The Lateran Council over, Henri de Marcy, now a cardinal,
crossed the Alps in the spring of 1181 to take up again the struggle against
heresy. He came as a papal legate, the first in history to raise and lead an
army on a military expedition in a Christian territory. Henri had taken his
vows at Clairvaux in 1156, three years after the death of Bernard, became abbot
of one of its important daughter houses (Hautecombe in the Savoy) only four
years later and returned to Clairvaux as abbot in 1176. What he had seen in
1178 in Toulouse – to him ‘the mother of heresy and the fountain-head of error’
– gave substance to the nightmare that he had inherited from Bernard of ‘the
order of heretics, an army of apostates, irreverently reviling the troops of
the living God, impiously presuming to blaspheme against the majesty of the
Lord’. Henri had been influential in preparing the Lateran decree against
heresy, and he and his successors continued to regard the campaign against it
in this region as a special responsibility, and popes to entrust them with it.
In consequence the Cistercians largely moulded both the church’s perception of
the nature of heresy in the region at the end of the twelfth century and,
through their letters and reports, modern understandings of it.
The mission of 1178 had been dispatched in response to an
appeal for help from Raymond V of Toulouse against those whom he called
heretics and their patrons. His real target was a political alliance formed
against him after his occupation of Narbonne the previous year. The war that he
had triggered by this action had raged intermittently ever since, and would
continue until the mid-1190s. It was conducted by mercenary soldiers employed
on all sides:
the Brabanters, Aragonese, Navarrese, Basques, Cotereaux and
Triaverdins, who practise such cruelty upon Christians that they respect
neither churches nor monasteries, and spare neither widows, orphans, old or
young nor any age or sex, but like pagans destroy and lay everything waste.
Thus Lateran III had condemned these mercenaries in the same
canon as the heretics and imposed the same penalties on ‘those who hire, keep
or support them’. According to Stephen of Tournai, travelling through the
region on his way to meet the papal legate, ‘we see nothing but the burned
villages and ruined houses; we find no refuge; all threatens our safety and
lays ambush for our lives.’ Afterwards he remembered how ‘passing there not
long ago I saw the terrible fiery image of death, churches half destroyed, holy
places in ashes, their foundations dug up. The houses of men had become the
dwellings of beasts.’
The misery and devastation that Stephen witnessed were real
and his horror genuine, but by this time the armies of every king and prince in
Europe were made up of mercenaries like these. Armies were no longer composed,
if they ever had been, of gallant knights giving loyal service to their lords.
What Stephen saw and the council had condemned was not a new evil but the sight
of familiar forces out of what they regarded as proper control, compounding the
miseries of the countless petty wars and feuds endemic in a deeply fragmented society,
too many of whose young men had nothing to lose but their ‘honour’.
Cardinal Henri’s army laid siege to Lavaur, a stronghold of
Vicomte Roger Trencavel of Béziers currently under the command of his wife,
Adelaide. Roger immediately agreed to stop protecting heretics and made a start
by handing over Bernard Raymond and Raymond de Baimac, who had taken refuge in
Lavaur after their encounter with Peter of St Chrysogonus in Toulouse in 1178.
Brought before a council of the church at Le Puy, they were so moved by the
eloquence of Henri de Marcy (he recounted) that they broke down, undertook to
reveal the secrets of their sect and were allowed to return to Toulouse as
canons respectively of St Etienne and St Sernin. Both were reported still to be
leading praiseworthily religious lives in those positions six or seven years
later; Bernard Raymond witnessed several acts of the chapter of St Etienne
between 1184 and 1197.
These events, including the confession, were described by
Henri de Marcy in a letter now lost but used by the Limousin chronicler
Geoffrey of Vigeois, who died in 1184, and another Cistercian abbot, Geoffrey
of Auxerre, three or four years later. The account of Geoffrey of Vigeois
contains two important novelties. He was the first to describe the heretics as
Albigensians, meaning specifically heretics living in the area of Albi. After
the Albigensian Crusade was launched in 1209, this became the name commonly
used by northerners for all adherents of the (supposedly) dualist heresy against
whose protectors it was directed, and by historians until the term ‘Cathar’
came into vogue in the second half of the twentieth century.
