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THE newly elected Innocent III [ ] had need of all the young man's
energy, need of optimism and of confidence, to speak only of human
gifts, if he was not to sink under the task that faced him. There was
the menace of the new Moslem- influenced philosophical materialism in
the schools of Paris; the problem of the new pious anti-clericalism of
the penitential brotherhoods; the problem of the Manichee conquest of
Languedoc; the problem of the future relations between the papacy and
those unruly children of the Church the Catholic kings; the problem,
too, which this last so largely conditioned, of the Latin East; and
beyond all these the chronic task of recalling to every Catholic the
standard of faith and good living to which, as a member of Christ's
mystical body, he was called; the resumption and the completion -- if
that were possible -- of the task which had been St. Gregory VII's, of
removing all obstacles to the perfect working of God's Church as
teacher and shepherd of men. It was a task which the Cardinal Lothario
of Segni, fresh from his book On the Contempt of this World, took up
willingly, eagerly, almost joyfully.
One of the first matters to which he applied himself was the state of
things in Languedoc. Within a matter of weeks he had appointed two of
the local Cistercians as his agents, accredited to the Prince, prelates
and people. Their mission was to induce the prince to banish the
heretics and to confiscate their property as the law of 1184 directed.
Disobedience was to be punished by ecclesiastical censures, and to
encourage the Catholic effort liberal indulgences were granted. As the
year 1199 went by, with little to show in the way of success, the
powers of these monks were increased. They were named as Innocent's
legates and commissioned also to reform the lives of the local clergy.
Even so they did not make much headway against the heresy, nor do much
to change the clerical ill-living.
In 1202 the legates were changed and two other Cistercians were
appointed in their place. One of these was Peter de Castelnau; he was
bold and vigorous, and the attack at last began against the real
centres of the sect. The Archbishop of Narbonne-who was, as it were,
the primate of Languedoc -- was deposed when he refused to co-operate;
and the Bishop of Toulouse deposed also, for simony. The Bishop of
Beziers was suspended, and then the pope deprived all the bishops of
Languedoc of their jurisdiction in heresy cases. This the legates alone
could exercise henceforward, and in addition they received the power to
deprive all unworthy clergy of their benefices, the deprived being
denied all right of appeal. To add to the force of the legation the
pope now named as its chief the head of the great Cistercian
federation, the Abbot of Citeaux himself. Another Cistercian, Fulk -- a
one-time troubadour -- was appointed to the vacant see of Toulouse and
the Cistercian Bishop of Auxerre added to the band. By the year 1205 an
active anti-Catharist propaganda -- instructions, controversy, sermons
and pamphlets -- was in full swing, directed by the best disciplined
religious of the time, papal commissioners who left the wavering
Catholic no chance to doubt either his own faith or the will of the
pope to correct disorderly living among his clergy.
Nevertheless the mission made very little progress. The Count of
Toulouse still refused to co-operate, and repeatedly the legates asked
to be relieved of their task. This the pope would not hear of and then
the beginnings of a new force appeared, in the form of two Spaniards,
Diego, Bishop of Osma, and Dominic Guzman, the prior of his cathedral
chapter, sent to Languedoc by the pope when they had begged his leave
to evangelise the Tartars of the Volga.
Dominic was at this time thirty-five years of age. He came of an
impoverished family of the nobles of Castile -- a family which in his
own generation gave several saints to the Church -- and he had had the
great advantage of ten years of study in the schools of Palencia
(1184-1194) at the time when, through the intellectual enthusiasm of
Spanish clerics, the new knowledge was beginning its transformation of
the west. In 1194 he had become a canon of the chapter of Osma, and
when the bishop proposed to restore for his canons the original
community life, under the so-called rule of St. Augustine, Dominic
gladly co-operated. He was named sub-prior and five years later, on the
prior, Diego's, consecration as bishop, he succeeded him as prior. With
Diego he had been despatched by the King of Castile to negotiate a
marriage treaty with Denmark. This was in 1203, and in the following
year he was again in Denmark with his bishop to fetch home the bride.
The lady died, however, and the two Spaniards next went to Rome, to
that meeting with Innocent III which changed both their lives and a
good deal of subsequent history.
Diego suggested to the legates that, given the prestige won for the
Perfect by their austerity and given the worldliness of the clergy, the
pomp and circumstance of office with which, naturally, the legates
surrounded themselves could not but be a hindrance to their work. He
suggested that they model themselves for the future on the seventy-two
disciples sent forth by Our Lord, with neither scrip nor staff -- let
alone retinue or guards -- no money in their purse, no shoes to their
feet. To give point to the advice he himself became a Cistercian and,
with Dominic, who, however, remained a canon-regular, began to put the
ideal into practice. After some hesitation the legates followed suit.
