CHAPTER II.

LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.

I have chosen to call the district in question “Languedoc” because

the literature which was the mark of its distinctive culture was

written in the “langue d’Oc” (in contra-distinction to the North

French langue d’Oïl which later became the master idiom), and

because the actual fighting to be described in the fourth chapter

took place within (or just outside) the territories later known as

the Province of Languedoc under the French monarchy, until the old

administrative divisions were wiped out by the Revolution. I have

rejected the various more definite names given by recent historians

to the heretical movement in question because the word “Albigenses”

is in general usage, and because I believe that general usage ought

not to be lightly disturbed by the preciosity of individual scholars

careless of the bewilderment of the non-specialist reader.

First, then, of the general physical characteristics of the

country with which we are concerned. The southern half of France

is definitely bounded by great mountain chains. The Alps separate

it from Italy, the Pyrenees from Spain. It is true that there is a

little room for doubt in the Roussillon and around Nice where the

Pyrenees and the Alps respectively approach the Mediterranean Sea,

but, on the whole, the natural boundaries are quite clear, and modern

France in establishing them has resumed the natural frontiers of

ancient Gaul, one of those major divisions of Europe that go back

beyond recorded history. This southern part of France, besides the

mountains which limit it, contains within itself a lesser mountain

mass central to itself, the Cévennes. It contains two principal river

basins, on the east that of the Rhône, which flows almost due south

to the Mediterranean, draining the country between the Cévennes

and the Alps; on the west that of the Garonne, which flows in a

general direction north-west to the Atlantic, draining the country

between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees. It contains also a curved

strip of coastal plain from the mouths of the Rhône west and south

to the eastern Pyrenees, and between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees

a region of moderate uplands, broken by a single notch, so low that

the highest point of its watershed between the Atlantic and the

Mediterranean lies below the 200-metre line.

With the upper basin of the Rhône this study has little to do. The

lower Rhône country enters into our story, although not as the main

theatre in which its events took place. We are mainly concerned

with the upper Garonne basin, the strip of Mediterranean coastal

plain curving from the lower Rhône to the Pyrenees, the mountain

slopes which border upon these two regions and the passage, or gap,

of Carcassonne which connects them. For in that space (roughly of

a hundred by a little over a hundred and fifty English miles) was

decided the failure of the first attempt to break the moral unity of

mediæval Christendom. And in that struggle the Inquisition for the

first time definitely appears.

Even this small stretch of country presents great differences of

climate and of appearance.

The landscape of the coastal plain between the Rhône and the Pyrenees

is of the typical Mediterranean sort which hardly changes all around

the inland sea. The sea itself is intensely blue and the boats upon

it are rigged with slim lateen sails pointed like sharks’ fins.

Within sight of the sea are mountains, great stark masses of rock

like the bare bones of the world. No forests, but between the sea and

the mountains extends a strip of land systematically cultivated down

to its last square inch, showing everywhere the vine and the olive,

and built up in terraces wherever there is a slope. This strip of

land is always narrow—from the town of Beziers, for instance, both

mountains and sea are full in sight. When rain falls it comes down

fiercely as it does in America, unlike the gentle misty rains of

England and Northern France. Usually the air is so clear that all

outlines come out sharp and strong—one thinks of the trenchant Latin

phrase and the fixed lines of classic columns. The sun is dazzling

and powerful, and the roads are full of white dust. The houses are

of stone, flat topped or nearly so, and generally roofed in red tile.

The people, as befits the heirs of an immemorial and still vigorous

civilization, are loud-voiced, vivacious in gesture, ceremonious in

compliment, and both easy and dignified in repose.

Westward from Narbonne, a sharply defined valley, deep and regular

like a vast trench, seems to open a path toward the Atlantic. A man

going east or west is held to this valley; to leave it is to be

caught in the deep irregular gorges of the Montagne Noire (which is

the southernmost outlier of the Cévennes) to the north of the valley,

or in the equally hopeless gorges of the Corbières (which are the

north-eastern outliers of the Pyrenees) to the south of it.

This valley culminates in what may be called the gap of Carcassonne,

for in the neighbourhood of that town it is deepest and most clearly

marked, although the actual water parting between the Atlantic and

the Mediterranean is somewhat to the west.

The Montagne Noire, the northern limit of the gap, is well named, for

it is all of dark slatey rock. The Corbières, on the contrary, are

of white limestone, and a man standing a little way above the valley

floor can see behind them the snow peaks of the high Pyrenees.

To the west of Carcassonne the hills are lower but the gap continues

none the less, with Montreal and Fanjeaux, each on an outstanding

buttress of hill, for sentinels upon its southern side. Of these

two Montreal stands out against the horizon as one looks west from

Carcassonne, and in turn hides Carcassonne as one looks east from the

height of Fanjeaux. West from Fanjeaux the hills become mere downs,

and the landscape quite loses its Mediterranean look and becomes that

of the Toulousain.

About Carcassonne itself the landscape is of an intermediate sort

between the Mediterranean and the Toulousain. Between the bare hills

one still sees the olive, but more rarely than on the Mediterranean

side, and (as in the Toulousain) grain fields begin to alternate with

the vine.

The Toulousain, although it is altogether of the south, is a

different sort of country from the Mediterranean slope. In the first

place it is not a mere strip of land between sea and mountains, but

a broad, fan-shaped arrangement of valleys running together in the

general neighbourhood of Toulouse, and separated only by ridges or

downs regular in outline and no great height. As on the Mediterranean

side the ground is minutely and intensely cultivated; still one sees

more trees and shrubs growing freely, although by no means as many

as in Northern and Central France. The type of cultivation, too,

is different. One no longer sees the olive, and the vineyards are

outnumbered by grain fields. Furthermore, it is not the valleys alone

that are cultivated, the flat or gently rolling summits of the downs

are worked as well.

Although the people are the same, their houses are different from

those of the Mediterranean in that their material is brick. Indeed,

one sees no masses of rock in the Toulousain, and the bits of stone

in the larger buildings are brought from outside the district.

In spite of these physical differences in their country, the men of

the three regions have a distinctive character of their own. The

north Frenchman will tell you that they are noisy and boastful, fond

of jewellery and all sorts of display, better suited to politics than

to soldiering. And yet both Joffre and Foch are from the Pyrenees.

Certainly the Southern Frenchman’s skin is darker and his speech is

not quite the same as that of the Northerner; it is nearer to the old

Latin speech in that Gascon and Provençal alike have followed the

Italians and Spaniards in keeping the grand broad vowels that make

the southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. In the early Middle

Ages this tongue of theirs, the langue d’oc, was spoken as far north

as Geneva on the east and Poitou on the west (the first troubadour

that we know was Count of Poitiers, not far from the central Loire),

but the royal province afterwards called Languedoc was much smaller,

and included, roughly, only the land already marked off as the

theatre of the Albigensian war.

Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded

history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the

Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city

states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and

intense local patriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean

became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so

for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts

but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to

make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing.

The schoolboy remembers how throughout the Commentaries there is

continually talk of calling drafts for the cavalry from “Tolosa

et Narbone.” This country came to be called “The Province,” _par

excellence_; the name survives in the modern word “Provence.”

Incidentally it is interesting to note that “Provincia” was not

confined to the Mediterranean lands. Scarcely had the Romans occupied

these than they went forward, over the gap of Carcassonne, the saddle

between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees, where the railway and the

canal go to-day. They took the upper Garonne country, then as now

centreing about Toulouse as its chief town, and connected it for

administration with the Mediterranean coastal plain from the Rhône to

the Pyrenees.

This arrangement, after enduring for five hundred years under the

Romans, reappears in the Dark Ages under the Counts of Toulouse,

and, first under them and later under the Kings of France, lasts for

eight hundred years more. It is astonishing to see how closely the

Roman administrative division called “Narbonensis Prima” of B.C. 100

corresponds with the province of Languedoc of the French monarchy of

A.D. 1790.

Everywhere she went Rome stamped upon the land its permanent

form. But nowhere, outside of Italy itself, does she seem to have

“Romanized” more thoroughly than in “Provincia.” To this day, “The

valley banks of the Rhône ... have still a greater mass of imperial

remains than the city [of Rome] itself,”[5] and the churches of

Toulouse show the round arch and the small Roman bricks.

