Chapter XXIII (4)

The malignant genius of Innocent III. was, however, equal to the emergency. In spite of the fact that ecclesiastical corruption was principally responsible for the widespread revolt against Papal authority, the Count of Toulouse and his feudatories were, in exquisite irony, appointed the ministers of apostolic vengeance. The mandate was issued by the Vatican that the Provençal nobility should become the persecutors of their vassals and lay waste their own possessions with fire and sword. No family ties, no considerations of friendship or intimacy, no hereditary connections, were exempted from the operation of this atrocious decree. When it had failed, as it was certain to do, as a last decisive expedient, a bull was promulgated announcing a crusade against the infidels of France. Their lands and their lives were declared forfeited for the crime of heresy; all good Catholics were called to arms; and the property of the rebellious sectaries was promised as a reward to the faithful champions of the Holy See. Every resource of Papal ingenuity and power was invoked. From twelve hundred monasteries, bands of fanatics issued to preach the crusade in all the states of Christendom. Plenary indulgence was granted to the warrior who donned his armor in the cause of the Church. Excommunication and the withdrawal of ecclesiastical protection were denounced against any guilty of hesitation or lukewarmness. In addition to the general absolution authorized by the Pope, the Crusaders were during the continuance of this Holy War released from the payment of all pecuniary obligations contracted prior to their enlistment, a concession which was practically equivalent to the repudiation of their debts. The answer to the summons of the Vatican was ready and unanimous. Every absorbing passion and every ignoble impulse--love of fame, religious zeal, national prejudice, desire of novelty, insatiable cupidity, private malice--attracted the roving, the licentious, and the unprincipled to the standard of the Cross. At that time Europe swarmed with military adventurers, some of whom had served in Palestine, in the trains of eminent personages; others, the refuse of disbanded armies, were outlaws and criminals who subsisted by plunder and extortion. To men like these, the announcement of such an enterprise appeared a singular stroke of good fortune. Provence and Languedoc embraced the richest territory, of its dimensions, west of Constantinople. Its luxury and its opulence, its elegant civilization, the magnificence of its cities, the vast treasures of its warehouses, the beauty of its women, were well known to its envious and ambitious neighbors. It was also known that no adequate means of defence existed, and that the hands, which had in the midst of barbarism evoked these marvels, lacked both the power and the resolution to protect them. The frontier was exposed to the invader. No efficient military force could be assembled to successfully resist a hostile advance. The stern qualifications of a soldier were not to be obtained in the effeminate atmosphere of the Provençal court, devoted to dancing, poetry, and amorous indulgence. Physically as well as morally the soft and idle population of the South was not fitted to cope with hardy adventurers accustomed to arms from childhood, tried in a hundred battles, and exercised daily in the broils and contests inseparable from the society of a turbulent and lawless age.