The mission split itself into small groups of threes and fours, and,
living h apostolic fashion, began to tour the countryside and towns
preaching, instructing and -- a new feature -- holding formal
disputations with the chiefs of the heretics which sometimes ran on for
a week or ten days.
Through 1206 and 1207 the new kind of mission continued, its way of
life commended by the papal approval. Converts began to come in, and to
house those who were women Dominic made his first foundation at
Prouille, a community of women to shelter converts, living under that
rule of St. Augustine which he had himself followed for twelve years.
The Cistercians supplied the campaign with yet more abbots, after their
general chapter of 1207, and a whole body of Waldensians were
converted. These Innocent III allowed to continue their life as a kind
of religious order under their old chief Durand of Huesca, with the
name of Poor Catholics.
It was now nearly ten years since the mission first began. Despite all
the efforts the heresy still held firm, its prestige Ullshaken, and
that prestige due very largely to the complicity of the princes and
particularly to the complicity of the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI. De
Castelnau resolved on a final attempt to win or compel his
co-operation. Twice the count had sworn to assist, and now, when he
formally refused, the legate excommunicated him and laid an interdict
on his territories. Three months later (January 15, 1208) one of the
count's serjeants murdered the legate.
It was a crime that recalled the death, forty years earlier, of St.
Thomas of Canterbury. The count was generally held responsible, and the
deed drew down upon him all the Catholic energy of the time. It brought
to an end the mission of simple preaching: it was the beginning of a
regular war to punish Raymond and to root out the heresy once for all.
The Cistercians, in a specially summoned general chapter, voted all the
resources of the order for the new crusade and the pope set all his
power to organise it. The murderer was excommunicated and Raymond's own
sentence renewed. He was outlawed and deprived of all his rights as
ruler; his vassals were freed from their allegiance to him; his allies
from their treaty obligations; and the pope looked around for some
prince to whom to entrust the leadership of the expedition and the
execution of the sentence. The new heretics were declared to be more
dangerous than the Saracens, and to all who took part in the war the
same indulgences and favours were granted as to those who went out to
Palestine. Presently the forces began to gather and by June, 1209, a
huge army of two hundred thousand was ready at Lyons.
Raymond, after vainly trying to enlist support from the King of France,
and from the emperor, surrendered himself to the legates (June 18,
1209), promising to expel the heretics, giving security in seven
castles, and submitting to a public scourging in the church at St.
Gilles. A few weeks later, when the crusade had reached Valence he
joined its army. By the end of August two strongholds of the heresy had
fallen, Beziers and Carcassonne, and at Beziers the victors --
apparently as a measure of terrorism -- had massacred the garrison and
thousands of the inhabitants. The forty days for which the crusaders
were pledged to serve had now almost expired, and, content with this
preliminary success, the mass of the great army prepared to return
home. Before it dispersed, however, one of its chiefs, Simon de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester in England, a baron from the north of
France, was offered, and with some reluctance accepted, the heritage of
the heretic Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne. In the next ten years
he was from this precarious base to maintain, single-handed, the fight
against the Count of Toulouse, against his numerous dependants and,
most formidable of all, against the King of Aragon, Peter II, who as
the suzerain of these southern French fiefs could not but be interested
in their political fate.
From now on, the question of the Albigenses is mixed up with the
personal ambitions of its chiefs and political rivalries. So it comes
about that there is found fighting with Raymond, whose faith is suspect
since he will not give up the heretics, a Catholic of such undoubted
orthodoxy as Peter II. Whence, too, a new difficulty for Innocent III,
in controlling the movement he has created and in keeping it true to
its purpose, the extirpation of heresy, to which the question of the
deposition of the family of Raymond bears, so far, no necessary
relation at all. For four years the pope was besieged by the envoys of
both parties. The legates in Languedoc, and Simon, urged extreme
measures against the Count of Toulouse in whose promises, they
asserted, no faith whatever could be placed. Raymond, on the other
hand, and his ally the King of Aragon, continued solemnly to give every
pledge demanded of them. And for a long time they managed to stave off
the papal sentence.
The legates could judge better than the pope -- for all that the
atmosphere of war may have made them partisans. They demanded that
Toulouse, Raymond's capital and the centre of the whole affair, should
surrender its heretics, and they met the refusal by re-excommunicating
the count and laying all his territories under an interdict. He
appealed to Rome and the, pope lifted the interdict and, while not
confirming the sentence on Raymond, ordered that a council should meet
in three months to consider his guilt. Meanwhile the Albigenses were
steadily making good the ground they had lost. Those who had returned
to Catholicism relapsed as soon as the crusading armies marched away.
