CARCASSONNE, THE ALBIGENSES AND PIERRE VIDAL
"Oh! garden that is blooming in the fields of Montolian,
* * * * *
Ye are crimsoned with the blood of the slain."
From MS. poem on the Albigensian Crusades found by M. FAURIEL
in the "Bibliothèque du Roi."
With the siege of Beaucaire fresh in our minds, Simon de Montfort and
Count Raimon VI. of Toulouse became enrolled among the names that jumped
to the eyes wherever they occurred. We pursued any trail that led to
further particulars of these two men who satisfied the human instinct to
worship, on the one hand, and to whole-heartedly abominate on the other.
There was no call at any time to moderate one's detestation of de Montfort
on account of some untimely incident betraying him in amiable sidelights.
He was never discovered playing at ninepins with the children of his
captive foe, or chivalrously endowing with a competence for life the
widow of the wretch whom he had sent to die in his deepest dungeons.
Never was he caught in unguarded moments of virtue; never did he tarnish
the full gloss of his villainy by any little inconsistency of honour or
compunction. He went on adding contempt to our hatred by a splendid and
unremitting variety of treachery and baseness. At his worst, he was a
fiend incarnate; and a better moment he never had.
[Illustration: ROMAN FOUNTAIN AT NIMES.
_By Joseph Pennell._]
Thus for the purposes of melodrama he was invaluable. He gave one's
emotions no trouble. He was a beautifully consistent, unmitigated ruffian,
and it was a pleasure to undisturbedly loathe him.
Count Raimon of Toulouse and Viscount of Béziers made a very good
companion-opposite to this satisfactory scoundrel.
The two seemed to fill the position in our affections of a handsome
pair of ornaments on a well-regulated mantelpiece--related by the
sharpness of their contrast: Summer and Winter, Vice and Virtue, or the
little meteorological man and woman who appear at the house-door, one
in and one out (never both at the same time), to indicate fair or foul
weather--perhaps also as a sly comment on domestic felicity!
Count Raimon and his companion interested us more especially when we
entered Languedoc, the Count's own territory and the principal scene of
the Albigensian wars. Beaucaire, as we had seen, which also belonged to
Count Raimon, had fallen into the hands of the arch-villain, but there
his wonderful luck at last deserted him.
The Pope had set his mind on consolidating the power of the Church
and on annexing the lands of the few reigning nobles who protected the
Albigenses. Of these Count Raimon of Toulouse was the most determined.
He is one of the most striking examples of religious toleration, almost
the only one, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Without
any leanings towards the doctrines of the heretics, he yet stood by
them from first to last, trying by every means in his power to avert
the fury of the Pope and the Crusaders. He tried diplomacy, he tried
conciliation, but without avail. He held firm in his refusal to hand
over any subjects in his dominions, whatsoever their faith, to the fury
of the Inquisition. Fortune was against him, with Innocent the Third on
the throne, St. Dominic, the powerful originator of the terrible tribunal
on the persecuting side, and Simon de Montfort as its military leader.
The Pope had actually recalled the Crusaders from the Holy Land to turn
their arms against their own kindred. Heretics at home, he held, were
more dangerous than infidels abroad. The war-intoxicated Defenders of the
Faith needed no incitement. Their ruthless savagery has cast a shadow
over the land to this day. This shadow hangs heavily over the scene of
the worst atrocities of the war, and it was remarkable how the radiance
so thrillingly pervasive in Provence failed to follow us into the richer
country of Languedoc.
Count Raimon's persistent defence of his Albigensian subjects kept the
war centred more or less within his dominions, of which Toulouse was
the capital.
Here, in Languedoc, it was, above all, that the gracious life which we
had learnt to associate with the troubadours was blotted out and quenched
in a very sea of blood and suffering.
It is saddening, too, to think that one of those very singers in his
later days became infected with the spirit of the Church, and ended as
one of the most ferocious of the persecutors.
This renegade was Folquet of Marseilles, who loved Azalais, the wife
of Count Barral of Marseilles. He was of a tenacious, zealous, gloomy
temperament--not at all of the true troubadour spirit--and this
characteristic afterwards shows itself in his ardour against the heretics.
"Too late," he laments, "I have discovered love's falsehood: I am like one
who swears never to gamble again after he has lost his whole fortune."
Azalais dies, and Folquet enters the monastery of Citeaux. And then he
becomes Abbot of Toulouse in the heart of the Albigensian troubles. From
that time forth he devotes himself to persecution.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TOWERS, CARCASSONNE.