No incentive was wanting to arouse the enthusiasm of every rank,--from the king to the villain, from the archbishop to the monk. The monarchy of France, whose feudal obligations nominally included the powerful states of the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, was, in fact, unable to enforce its mandates beyond the Loire. The sovereignty of that rich country, now abandoned to conquest, could not fail to immeasurably augment the power and consequence of the crown. Ecclesiastical avarice and revenge looked longingly upon the wealthy benefices usurped and administered by heretics, the prospect of enormous forfeitures, the certainty of a fearful retribution entailed by religious errors and impious defiance of the admonitions of the Pope. Hope of the unbridled indulgence of every brutal passion appealed to the baser and more selfish instincts of the rabble,--the beggars, the robbers, the soldiers of fortune. The popularity of the enterprise is shown by the numbers who assumed the cross. It is estimated that from three hundred thousand to half a million engaged in the war, of whom nearly a hundred thousand were fighting men who had seen military service. There was not a government in Europe at that time able to withstand the onslaught of such a force. Appalled by the frightful prospect of impending destruction, the Count of Toulouse consented to observe unconditionally the requirements of the Holy See, in the delusive hope of averting from his dominions the tempest which must involve all his subjects in one common ruin. His punishment was inflicted with every circumstance of public ignominy and personal degradation. His excommunication, long since pronounced for heretical opinions which he did not entertain, was not revoked. Summoned before an ecclesiastical council at Valence, he acknowledged his sins and promised future obedience. Stripped naked to the girdle, he was conducted, in the presence of a great multitude, to the front of the principal church, where he abjured his errors, and, his hands placed in those of the Legate, he swore allegiance to the Pope. He conveyed to the clergy, as security for his obligations, seven of the strongest castles in his dominions,--a fatal step, which rendered his downfall, hitherto scarcely doubtful, now a matter of absolute certainty. Then, a rope having been passed about his neck, he was dragged through the aisle to the altar, where he was scourged like the vilest criminal. His recantation was repeated, and absolution was finally pronounced under condition of implicit submission, and with the promise that he would assist in the prosecution of a war which involved the devastation of his country and the extermination of his subjects. These humiliating sacrifices, made with the implied understanding that future immunity would be granted his vassals in case they submitted to pontifical authority, proved unavailing. The clergy placed their own construction upon matters in which they were at once prosecutors and judges. Although the Count of Toulouse observed as far as possible the degrading conditions through whose performance he became reconciled to the Church, it was not the policy of Innocent to deal leniently with those who had disobeyed her canons, questioned her inspiration, or intercepted her revenues. Pretexts were easily found under which Raymond was accused of having violated his covenants. His castles were declared escheated to the Papacy. His actions were carefully observed, and it became evident that his presence with the Crusaders was enforced rather than voluntary. The great army which had assembled to vindicate the outraged majesty of the Vicar of Christ now clamored to be led to battle. Their irresistible numbers darkened the plains of Lyons and spread consternation among the peasantry, whose women they insulted and whose substance they consumed. The eminent prelates of the French hierarchy sanctioned by their presence and their example the most awful of outrages on human rights and intellectual liberty. The religious character of the enterprise was indicated by the predominance of the sacerdotal order; by the omnipresence of holy emblems,--crosiers, censers, banners, relics; by the mitre of the metropolitan; by the scallop-shell of the pilgrim; by the cowl and the knotted cord of the friar; by the tattered garb and emaciated form of the hermit. The clergy were headed by Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux, the Papal Legate. Four archbishops and ten bishops, in their official vestments, were conspicuous in the van. Monkish zealots, whose untaught eloquence had inflamed the worst passions of the ignorant populace of Europe, brandishing crucifix and sword, and calling for vengeance against the abhorred sectaries whom divine justice had delivered as a prey to the elect, foaming at the mouth, and uttering maledictions and inarticulate cries, rushed to and fro through the maddened and tumultuous throng. All wore the cross embroidered upon the breast, in contradistinction to the Crusaders of Palestine, who wore it upon the shoulder. In the train of the higher clergy were numerous priests and thousands of dependents and retainers. The Archdeacon of Paris, a distinguished member of the church militant, was present in the capacity of chief engineer. Despite his pacific calling, he proved himself, in the discharge of the seemingly incongruous duties of his new profession, one of the most talented soldiers of the age. The shrewd and politic Philip Augustus, while anxious to secure for the Crown of France the substantial benefits certain to result from the conquest and spoliation of the great feudatories of the South, yet unwilling to share the ignominy attaching to the undertaking, promoted it in secret, but refused to openly employ the resources of his kingdom in such a cause. The French nobility also, for the most part, held aloof; but the names of the Duke of Burgundy and the Counts of Nevers and St. Pol have come down to us as instruments of the apostolic wrath which extirpated the Albigensian heresy.