When the Empire became Christian, Toulouse still grouped itself, as

it does to this day, around its municipal building, the “Capitol.”

That building and the “Place du Capitole” continued central in the

town. The churches of Toulouse are fitted in like after-thoughts in

the town plan. They do not dominate everything as do the cathedrals

of the old towns of Northern France, as Notre Dame must have

dominated mediæval Paris. This difference in town-planning[6] seems

to be accompanied by a greater measure of continuity in municipal

institutions: mediæval Toulouse called her chief magistrates

“consules.”

In the decline, when the Roman auxiliaries were fighting their

aimless civil wars (much as if the “colonial troops” of to-day

were to become dominant in armies and go about setting up their

Europeanized leaders as chief executives), Toulouse was for a time

the capital of one of their shifting sovereignties, that of the

Visigoths, whose power, at its greatest, extended from the Loire and

the Alps clear down to Gibraltar. After a few years, another little

group of auxiliaries, the Franks, defeated the Visigoths, drove

them out of south-western Gaul clear down to the Pyrenees, and took

Toulouse. But although the Frankish chiefs would now and then raid

Spain itself for plunder, they never cleared the Goths out of the

coastal plain from the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees. So matters

stood when the first of the three great scourges of the Dark Ages,

the Mohammedan Saracens, fell upon Europe.

In their first rush north from Spain, the Mohammedans swept the

Mediterranean coastal plain. Narbonne resisted them, and saw its

people duly massacred, but some of the cities seemed to have

surrendered (as many of the Spanish towns had done) on condition

that their laws should be respected. The “Visigothic” State was a

flimsy affair. That part of Gaul which submitted to the Saracens

corresponded almost exactly to that which the Goths had held.

Carcassonne, Beziers, Agde, Maguelonne, Lodève, and Nismes had

Mohammedan garrisons. East of the Rhône they went beyond the Gothic

boundaries, and for three or four years, with the support of local

rebels, held Arles and Avignon.

Toulouse they never could take. Once they raided up the Rhône and

Saône and burned Autun, but with Toulouse in Christian hands they

could never hope to do much with the central Rhône valley. It was

the successful defence of Toulouse, quite as much as the victory of

Charles Martel, that checked their greatest effort in the familiar

year 732. Coming over the west central Pyrenees, they turned

north-east to attack Toulouse, compelled (like Wellington in 1814) to

deal with such a centre of population and communications in order to

secure their right flank for a move northward. So that when Toulouse

held out, their stroke which took Bordeaux and failed against Charles

Martel near Poitiers, was no longer a regular campaign, but merely a

plundering raid on a great scale.

It is worth insisting on the resistance of Toulouse to the Mohammedan

invasions in order to emphasize the importance of the town. But

although the infidel could not take Toulouse, he held Narbonne,

eighty miles away, for forty years. He was in Saragossa for just over

four hundred years until 1119, and Saragossa, the great town and

road centre south of the Pyrenees (corresponding to Toulouse to the

north of them), is only 250 miles from Toulouse as the crow flies.

Sometimes, from either city, the crest of the mountain chain can be

seen. The two faced one another, Toulouse as the untaken pivot of the

Christian defence, Saragossa as the bastion of the long, but finally

unsuccessful, defence of Islam. For about the same length of time as

that which separates Americans of 1920 from the death of Christopher

Columbus, Saragossa stood for Asia in the face of Christian Europe.

Naturally, Languedoc felt the Moslem influence in every sort of way.

The other two foes of the Dark Ages, the Viking and the Magyar,

appear and ravage the country but leave no trace except ruins. Alone

of the three the Mohammedan remained long close by, and he differed

from the other two in that he knew that cities were meant to live in,

as well as to burn, and in that he had ideas of a sort of his own.

It was too much trouble to keep fighting him all the time, and, in

the intervals of peace, his ideas sifted in through the intercourse,

north and south, over the border. In his train, as it were, came also

the Jew; already, in the early eighth century, an archbishop of Lyons

was troubled by the “aggressive prosperity” of Jews in Southern Gaul.

In vain we ask ourselves how much all this fighting and plundering

left standing of the institutions of the country, and how far

it destroyed them. Later we find the cities governed by elected

magistrates under the name of “consuls,” while similar magistrates in

the French towns outside of Languedoc go by other titles. At first

blush this seems to suggest that the Roman municipal organization

had been kept up. But whether or not this is true, we cannot tell.

The weighty opinion of Brutails is against the idea of continuity.

He makes the point that in Roussillon no title deed reposing on any

right of ownership before the Mohammedan invasion has come down to

us. He reminds us that Charlemagne’s father and grandfather when

driving out the Saracen pillaged the country quite as heartily as any

misbeliever. Still, the Roussillon of which he writes was the last

foothold of the Saracen in Gaul, whereas Toulouse, as we have seen,

was never theirs. Therefore the question remains doubtful.

The sudden eleventh century rise out of the sleepy Dark Ages into

the true Middle Ages shows us the Counts of Toulouse among the

greatest lords in Europe. The office had become hereditary around

the middle of the ninth century, about the same time as did so many

of the imperial offices. Count Raymond IV, sixth in descent from

the first Count who had handed down Toulouse to his son, was the

richest of the chiefs that took the Cross for the First Crusade.

Already, between the “Provençal” southerners and the North French

who were still called simply “French,” there was bad feeling, at

least on the part of the latter. A “French” chronicler seems to

lump Burgundians, Auvergnats, Gascons, and “Goths” (that is, men

from the Rhône-Pyrenees coast plain) all together under the name of

“Provençals,” and says that they excelled in nosing out foodstuffs,

and were accordingly very useful in times of famine, but had little

stomach for fighting. The antagonism is significant. Whether it was

justified or not is another matter; the accusation of cowardice does

not clearly appear in the records of the fighting, and does not seem

to have affected Raymond’s position. One fancies that, in such an

age, his riches would not have kept him among the half-dozen leaders

of the Crusade had his eleventh century Provençals been really

notorious cowards. Certainly the North Frenchman’s prejudice against

the “meridional” as a soldier remains to this day.

Even before the Counts of Toulouse appear as one of the richest

families in Europe, we can trace the beginning of the troubadour

poetry. It is probably the most distinctive contribution by the

lands, now Southern France, to the world’s history. The word

troubadour to-day means a poet of lyric love.

The twelfth century was its golden age, although we can just hear its

notes beginning in the eleventh, and dying away in the thirteenth.

The language of the troubadour poetry was the “langue d’oc” (as

opposed to the North French “langue d’oïl” or “langue d’oui”). It was

spoken over a stretch of country far more extensive than was later

the province of Languedoc. Thus there were troubadours in the central

mountain mass of Auvergne and in the broad Atlantic coastal plain

from the Pyrenees up to the Loire. Nevertheless, Toulouse remained

its centre.

The first thing that strikes its readers is the familiarity of many

of its rhythms. The Greek and Latin classic rhythms have to be

learnt. The “Song of Roland,” with all its power, strikes uncouthly

on the modern ear. But the troubadour poetry, after seven centuries,

sings itself as if it had been written yesterday, in such stanzas as

this of Bernard de Ventadour:—

“Quan la douss avra venta

Deves vostre pais

M’es vejaire qu’ev senta

Odor de paradis.”

Notwithstanding English blank verse from the sixteenth century on,

and notwithstanding the pathetic efforts of our contemporary crew of

“free versifiers” feeling ignorantly back to unrhymed rhythms such

as the ancients knew, notwithstanding these, I say that Provençal

stanza, with its rhyme and regular accents, still represents exactly

the sort of lyric rhythm we use. As far as verse form goes, the

troubadours were beyond all question the first of the modern poets,

in the easy skill and variety of their measures, some simple, some as

intricate as any verse ever written. Dante revered them second only

to Virgil.

