had been intimidated into making themselves scarce and, more important, that Bernard Délicieux had the ear of the most important royal officials in Languedoc.

  After their initial meeting, Délicieux consulted frequently with Picquigny and Leneveu in Carcassonne, in a townhouse of the Bourg. The dwelling still belonged to Raimond Costa, the agitator of the 1280s who had escaped imprisonment and set himself up as the untouchable bishop of Elne, in the Kingdom of Majorca. Thus, from across the Corbières mountains, then the frontier of Capetian France, this rather peculiar bishop continued to lend a hand to the foes of the inquisition.

  The persuasive Bernard laid out his case forcefully to his two powerful auditors from the north. The prisoners from Albi deserved justice from their king. They had been left to rot in the Wall, just as their deceased kinsmen had been left to rot in the trees of the lands that they had refused to hand over to an avaricious tormentor. Bishop Castanet was a wicked, amoral prelate, his lordship of Albi inimical to the interests of the king, his brazen conflict with the royal agents there a vivid reminder to the townsmen that their true lord lived impossibly far away, in Paris, unaware of their troubles. Bernard would not have complained, however, of Castanet’s liberal recourse to torture, as the men seated in front of him had no qualms about its use. In the investigation of the Sais
set matter, Picquigny and Leveneu had given free rein to the torturer—one of their recalcitrant witnesses emerged from the dungeon to testify with both arms irredeemably broken.

  In Carcassonne, Bernard argued, matters were no better than at Albi. Thanks to years of merciless persecution, a sullen cloud of suspicion lowered over the town like a thunderhead ready to unleash its fury. People feared each other; factions thrived; the townsmen were at each other’s throats. All knew that, guilty or not, they could one day be taken from their families and immured in the prison. Though no one had seen the infamous registers, many knew some of their contents, having heard family, friends, and neighbors tell of their testimony before the inquisitors. Then, at the well and the washhouse, in the fields and taverns, there was gossip, always gossip, all the more urgent and contagious since life and livelihood might depend on it.

  Bernard would have detailed the objections he had nailed to the inquisitors’ door. Their registers overflowed with falsehoods, for heretics did not betray each other—they betrayed the innocent. On leaving the Wall, destitute and penniless, they were repaid for their false testimony by the heretical people they had shielded. Unscrupulous people got even with their enemies. Merchants named competitors. As for Registers X and XI, they were works of the imagination dreamed up by two inquisition clerks in the interest of enriching themselves through extortion. They had come up with two make-believe Good Men to bolster their shameful lies. No one had seen Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès; no one could say anything substantial about them. Their names were so common in the Languedoc as to be meaningless. Indeed, Délicieux, Picquigny, and Leneveu were meeting in the house of one Raimond Costa.