Of all the leaders, spiritual or secular, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, was the most zealous and distinguished. An English adventurer, of ancient and illustrious lineage, he had long followed the exciting career of a soldier of fortune, and had won a high reputation for courage and military capacity among the Christian warriors who contended with the infidel in the wars of the Holy Land. In his political and social relations, De Montfort was a man of exceptional probity, courtesy, and honor; but in matters that involved the maintenance of ecclesiastical supremacy, he was a monster of savage brutality, a remorseless persecutor, an incarnate fiend. His bravery, his fanaticism, and his talents for war early secured for him the admiration of the clergy, whose influence eventually raised him to the supreme command of the motley host which their exhortations had assembled. The infamy of the Albigensian crusade is inseparably associated with his name, which has descended to posterity as the synonym of all that is merciless, base, and treacherous in the history of religious persecution. Attendant upon their feudal lords were long retinues of vassals, resplendent in sumptuous armor and gaudy liveries, and the sturdy yeomanry, now beginning to assert their importance in the mailed armies of Europe. The promise of booty and glory, of pardon for past offences and of immunity for future crimes, had, as in former Crusades, drawn from every quarter the dregs of the city and the camp, the footpad and the outlaw, the merciless slaves of rapine, lust, and superstition. This mob was for the most part unarmed, but many were provided with scythes and other implements of husbandry, impotent against the armor of the knight, but amply sufficient for the destruction of those whom age, infirmity, or the disadvantages of sex rendered incapable of defence. Confident in their immense superiority in numbers, this fanatical and disorderly rabble swept like a tornado over the smiling and fertile territory of the Rhone. The authority of the Count of Toulouse, who, incapacitated from hostile action by his humiliating compact with the Pope, was forced to aid the invaders, had been assumed by his nephew, Raymond Roger. The latter, relying upon the strength of his principal cities, Béziers and Carcassonne, two of the best-fortified fortresses in Europe, awaited the approach of the enemy with the calm intrepidity born of the consciousness of right and the resolution of despair. While the Crusaders were pitching their camp, they were surprised by a sally of the besieged. Overwhelmed by numbers, the latter were driven back; the gateways, choked by the fugitives, permitted the ingress of the enemy, and almost in an instant the fate of the populous and thriving city of Béziers was decided. In the horrible butchery that ensued no quarter was shown. The old and the young, the strong and the weak, perished alike under the weapons of the infuriated assailants. Catholics obtained no immunity by reason of their belief, but fell by the side of their Albigensian neighbors. When the soldiers, in the heat of the massacre, demanded of the Papal Legate how they might distinguish the orthodox believer from the heretic, that pious monster replied, “Kill them all; God will know His own!” In the Roman Catholic cathedral seven thousand corpses were counted after the assault. Priests, clad in their sacred vestments, fell at the very foot of the altar. The population of the city had been greatly increased by the neighboring peasantry, who had sought protection behind its ramparts. Of all this multitude, not a single person escaped alive. The estimates of those thus devoted to slaughter are variously given by different writers at from twelve to sixty thousand. The city was pillaged and set on fire, and even the churches and monasteries belonging to the See of Rome disappeared in the indiscriminate destruction. The invading army, flushed with triumph, and not yet satiated with blood, next invested Carcassonne, whose fortifications, still stronger than those of Béziers, offered some hope of successful resistance. Its resources, however, were seriously impaired by the number of refugees who had fled thither for safety. In a few days the water gave out. Defective sanitary conditions, increased by great masses of human beings crowded together in a limited space, produced a pestilence. A surrender was agreed upon, by which the inhabitants were permitted to depart, leaving behind them all their effects. In consequence of these rigorous measures, the entire country was filled with starving beggars, many of whom, but a week before, had been living in affluence and luxury. The Viscount, Raymond Roger, whose safe-conduct had been perfidiously violated, was imprisoned and died suddenly, probably of poison.

