With the last major redoubt of Catharism gone, Perfect and Believers found themselves in a world with little shelter and fewer protectors. No one was safe, as Peter Garcias found out to his cost in Toulouse during Lent 1247. His relative, William, a Franciscan, had invited him to their convent in order to discuss issues of faith and doctrine. Naturally, Peter had no qualms about telling William about his Cathar faith; after all, William was family. Peter railed against the Church of Rome, declaring that it was a ‘harlot who gives poison’, while the law of Moses was ‘nothing but shadow and vanity’.78 Peter was too trusting: in a scene reminiscent of the exposing of Basil the Physician, a curtain was pulled back to reveal that Peter’s testimony had been carefully transcribed by a team of secretaries. Peter was handed over to the Inquisition.
William Garcias was not the only person to betray his family to the Inquisitors. A former Cathar Perfect, Sicard of Lunel, denounced scores of his former associates and supporters ‘whether they had offered him a bed for the night or given him a jar of honey.’79 The list of people he denounced included his parents. Sicard’s treachery was amply rewarded by the Church, and he survived well into old age.
These two examples were but among many. The Languedoc in the years immediately after the fall of Montsegur was subject to inquisitorial scrutiny of protoStalinist proportions. Heading this clampdown on the thirteenth-century equivalent of thoughtcrime were Bernard of Caux and John of St Pierre. Over 5,000 depositions survive, but this is only a fraction of what was actually taken down at the time. As Malcolm Lambert notes, Bernard, John and their brethren were attempting to build ‘a total, all-embracing picture’80 of Cathar belief, practices and support in the areas in which they operated.
For the Cathars, being caught presented a major dilemma: the Perfect were forbidden to lie or to swear oaths. Whatever they did, they would be compromising their beliefs. Some chose to tell the truth, and thereby implicate other Perfect, Believers and supporters, while others either lied or gave away as little information as possible. Others opted for collaboration, and became double agents, continuing to live as Cathar Believers and receiving the fugitive Perfect into their homes, and then reporting them. Collaboration, however, was risky, as there were frequent reprisals against turncoats. One such was Arnold Pradier, who had been a Perfect during the de Montfort years, but later converted to Catholicism along with his wife (who had also been a Perfect) and began naming names. The Inquisition installed them in a safe house, the Chateau Narbonnais in Toulouse, where they lived well at the Church’s expense.
Although resistance continued — at Castelbon, the Inquisitor was poisoned and the castle attacked — there was ultimately little people could do. The Inquisition became a fact of life, ‘an entrenched institution rather than a single, unrepeated ordeal.’81 If people were suspected of giving false or incomplete testimony, they were hauled back in front of the Inquisitors to be reinterrogated, regardless of whether they were high-born or peasant. Faced with such intensive action, most nobility realised there was no point any more in trying to oppose the Church; even Raymond VII began to persecute suspected heretics, burning 80 at Agen in June 1249.
The Fall of Queribus
While the Inquisition was doing its inexorable work, there was still one Cathar castle attempting to hold out against all the odds. The eleventh-century castle of Queribus sat on a rocky outcrop high in the Corbieres. Like Montsegur, its remoteness and the difficulty of the terrain protected it from the attentions of northern forces. The castle had been sheltering fugitive Cathars for years, ever since Oliver Termes regained lordship over his ancestral lands at Termes after the death of Alan of Roucy, the northern Crusader who had been given the fief by Simon de Montfort, in the early 1220s. Oliver had played a part in the Trencavel and St Gilles revolts of the early 1240s, which had led to the loss of his castle at Aguilar, to the north-east of Queribus, and to his excommunication. The Church trusted him about as much as it had Raymond VI of Toulouse. Like Raymond VI, he was undeterred by excommunication, and together with his co-lord, Chabert of Barbera, he continued to shelter Cathars at Queribus until Oliver was forced to submit to King Louis IX in 1247. Oliver redeemed himself sufficiently during the Seventh Crusade (1249—54) that some of his possessions, including Aguilar, were returned to him. However, upon his return from the Crusade in 1255, he was forced into one final act of betrayal: he had to ambush and hand over Chabert of Barbera to the Inquisition.
Unlike the fall of Montsegur, the fall of Queribus is still shrouded in mystery. It is not known how many Cathars were in residence at the time, and neither is it certain whether the castle fell by force or surrender. But fall it did, in August 1255. Oliver managed to save the life of Chabert through negotiation, and all the Cathars in the castle managed to escape. During the winter of 1255—56 Peter of Auteuil, Louis’s seneschal in Carcasonne, took over the castle, and also the neighbouring castle of Puylaurens, which was also known to be sympathetic to the Cathars. There were now no walls the Good Christians could hide in safety behind. The Cathar church was driven underground.
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