The Friar of Carcassonne Page 5
In such an airless atmosphere of ambition and risk, there was little oxygen for scruples to thrive. In the case of Philip the Fair, the men on whom he relied—the men behind the Templar operation and the men whom Bernard Délicieux would have to win over—stopped at nothing in reaching their goals. Historians have argued whether the king was their pawn or he their puppeteer, but what is indisputable is that their record impresses through its brutal exercise of power.
In the latter part of Philip’s reign, the most prominent of the king’s men was Guillaume de Nogaret. A man of Languedoc born at midcentury, he grew up on a modest manor near St. Félix de Caraman, a notorious locale in the annals of heresy.* In 1167, some one hundred years before Guillaume’s lifetime, a well-attended conclave of Cathars had been held in St. Félix, brazenly, out in the open. The event had been unprecedented; indeed, it was never repeated. The conclave, in a strange echo of the conciliar meetings of cardinals and bishops of the Church, welcomed visiting heresiarchs from as far afield as Milan and Constantinople and lasted several days. The event at St. Félix would have been known and remembered a century later. Thus a slight whiff of heresy clung to Guillaume’s garments because of his origins; it was even rumored his grandfather had been a Cathar sympathizer. This skeleton in his closet emboldened his enemies to invoke his background when opposing him and, it has been speculated, drove him to new degrees of zeal when wielding charges of heresy and sorcery against whichever of the king’s foes he happened to be engaged in demonizing. In the mid-* 1290s he moved from his chair in jurisprudence at the university in Montpellier to the halls of Philip’s expensive new palace being built alongside St. Louis’ Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
Expensive is the operative word for Philip’s reign. Whether waging war, hiring functionaries, endowing institutions, building residences, or living in the grand style befitting the dignity of his office, the king needed money. Guillaume de Nogaret found it. Together they hatched extraordinary schemes. The crown attacked the Lombard bankers, expropriating their assets and expelling them from the kingdom. The Jews of France suffered the same fate, and although bad treatment of the Jews had been something of a Capetian specialty, particularly under the pious Louis IX, Nogaret’s outright theft of their property was audaciously bald. Another trick concerned debasing the coinage of the kingdom by reducing the amount of gold and silver it contained (Philip was called, behind his back, faux-monnayeur, “counterfeiter”). One such campaign of currency manipulation in 1306 resulted in the merchants of Paris taking to the streets to riot. The king, frightened for his life, found shelter in what was then the safest place in the kingdom: the headquarters of the Knights Templar, a castle just outside the city walls of Paris. He remained there, under their protection, until the unrest died down and the requisite number of rioters were hanged. The following year Nogaret had all of these same Templars arrested and tortured, and he moved much of their treasury out of that castle and to the Louvre. Ingrate, ruthless, Machiavellian avant la lettre—such are the traits that spring to mind when speaking of Philip’s cadre of trained lawyers. Among the general population, they were hated.
Yet much of this pales when put alongside the king’s relations with the pope. The eldest daughter of the Church had turned wanton. Christendom watched aghast, or perhaps amused, as Guillaume de Nogaret and his ilk humiliated the supreme pontiff at almost every turn. There had been prior medieval incidents pitting monarch against pope: the Investiture Contest of the eleventh century, which famously had a penitent Emperor Henry IV barefoot in the snows of Canossa; the extravagant twelfth-century penance meted out to England’s Henry II for the slaying of Thomas Becket; and various crises involving excommunications and interdicts, to which the thirteenth-century Stupor Mundi was no stranger. But Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII broke new ground in vituperation.