The examples of Béziers and Carcassonne were not lost upon the terror-stricken people of Languedoc. Strongholds and villages submitted by the hundred without resistance; the garrisons of those castles which held out were massacred to a man; the lands of the heretic were parcelled out among the crusaders, under the suzerainty of that faithful and consistent servant of the Papacy, the Earl of Leicester. The establishment of the Inquisition, under the auspices of the Dominican order of friars, completed the ruin of the country, whose civilization had long been a shining beacon amidst the intellectual darkness of Christendom. The classic monuments which had escaped the violence of former ages were broken to pieces or defaced. The destruction of great cities, the dread of mysterious tribunals, whose victims, immured in filthy dungeons or devoted, in the name of religion, to awful tortures and a lingering death, never saw again the light of day, the insatiable rapacity of the clergy, the tyranny of alien masters, depopulated entire districts and turned the commerce upon which the prosperity of Southern France principally depended into foreign channels, where the property and person of the merchant could be reasonably secure. The beautiful and melodious language of the troubadours, the parent of the modern idioms of Latin derivation, which seemed about to be adopted by all the people of French extraction, was abandoned, and degraded to a patois which, much corrupted, is still spoken by the Gascon and Catalan peasantry. The gay diversions, the dances, the literary contests, the musical chants of the jongleur, the passionate and satirical verses of the poet, the banquets, the Courts of Love, the hunting parties, the tournaments, disappeared forever.

The Albigensian crusade is one of the darkest blots upon the religious history of Rome. It gave rise to the infamous maxim, then first officially promulgated by Papal authority, that no contract made with heretics was binding upon a member of the Roman Catholic faith. Then the civil power was for the first time employed in the systematic and unrelenting suppression of independent thought. Then was organized and set in motion the most gigantic and effective engine of persecution that the world has ever known. Then was perfected that grand and imposing fabric of government which, begun and improved by the genius of many successive pontiffs, rose to such a towering height during the administration of Innocent III.,--a system in whose policy the religious and the secular powers, while theoretically separate, were, in fact, closely co-ordinated and combined; which, while draining of its revenues every kingdom within its grasp, extolled beyond all virtues the merit of evangelical poverty; which, while discouraging philosophical studies, endeavored to secure a monopoly of learning, thus adding to the superiority attaching to a sacred character and profession the influence derived from mental attainments and unusual erudition; which fastened upon Europe an intolerable despotism, under which it was doomed to suffer for more than three hundred years, and which brought to the prosecution of its ambitious designs every device of intrigue and every method of intimidation, enforced by the infliction of punishments whose ingenious and merciless atrocity had been hitherto unknown to the political oppression of ancient or of mediæval times.

In this way was the absolute power of the Papal system consolidated by one of the greatest of the Supreme Pontiffs, through the extirpation of two grand civilizations which for more than a century had represented the intelligence, the culture, and the science of Christian Europe.

I have thus related--not in their chronological order, but in the order of their importance--the events growing out of the rise, development, and suppression of the intellectual revolutions which, in the thirteenth century, appeared in Sicily and Southern France, for the reason that they were the direct and legitimate results of Arab conquest and the subsequent promulgation of Arab philosophical opinions. A striking analogy exists between the circumstances respectively connected with these two great movements of the human mind. Both arose in regions which had been subject to Moslem domination. In both, after the extinction of Saracen rule, the customs of the vanquished race long maintained their influence over the ruder conquerors, who insensibly adopted and diligently observed them. Commercial relations strengthened the bonds already existing between Christian master and Moslem tributary. In the heyday of their prosperity, the courts of Toulouse and Palermo were, in all but name and costume, Mohammedan. Indeed, one of these exceptions scarcely applied to the Sicilian capital, where the ample robes and spotless turbans of the Moorish philosophers suggested at every step the habits and traditions of the Orient. In Sicily, the Arabic language was almost universally used by the nobility and the mercantile classes; in Provence and Languedoc, intercourse with the Moorish principalities of Spain rendered its adoption necessary to a large portion of the community; in both countries its study formed an essential part of a learned education. The general trend of scientific thought, and its practical adaptation to the intellectual requirements of the people, is disclosed by the establishment of those two great literary foundations, the medical colleges of Salerno and Montpellier. In the curriculums of these magnificent schools, which were by no means confined to instruction in the art of healing, Arabic and Hebrew literature, taught by professors of those nationalities, predominated. The Romance idiom, more widely diffused than any other tongue spoken in Europe since the dissolution of the Roman Empire, has, in a measure, survived the calamities of conquest and revolution; still indicates its Arabic derivation by words daily heard upon the banks of the Seine and the Danube; and forms no inconsiderable portion of the language of the English-speaking world. In Italy, it made greater progress than in any other country, advancing simultaneously through the North from France and through the South from Sicily, superseding the unformed dialects of the Latin Peninsula, and, through its adoption by the potentates of Ferrara and Montferrat, it reached even the Greek principality of Thessalonica; its impress is to-day apparent in Portuguese, in Castilian, and in the numerous soft and guttural dialects of Spain.

