Rome, p.26
Rome, page 26
It may be said to Innocent III’s (rather limited) credit that he did not authorize, still less organize, this atrocity. He protested against it and even excommunicated those Venetians who had facilitated it. On the other hand, he was not reluctant to see his church benefit from it. He did nothing to force the Venetians to restore their loot to the prostrate city. The matchless Greek bronze horses from Constantinople were installed on the façade of Saint Mark’s, never to return. Hundredweights of precious stones were lost to the Venetians; many of them may still, a thousand years later, be seen set in the Pala d’Oro, behind the high altar of Saint Mark’s. Gold, silver, and bejeweled reliquaries, monstrances, ciboriums, pyxes, patens, and chalices by the ton were distributed to church treasuries all over Europe but especially in Italy. The very icons were torn from the churches and broken up in thousands, burned to extract the precious metal from their gold-leaf backgrounds, which ran down into glittering puddles amid the ash. And nobody knows (though it is not hard to guess) what happened to such things as the high altar of Hagia Sophia, which beggared the descriptive powers of such crusaders as Robert de Clari, an unlettered knight dictating a memoir of the sack years after his return to France:
The master altar of the church was so rich that it was beyond price … made of gold and precious stones broken up and crushed all together, which a rich emperor had made. This table was fully fourteen feet long. Around the altar were columns of silver supporting a canopy over the altar which was made just like a church spire and it was all of solid silver and was so rich that no one could tell the money it was worth.
“Now about the size of the city,” recalled de Clari,
about the palaces and the other marvels that are there, we shall leave off telling you. For no man on earth, however long he might have lived in the city, could number them or recount them to you. And if anyone should recount to you the hundredth part of the richness and the beauty and the nobility that was found in the abbeys and the churches and in the palaces and in the city, it would seem like a lie and you would not believe it.
Neither richness, nor beauty, nor nobility could do anything to deflect the horde of ravening Frankish thugs who stripped Constantinople in the name of Jesus. The city was replete with other wonders, not of an artistic kind. It had a magical tube the size of a shepherd’s pipe hanging by the silver portal of Hagia Sophia, “of what material no man knew”; if a sick man put one end in his mouth, “it sucked out all the sickness and it made the poison run out of his mouth and it held him so fast that it made his eyes roll and turn in his head, and he could not get away until the tube had sucked all the sickness out of him.” And of course there were relics in profusion: wonder-working icons, pieces of the True Cross, the iron of the lance that pierced Jesus’ side on Calvary, the robe of our Lady, the head of John the Baptist, “and so many other rich relics that I could not recount them to you or tell you the whole truth.”
So much has been said about the importance of the Crusades as the collision of two utterly incompatible worldviews that their significance is habitually overblown. In the end, they did not make much difference to either Islam or Christianity, except as largely symbolic events.
The eleventh-to-thirteenth-century assaults of Christian forces were a peripheral affair in the Muslim world, and the Muslim counterattacks hardly menaced the stability of the Christian empire. (The later Ottoman surge against Europe, in the sixteenth century, so memorably beaten back from the walls of Vienna and repulsed by the galleys of Don John of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto, was of course quite a different matter.) Nevertheless, their memory retained enormous rhetorical power, casting the Arabs in European eyes as cruel, barbarous infidels, and the Christians in Muslim eyes as culturally bestial thugs. That is why the Islamic media, to this day, continue to refer to the American armies in Iraq as “crusaders”—not by any means the compliment that the stupider voices of American faith fancy it to be. What gets ignored in this clang and rattle of poisoned stereotypes is the immense cultural heritage shared between Islam and Christianity—though not the Christianity of the ranting American fundamentalist bigots, or the Islam of the murderous lowbrow ayatollahs. As Christians once built Chartres and Saint Peter’s, Muslims once built the Blue Mosque of Istanbul and the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the courts and gardens of the Alhambra. Their librarians preserved all that we have of classical drama and philosophy. They created in al-Andalus, the Arab name for Moorish Spain, one of the supreme cultures in world history—supreme, not least, in its tolerance for other faiths and creeds, a tolerance not shared by the anti-Semitic Catholic brutes who did the dirty work of the Reconquista for Ferdinand and Isabella.