_By E. M. Synge._]
The taking of the hill-set city of Béziers, where a brilliant Court used
to be held, is one of the most terrible incidents in this twenty years'
war.
"Kill! kill!" shouted the leaders; "Kill! kill!" the cry was echoed
through the blazing city, and sixty thousand souls are said to have
perished on that awful day.
Folquet, the ex-troubadour, had been told that heretics and faithful
were being indiscriminately massacred.
"Slay them," he cried; "God will know his own."
There is also a similar story about de Montfort, to whom two heretics
were brought: one firm in the faith, the other open to conviction.
"Burn them both," shouted de Montfort. "If this fellow means what he
says the fire will expiate his sins; and if he lies he will suffer for
his imposture."
We saw the city of Béziers from the windows of the train: a picturesque
mass of houses climbing up a steep hill to cluster round the fine
fortress-cathedral--another characteristic example of the architecture
of Southern France.
Our train puffed along the valley of the Aude to the famous walled city
of Carcassonne, the next scene of this savage drama.
It was here that Count Raimon--or the Viscount of Béziers, as he was
also called--had established himself when the news came of the fall of
Béziers. A bad day that must have been for the Count and his garrison!
His brother-in-law, King Pedro of Arragon, had come to help him in this
almost hopeless cause, and he went at once to mediate with the Crusaders,
pleading Raimon's own unimpeachable orthodoxy.
But it was of no use. The Defenders of the Faith were panting for plunder
and massacre. They said the Count and twelve knights might depart in
peace, but the town must be given up and every other soul in it.
"That shall be when an ass flies to heaven," replied the Count, and
prepared for defence.
It was almost with a sense that we were to be present at one of the
most terrible moments in mediæval history that we watched the flying
landscape for a first sight of Carcassonne on its height.
Who could ever forget that first impression of it, as the train slowed up
to the station of the lower town in the valley and a strange vision came
into the sky of a double-walled mediæval city with a forest of towers
rising tall and pointed through the mists and mystery of a far-away
romance?
This was a return to the Middle Ages indeed!
The hotel omnibus trundled us--amid a vibrating heap of rugs, handbags,
umbrellas--through the ancient streets of the lower town, which the
natives spoke of as "modern" to distinguish it from "la Cité," which
was far more ancient, seeing that it possessed more than one tower
belonging to the misty times of the Visigothic kingdom, whose capital
was at Toulouse.
As we drove, the turn of the road placed us at different angles with
the City of Dreams; and it stood the test.
No sign of fading away, or of dwindling into anything less than its
astonishing self.
At the hotel we were received by a most elegant landlady in widow's
garb. If it had not been for her pressing us to have our lunch before we
started, I feel sure that we should have been off and up to the _cité_
without a moment's delay. However, we first made acquaintance with this
lady's wonderful _cuisine_ in the old, low-pitched _salle-à-manger_,
where only a few Frenchmen of the commercial type were taking their
luncheon. We were neither of us much given to what we called "fussing
over our food," but it was impossible for the most benighted of women
to fail to notice the delicate art which distinguished every detail of
the repast. What we had I cannot remember, but it was a succession of
masterpieces. Such modulation of flavours, such opposing of salt and
sweet, acid and flat, creamy and piquant; such coquetry in the salad
dressing, such sentiment in the sauces! It was wonderful, as all true
art is.
Altogether Carcassonne was a place of artistic achievement.
The city, as we wended our way towards it, grew more and more dazzling
to the sense of reality. That progress through the lower town, across
the Aude, was like walking straight into the background of a mediæval
painting--and who has not longed for that excursion? There was not a
sight or a sound to mar the perfection of the place. Doubtless in the
old days there would have been more stir as one approached the great
double-towered gateway and crossed the bridge over what was once a moat.
And there would have been sentries, and perhaps the flash of armour
caught between the crenellations of the lower outer walls. Otherwise
precisely the same sights and sounds met our senses as met those of the
wayfarers of the thirteenth century.
Immediately within the inner walls there is a street of smallish houses.
But soon we diverge from this and are admitted by the custodian--a most
singular person, by the way--through a side door and up a steep staircase
to the ramparts.
And here on emerging, one holds one's breath. Towers, towers, and
more towers; towers with high conical roofs in fantastic medley; round
towers, square towers, tall, emaciated towers springing above the mass
of building; towers with crenellated parapets showing rounded contours
to the enemy and flat sides to the town; Visigoth towers recalling the
momentous days when barbarian races began to swarm and settle in the
fertile provinces of Roman Gaul.