What is most important to us is the picture they give of their

society. First of all they represent the chief end of man to be the

worship of woman. We have seen in the last chapter that feminism

in religion, i.e., the cult of the Virgin, was one of the twelfth

century master-passions. In Italy, towards the end of the thirteenth

century, poets intertwined love with philosophy, somewhat as the

Platonists had before them. The troubadours concerned themselves not

at all with philosophy and little with religion. Here and there they

bring in religion as a sauce to flavour more piquantly their love for

their lady, very much in the manner of our modern decadents. Thus the

poet may protest that he loves his lady “more than God loves Our Lady

of Puy de Dôme.” Incidentally, the devotion of the poets is almost

always for someone else’s wife.

The essential thing about all this “courteous love” is that it is

unmistakably the most cultivated and civilized thing that had been

since Rome had fallen asleep.

Furthermore, the appearance of the troubadour poetry in Southern

Gaul is still another fact proving that the Dark Ages were not a

murder but a sleep. The foolish historians of the last generation who

attributed the vigour and the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages

to an infusion of “Teutonic” blood, got a hard knock when Belloc[7]

noted that after the Dark Ages a comparatively high civilization

expressing itself in poetry full of the “romantic” idealization of

woman arose in precisely one of the districts least affected by

the handfuls of barbarian auxiliary troops of the fifth and sixth

century. The soul of Europe was not moulded anew by the barbarians

of the northern forests. That soul fell asleep, as it were, from

weariness, and then having slept, it awoke and sang.

The courtly fashion set by the troubadours overspread Christendom.

Indeed, it became a characteristic of the later twelfth century, as

we saw in the last chapter. Treitschke has a lively passage on the

“chivalrous, polished” time of the Hohenstaufen in Germany, “the

age of gallantry and the Minnesingers, quite distinctly feminine in

its universal attempt to adorn itself with womanly graces,”[8] in

contrast to the harsher time which had preceded it. But the fact that

the new fashion so quickly became European must not blind us to the

fact that it began in Languedoc. The troubadour poetry is already

fully developed in William Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine,

who was born in 1071. The first Hohenstaufen king did not reign over

Germany until 1138, and it was Count William’s granddaughter Eleanor,

Queen to Henry II, who first brought the cultivation of Provence to

England about the middle of the twelfth century.

Even in the troubadours, however, the near savagery of the Dark Ages

had been merely overlaid and not destroyed. Vivid memories of a time

at once feeble and gross swelled up in them sometimes. One poet,

that Sordello whose name Dante and Browning have combined to keep

alive, when singing the death of a brave knight, amiably suggests

that a long list of coward princes would do well to eat of the dead

man’s heart to better their courage! The idea was familiar to our Red

Indians.

Unfortunately, as events were to prove, their society which still

kept something of the underlying spirit of the savage, was losing the

spirit of the soldier. The statement needs qualification, especially

in the case of one of the greatest troubadours, Bertran de Born, who

was never happy without a fight unless he was rhyming about one.

But, although a striking exception he was only an exception. Even if

none of the troubadour poetry had survived, we could perhaps prove

that the “Provençal” was less warlike than the North Frenchman, or

even than most Christians of the time, by the fact that local wars

had to be fought with a larger proportion of mercenaries than was

the case elsewhere; so large indeed that their roving bands became a

serious “social problem,” as we shall see. Even if we assume that the

high proportion of mercenaries was due to the wealth of Languedoc,

still it is hard for us to imagine any twelfth-century hero of song

or story, outside of Provence, who would lose himself so deeply in

day dreams of his beloved as to be captured by his enemies, like

Aucassin in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” without so much as striking a

blow in his own defence.

The evidences of the wealth and refinement of this cultivated

and unwarlike society are not confined to the written records of

chroniclers and poets. Their buildings prove the same thing. For

combined breadth of composition and elegance of detail the porches of

such churches as St. Trophimus at Arles or the great church at St.

Gilles, are equalled by nothing in the Romanesque. Often their detail

is exactly that of the antique world to which they looked back over

the intervening lowlands of the Dark Ages.

Further, we have seen that the society for which the troubadours sang

was close to the Moslem, and was moved by currents Asiatic in their

origin both Moslem and Jew. Moslem coins circulated freely there.

The fact is proved beyond reams of learned stuff by such unconscious

evidence as that of one troubadour’s simile:—

“... Like a child which a man makes stop crying with a ‘marabotin’

...”

The poet does not think it necessary to stop and explain that a

marabotin was a Moorish penny, and being unconscious his testimony

cannot be challenged. Of the Universities, while Bologna studied law

and Paris theology, Languedoc in her greatest University, that of

Montpellier, studied medicine. This fact again proves her intercourse

with the “Paynim,” for it is a commonplace that the Arabs of Spain

were the great physicians of the Middle Ages. Saracen slaves, and

negroes brought from Africa by Saracens to be slaves, continued to

be held there centuries after slavery was extinct everywhere else in

Christendom. As for the Jews, they were so many and so prominent that

some chroniclers called Languedoc “Judea secunda.”

In such a society, it would have been strange if the different forces

which worked against the Church had not been active. No word remains

to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II

of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn

Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western

French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in

the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:—

“In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I

may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to

Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There

go old priests, and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and

all night crouch before altars, and in old crypts, and are clothed

with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags, who are naked and

footbare, and sore, who die of hunger and want and misery. These go

to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do. But to Hell I am willing

to go; for to Hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who die

in tourneys and in glorious wars, and good men-at-arms and the well

born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair courteous

ladies which have two or three friends besides their lords also

thereto. And the gold, and the silver go there, and the ermines and

sables; and there go the harpers, and jongleurs, and the kings of the

world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very

sweet friend, with me.”[9]

It is clear that the idea of “Heaven for climate and Hell for

company” is not new. Nietzsche himself has nowhere put it better.

And it is perhaps significant that of all that glittering company of

servants of the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the

pride of life, first of all come churchmen—the “fine scholars.”

Of course, all this sort of thing is not heresy. Logically it might

just as well have ended in mere negation. These volatile southerners

with their envy of the riches of the Church and their contempt, too

often well deserved, for her ministers—so that instead of saying

like most Christians “Rather than do so and so I would be a Jew,”

they said, “I would rather be a priest”—might have gone on their

way without troubling themselves about things not of this world.

Nevertheless, they lived in an age which hardly took Nature and her

secrets seriously, so absorbed were its thinkers in the nature of

God and man and their relation to each other. The other world of the

supernatural was as real and vivid to them as, in a different way, it

was to the New England Puritans. Irrespective of their own temper,

the currents of their time carried them away from secularism and mere

denial.

Like practically all keen and vivid times, the twelfth century was

full of religious debate. Among the learned the discussion turned

largely upon philosophy. The speculative and transcendental doctrines

of the Church might be called in question. In this way heresy, that

is religious error among those who claimed to be Christians, might

arise from intellectual speculation upon intellectual and philosophic

themes. Thus the early Church, in the high Imperial time before the

Dark Ages, thought of heresy first of all as erroneous speculation.

But theology and morals are not and can never be really separate.

The very idea of their possible separation could not have arisen

except in an age so bent upon “observing” as to be contemptuous of

reason. Theology and morals being merely mutually indispensable

different sides of religion, it therefore follows that speculative

heretics tended to become moral heretics. Now, in the Middle Ages,

as we have seen, the scholars were always in minor orders. At least

outside of Italy, learned heretics were rare. Therefore a good deal

of speculative heresy and near-heresy could, and did, exist without

doing much harm to the Church as an institution. A scholar who fell

foul of authority with regard to some article of faith was punished

of course, but his punishment was merely a matter of internal Church

discipline about which the “general public” usually knew or cared

very little.

It was very different when a dissenter, instead of confining himself

to philosophy, went further and took the logical next step of

“stirring up the people” by attacking not only the doctrine of the

Church but also the moral conduct of her officials. To-day when a man

attacks the idea of property as such, we smile. But when he attacks

the excessive inequality of its distribution, that is more serious,

because, however false some of his conclusions may be, a part of his

major premise is undeniably true. Just so, in the twelfth century,

the Church realized that her wealth laid her open to envy, and the

evil conduct of many of her ministers was a scandal. Her own true

leaders, those who were the most zealous for her honour, spent much

of their energy in trying to bring about a wider distribution of

morals within the ranks of her own clergy, just as to-day those who

believe in the idea of private property would do well to work for a

wider distribution of that. Accordingly heresy in the Middle Ages,

although necessarily arising, like all heresy, in speculation, based

its propaganda upon moral protest.