The conflict began, as ever, over money. Philip needed it for war against England. Like any medieval French monarch worth his salt, combating those known up until the First World War as the ennemi héréditaire came naturally. Indeed, fighting the English—or les god-dams, as they were called more jocularly at the time—could be said to form a part of a French king’s job description. One reason for this sturdy antipathy stemmed from familiarity and dynastic squabbling—royal houses and noble clans having cross-Channel ties of kinship. The greater reason, however, arose from the inconvenience of the English king’s holding a huge part of what is now southwestern France: Aquitaine, or Guyenne, and much of Gascony. Philip, in the late 1290s, tried unsuccessfully to dislodge his brother-in-law, King Edward I of England, from Aquitaine in a protracted and expensive series of battles, somewhat of a dress rehearsal of the ruinous Hundred Years’ War that was to begin four decades later. To finance the hostilities, both kings taxed the Church for revenue, to which Boniface objected strenuously by issuing blistering papal bulls. Such secular rerouting of church monies was not without precedent, but usually the monarch had the decency to ask first. Philip’s men blithely decided to impound no less than half the revenues of the French Church every year. In their view, the king was the protector of the French Church; thus it was in fact his Church.
Boniface issued more strident proclamations, which were pointedly ignored. He tried diplomacy of an unusual kind: in 1297 he had Philip’s grandfather, Louis IX, canonized as St. Louis. Philip was grateful but nonetheless extended his prohibition on the export of all gold from his kingdom, which cut into the Holy See’s annual revenues even more. Boniface howled, wrote ever more insistent and in some instances insulting bulls, one of which Philip’s men tossed into the fireplace. Unlike Dominic’s notes, it burned. Another bull, Ausculta Fili (“Give ear, my son”), was waved dismissively in the spring of 1302 before an assembly of eight hundred clerics, nobles, and burghers—delegates of the three estates—from the altar of Notre Dame in Paris. Pierre Flote, the king’s man making the presentation of the pope’s latest missive, neglected to mention that the document he held had been edited by royal lawyers to make Boniface appear even more unreasonable than he already was. In Flote’s telling, the pope claimed that the king and his people were subservient to Rome in all matters, spiritual and temporal. The assembly—the Estates General—was suitably horrified, and voted to support the king in his struggle with the pope.
Like Flote, Guillaume de Nogaret also excelled at dragging the pope’s name through the mud and exciting resentment directed at Rome. Thanks to him, intimations arose that Boniface’s predecessor, the hermit Celestine, had been murdered or that at the very least Boniface’s election had been illegitimate. The pope, Nogaret’s whispering campaign added, might even be a heretic.
By the time Nogaret had fully taken the reins of the antipapal campaign, the subject of the dispute had changed from money to another medieval predilection, jurisdiction. The conflict deepened dramatically when the king’s men took an unprecedented action: in 1301 they arrested a bishop, Bernard Saisset of Pamiers, a town near the Pyrenees. The bishop had been heard arguing that Languedoc should secede from the kingdom of France. A colorful and controversial figure, Saisset was to play an important role in the rise of Bernard Délicieux; here, on the stage of king and pope, he served as the spark setting off a conflagration that was waiting to happen.
The king had Saisset charged with high treason, heresy, simony, sorcery, fornication, and blasphemy.* If Philip was angry at the bishop, Boniface was now livid with the king. Like almost every pope of the preceding two hundred years, he was a lawyer, trained in canon law. He and his predecessors had an exacting view of the limits of temporal power over a member of the clergy. The prerogatives of the Church were guarded jealously, ferociously. If some sort of action was to be taken against Saisset, it had to be taken by a Church court. The dispute exemplified perfectly the tension between a partisan of canon law, Boniface, and an advocate of territorial, secular law, Guillaume de Nogaret. The products of two separate strains of thirteenth-century codification, a priestly lawyer and a royal lawyer, stood toe to toe.
In the late summer of 1303, an exasperated Boniface readied himself to excommunicate Philip the Fair and place his kingdom under interdict so that no religious services—masses, weddings, baptisms, funerals—could be performed there. Since their monarch would now be an excommunicate, that is, an outcast from the community of the faithful, the people of France would be freed from their allegiance to him. This was the heaviest weapon in the papal arsenal and had to be wielded advisedly. The pope retired to his residence in the hilltop town of his birth, Anagni, in the verdant Latium countryside south of Rome, to prepare the dreadful sentence against the greatest monarch in Christendom. The locale chosen to roll out this awful papal power could hardly have been more fitting: aside from Boniface himself, the town had produced three other thirteenth-century popes, including the indomitable Innocent III.*
On September 7, 1303, there came a crashing at the door. Soldiery could be heard running through the streets of Anagni. There were sounds of looting, fighting, dying. The pope’s guards were overrun, his entourage fled. Boniface, now in his eighties, prepared for the worst.