Geoffrey of Vigeois’s report of the confession itself is
more sensational. Having described the heresy which the two converts recanted
at Le Puy as rejecting, predictably enough, the teaching of the Roman church on
the sacrifice of the Mass, the baptism of infants, marriage and the other
sacraments, he quotes them as saying that it taught that
Satan, the Great Lucifer, who because of his pride and
wickedness had fallen from the throne of the good angels, is the creator of
heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, and of the evil spirits.
It was he who had given the law of Moses. Christ had only the appearance of
humanity; he did not experience hunger, thirst or other bodily needs; he did
not undergo the passion, was not crucified, did not die and has not risen
again. Everything claimed by the Gospels and the apostles is fantasy.
Raymond and Bernard also claimed that the heretics indulged
in sexual orgies and justified abortion and infanticide on the ground that
giving life was the work of the devil. For good measure Geoffrey of Vigeois
throws in the story that the wife of a local noble who had left her husband to
join the heretics was initiated by being vigorously debauched by fifty of their
senior members. Geoffrey of Auxerre adds that, according to Bernard and
Raymond, the heretics dismissed infant baptism as valueless because adults must
undergo their own ritual imposition of hands from their elect, and that they
attacked alms to churches and condemned prayers for the dead as a mercenary
racket invented by clerks.
Thus far Bernard and Raymond had reiterated for the most
part a familiar combination of anticlerical and anti-ecclesiastical sentiments
deriving from literally understood biblical precepts whose implications were
exaggerated either by the heretics themselves or their accusers. It was
embellished by the routine monastic invective that Henri de Marcy had used to
describe the Toulouse he entered in 1178, in which every form of pollution,
from heresy to leprosy, sodomy and bestiality, was merged into a single
diabolically inspired menace to the divine and social order.
In its vivid and explicit description of Satan as the
creator of the earth and the giver of the law of Moses, on the other hand, the
confession made a major contribution to the emerging account of the heresy as
not merely another set of doctrinal errors springing from apostolic enthusiasm
and anticlericalism but a counter-church with its own ritual and hierarchy and
a theology and mythology based on the belief in two principles. That such a
counter-church indeed existed in the lands between the Rhône and the Garonne
has often been inferred, with varying plausibility, from some of the earlier
accusations discussed in this book. It is here asserted directly and explicitly
for the first time. It became henceforth the model for Cistercian accounts of
the Albigensian heresy and was eventually taken up by the inquisitors of the
thirteenth century. But it is not clear where it came from. It is possible that
as repentant heretics Raymond and Bernard were simply reporting what they knew
from experience to be true, but it is also possible that they hoped to win
pardon and favour (as, in fact, they did) by confirming the expectations of
their interrogators. If so, they would have been neither the first nor the last
converts to do so.
It was not the tradition of Bernard of Clairvaux, whose
interest was in the moral and sacramental consequences of heresy rather than
its theological basis, that led Henri de Marcy to look for dualism. Nor are the
rumours of dualist preaching in Toulouse before 1178 substantiated by the
accounts of the mission of that year, though they had been reported, as
rumours, by Peter of St Chrysogonus. It would have been in Peter’s retinue,
rather than that of Henri de Marcy, that we would expect to find clerks from
the Paris schools, where rebuttal of the ‘Manichaean’ heresy, based on the descriptions
of it by St Augustine and other early fathers of the church, was by now a
routine academic exercise. Be that as it may, it looks as though it was from
the mission in 1178, though not directly from his own experience or observation
during it, that Henri de Marcy learned to anticipate the abomination that in
1181 he confirmed to his own satisfaction and fed into a regular place in the
rhetoric of his order.