Wonderful was that walk round the walls passing through the long
procession of the towers. It was a veritable city of towers, moving like
living figures as we moved, appearing in new groups between the houses,
opening into vistas, falling back and reappearing.
It seemed as if those silent sentinels were trying to keep us always
in view, stealing out cautiously from behind the buildings, crossing,
falling back, making way for one another, with a sort of secret movement
round the whole circle of their orbit.
There were great flights of steps corbelled out on the inner side of
the ramparts, apparently to provide a means of descending to the city,
and also of reaching certain points of the fortifications. There were
gateways, barbicans, turrets, and a marvellous everchanging series of
architectural groupings; walls, bulwarks, battlements.
Below were the outer walls, within which was a spacious grassy enclosure
where the men-at-arms used to keep guard.
Citywards, there was the castle, and the cathedral. And at the foot of
the ramparts, backing into them, were the little gardens of the citizens
of Carcassonne. Boughs would sway against the masonry--Merovingian some
of these splendid blocks of stone!--while the bright, quiet sun of a
November afternoon poured with broad, equal glow into the silent city.
And far away on the horizon, miles and miles beyond the sweeping plains
of Languedoc, the faint white peaks of the Pyrenees!
* * * * *
Our guide was the most singular of men. Whether he had a patriotic hatred
of the English I cannot tell, but he did his best to ignore our presence
altogether.
Having reeled off his stock information--(not to us, but to the universe
generally)--he would retire and lean gloomily over the battlements as if
he were taking a stroll on his own account and were contemplating life
from the pessimist standpoint. Perhaps he was resisting an inclination
to dispose of us mediævally in one of the oubliettes.
Sometimes he would gaze down into the gardens below as if he were watching
some one at whose folly he was thoroughly disgusted. Yet not a soul was to
be seen. An attempt at geniality on our part was met in the most freezing
manner. There was something really extraordinary about the man, and I
incline to think he was either a patriot sustaining his country's honour
by this simple means, or a person suffering from melancholy madness of
a very aggravated type.
Even if he unlocked a door for us he studied the far distance till we had
passed through. Then he re-locked the door and hurried on in front as if
dreading we should ask him stupid questions. It may be he was horribly
bored by this eternal round of the bulwarks with foolish tourists.
The longer we lingered on the ramparts of Carcassonne the more incredible
it appeared that the town could ever be taken by the means of assault
available in the thirteenth century. Yet taken we sadly knew that it
was, and by Simon de Montfort!
That was virtually the end of the house of Toulouse and of the cause of
the Albigenses.
The lower outer walls were as solid as they could be. Then between
the outer and inner walls were stationed sentries and men-at-arms. But
supposing these dangers to be overcome, and the foe to aspire to pass
through the high inner walls, from whose battlements hundreds of arrows
might be flying and boiling pitch be pouring, perhaps the assailant would
rush up some cunning, wall-embedded staircase which seemed to promise
access to the city or the ramparts. But instead of that it would turn
out, after many windings and confused branchings, to be merely a blind
passage fashioned thus on purpose to mislead an enemy and prevent his
surprising the town. Moreover, even if the impossible were achieved and
those vast walls scaled, there was still the castle or inner fortress,
where the inhabitants could all collect in time of emergency and bid
defiance to every foe except hunger and thirst.
[Illustration: THE RAMPARTS, CARCASSONNE.
_By E. M. Synge._]
Probably Count Raimon and his garrison expected to be able to hold out
against de Montfort in spite of the invariable success of the latter.
One can imagine with what ardour the preparations were made for the
defence: every watch-tower and turret, every outlook and barbican haunted
by anxious faces scanning the country.
And then the attack! The first assault was led by the prelates solemnly
chanting the "Veni Creator," and the God of the Christians was called
upon to fight on the side of slayers and torturers, of murderers of
unarmed citizens and women and children. It was de Montfort who boasted:
"Neither age nor sex have we spared; we have slain all!"
This first onslaught was repulsed, and perhaps if it had not been for
a failure in the water supply, the beautiful city and its noble cause
might have prevailed.
How they must have prayed for rain in that wondrous colour-flooded
cathedral, when day after day the cruel, cloudless heavens smiled down
ironically upon the dusty streets and glaring walls!
