Gregory seems to have taken the complaints of the Archbishops of Trier and Mainz about Conrad seriously. While he castigated them for failing to keep the Inquisitor in check, he realised that if the Inquisition was to do its job properly, it needed to be much more methodical and thorough-going in its approach. With that in mind, Inquisitors were appointed in Toulouse, Albi and Carcasonne in the spring of 1233. It was with their arrival in the south that the Inquisition proper came into existence, and was to remain a grim fixture of life in the Languedoc for the next hundred years.
When the Inquisition came to a town or a village, the first thing its agents would do was to talk to the clergy, in order to brief them on their procedure. The Inquisitors were then allowed to give a sermon in the church, in which they demanded a profession of faith from all males over the age of 14 and all females over 12. Those who did not or could not profess were automatically suspect and would be the first to be questioned. The congregation was obliged to swear an oath against heresy and ordered to go to confession three times a year. The Inquisitors then asked them to think about their past actions and make confidential statements the following week, either confessing to their own sins, or denouncing their neighbour. Cathars who voluntarily confessed were resettled in areas where no heresy was known, and had to wear two yellow crosses sewn onto their clothes, which identified them as former heretics. Known or suspected heretics who hadn’t confessed voluntarily within this first week were issued a summons to appear before the Inquisitors immediately. Heresy, in the eyes of the Inquisition, included being a Perfect, sheltering them, ‘adoring’ them (i. e., performing the melioramentum), witnessing a ‘heretication’ (i. e., a consolamentum), and failing to report others. The Inquisitors needed at least two witnesses to convict someone; witnesses’ names were always withheld, making it all the easier to accuse an enemy — who may have been a perfectly upstanding citizen — of heresy. In a gruesome and deliberately shocking ploy, the Inquisitors did not just restrict the search for heretics among the living. If people named dead relatives as heretics, their bodies were dug up and burnt. If the denounced deceased had any living relatives, their homes and possessions were taken, and they were forced to wear the yellow crosses to acknowledge their relatives’ heresy.
Once the Inquisition had names, it was merciless in its pursuit of suspected heretics. The Inquisitors had the power to search a house, and burn down any building where heretics were known to have hidden. Anyone caught in possession of an Old or New Testament was seen as suspicious, and the sick and dying were watched closely lest ‘wicked and abominable things’76 occur (i. e., they receive the consolamentum). Once a suspect was caught, they were bombarded with questions: Have they seen a heretic or been acquainted with one? How many times have they seen them? Where did they see them? Who was with the heretics? Has the suspect admitted heretics into their home? If so, who brought them? How many times did the heretics visit? Where did they go after they left? Did the suspect adore them? Did the suspect see others adore the heretics? Did the suspect witness an heretication? If so, what was the name of the people at the ceremony? If the person was hereticated on their deathbed, where were they buried? If they recovered, where are they now?77
The ruthless fanaticism with which the Inquisitors carried out their duties is illustrated by the fate of an old woman in Toulouse. A Cathar Believer, she wanted to receive the consolamentum while she was still able. On her deathbed, her family sent out for a Perfect to come and administer the sacrament. A Perfect was located, ministered to the woman and left before the Inquisitors got wind of his presence in the woman’s house. However, they did get to hear of the deathbed consolamentum, and went to question the woman. Under the impression she was talking to the Cathar bishop, Guilhabert de Castres, she described her faith in detail. This was enough. Despite the fact that she only had a matter of hours left to live, she was taken out, still in her bed, and burnt.
Despite the power they wielded, the Inquisition met fierce — and frequently violent — resistance. In Albi, the Inquisitor Arnold Catalan’s assistants were too frightened to enter the cemetery to dig up the body of a woman who had been posthumously accused of heresy. Incensed, Arnold went to the cemetery himself with several of the bishop’s staff in tow. He broke the topsoil, intending to leave the actual digging to the bishop’s underlings, but before any further work could be done, a mob set upon Arnold and nearly beat him to death. They were only prevented from throwing the body of the unconscious Inquisitor into the River Tarn by the intervention of an armed delegation from the bishop. While Arnold was recovering in the safety of the cathedral, the mob outside shouted for his head to be cut off, put in a sack and then thrown into the river. Without even waiting to recover from his ordeal, Arnold excommunicated the entire town. There were similar incidents elsewhere. At Cordes two agents of the Inquisitor were thrown to their deaths down a well; in Moissac, while the Inquisitors Peter Seila and William Arnold were burning heretics, Cistercian monks were hiding them; in Narbonne, when Dominicans attempted to arrest a suspect an argument broke out that led to the sacking of the Dominican convent there.