The tireless Lea has made a long list of preachers who went up and

down crying against the wealth and vices of the clergy. Sometimes

they opposed a crude abuse of Christian symbols as tending towards

idolatry. Sometimes they taught that the sacraments had no virtue

when administered by a priest unshriven from mortal sin. This idea,

however strongly it might appeal to natural feeling, was utterly

anarchic. For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore

entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a

charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced

null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years

afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when

he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s

land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar

with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse

of established Churches. The early twelfth century shouters began

by playing lone hands, like our own Billy Sunday and his tribe.

Their stormy careers left little definite trace. At most they set in

motion a general criticism of the wealth and pride of the Church in

comparison with the poverty of her founder and of the humility which

she taught.

After a while these sporadic reformers, each setting up his own

little whirlpool or eddy, began to be merged into distinguishable

currents each flowing in a definite direction. In the third decade of

the century we begin to hear of “Waldenses,” members of a religious

body so called after its founder Waldo, a rich but unlearned merchant

of Lyons. The Waldenses began in reform and ended in heresy. They

are heard of principally in Languedoc, in North-Eastern Spain,

and in Lombardy. They were loosely organized, consequently their

teaching varied; but, in general, they prized the letter of the

Gospel and minimized the distinction between clergy and laity. They

translated the Scriptures into the vernacular, read them zealously,

and applied rigorously their commandments against lying or oaths

of any sort whatsoever. To forbid even “white” lies is certainly

harmless enough, although if pushed to an extreme it partakes of

the character of impossibilism and eccentricity which the Catholic

Church has always avoided. But, in a society knit together by the

feudal oath of allegiance, to say that a Christian man ought not to

take any sort of oath smelled of nihilism and anarchy. So too, the

Waldensian enlargement of the functions of the laity. Granting, for

the sake of the argument, that even in those times it might have

been wise to enlarge the part to be played by laymen in the work of

Christian teaching, still nothing but harmful irregularities could be

expected from the Waldensian idea that “any good man” might perform

the Sacraments. For instance, take their practice of confession to a

layman. Personal and private confessions give to the one who hears

them great power for good or evil in families and communities. If his

secrecy cannot be guaranteed by the strongest possible means we must

admit (whatever our view of confession in general) that the thing

would be dangerous. Further, the Waldenses seem to have gone beyond

even the Quakers, in that they had their doubts as to the moral right

of judges to punish. Nevertheless, Waldensianism had considerable

momentum.

At first they insisted vehemently that they were good Catholics, and

came not to destroy but to fulfil. After being forbidden to preach by

the Archbishop of Lyons, they appealed boldly to the Lateran Council

of 1179. When that Council forbade them to preach without permission

from the local bishop the turning point came. Waldo, their leader,

preferred his own private judgment to obedience to constituted

authority, and refused to abide by the Council’s decision. In a

phrase that many have since used he said that he preferred to obey

God rather than man.

Still they were slow to break completely with the Church. Not

until 1184, five years after the Council, were they definitely

excommunicated by the Pope, Lucius III. This was done at the Council

of Verona, an assembly of which we shall hear again. Even then, a

distinction was sometimes made between them and more pestilent forms

of heresy. The fact that, as late as 1218 in the ninth year of the

Albigensian crusade, a sort of Waldensian Council including delegates

from north and west of the Alps could meet in Bergamo may possibly

stand as evidence of an easy-going attitude of the authorities

toward them. To-day, the Protestant remembers affectionately that

their Provençal translation of the Scriptures, or at least of

the New Testament, was the first rendering of the Bible into the

vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and the most that a militant

Roman Catholic can find to say of their system is that it was a

“vapid degradation of religion.”[10] Now “vapid degradations” do not

produce great wars like the Albigensian crusade or great systems of

persecution like the Inquisition established after that crusade. For

my own part I am convinced that, had the Waldenses been the only

heretical body in the field, there would have been no crusade against

heresy and perhaps no Inquisition.

The movement which called out such resistance from those who

repeated the ancient creed of Europe was of a different sort. On its

negative side it echoed the same charges brought against the Church

by the isolated heretics and by the Waldenses, repeating them so

exactly that certain superficial Protestant scholars once maintained

that it was little more than a protest against Roman abuses. Even

Limborch, whose learning forces him to admit that it was more than

this, naively remarks à propos of their genial custom of starving

themselves to death as the highest possible act of faith:—

“’Tis rather to be wondered at, that in so barbarous an age, they

should throw off so many errors rather than that they should retain

some.”[11] It now seems certain that the movement based itself on a

philosophy fundamentally hostile to Christianity and nauseous to us

who have breathed no other air than that of Christendom.

Before considering the nature of this philosophy, and of its logical

developments in the sphere of morals, let us reject the various

names by which it has been called by modern scholars, and refer

to it as the “Albigensian” movement. It is true that “Manichean,”

“neo-Manichean,” and “Catharist” (after the habit of the sect of

referring to themselves as the “Cathari” or “pure”), are more

descriptive. “Albigensian” is sanctioned by usage, and usage should

prevail over the preciosity of the pedant.

The un-Christian creed of the “Albigenses” began to sift into Western

Europe soon after the year 1000. It was very old, for it represented

one of the few fundamentally different ways of looking at life,

and it is probably indestructible as long as the world endures.

Its central idea is that the universe is dual and was created by

two Gods, or if you will, two principles, of about equal strength,

one Good and one Evil. The attempt to reconcile this idea with

Christianity is as old as Manes who lived in Mesopotamia in the third

century and founded the heretical sect of the Manicheans. Back of

Manes, again, at the very beginning of recorded history, we find the

Persians with a dualist religion which they attributed to a shadowy

prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. To-day three striking examples of

its survival come to mind. First, Dualism, with its scorn for matter

as inherently evil, is not far from Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science.

Second, in 1909, Paul Elmer More, one of the foremost of American

scholars and critics, who would rank among the great critics of all

times did he but possess the gift of vivid phrase, published a book,

“Studies in Dualism,” which bore on its title page the following

quotation from another modern worthy, Sir Leslie Stephen:—

“Manicheanism may be disavowed in words. It cannot be exiled from the

actual belief of mankind.”[12]

Third, in 1917, under the influence of the war, H. G. Wells (whom I

hesitate whether to characterize as a sort of prose Shelley, “beating

in the void his luminous wings in vain,” or as an æolian harp upon

which almost any passing wind of doctrine can play) thus sets forth

the thoughts of his imaginary Englishman mourning for the death of

his soldier son:—

“His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the

Gnostics and the Manicheans which saw the God of the World as

altogether evil. For a while his soul sank down into the uncongenial

darknesses of these creeds of despair....

“Is the whole scheme of Nature evil? Is life in its essence

cruel?”[13]

I hasten to add that the Manicheans, following the little-known

Gnostics, made matter the evil principle in Nature, as opposed to

spirit, the principle of good.

We have seen that it had come originally from the East. Manes

himself, away back in the third century, had been a Mesopotamian,

and in the fourth century his disciples seem to have been widely

distributed from Persia to the Atlantic. They were hated. “Manicheans

and Mathematicians (i.e., sorcerers) were alone excepted from the

general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.”[14] They

reappear, under the name of Paulicians, in the East Roman Empire,

during the tenth century, and thence passed into Bulgaria. Later,

in Western Europe, they were often known as Bulgars, “Bougres,”

or “Buggers.” From Bulgaria they spread westward into what is now

Bosnia, and from Bosnia westward again into Northern Italy. By the

middle of the eleventh century they were numerous and influential

throughout Lombardy and especially in Milan.

Lea suggests that without the impulse these people gave to extreme

asceticism, and especially their contempt for marriage, Pope Gregory

VII would not have been able to get his decrees forbidding the

marriage of priests obeyed in Northern Italy.

“Vernon Lee”[15] gives ... “a very curious anecdote, unearthed by

the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his

extremely suggestive book on mediæval heresies. A certain priest of

Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the

marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him

before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a

saint. The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his

death; and in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his

intercession, it became necessary to proceed to his beatification.