At last a parley was arranged between the Count and the besiegers. They
gave him a pledge of safe conduct, and he went out to the camp. In the
service of Heaven and the Church, the Crusaders considered ordinary
honour and good faith superfluous--the usual plea of a good motive for
villainous deeds--and they traitorously seized him, and when the city fell
they threw him into a dungeon in his own citadel at Carcassonne--with
all the beautiful precepts of chivalry ringing in their ears--a piece
of work after de Montfort's own heart.
It is better not to dwell on the sack of the city: a sack of the
thirteenth century conducted by de Montfort.
"For thou hast delivered them to the vilest of mortal men," the Comte
de Foix had exclaimed to the Pope, speaking of the Albigenses at the
Council of the Lateran, "to Simon de Montfort."
Count Raimon died in prison, nobody knows by what means. We were shown
the noisome little hole in which the noble and tolerant spirit saw the
last of this sad and cruel and beautiful world.
In virtue of the poet's faculty of imaginative sympathy Pierre Cardinal,
the famous troubadour, had the insight to understand the nobility of
this man born centuries too soon.
"As water in the fountain, so chivalry has its source in him. Against
the basest of men, nay, against the whole world he stands." So writes
the poet of the hero. It was a sorry age in which to be born before
one's time!
Happily there are other and brighter memories to associate with
Carcassonne. The troubadour of far renown, Pierre Vidal, must have
often passed in and out at the great gateway: that delightful, foolish,
brilliant personage; courtly, naif, and infinitely charming, yet
pathetically unsuccessful, for all his genius--perhaps partly because
of it. He was born at Toulouse, and so belonged to this country, then
ruled by Raimon V., but his fate was chiefly active at the court of
Marseilles where he fell in love with Azalais de Rocca Martina, wife
of Count Barral, a lady who is described as possessing "charms of the
sort that intoxicate; an emotional power, a magnetism, a luxurious will
that swept all resistance away." He called her "Vierna," and wrote his
canzos to her under that name.
One of his biographers says of him: "He was one of the most foolish
men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased
him, and as he would have it." It is a moot point whether this may not
be rather wisdom than folly, for believing things to be as one desires
them often goes a long way towards fulfilling that tacit prophecy.
Alas, things were not exactly as Vidal wished, in spite of his pleasant
believings, but he had rosy hours and sang enchanting songs and gave
much joy with his gifts and his charm. "Vierna," however, did not at all
appreciate him. She gave him a ring and a little perfunctory graciousness,
as she was bound to do to sustain her character as a courteous lady; but
she appears to have wearied of his songs and his devotion. At last her
husband tried to reconcile her to the troubadour, and to induce her to
treat him more kindly. Vidal lost heart after a time, and concluded he
was a fool.
"But beauty makes the sanest man go mad," he sang or said, and though
he had many love-affairs and fancies, they seem to have been of slight
seriousness compared with his passion for Azalais. In his erratic
life, he haunted the neighbourhood of Carcassonne and Toulouse; visited
Albi--whence the luckless Albigenses took their name--and Saissac and
Cabaret near Carcassonne. In Provence he had an unpleasant adventure at
St. Gilles, where the husband of a lady to whom he addressed love-songs
and of whose love he had boasted, became enraged and bored the poet's
too eloquent tongue.
In these strange times, the exquisite chivalric civilisation being but
newly formed--like a sheet of ice on a dark pool--had very thin places.
Vidal's friend Ugo del Baux bore him off--perhaps to his wonderful eyrie
in the Alpilles--and nursed him till he was well again.
Vidal's wanderings were far and wide in Languedoc and Provence. We even
hear of him singing in the little grey hill-top village of Beuil in the
mountains to the north of Nice.
* * * * *
Near Carcassonne lived a famous beauty, Loba de Pegnautier. She inhabited
the fortified town of Cabaret, and there knights and troubadours flocked
to visit her, among them Pierre Vidal.
The story goes that in order to please her he adopted the crest or emblem
of a Wolf in compliment to her name, Loba; and, dressed in a wolf-skin,
ran out into the field and had himself hunted by the shepherds with their
dogs. But Loba only made fun of him, and it appears that the shepherds
hunted him rather too seriously, and altogether the foolish poet came
off unhappily in this fantastic scheme of love-making.
He is said to have joined Richard Cœur de Lion in his Crusade, to have
visited Spain and Italy, notably the Court of Montferrat, and everywhere
to have pursued his troubadour's calling and the will-of-the-wisp of a
satisfying love.