Soon standing before him were the two leaders of the commando. One was Sciarra Colonna, of the family that detested his and whose cardinals had actively tried to undermine the pope in the interests of getting one of their own on the throne of St. Peter. The other was Guillaume de Nogaret.
Faced with the Italian and the Frenchman he hated most, Boniface is said to have gestured with his hand and spat out, in the vernacular, “E le cole, e le cape!”—“Here is my neck, and here is my head.” A source states that Sciarra obliged, slapping the old man hard until restrained by Nogaret. The king’s man wanted his quarry alive, to be brought to France in chains for trial.
That was not to be, for three days later the people of Anagni rallied to the defense of their illustrious kinsman and drove the intruders from the town. The pope, severely shaken by the experience and humiliated by the theft of his worldly goods and the sack of his house, returned to Rome. Within a month the broken old man was dead.
The incident, known to history as the Outrage of Anagni, sent shock waves far and wide. That the pope—the Supreme Pontiff—could be manhandled by a band of rowdy mercenaries in the pay of the French king, in effect assassinated by them, was an unholy act worthy of infidels, not a reigning Christian monarch. Dante wrote scathingly of Philip in the Purgatorio, calling him “a new Pilate” crucifying Christ anew by attacking his vicar. Sciarra Colonna and Guillaume de Nogaret were the “two thieves” between whom Christ had been crucified. And yet this was the same Dante who despised Boniface for conspiring with his political enemies to banish him from his cherished Florence. He took care elsewhere to ensconce Boniface firmly and definitively in Hell for the crime of simony. That Dante should have felt obliged to come to the defense of the pope’s memory in this affair is indicative of the indignation it must have aroused elsewhere.
But Nogaret and Philip did not blink. Nogaret launched a seven-year-long campaign to have Boniface tried posthumously, surely one of the most egregious instances of lawyerly chutzpah in history. His campaign of continued vilification ceased at last when a council of the Church wearily consented to take up the case, only to end up dismissing it. As a sop to the royal party, the churchmen lifted Nogaret’s well-deserved excommunication.
In this overheated, tempestuous atmosphere, when a great Jubilee was called, a king denied the Church its income and its dignity, and his minister claimed the pope was a heretical criminal, a delegation arrived in 1301 before King Philip the Fair from far in the south of France. Their distant cities were in open revolt against the servants of Pope Boniface’s Church. Many of these churchmen were corrupt, unjust, and, most important, harmful to the interests of the kingdom, declared the leader of the delegation. Philip, one can easily imagine, would have started at the mention of this last offense—he might even have looked searchingly into the eyes of the speaker, a Franciscan friar of unusual oratorical gifts.
As the king’s ministers listened intently, Bernard Délicieux proclaimed that his city wanted peace. His companions seconded him. And they proposed a solution: the inquisitors had to be stopped.
* French Philippe le Bel avoids any such misunderstanding.
* Estimates range up to twenty million inhabitants.
* It was only a matter of time before later humanists exposed the Donation of Constantine, an imperial decree of Constantine’s granting the pope lands in Italy, as a medieval forgery concocted by a revenue-hungry curia.
* Its name today is St.-Félix-en-–Lauragais.
* Simony is the selling of ecclesiastical offices. The word is derived from Simon Magus, the Samaritan sorcerer who tried to bribe the apostles in Acts 8:9–24.
* The other two were Gregory IX and Alexander IV.