Today, Islam’s fundamentalist descendants can invent nothing, preserve nothing, create nothing. Comparing them with the remarkable figures of their own history is like comparing some illiterate IRA kneecapper to Seamus Heaney or William Butler Yeats. And it is the same on our side, where the Christian fundamentalists have no sacred art to show, no writing of aesthetic significance, and little architecture beyond drive-in megachurches.
Next only to the Fourth Crusade, the worst of all exercises in medieval crusading took place inside Europe and was also launched by Pope Innocent III. It was directed, not against the Byzantine Church, not against Saracens and other “infidels,” but against Europeans: a heretical religious movement of the French, the Cathars, whom Innocent III and his hierarchy were determined to wipe out by all possible means, by proscription, fire, and the sword.
“Catharism” comes from the Greek root katharos, meaning pure—and the Cathars saw purification as their appointed mission in a spiritually fallen world. It was strongest in France, where the tragic and bloody dénouement of its growth and repression took place in the early thirteenth century; but at its height, Catharist “cells” grew up all over Europe, including Italy, where they survived until the early 1300s and were experienced, by Rome, as a powerful threat to Christianity itself—as cancerous, potentially, as Stalinist cells in Western democracies were seen to be by the Catholic Church and the U.S. government in the postwar years of Pius XII’s papacy.
The first reports of Catharist belief communities actually came from Cologne, in 1143. But France was the stronghold of the cult, and in particular the Languedoc, in the Midi region of southern France, with its strong sense of exception, its remoteness from the great power-center of Paris, its separate language (Provençal, close to Catalan), and its traditions of vehement pietism.
Where did the Catharist faith come from? Because nearly all its “scriptures” and holy books were destroyed, burned along with the Cathars themselves,3 it is difficult to be certain about this, but most scholars seem to agree that it was an Eastern import whose roots lay in the Balkans and the Byzantine Empire. It was related to the beliefs of the Bogomils, or “Friends of God,” who, being particularly strong in Bulgaria, were also known as the Bougres—whence our durable term of extreme disparagement “buggers.”
What did the Cathars believe? This can no more be summed up in a few sentences, or even a single book, than the theology of medieval Catholicism can. Besides, the Catholic effort to extirpate it was all too successful. After the texts were burned, only the merest traces and outlines of their content have remained.
Fundamentally, they thought in terms of a dualist universe ruled by two creative principles, one good, the other evil. The good was entirely spiritual. The evil was material, created by a demiurge whom the Cathars identified with Satan and referred to as the “King of the World,” Rex Mundi.
The world we inhabit, including our own bodies, was his product. Sexual procreation, in the Cathar view, was an act of unsurpassed cruelty, since it brought down a helpless and undeveloped soul into a world of utter imperfection.
The great object of mankind’s spiritual quest, therefore, was to escape from a hopelessly debased world of substance and material desires ruled by the Devil and his minions, and to enter a world of pure articulate Spirit, beyond desire.
This difficult evolution could hardly be achieved in a flash of insight, or even in a lifetime, although some exceptionally illuminated souls were believed to manage the latter. Generally, it required reincarnation: a second life, and perhaps a third and even a fourth, to achieve the journey toward perfection. Those who did so were known as Perfecti, and were a revered minority within the Cathar cult; they corresponded to the hierarchy of Catholicism (though the Cathars absolutely rejected the idea of priesthood), and were marked by their extreme asceticism. The majority, the rest of the Cathars, the credentes or simply “believers,” led relatively normal lives in a normal world, farming and trading, but abstaining from meat, milk, cheese, and other animal products, not swearing oaths or engaging in acts of violence.
One might have thought that such mild people presented about as much threat to society as a gaggle of vegans—whose spiritual ancestors, in a sense, they were. But that was not how Rome saw the matter.
The pope and clergy perceived the Catharist doctrine of resurrection as the rankest heresy.