The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when,

in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it

was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a

_Catharus_, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan,

the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming

of Christ. It was quite probable that he had spat upon the crucifix

as a symbol of the devil’s triumph; it was quite possible that he

had said masses to Satan as the true creator of all matter. Be this

as it may, that priest’s half-canonized bones were publicly burnt

and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows that the

Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and foul,

had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when

we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a

revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk

of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic

rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base

according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such

views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of

the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism

of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, should

have found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of the

early Middle Ages. In those stern and ferocious yet tender-hearted

and most questioning times, there must have been something logically

satisfying, and satisfying also to the harrowed sympathies, in the

conviction, if not in the dogma, that the soul of man had not been

made by the maker of the foul and cruel world of matter; and that the

suffering of all good men’s hearts corresponded with the suffering,

the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of the Spirit. And

what a light it must have shed, completely solving all terrible

questions, upon the story of Christ’s martyrdom, so constantly

uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediæval men!”

The same author noting what seems to be the intentionally hopeless,

repulsive, and horrible nature of twelfth century (or, as she

puts it, pre-Franciscan) Italian sculpture, goes on to argue from

this that such “Nightmare pessimism had honeycombed the twelfth

century Italian mind.” How uncertain was the popular distinction

between orthodox and heretical asceticism is attested by many

humorous-pathetic stories like that of the priest of Milan. What the

distinction actually was may well be considered later in connection

with the Dominican order.

The man of European stock cannot but wonder why any Christian

people, especially the volatile Provençals, could accept so savage a

creed. Perhaps people ready to “... jump the life to come” might be

attracted by the moral latitude allowed the Albigensian “Believers”

during life, and would, meanwhile, banish the thought of death, as so

many moderns do, or else hope to be “consoled” even at the last gasp.

But this is guesswork. What is certain is that the sect prospered.

We have seen that the Middle Ages, although weaker than we in the

observation of Nature, had a stronger faith in logic, and were,

therefore, bolder in the application of formally reasoned, logical,

ideas of life. Accordingly, those of them who were possessed of the

dualistic idea proceeded to all sorts of perfectly logical extremes

in showing their hatred and contempt for matter.

Thus their fully initiated members, or “Perfect,” were sworn never

to eat meat, eggs, milk, cheese or anything which was the result of

sexual procreation. Fish was permitted because they thought that fish

did not reproduce themselves by the coming together of the male and

female! To eat any sort of food which came from a warm-blooded animal

might be murder, for they believed in the transmigration of souls,

and therefore such an animal might be the dwelling-place of a human

soul. This, again, was perfectly logical; to be born again, after

death, in another body was, according to this theology, a proper and

necessary punishment for sin. All sexual acts which might possibly

produce offspring were forbidden to the “Perfect”; they must purify

themselves by fasts and elaborate ceremonies if they so much as

touched a woman by accident. The propagation of human beings, with

their sinful, material bodies, was clearly the worst of crimes. Hence

the “Perfect” would sometimes tell a pregnant woman that she had a

devil within her. Marriage was a perpetual state of sin; it was worse

than adultery and fornication because the married felt no shame,

and were, therefore, more likely to persist in cohabitation. It was

even whispered that, just as sexual intercourse out of marriage was

better than intercourse between married people because the married

felt no shame, so, too, any unnatural form of intercourse from which

children could not be conceived was better than natural cohabitation.

Finally, the horrible and perfectly logical climax to all this was

that suicide was the deed above all others most pleasing to God.

It was one of the charges against the sect that their professed

hatred for life and its pleasures was accompanied by promiscuous

sexual orgies. Nor is there anything improbable in such accusations:

they have been true of occasional heretical bodies from the earliest

Christian times to Rasputin and certain contemporary Russian sects.

Nevertheless, there is no evidence to prove that such sexual orgies

were ever regularly practised or officially encouraged by the sect.

The weight of testimony would rather seem to prove their extreme

asceticism, out of which would naturally come occasional excesses of

self-indulgence on the part of the “weaker brethren.”

Naturally, with such a _régime_ as that laid down for them, the

Albigensian “Perfect” were few. The sect made up its numbers by

including also “Believers,” who were admitted on their mere promise

to renounce the Catholic faith and to receive the Albigensian

“Consolamentum” or initiation of the “Perfect,” at least in the

hour of death, as many of the early Christians used to receive

baptism. The lives of the “Believers” were as unrestrained as those

of the “Perfect” were strict. Except to “venerate” or do homage to

the “Perfect” according to certain prescribed forms and ceremonies

whenever they met, their religion seems to have laid upon them no

prescribed duties whatsoever. They were allowed to marry and to eat

meat. To be sure they could not be finally saved without undergoing

the “Consolamentum,” and, when this was once received, the jaws of

the system closed upon them with a ferocity so extraordinary that

we shudder at it as we shudder at the lurid horrors imagined by

Poe. But this ugly possibility weighed light in comparison with the

easy absence of any code of morals for everyday living. Clearly,

Albigensianism aimed to meet all tastes.

If we ask why such a life as that of the Albigensian “Perfect” ever

attracted anyone, we must go back one step further and ask why

asceticism, deprivation for its own sake, has always had such power

over mankind. It is one of the unanswerable mysteries of the human

soul why men have so often felt that their God, or Gods, would be

pleased at seeing the worshipper voluntarily submit to deprivation,

discomfort and pain. It has been argued that limitation in pleasure

is necessary for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being and

that asceticism (itself a word derived from the training of the Greek

athletes) merely sets one free for undivided effort. But this does

not meet the case. For the fact is that there is always in man the

tendency to condemn pleasure for its own sake, as evil in itself, as

if there was something holy in the mere state of being deprived or

uncomfortable. And this curious state of mind is as strong to-day as

it ever was, witness the extraordinary savageness of the campaign

waged by what an Englishman would call the “Dissenting” religious

bodies in America to-day against any pleasure or amusement that

strikes them as “sinful.” Finally, it is also the fact that many who

would not dream of denying themselves a certain amount of physical

satisfaction of different sorts will applaud ascetics. Accordingly,

the Albigensian system addressed itself to a fundamental instinct of

human nature.

Finally, it must be remembered that the Albigenses claimed to be

purifying, not destroying, Christianity. Just so, the Humanitarians

of to-day reduce Christianity to “Social Service” and throw over

supernatural teaching altogether. In most cases the Albigensian

system had certain outward likenesses to the Catholic. Their

distinction between “Perfect” and “Believers” was somewhat like

the Catholic distinction between clergy and laity, or that between

monastic people and people “living in the world.” The form of their

promise to renounce “Satan” (i.e., the Catholic Church), by which one

became an Albigensian believer, was a little like baptism, and their

“Consolamentum” was like Communion and Extreme Unction combined. They

claimed to be true followers of Christ, they particularly reverenced

the Lord’s Prayer, and they even went through a form of Lord’s

Supper. The fasts of the “Perfect,” except when prolonged into the

“Endura,” were not altogether unlike the Catholic fasts. As to the

points in which they differed from the Church, they made the usual

heretical claim of following “purer” traditions. Certain modern

scholars see reason for believing that they possessed apocryphal

writings dating from the apostolic or post-apostolic age.[16] In

their propaganda they laid stress upon the negative side, that

is, of their opposition to the “corruptions” of Catholicism, and

thus secured for themselves the support of much of the prevailing

dissatisfaction with the Church.

Why their practice of fasting themselves to death, in what they

called the “Endura,” did not drive away converts is the hardest

question to answer concerning them. That the “Perfect” voluntarily

practised it was bad enough. What was worse was their treatment of

believers who had received the “Consolamentum” when thought to be

on death-beds and had then been so unlucky as to begin to get well.

The “Perfect” had probably learned by experience that “Believers”

who had been “consoled” on their death-bed and had then recovered,

were not likely to follow the extraordinarily strict rules for the

“Perfect” as all “consoled” persons were bound to do. For them, the

relapse of a “consoled person” was the greatest conceivable horror.

Therefore, when a “consoled” sick person showed signs of recovery the

“Perfect” forbade the family to give the patient food, and, if the

family showed signs of weakening, they stationed themselves by the

bedside or took away the sufferer to some place of safety where they

might starve him or her to death in peace!

