Note 143 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

For the rest, every one of the new literary influences that were assailing the Church would tend to flourish in such a civilization as that of Languedoc, which had been peaceful and prosperous for over two hundred years. Unable to lay hold of the popular poets and minstrels who propagated anti-clericalism, the papacy could hope to put down by brute force the social system in which they flourished, crushing the pious and more hated heretic with the scoffer. And Languedoc was a peculiarly tempting field for such operations. Its relative lack of military strength, as well as its pre-eminence in heresy, led Innocent III, a peculiarly zealous assertor of the papal power,143 to attack it in preference to other and remoter centres of enmity. In the first year of his pontificate, 1198, he commenced a new and zealous Inquisition144 in the doomed region; and in the year 1207, when as much persecution had been accomplished as the lax faith of the nobility and many of the bishops would consent to—an appeal to the King of France to interfere being disregarded—the scheme of a crusade against the dominions of Raymond Count of Toulouse was conceived and gradually matured. The alternate weakness and obstinacy of Raymond, and the fresh provocation given by the murder, in 1208, of the arrogant papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau,145 permitted the success of the scheme in such hands. The crusade was planned exactly on the conditions of those against the Saracens—the heretics at home being declared far worse than they.146 The crusaders were freed from payment of interest on their debts, exempted from the jurisdiction of all law courts, and absolved from all their sins past or future.147 To earn this reward they were to give only forty days’ service148—a trifle in comparison with the hardships of the crusades to Palestine. “Never therefore had the cross been taken up with a more unanimous consent.”149 Bishops and nobles in Burgundy and France, the English Simon de Montfort, the Abbot of Citeaux, and the Bernardine monks throughout Europe, combined in the cause; and recruits came from Austria and Saxony, from Bremen, even from Slavonia, as well as from northern France.150 The result was such a campaign of crime and massacre as European history cannot match.151 Despite the abject submission of the Count of Toulouse, who was publicly stripped and scourged, and despite the efforts of his nephew the Count of Albi to make terms, village after village was fired, all heretics caught were burned, and on the capture of the city and castle of Beziers (1209), every man, woman, and child within the walls was slaughtered, many of them in the churches, whither they had run for refuge. The legate, Arnold abbot of Citeaux, being asked at an early stage how the heretics were to be distinguished from the faithful, gave the never-to-be-forgotten answer, “Kill all; God will know his own.”152 Seven thousand dead bodies were counted in the great church of St. Mary Magdalene. The legate in writing estimated the total quarry at 15,000; others put the number at sixty thousand.153 When all in the place were slain, and all the plunder removed, the town was burned to the ground, not one house being left standing. Warned by the fate of Beziers, the people of Carcassonne, after defending themselves for many days, secretly evacuated their town; but the legate contrived to capture a number of the fugitives, of whom he burned alive four hundred, and hanged fifty.154 Systematic treachery, authorized and prescribed by the Pope,155 completed the success of the undertaking. The Church had succeeded, in the name of religion, in bringing half of Europe to the attainment of the ideal height of wickedness, in that it had learned to make evil its good; and the papacy had on the whole come nearer to destroying the moral sense of all Christendom156 than any conceivable combination of other causes could ever have done in any age.