Because the Cathars saw the material world as intrinsically evil, they regarded as a fraud Jesus’ coming to earth as the incarnate Son of God. If he was made flesh, he became evil; he became, or was allied with, the creator of material existence, Rex Mundi, and could not be worshipped as the God of love and peace. To the Catholic argument that he had died to redeem material creation, their response was that, by dying to redeem an evil thing, he was himself evil. (As with many structures of religious “reasoning,” once you granted the initial premises the rest made logical sense. That is why Catholic theologians came up with that very useful phrase “a mystery of faith.”)
The Catharist doctrine was the polar opposite of what Catholicism taught about Jesus’ nature and the supreme value of his sacrifice on the cross. When a Catholic learned that a Cathar despised Christ and held the crucifixion to be of no spiritual value, or that Catharism rejected all belief in Hell and Purgatory, the sacrament of the Eucharist, or the doctrine of the Trinity, he would be horrified. He would think of such ideas as literally diabolic, coming from the Devil. And Catharism’s other doctrines aroused an equal hostility. “Resurrection,” for instance, meant different things to Cathars and Catholics. To a Cathar, “resurrection” was the means whereby a soul passed from one incarnation to another, in its progress toward perfection. It was essentially the same as the Pythagorean belief in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Whereas to a Catholic it had the narrower meaning of the physical resumption of life after death, emergence from the grave, like that of Jesus or Lazarus.
There were other features of Cathar belief that Roman Catholicism found equally repugnant. In the Middle Ages, before general literacy, and hence before a widespread reliance on written contracts, the swearing of oaths was of paramount importance. But the Cathars regarded oath taking as wrong—the practice came from Rex Mundi, the Devil. They were pacifists and did not believe in war, capital punishment (a most radical departure from medieval norms), or marriage vows. Nor were they at all keen on propagating children; the enormous value placed on sacred copulation and childbirth by the Catholics was not shared by them. And they loathed Roman Catholicism, believing it to be the creation of the Rex Mundi, utterly unworthy of veneration. The cult of relics—old bits of bone, splinters of wood, and scraps of cloth with deluded pilgrims bowing before them—they rightly held to be a sham, merely another form of matter worship. The Cathars had to renounce all aspects of Rome: utterly renounce them, not merely criticize them. Rome was Babylon—hugely rich, corrupt beyond redemption. In fact, the Cathars were so different from Roman Catholics that they positively begged to be stamped out, as in Hilaire Belloc’s disillusioned little distich:
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
Roaring Bill, in this context, was none other than Pope Innocent III. With the Fourth Crusade of 1204 over, and the treasure houses and reliquaries of Venice crammed with the loot of Constantinople, Christ’s vicar on earth now turned his attention to the hapless and heretical Cathars. So determined was the Cathar resistance, spiritual rather than military, that it took the pope’s formal crusade, misnamed the Albigensian Crusade though it was not born in and did not attack Albi, twenty years to extinguish it. Yet in the end the job was done; Innocent III’s Final Solution to this particular heresy was at last achieved.
But how to raise the necessary papal armies? The Cathars may not have had the riches of Venice. Indeed, most of them had no riches at all, in terms of jewels, gold, or other palpable treasures. But they and their sympathizers in the Languedoc, including many rich nobles, did have land. Innocent III therefore let it be known, and had his preachers declare, that whoever successfully brought a Cathar to trial and thence to death would receive his lands in reward. It was a most effective strategy, because it attracted predatory, land-hungry nobles from the north. Besides, one did not need a huge army to launch an internal crusade. Medieval armies were tiny by modern standards. The pitched battles that determined the fate of whole regimes involved forces that would hardly have made dents in either side today. Ten thousand soldiers, twenty at the most, would more than do.
But the Cathars also had their share of loyal supporters. Weary of the money-grubbing and sexually debauched behavior that they saw everywhere in the upper hierarchy of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Church, many Catholics stood with the Cathars in a bond of moral superiority. The reputation of the medieval Church in Provence was low, and getting lower all the time.
The Church in the twelfth-century Midi was not entirely discredited by the behavior of its clergy, their love of luxury, their usurious money-grubbing and sexual debauchery. There were always some humble priests, honest bishops, and congregations who valued them. But the moral superiority of the Cathars to the general run of Catholic prelates was no empty claim, and knowledge of it won many converts and tolerant allies for Catharism, doing limitless damage to the Church. Innocent III heard about these doings in Languedoc, of course.