He once tried boldness with Azalais and ventured on stealing a kiss one
morning while she was sleeping. But he lived to rue the day. She fell
into a passion of anger and refused to accept any apology. However, he
murmured ancient saws about women and hoped on. Count Barral laughed at
his wife for taking the wild poet's doings so seriously. She was not to
be appeased, and finally Vidal went off to Cyprus and characteristically
married a Princess who claimed the title of Empress of the Eastern Empire.
And the two set up an Imperial Court and ordered an expensive throne,
and thoroughly enjoyed themselves until Vidal had spent all his money.
Presumably the Princess died, or they parted, and then Barral insisted
on Vidal's returning to Provence; and he met him joyously at Les Baux,
and brought him home to Marseilles where Azalais welcomed him with a
freely given kiss as a token of forgiveness. And poor Vidal breaks out
into a veritable spring-song of joy and thankfulness. But the Countess
tired of him very soon, and never had the least idea of returning his
passion.
So he starts again on his wanderings, and goes all over the world with
one patron and friend after another, and so ends his strange, brilliant,
joyous, troubled, unsatisfied life.
With all his natural susceptibility and need of affection he seems never
to have overcome his love for the beautiful Azalais, nor, with all his
charm, does he appear to have been able to inspire a serious attachment
in any of the innumerable ladies to whom he warbled his graceful canzos.
He never seems to have thoroughly grown up, and probably no woman capable
of passionate attachment could have bestowed the full flood of it on a
nature so immature.
What exactly the quality or qualities may be that bestow the power of
inspiring a _grande passion_ is one of the unfathomed mysteries of the
heart. Vidal possessed every attribute that could charm--or so one would
suppose--yet ladies only laughed at him affectionately, petted him, and
gave their hearts elsewhere.
He is one of the most attractive and pathetic of the troubadours,
and gives the impression of a sort of erratic genius. His naïveté is
astonishing and charming, in spite of his outrageous habit of boasting
of his successes in love and war.
One can easily picture the richly-dressed figure issuing from the great
gates of Carcassonne on his beautiful horse--his horse was surely a
noble one--followed by his accompanist and his servant, who carried his
vielle; and we saw him in our mind's eye riding through the country on
his way to Cabaret to pay homage to Loba de Pegnautier--and so he fades
into the far away.
Alas, those beautiful towers and walls were destined to be battered and
broken by de Montfort and his Crusaders, as we have seen. And it was not
long after the taking of the city that the cause of the Albigenses was
finally lost on the field of Muret, in this district. De Montfort was
killed a little later by a stone at the siege of Toulouse, and a yell
of joy and execration went up from the whole Midi which he had tortured
so hideously.
We saw his tomb in the cathedral at Carcassonne--and wondered! Our
feelings of hatred died away in the glory of that cathedral.
When we entered, we found ourselves suddenly bathed in waves of colour.
The entire east end of the building was a splendid expanse of stained
glass stretching from floor to roof, and from wall to wall: the whole
breadth of the cathedral, divided only by a few slender mullions. The
transmuted glow of the afternoon sun was flooding the church, kindling
the tints of the glass to the liquid glory of gems; and it was perfectly,
radiantly still.
After all, it is unspeakable pity rather than hatred that madmen like
de Montfort ought to inspire; for frenzied cruelty such as his implied
a misery and darkness of spirit beyond the power of human speech to
express, and surely, sooner or later, an awful expiation.
"But what opinion was it that the Albigenses held which made the Pope
and the Crusaders treat them so ferociously?" cried Barbara, bewildered
at the accounts of their cruelty and of de Montfort's specially hateful
savageries. Well might she ask!
For one thing, the Albigenses _would_ have it that three nails were
used at the Crucifixion; whereas all true believers know that there were
four----
Barbara stared.
I had chapter and verse for it. A learned controversialist had denounced
the Three Nail view as unworthy of Catholics and Christians.
"And for that they killed and racked and tortured----"
In truth it was for that among other errors of doctrine. It is difficult
to find out what the Albigenses really believed, for they were so
calumniated. Baring-Gould contends that they had revived the ancient
paganism of the country.
They believed in two forces, a good and an evil: the nine-lived Manichæan
heresy.
But that belief is represented in our good old friend the Devil, who,
indeed, is probably a remnant of Pagan ideas. They rejected the Trinity,
refused to worship saints, and discouraged marriage. They seemed very
much like any other enthusiastic sect that breaks off from the main body
of believers, and is ready to die for Three Nails instead of the orthodox
Four. Will the history of religious persecution never cure people of
their Three-Nail controversies?