Raymond VII was initially supportive — he was not in a position to be otherwise — but in 1235 a chance arose to fight back. Relations between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, were becoming increasingly strained. Indeed, they had never been good: one of Gregory’s first actions as pontiff had been to excommunicate Frederick for dallying over his crusading commitments. When Frederick did finally set off for the Sixth Crusade in 1227, Gregory excommunicated him again for going on Crusade while excommunicated. Raymond offered to intervene in the Languedoc on Gregory’s behalf if the Inquisitors could be made to show more restraint. Gregory agreed, and tried to curb the Inquisition’s most fanatical agents in the Languedoc. Seeing that they had regained some ground, the Toulousains began to resist even more. Cathars and their sympathisers were hidden or whisked out of town. Matters escalated until, in October, the Inquisitors were thrown out of Toulouse by a jeering mob, who pelted them with stones and excrement. Realising he needed Raymond as an ally, the pope could do little more than write the count an angry letter, and installed a Franciscan friar, Stephen of St Thibery, as the new Inquisitor, hoping that the Franciscans’ reputation for being more humane than their Dominican brothers might go some way to alleviate tensions. Unfortunately, the move backfired as Stephen proved to be as fanatical as any Dominican.
The Inquisition did score some successes, however. Two Perfect who had converted to Catholicism, Raymond Gros and William of Soler, provided dozens of names, and also told the Inquisitors that the Perfect had adopted a number of strategies to help them escape detection. Some male and female Perfect travelled in pairs, pretending to be married couples; some deliberately ate meat in public; others swapped their black robes for blue or dark green ones. Such ploys were seen as evidence of the cunning and deceit of heretics, despite the fact that it was the Catholic Church that made such cunning and deceit necessary.
The Trencavel and St Gilles Revolts
As the Inquisition continued to go about its detested business, discontent grew. Raymond Trencavel, son of
Raymond Roger, attempted to capitalise on the ill-will shown towards the agents of the Church. From exile in Aragon, he assembled an army which in 1240 besieged his ancestral seat of Carcasonne. After a tense and bloody stand-off that lasted for over a month, the two sides agreed a truce. Raymond would never regain his birthright, but was at least still alive.
Raymond VII had played no part in the Trencavel revolt, but, with the death of Gregory VII the following year, he saw a chance to intervene militarily. The papacy was in no position to stop him, as Gregory’s successor, Celestine IV, was pope for only 17 days, and, due to Frederick II’s attacks on Rome, it wasn’t until June 1243 that his successor, Innocent IV, was elected. By the spring of 1242, Raymond had persuaded King Henry III of England and Hugh de Lusignan, the most powerful baron in Aquitaine, to join forces with him.
As if to announce the start of the revolt, the Inquisitors Stephen of St Thibery and William Arnold were murdered on 28 May at Avignonet by a small group of Cathar supporters from Montsegur. News of the incident spread quickly, and was greeted with enthusiasm; one country priest even rang the bell of his church to celebrate the deaths of the Inquisitors. Within days, Raymond’s forces struck, taking French possessions and Dominican properties with decisive ease. By late summer, it looked as if the coup would be successful, but then things began to go wrong: Henry landed with a force that was too small to do anything other than get itself wiped out, which it successfully managed to do in an engagement with French forces near Bordeaux. Among Henry’s knights was Simon de Montfort the younger, whose changing of sides was on a par with that of Arnold Amaury, and would no doubt have made his father turn in his grave. Hugh of Lusignan, suddenly fearing he might be on the losing side, joined the French. But the death knell was sounded by none other than Roger Bernard of Foix. Despite his family’s long history of pro-southern, pro-Cathar, anti-French activism, Roger Bernard too felt that the revolt was doomed, and negotiated a separate peace with the French. Raymond VII realised that all was lost, and he too came to terms in January 1243. It was the end of the St Gilles family’s power in the Languedoc, and everyone knew it.
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