At first, the Church in Rome tried to deal with the Cathars by peaceful persuasion. In the last half of the twelfth century, various missions were dispatched to the Languedoc; all failed. The resolutions of Catholic Church councils—Tours in 1163, the Third Lateran Council in 1179—had negligible effect. The nobly born Domingo de Guzmán, the future Saint Dominic and founder of the religious order that bears his name, began a conversion drive in the Midi, declaring, “Zeal must be met by zeal, humility by humility, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching falsehood by preaching truth.” It had little success, although it was attended by at least one spectacular miracle, sometimes represented in art: locked in a debate between Cathars and orthodox Catholics, the two sides flung their books on a fire; the book of the Albigensians was burned, but Dominic’s collection of his writings was spared and floated up above the flames. The mendicant Dominicans whose passion against heresy earned them the name “Domini canes,” “hounds of the Lord” (their emblem was a black-and-white dog, duplicating the black-and-white habit of the order, and holding a flaming torch in its jaws), were frustrated by the Cathars’ stubborn adherence to their own faith. “In my country,” Dominic declared, “we have a saying, ‘Where words fail, blows will avail.’ ”
The blows soon came raining down. In 1208, Innocent III’s legate Pierre de Castelnau was sent to meet, and threaten, the most powerful ruler in the Midi, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. Believing (probably correctly) that the count was soft on Cathars and had been known to shelter them, Castelnau excommunicated him. Vengeance immediately followed: Castelnau was murdered on his way back to Rome, by one of Count Raymond’s knights. This left Innocent III no choice, or none that he could see. Exasperated, he called for a full crusade against the Cathars, and land-greedy northern-French noblemen donned their chain mail, saddled their horses, and, brandishing the red insignia of the cross so hated by Arabs and Cathars alike, flocked to the papal banner.
Thus began the Albigensian Crusade, French against French, instigated by an Italian pontiff. Of course, it was not Innocent III’s only piece of international meddling: he had received the feudal allegiances of Aragon, Bohemia, León, and Portugal, tampered with the politics of succession in Sardinia, and intervened relentlessly in English affairs, even declaring the Magna Carta invalid. Nevertheless, the crusade against the Cathars joined the Fourth Crusade as the apogee of Innocent’s political adventurism, not because he organized it—he did not—but because he gave permission for it.
The pope placed the vanquished territory under the command of a Cistercian abbot, his papal legate, Arnaud-Amaury. He began his crusade in the summer of 1209 by besieging what was supposed to be a Cathar stronghold, the town of Béziers. Béziers also had a Catholic population, who were given the option of leaving the town unharmed. Significantly, few of them did, many preferring to stay and fight alongside the Cathars. One of Arnaud’s fellow Cistercians asked his commander how he would tell a Cathar from a Catholic, and the reply became legendary: “Caedite eos, novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius:” “Kill them all, the Lord will recognize his own.” When the crusaders entered Béziers, where many had taken refuge, they killed some seven thousand people right away, and thousands more later. They were blinded, maimed, impaled, strung up as targets for archers, and dragged behind horses. The town was then gutted by fire. “Today, Your Holiness,” the Abbot Arnaud reported with obsequious satisfaction to Innocent III, “twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”
This initial slaughter was followed in 1229 by the establishment of the Inquisition throughout southern France. Overzealous thugs interrogated thousands of suspected Cathars, and those who seemed guilty were hanged or publicly burned at the stake. For almost a year, the last redoubt of the Cathars, the almost inaccessible fortress of Montségur (the name means “Safe Mountain”) was besieged by troops of the archbishop of Narbonne. It fell in March 1244, and a large massacre followed, in which more than two hundred Perfecti were incinerated on a killing field below the castle, the Prat des Cremats or “Field of the Burned.” Though this did not eliminate all the Cathar faithful, it scattered them and broke the back of resistance. The last Cathar leaders, Pierre and Jacques Autier, were executed in 1310.