How such amiable folk ever led away much people after them is a

riddle. And yet, despite the appalling features of their system,

during the eleventh century Manicheanism is found sprouting up

here and there throughout Western Europe. In the second half of

the eleventh century we find it powerful in Northern Italy, and

especially in Milan, but it seems not to have had any deep root north

or west of the Alps before 1100. We hear of Manicheans at Toulouse

in 1018, at Orleans in 1022, at Cambrai and Liège in 1025, and at

Châlons in 1045. By the middle of the century they had penetrated

north into the Germanies as far as the city of Goslar. Nowhere do we

hear of their appearance without hearing also of their persecution.

It is one of man’s deepest instincts to defend that which he holds

sacred, and to the man possessed of a religion, nothing is so sacred

as his gods. What can be more natural than to wish to punish offences

against the gods? Limborch has a long account of “Persecution among

the Pagans.” For us it will be enough to remember that Athens itself

put Socrates to death on the charge of teaching men not to believe in

the gods of the city. And this in spite of the fact that Bacon truly

says, “... the religion of the heathens consisted rather in rites and

ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what

kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their

church were the poets.”[17]

Roman tolerance was born of the necessities of ruling over many

races, none of whom except the Jews had an exclusive, “Jealous” God.

Almost all the other people of the Empire were willing to accept

the gods of strangers as differing from their own merely in name.

Naturally, when one fanciful story about a god or goddess was as good

as another, the educated man cared little about the whole body of

myths. As an administrator, this same educated man was easily able

to be “tolerant” to all religions because he cared little or nothing

for his own, and was, in reality, indifferent and therefore not

“tolerant” at all in the strict sense of the word. St. Paul’s Gallio,

so much maligned by fools but so worthily celebrated by Kipling,

is a fine specimen of the type. Such a man was devoted solely to

the public interest. His feeling would not be as clear cut as our

national patriotisms: “Rome” was almost the whole civilized world, so

that the chance of her perishing was unthinkable. Nevertheless, she

could still be an object of affection; her government represented the

definite benefit of order. Devotion to her was not vague emotionalism

like that of our internationalists of to-day. After a fashion she

could be worshipped.

On the other hand when any religion or religious practice seemed

to threaten the government upon which order reposed, the Roman

magistrate struck at once. The rediscovered Roman law, remember, was

to be a great force actively informing the twelfth century.

In adopting Christianity, Europe exchanged a religion in which one

god, or one story about a god, was about as good as another, for a

religion which claimed a definite, historical founder who had left

behind him a corporate teaching body, the Church. To such a body, the

out-and-out pagan or disbeliever is an open and possibly generous

enemy. Whereas he who proclaims himself a fellow Christian, but

meanwhile falsifies the Church’s doctrine by twisting and altering it

to suit himself, is a traitor, a snake in the grass compared to whom

the heathen is an angel of light.

Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the

heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to

maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential,

of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. She

must, therefore, contend especially against the heretic, the enemy

from within, who would disfigure the faith by which she lives; and

she has done so, from the “false teachers” and “heretics” whom St.

Paul so often urged his flock to avoid, down to the poor creatures

who would reduce her Saviour to the stature of a “social uplifter”

or the walking delegate of a labor union. To keep the faith is a

perpetual warfare.

Make what you will of the body empowered to interpret and define

Christian doctrine and of the means of defending that doctrine when

defined: the necessities of some sort of definition and authority

will remain as long as the Christian name endures.

Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction

against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a

learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide

his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees

denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “...

Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they

may learn not to blaspheme.”[18] Later, he would find Christian

Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting

laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws

went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose

possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would

find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the

last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors,

including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be

Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the

Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences,

and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early

doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a

matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force.

Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among

them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had

gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon

heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark

Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare,

our imagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin,

Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that

by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith

have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19] Even in those sleepy

days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the

refutation of heresy.

But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more

concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the

intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action

against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized

charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was

even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage

to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make

it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly

be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of

human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple,

would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and

distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had

not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the

Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein

defined) he cannot be saved?

Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as

it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open

denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and

ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day.

But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He

acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the

Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make

himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the

devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did

once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s

“Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that

we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; in

the modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the

effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all

material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly

devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and

woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing

for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to

take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack

the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical

basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture

indeed.

But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in

Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and

ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first

discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a

council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was

such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was

feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of

the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king

had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among

them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him

so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were

taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they

were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they

refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they

went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in

the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they

repented, although too late to be rescued.

The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the

king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the

queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this

feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or

recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the

constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their

punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner

of the punishment we shall in a moment return.

We hear of the execution of heretics here and there throughout

Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time

on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was

vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush

the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern

lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them,

as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear

of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned.

If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic,

there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the

same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion,

as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white

woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities.

Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued

opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the

civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law,

methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went

on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere

of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the

fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he

repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went

so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for

the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire

approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote

Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of

it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience....

You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of

some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear

of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or

unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest

against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine

of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described

to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses,

sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their

plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ...

a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate even in words ... the

framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a

horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total

destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous

instances ... Savonarola is one in point ... that the judges often

appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead.

The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the

court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the

flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain

could have existed, but it did exist.”[20]

It is possible to go even further than the passage quoted above. For,

if the culprit had died, it was thought worth while to dig up his

corpse and at least burn that. Certainly, then, it would seem as if

there was something almost sacramental about burning the heretic.

Study of the discussion of witch-burning in the “Golden Bough”

suggests the idea that heretics were burned, as witches were, because

it was believed that fire was the one adequate means of purifying

the community from the pollution which they had brought upon it. If

this is so, then heretic- and witch-burning is connected with the

most primitive superstitions, not only long before Christianity, but

before the possibility of any systematized religion.

On the other hand, burning alive conformed after a grisly fashion to

the letter of an old saying that “the Church abhors bloodshed.”

Cardinal Newman has left us an interesting passage combining extreme

hatred for the heretic, or rather for the heresiarch (i.e., the

active preacher of heresy and corrupter of the faithful), with the

typical modern sensitiveness to the sight of physical pain:

“Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs I had said: the latter should

meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter; and so far

as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as

if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity.

It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable

toward himself. I cannot deny that this is a very fierce passage; but

Arius was banished, not burned; and it is only fair to myself to say

that neither at this nor at any other time of my life, not even when

I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a Puritan’s ears, and I

think the sight of a Spanish auto-da-fé would have been the death of

me.”[21]

It would be a study in itself to work up the evidence as to the

toughness of the mediæval mind with respect to disagreeable ideas

and to the actual infliction of pain. To-day, in America, we have

our lynchings, and we have the ugly stories of torture inflicted

in revolutionary Russia. But, on the other hand, we have a crew of

drivellers against capital punishment, and many people can hardly

bear the idea of hell. As Zarathustra puts it, of the God of the

Christians:—

“When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh

and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his

favourites.”

“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful,

more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old

grandmother.”

“There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on

account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he

suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22]

Whereas in the Middle Ages—

“The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing

instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much

as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23]

With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover

(like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he

cheerfully risked being roasted eternally.

As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between

mediæval and modern as follows:—

“Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from

which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s

nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the

papers say about the execution of those condemned to death; they

reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point

of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man.

What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of

old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet

parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed

the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke

the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked

off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach

as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado,

roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with

impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan.

These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they

found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were

full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24]

Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval

man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves

were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the

Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for

centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the

time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part,

although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are

only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of

every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if

possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy

were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.

With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout

considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain

such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected

there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse,

and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began

to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard

to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people

of Albi prevented the bishop and a neighbouring abbot from

imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126

we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious

anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his

contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on

Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to

have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In

1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared

the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to

get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the

second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated

the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities

to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the

Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under

Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all

who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third

General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more.

The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another

shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in

practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries

travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and

the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly

stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy

enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property

rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate.

The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier

in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of

escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it.

To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial

tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of

recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist,

a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines

of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an

Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a

Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentrics

found in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more

fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order.

Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose

ground.

Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman

in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture

of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people

without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and

Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence

of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still

it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside

of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean

or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a

priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came

South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one

important occasion.

The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash

of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea

tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage

... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to

confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think

so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’

replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for

itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites,

whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and

your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own

neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your

master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his

cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration

and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25] One has

a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of

Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels.

Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist

meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi,

after preaching to a throng which packed the cathedral, he called

upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But

like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,”

St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip.

After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing

precisely as if he had never come.

In 1165, at Lombers near Albi, we find Catholic priests publicly

debating against representative “Albigenses” in the presence of

Pons, Archbishop of Narbonne, and sundry bishops, besides the most

powerful nobles of the region, Constance, sister of King Louis VII of

France and wife of Count Raymond V of Toulouse, Viscount Trencavel

of Beziers, and others. When the verdict went against the heretics,

no action whatsoever seems to have been taken against them: it was

a mere tournament of words, “a matter of public interest” as we

should say. Two years later the heretics openly held a council at

St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The president came all the way

from Constantinople to attend, delegates from Lombardy were present,

“bishops” were elected for various vacant sees, and a committee

was appointed to settle a disputed boundary between the “dioceses”

of Toulouse and Carcassonne. Clearly we have here to do with an

organized religious body, emphatically a “going concern,” acting

fearlessly in the open.

With the year 1178 we get the first suggestion of vigorous direct

action against the heresy. Count Raymond V of Toulouse wrote to his

brother-in-law, Louis VII of France, deploring the progress of heresy

and the abandonment of orthodox religion throughout his lands, and

connecting this condition with an alarming increase of brigandage and

public disorder. The King of France had just made peace (or rather

truce) with Henry II of England, so that the long struggle between

the French Monarchy and the Angevin house was at rest for the time

being and the two kings were free to combine against heresy. The

other great chronic political controversy, between the Papacy and the

“Holy Roman” Empire was also inactive, Pope Alexander III having got

the better of Frederic Barbarossa and his anti-Pope. Accordingly,

the Pope was free to spur on the kings to action. At first it was

proposed that Louis and Henry march into Toulouse with a joint army.

But, finally, it was decided merely to send to Toulouse a mission of

high clerical dignitaries with power to act. Lea suggests that the

enthusiasm of the kings had cooled off during the long time spent in

preliminary discussion. Mother Drane holds that the Pope preferred

peaceful measures.

When the mission reached Toulouse they were insulted in the streets.

Nevertheless, they went on to draw up a long list of heretics,

and finally determined to make an example of a rich old man named

Peter Mauran who seems to have been one of the first citizens of

Toulouse. They proceeded against him under the canon promulgated by

the Council of Tours, which prescribed imprisonment for convicted

heretics and confiscation of their property. After much palaver and

wordy shuffling by the accused he was adjudged a heretic. To save

his property he recanted and offered to submit to such penance as

might be imposed. Accordingly, “stripped to the waist, with the

Bishop of Toulouse and the Abbot of St. Sernin busily scourging him

on either side, he was led through an immense crowd to the high altar

of the Cathedral ... (and) ... ordered to undertake a three years’

pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to be daily scourged through the streets

of Toulouse until his departure, to make restitution of all Church

lands occupied by him and of all money acquired by usury, and to

pay to the Count five hundred pounds of silver in redemption of his

forfeited property.”[26]

The results of these measures were only temporary. After his return

from Palestine, Mauran was three times elected chief magistrate of

the city. In the same year in which he had first been tried, the

Third Lateran Council cursed the heretics of Languedoc, together

with those who favoured them, and included as heretics the marauding

bands of wandering mercenaries who, when out of employment, drifted

about as brigands. Further, the Council took the unprecedented step

of declaring a Crusade against all these enemies of the Church and of

proclaiming a two years’ indulgence to Crusaders. So that in 1181,

Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux and Cardinal, was able to raise a military

force with which he invaded the Beziers district and took the castle

of Lavaur, capturing in it many prominent heretics. But two of the

captured Albigensian “bishops,” upon recanting, were promptly given

Catholic benefices in Toulouse, and, all told, Henry of Clairvaux’s

little crusade was no more than a flash in the pan.

The Lateran Council’s curse upon bandits, lumping them with

heretics, raises the question of how closely the anarchical side of

Albigensianism may have been connected with public disorder. The

twelfth century men were great bandit-slayers. Probably there were

more bandits to be slain because there was more wealth worth robbing

in Western Christendom than formerly. The mercenary soldier, a man

without a country, hired by the princes of the time for their big

or little wars, was not far from the bandit, even when in campaign.

In England the name of King John’s mercenaries was hated and feared

for generations. In his times of unemployment, when he was drifting

about the country he tended to become the bandit pure and simple.

Always he was unbound by social and conventional restraints and ties,

wanting especially reverence for the Church, which was usually the

chief protection for the property of that greatest and richest of

mediæval corporations. We are told that one of Richard Cœur de Lion’s

mercenaries, quite wantonly it would seem, once ... “broke off an

arm of a statue in the Church of Our Lady at Chateauroux, whereupon

the figure bled as if it were alive; and John (afterwards King John)

picked up the severed arm and carried it off as a holy relic.”[27]

But we are not told that the fellow himself was in the least abashed

by the miracle, or that he was punished for his sacrilege. However,

in twelfth-century Northern and Central France, when banditry became

annoying, the bandits by no means had it all their own way. Their

career was often short and ended by steel or rope. The community went

for them mercilessly, much as men did in our own Wild West.

In Languedoc (as we have seen) with its wealth, its Jews, and its

nearness to the Moslem, reverence for the Church was less. Further,

it may well be that the nobles were more dependent upon mercenaries

inasmuch as their vassals were less warlike. We shall find the

unhappy Raymond VII refusing to dismiss his hired soldiers, no

matter under what pressure. Finally, some heretics denied the moral

right of all private property whatsoever; most of them attacked the

Church for the great wealth which it possessed, and practically all

would refuse to take oaths, and denied the moral force of them when

taken, although the feudal oath of allegiance from the vassal to his

lord was the chief bond of civil society. In silent witness to the

difference these things made, we find many of the southern churches,

especially the country churches, were fortified. Whereas in the

North, in spite of all the continual quarrelling between priest and

noble, the church building nearly always depended for its protection

on its sanctity alone.

The churches of Languedoc were not fortified for nothing. Speaking of

the bandits, Lea remarks that the chroniclers, who were themselves

mostly Churchmen, “... insist that their blows ... fell heavier

on church and monastery than on the castle of the seigneur or the

cottage of the peasant.” Naturally, since they would get little

plunder from the cottage and many hard knocks from the castle. “...

They ridiculed the priests as singers, and it was one of their

savage sports to beat them to death while mockingly begging their

intercession, ... ‘Sing for us, you singer, sing for us’; and the

culmination of their ... sacrilege was ... their casting out and

trampling on the holy wafers whose precious pyxes they eagerly

seized.”[28]

Exactly how much connection Albigensianism had with disorder we

cannot say. On the face of it, such teaching tended rather to

non-resistance. But in an age so direct, so extreme in brutality

as well as in tenderness (as for brutality in speech a leading

Albigensian argument against transubstantiation was that it involved

the excretion of the body of Christ into latrines), in such an age,

I say, it is improbable that the heretics greatly disapproved of

anyone who attacked their enemies, the Churchmen. Even assuming that

the godless mercenary-turned-bandit was not, strictly speaking, a

heretic at all, he was certainly favoured by the atmosphere of heresy.

As the twelfth century neared its close Albigensianism must have

seemed “the coming thing” in Languedoc. Although we hear of none of

the greatest nobles of the region as having been “hereticated,” yet

many individuals among their immediate families had been, especially

among the women. In general, the heretics were enthusiastic and the

Catholics uncertain and troubled. The Orthodox were still able (as in

the affair of Mauran) to win “test cases,” but they must have felt

that their hold was slipping.

From the point of view of those resolute to suppress heresy, the only

real gain of the whole twelfth century was that both the canon and

the civil laws on the subject had become more defined. Even as late

as the middle of the century, we find St. Bernard calling the burning

of heretics “excessive cruelty,” and favouring imprisonment as a

maximum punishment.