From Moorish sources, through intercourse with the Hispano-Arabs and the medium of French and Sicilian conquest, were derived those maxims of chivalry which modified the turbulent barbarism of feudal Europe, the courteous gallantry of the tournament, idolatrous devotion to the female character, a high sense of honor and personal dignity, and the refining amenities of social life.

From these originals sprang the germ of modern literature and the earliest models of modern poetry. The Arabs were unrivalled masters of improvisation, an art which attained an extraordinary degree of popularity in the Middle Ages; and the employment of rhyme, the most important and striking characteristic of modern versification, was familiar to the Bedouin centuries before the appearance of Mohammed. The vagrant bard of the Desert was the literary progenitor of the troubadour, as was the Arabian buffoon and story-teller the prototype of his companion the jongleur, whose broad pleasantry and suggestive antics diverted the appreciative and not over-delicate assemblies of the Provençal and Sicilian courts. Through the schools of Montpellier and Salerno, contemporaneous seats of learning and both dominated by Arabian influence, the philosophy of Averroes, the botany of Ibn-Beithar, the surgery of Abulcasis, the agriculture of Ibn-al-Awam, the histories of Ibn-al-Khatib, became familiar to the benighted and priest-ridden people of Europe.

It was, however, in the impetus it gave to the assertion of the right of private interpretation in religious matters that Moorish influence was most marked and permanent. One of the principal tenets of the Moslem creed was toleration. On the other hand, the first duty of the Christian was unquestioning obedience to his spiritual advisers. The rapid and almost miraculous development of the human mind during the thirteenth century was the inevitable consequence of a policy based upon those principles whose application had promoted the wonderful progress of every nation ruled by the enlightened successors of Mohammed.

The parallel existing between the Sicilian and Languedocian civilizations in origin, in progress, in thought, in education, in skepticism, in the repudiation of ecclesiastical interference, is continued even in the date and the method of their extirpation. Both reached their climax during the pontificate of Innocent III., the exemplar of Papal autocracy, the ruthless foe of religious freedom, the evil genius of the thirteenth century. Each was destroyed by a crusade which under the mask of piety appealed to the most sordid impulses and degrading instincts of humanity. Both were followed by conflicts, seditions, and persecutions which endured for centuries. But the fires, while apparently quenched, still smouldered under the ashes of their victims. The principles advocated by philosophical thinkers at the courts of Raymond and Frederick formed the basis of the creeds of Lollard, Huguenot, Puritan. All of the blessings of civil and religious liberty now enjoyed by the enlightened nations of the earth, all of the wonderful mechanical contrivances which lighten toil, diminish suffering, facilitate communication, encourage commerce, promote manufactures, and conduce to the general happiness of the human race, are indirectly derived from the impulse given to philosophical inquiry and scientific progress by the Norman kings of Sicily, the Emperor Frederick II., and the Counts of Provence, animated by the spirit and emulous of the achievements of Arab civilization. These inestimable benefits are inseparable from the innate right of every individual to freely exercise and profit by his mental faculties. That right the Church has always denied as subversive of her alleged prescriptive title to universal sovereignty over the opinions of mankind. In Europe it was first publicly asserted upon the banks of the Guadalquivir, and the advantages its untrammelled practice affords the present generation are a priceless legacy of the founders of the Moslem empire in Spain.