CHAPTER THREE
THE HOLY OFFICE
CARCASSONNE RISES ON HIGH ground overlooking the tranquil river Aude. Or, rather, the Cité does, the episcopal and royal administrative city, surrounded by tall battlements and a parade of forbidding guard towers. This is the familiar postcard image of medieval Carcassonne, the one that attracts three million sightseers every year. Although it received a fanciful makeover in the nineteenth century at the hands of architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the Cité still retains a great measure of authenticity—a grandee of the Middle Ages miraculously stopping by to spend time with us. Its mass of old stone and fortification fires the imagination of the susceptible. The motto of the city’s tourist board is “Carcassonne, un rêve qui se visite”—–Carcassonne, a dream you can visit. Few places in Languedoc inspire such intimacy with people long gone.
There is another Carcassonne. The lower town, called the Bourg, is a rather raffish mix of the modern and historic that stretches out in the flats on the left bank of the Aude, to the west of the Cité. It is laid out in a grid, having been built explicitly for defensive purposes, normally to fend off the marauding English. The grid was constructed this way, and named the Bastide St. Louis, after England’s Black Prince had destroyed the older medieval Bourg in the mid-fourteenth century. Much of the martial heritage still lives on—the modern city houses a marine infantry parachute regiment—as does the lively and long-standing commercialism in the crisscrossing of narrow streets. Although much of what he saw is now gone, Bernard Délicieux’s Bourg was Carcassonne’s beating heart, where merchant allies and other townspeople listened to his fiery sermons and took action against the hated Dominican inquisitors. Theirs, too, was a lively, raffish Bourg, and it was this part of Carcassonne, not the stately Cité standing aloof on a hilltop, that brought the authorities such grief.
To reach the Bourg from the Cité one must naturally descend. Once past the fortress of the royal governor and then the bishop’s palace and the towers that held the offices and torture chambers of the inquisition, one emerges through a western gate onto a steep grassy slope. The path downward, called Trivalle, gradually becomes lined with houses, as it may have been seven hundred years ago. The warm domestic scene at that time then suddenly gave way to the cold fist of fear.
Nearer the river, off to the left of the Trivalle, rose the hulking prison of the inquisition, constructed in the reign of Louis IX and known thereafter as the Wall. Today, it must be conjured up in the mind’s eye only, as it was long ago
torn down. In Bernard’s day, however, it loomed unmissable, halfway between the royal and priestly power of the Cité and the merchant and commercial ambition of the Bourg. In its dark stone cells rotted those convicted by secret trial and anonymous accusation. Built by a saint, maintained by the king, and staffed by black-robed friars, the Wall served as a daily reminder of the authority of Crown and Church. If they stood together, the people stood no chance. To break the hold of the inquisition, to shatter the climate of fear and betrayal, the Wall had to be attacked. Prior to the rise of Bernard Délicieux, no dissident of Carcassonne had realized that—even though its baleful presence could be seen every day from the upper stories of the Bourg’s half-timbered houses and the western gates to the town. Its presence constituted a threat; in the view of a gifted rabble-rouser, it rose as a challenge.
Aside from the town mill at the riverside and the usual huddle of huts, the no-man’s-land surrounding the Wall at the foot of the Cité contained no other structures of note.* There were, however, wells in this part of the city, which is why the hard men of the Albigensian Crusade attacked here in the hot summer of 1209, in the hope, soon realized, of making the panicked, overcrowded Cité surrender out of thirst. This, then, was the place that sealed the doom of Languedoc’s independence. The Wall, constructed a half century later, only emphasized this mournful reality.
Spanning the river is a fine medieval bridge, the Pont Vieux, which was being built during the lifetime of Brother Bernard. The tendrils of graceful willows reach down from the riverbanks to touch the gently flowing water. Ahead is the Bourg proper, on the left bank, a noisier, more populous settlement than the Cité, with its church spires and market buildings. The first great square reached—indeed, the city’s largest—stretches out barren and rectangular, its smooth granite slabs left unadorned. Its only notable vertical feature, a glass booth that reveals itself to be the top of an elevator shaft, betrays the unseen, underground parking lot below. At ground level, the flat slab of this Square Gambetta looks like an immense tabula rasa, waiting to be inscribed. On this spot there stood the Franciscan convent overseen by its prior, Bernard Délicieux.