The heresy made its only appearance in England in 1166. Henry II, the

very man whom we have seen so angry against Becket as to threaten to

turn Mohammedan, seems to have felt free to take a line of his own.

He had them stripped to the waist, flogged, branded on the forehead,

and turned adrift, strictly forbidding everyone to give them any aid

and comfort whatsoever. This was effective enough in its way, as they

must have soon died from hunger and exposure, but the point is that

there seems to have been no recognized procedure to be followed.

This want had been partly met, in the last two decades of the

century, by three laws.

In 1184, at the Diet of Verona, the “Holy Roman” Emperor, Frederic

Barbarossa, and the short-lived Pope Lucius III, had conferred on

heresy. Although in disagreement about many important matters, they

seem to have agreed perfectly about the treatment of heretics.

They published a joint decree. The Pope on his side directed that

the bishops, who had always had jurisdiction in matters of heresy,

should make, or cause to be made, an inquiry, or “inquisition,” into

the possible existence of heresy in every parish where the presence

of heretics was even suspected. Even those whose manner of living

differed from that of the ordinary Catholic were to be questioned

as to their faith. The accused were to be tried in the episcopal

court and such as should be convicted (if they refused to “repent”

and acknowledge their errors) were to be handed over to the secular

authorities “in order that they may receive the punishment they

deserve (animadversio debita).” This last formula was vague, perhaps

intentionally so. All secular magistrates were to take an oath before

the bishop that they would enforce the laws against heresy, and those

who refused to act after having been duly called upon to do so were

to be excommunicated. Furthermore, all Catholics were forbidden to do

business with any city which might sustain a pro-heretical magistrate

in failure to act.

The Emperor, on his side, was not behindhand. He decreed that any

magistrate excommunicated for refusal or neglect to proceed against

heretics should lose his office and be debarred from accepting

another. All those convicted, or to be convicted, of heresy were

put under the imperial ban, which meant banishment, confiscation

of goods, destruction of their houses, public infamy, debarment

from office, &c. There is no explicit mention of the death

penalty. “Animadversio” had meant death in ancient times, and the

twelfth-century lawyer was apt to be both a great pedant and a great

imperialist. Nevertheless, the formula had become vaguer.

The other two enactments are those of secular princes, acting alone.

Count Raymond V of Toulouse, he whom we have seen appealing to his

suzerain Louis VII of France against heresy, at some time during his

long reign of forty-six years (from 1148 to 1194) decreed not only

banishment but also death by fire for heretics. Probably this was

done in connection with Henry of Clairvaux’s mission which condemned

Mauran, or with the short “Crusade” of 1181. What action, if any, was

taken under it we do not know. In 1209 we shall find the municipality

of Toulouse writing to Pope Innocent III to the effect that “many”

heretics had been burnt under it. But we must remember that the

letter was written when the city was threatened by Montfort and his

Crusaders, and its magistrates were correspondingly anxious to make a

case.

The third of the three laws against heretics was enacted by King

Pedro II of Aragon, who later got himself killed in his attempt to

protect the protector of heretics, Raymond VI of Toulouse! In 1197

Pedro banished the Waldenses and other heretics from his lands as

public enemies to himself and his realm, and announced that if any

of them were found when the months of grace had expired, their goods

were to be confiscated and themselves burned. Of course, this was

only a threat, and in all human probability no one stayed to risk the

stake. The significant thing is that the threat is made against the

Waldenses as the heretics par excellence.

But, although it was a gain to have the legal machinery for punishing

heretics, still the gain did not amount to much if there was no

organized force capable of putting the machinery in motion. Except

for the banishment of Mauran and the little Crusade which took Lavaur

in 1181, no real action against the heretics of Languedoc had been

taken. In 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier and

condemned heresy in the strongest terms, but his thunders died away

without an echo. No progress whatsoever had been made against heresy

in Languedoc when, in 1198, Innocent III became Pope.

Why did Rome wait so long before moving in the Albigensian matter?

The Curia must surely have known, for decades past, that things were

steadily going from bad to worse in Languedoc. It has been suggested

that all the moral forces and diplomatic skill that the Papacy could

muster had been needed to make head against the redoubtable emperors,

Barbarossa and his son, Henry VI. But this, at most, can be only half

the answer. In the first place, the Curia had been and was entirely

competent to carry on several major controversies at the same time,

with the sure touch of a skilful juggler keeping three or four balls

going at once. In the second place, even in the last fifty years,

crowded as they had been, still there had been intervals of peace

between Papacy and Empire. One such interval had been seven years

long, and still the Papacy had made no move in Languedoc. Probably

the answer is that none of the popes, not even Alexander III, and

still less his short-lived successors, had possessed the tremendous

energy and courage of the newly-elected Pope.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] “Rome Revisited,” in “The Meaning of History,” by Frederic

Harrison. Publishers: The Macmillan Co., New York, 1902.

[6] “Some Types of Cities in Temperate Europe,” by H. J. Fleure,

in the “Geographical Review,” N.Y., December, 1920, which compares

cities like Arles, Nismes and Toulouse on the one hand, and the

north-French cities on the other. The author mars an able discussion

of the subject by imagining a strong “Frankish” influence in the

north—derived no doubt from the tiny mongrel war band of Clovis,

some 8,000 strong, including Thuringians and Bretons, by which that

leader raised himself to be consul, by imperial commission, over a

Romanized Gaul of millions! The point is that military, civil and

ecclesiastical authority were alike integrally Roman in the high

imperial time. In Northern France, during the Dark Ages, secular

civil government seems to have disappeared. Therefore, the Roman

military officers who had turned themselves into feudal lords, and

the bishops who continued to take their orders from Rome, obtained

greater relative importance.

[7] “Europe and the Faith,” by Hilaire Belloc. Paulist Press, N.Y.,

1920.

[8] “Politics,” Heinrich Von Treitschke, trans. Publ. Macmillan 1916.

Vol. I, chap. vii, pp. 245, 246.

[9] “Aucassin and Nicolette.” Passage translated by Henry Adams, in

“Mont St. Michel and Chartres.” Pub. Houghton Mifflin, New York,

1913. Chapter xii, page 233.

[10] “The Old Road,” by H. Belloc. Published by Constable and Co.,

London, 1911. Page 30.

[11] “History of the Inquisition,” by Philip Limborch, Professor of

Divinity among the Remonstrants; Chandler’s translation, London,

1731. Reference page 44, vol. i.

[12] “Shelburne Essays,” Sixth Series, by Paul Elmer More. Published

by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1909.

[13] “Mr. Britling sees it Through,” by H. G. Wells. Published by

Macmillan, New York, 1917.

[14] “Italy and her Invaders,” by Thomas Hodgkin. Published by the

Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892. Vol. i, chapter III, p. 203.

[15] “Renaissance Fancies and Studies,” by “Vernon Lee.” Published by

John Lane, New York. 1909. Pp. 47-49.

[16] See: Fragments of an “Ancient (Egyptian?) Gospel,” used by

“The Cathars of Albi,” by F. P. Bodham and F. C. Conybeare, in the

_Hibbert Journal_ of July, 1913.

[17] “Essays,” by Francis Bacon: “Of Unity in Religion.”

[18] I Timothy, chapter i, verse 20.

[19] “The Mediæval Mind,” by Henry Osborn Taylor, _supra_

“Carolingian Scholars,” in vol. i, chapter x, p. 217.

[20] “On Anything,” H. Belloc; Dutton, New York, 1910, p. 72, _et

seq._

[21] “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” by John Henry Newman, chap. i.

[22] “Thus spake ‘Zarathustra,’” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. publ.

Macmillan, New York, 1914, chap. lxvi, p. 318.

[23] “Mont St. Michel and Chartres,” _supra_, chap. xi, p. 218.

[24] “Là-bas,” by Joris Karl Huysmans. Published Plon-Nourrit Paris,

1913. Pp. 362-3, author’s trans.

[25] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 71.

[26] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, p. 122.

[27] “John Lackland,” by Kate Norgate. Macmillan, N.Y., 1902, p. 21.

[28] “Inquisition of the Middle Ages,” Henry C. Lea. Vol. i, pp.

125-6.