When the council met, at St. Gilles, 1210, Raymond had ignored all the
obligations to which he was sworn. He had not dismissed his
mercenaries, he still continued to patronise and favour the heretics.
He thus played into the hands of the legates, who declared him
incapable of testifying and therefore of clearing himself by oath.
Innocent, however, intervened yet once again. He sent Raymond a severe
warning of what must follow on his perversity, and once more ordered
him to co-operate in the work of extirpating the heresy. Similar
admonitions were sent to his allies the Counts of Foix and Comminges.
Three councils at the turn of the year -- Narbonne in December, 1210,
Montpellier in January, 1211, and Arles in the February following --
were to judge what they had done. This new move from Rome brought in
once more the King of Aragon. For all his engagements with Raymond he
could not afford to see these important fiefs, that commanded the
passes of the eastern Pyrenees, fall into the hands of enemies such as
vassals of the King of France would be. He therefore did his best to
reconcile all parties. He recognised de Montfort as Viscount of Beziers
and Carcassonne, he compelled his vassals to comply with the legate's
conditions. But the Count of Toulouse, although he now married the
king's sister, refused the conditions. He was thereupon
re-excommunicated, and in April, 1211, the pope confirmed the sentence.
Through the rest of that year, and through 1212, de Montfort slowly
conquered place after place. Peter II was away in the south of Spain
playing a great part in the new crusade against the Moors, and soon
Raymond was left with little else than his capital, Toulouse. The
legate now urged the pope to depose him -- to set de Montfort in his
place. This, however, Innocent would not do. Aragon's diplomacy, and
his own natural fear of the Holy War becoming a means to make the
fortune of a successful adventurer, kept the pope back. The legates
were lectured for their partisan statements and bidden to wind up the
crusade. Raymond was to be admitted to penance, and de Montfort
reminded of his duties to Peter II, his suzerain (January, 1213). It
was not until May, 1213, that the pope was convinced of the treachery
of Raymond and of the trickery of the King of Aragon. Then he cancelled
his letters of January, and ordered all concerned to submit to the
legates. Peter, the Catholic champion against Islam, with the laurels
of Las Navas de Tolosa fresh upon him, was warned that the heretics
were more dangerous than any Moslem.
But Peter had already moved, and by the time the pope was writing these
last paternal warnings, he was marching north with a huge army
destined, he had every reason to think, to wipe out de Montfort for
ever. There followed the campaign which ended on September 11, 1213,
with the incredible battle of Muret. On that day de Montfort, with a
force of some seven hundred cavalry, routed and destroyed Peter's army
-- forty thousand strong in all, three thousand horsemen -- with the
loss of only nine men killed. Peter himself was among the slain.
The whole of Raymond's dominions now fell into de Montfort's hands,
always excepting Toulouse. But Innocent still refused to do more than
recognise him as administrator of these lands until the coming General
Council (summoned for November, 1215). The nobles all submitted
unconditionally, and Raymond made over his lands to the pope.
Nevertheless, despite Innocent's endeavours, the war now reopened. This
was due to the action of the papal legate at the court of France. The
French king Philip II. called Augustus (1180-1223), had held back from
the crusade ever since its inception six years earlier. But now, having
defeated his allied enemies, England and the emperor, at Bouvines
(July, 1214), he was willing to fish for whatever prize the upheaval in
the south had to offer. In July the French cardinal who acted as legate
at his court confirmed, in council, de Montfort's title as Count of
Toulouse and renewed the crusade. A second council at Montpellier in
January, 1215, also voted Raymond's deposition and the installation of
de Montfort in his place, despite the protests of Innocent's legates
there.
The final scene was enacted in the General Council when it met in the
Lateran. The weight of evidence was too much for Innocent's hope of
compromise, and on December 15, 1215, he recognised Simon de Montfort
as Count of Toulouse. It was not, however, an unconditional
recognition. All those lands which had so far escaped the crusade were
assigned to Raymond's heir; Raymond himself was to enjoy a considerable
annuity as long as he lived; his wife's dower lands were restored to
her; and, finally, de Montfort was not created a sovereign prince. He
was to remain what Raymond had been -- the vassal of the King of
France. After seven years of stress, of bloodshed and of massacre in
which neither side had the monopoly. the first great obstacle to the
extirpation of the neo-Manichees had been surmounted. They were no
longer protected by the State. In the next stage the State would
co-operate with the Church against them. The primary agents of the
Church in that next stage were the associates of Dominic Guzman, who
about this time, 1215, begin to emerge as a new kind of religious
order.
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