Chapter V · THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE. MURET AND ITS SEQUEL. (continued 2)

After the long delay at Avignon the army was at last directed against Toulouse. Almost all the Languedocian cities, including Nismes, Narbonne, Carcassonne, Albi, Beziers, Marseilles, Castres, and Puylaurens had already declared for Church and King. But, just as the end seemed in sight, the hardships of the campaign forced Louis to turn homewards, sick with dysentery. At Montpensier, in Auvergne, on November 8, he died. Within a little over three years after Philip Augustus’s death, his fear had been realized: the kingdom he had given his life to build was in the hands of a woman and child.

Despite this perilous state of affairs, the ideas of centralization and nationality had been so quickened that their growth was hardly checked. At first, to be sure, there was confusion, during which Raymond was able to recover some ground. Louis’ widow, the able and pious Blanche of Castille, was busy getting her 11 year old son, Louis IX, crowned at Rheims. Meanwhile the Counts of La Marche, Champagne, and Brittany intrigued busily with each other and with England, and prepared for open rebellion. Blanche’s position was so difficult that operations on a large scale in Languedoc could not be continued. Nevertheless the ground already won was held by the royal troops, under the energetic Humbert of Beaujeu who had been left in command in the theatre of war by Louis when he turned homeward to die. As long as Humbert’s force was kept “in being” in the South, the crusading tithes on Church property continued to flow into the royal treasury. During Lent in the year 1227, a local Church council at Narbonne excommunicated those who had broken their oaths sworn to Louis and ordered stricter persecution of heretics, showing therefore that some oaths had been broken and that persecution was not being carried on as faithfully as it might have been. Throughout the year the fighting swayed back and forth. Humbert de Beaujeu, with Archbishop Peter Amiel, of Narbonne, and Bishop Fulk, of Toulouse, at his side, took the castle of Becede, massacred the garrison and joyously burned some heretics. Raymond VII, for his part, recovered the town of Castel Sarrasin on the middle Garonne, but was not strong enough to keep the royalists from laying waste the countryside clear up to the walls of Toulouse.

Both sides were weary of war. The drain on the royal resources was serious, especially in view of the hostile attitude of the three northern Counts, and the Church tithes came in slowly and caused endless friction to collect. On the other hand, Raymond saw his position in the eyes of the world steadily going from bad to worse as his overlord continued to make war against him in the name of the Church. Clearly, if he could save anything at all by submission, he had better make haste to do so. Finally, the third party to the matter, the papacy, had also become anxious for peace in Languedoc. In March, 1227, the mild and aged Honorius III had died and been succeeded as Pope by Gregory IX, equally aged but far harsher than his predecessor. In spite of his eighty years, Gregory was determined to oppose the Emperor Frederic II, who had been growing ever more powerful and readier to oppose the Church ever since his guardian Innocent III had died. For a collision with Frederic, the Church must concentrate all her strength. The Languedocian business, therefore, was better out of the way.

With all three parties to the dispute equally determined upon a settlement, there remained only the question of ways and means. Raymond VII had no son and only one daughter, Jeanne. To betroth her to one of the younger brothers of the King would assure the ultimate reversion of the entire Toulousain heritage to the Crown. The Church would back the Crown in obtaining a settlement favourable to the King of France, granted that strong and systematic measures were taken against heresy. A papal letter of March, 1228, to Cardinal Romano the legate, shows that the proposed marriage was the heart of the negotiations. A second letter, of October 21 in the same year, renewing the crusading indulgences, shows that pressure upon Raymond was necessary in order to make him accept the terms proposed. To the same end, it seems that there was further devastation of Toulousain territory. In December Raymond gave in, and named Count Thibaut of Champagne as his agent with full power to negotiate in his behalf. In January, 1229, the parties in interest, including representatives of the municipality of Toulouse, met at Meaux and signed a preliminary agreement. On Holy Thursday, before the great western doorways of Notre Dame de Paris, was enacted the last scene of the long drama. There Raymond came before the legate, bare-footed like his father twenty years before at St. Gilles and clad only in his shirt. He then walked the length of the church to be “reconciled” as a penitent before the high altar. This done, he yielded himself the King’s prisoner in the Louvre, until such time as his daughter and five of his castles should be in royal hands, and five hundred “toises” (over a thousand yards) of the long-suffering walls of Toulouse should be demolished. The end had come.

The terms were hard. Raymond was to pursue heretics and their “favorers” without reserve, even to his nearest kinsmen. The familiar conditions of restoration of Church property, dismissal of bandit mercenaries, and establishing public security, again appear. In addition, the Count was to pay handsomely for ten years, “two masters in theology, two decretalists and six masters in grammar and the liberal arts” as members of the faculty of Toulouse University. He made also the familiar promise to crusade to Palestine, and engaged to do so within two years and remain in the Holy Land five years more. He, and after him his daughter Jeanne, were to retain Toulouse itself, Agen, Rouergue, Quercy except Cahors, and part of the district of Albi. The duchy of Narbonne and the counties of Velay, Gevaudan, Viviers, and Lodeve reverted at once to the Crown. The Church took the “Marquisate of Provence” a fief of the Empire to the east of the Rhône. Jeanne’s betrothal to Prince Alphonse, a child of nine, was treated as a royal “grace” bestowed on Raymond, and so was the royal amnesty to the numerous prescribed gentlemen of Languedoc, except the heretics among them. His vassals and people also subscribed to the conditions, and swore to acknowledge the King as their sole lord after forty days should Raymond fail in any particular. The glory had departed from Toulouse.

The settlement ended the struggle. The Count of Foix came in and made his peace the following year. Raymond seems to have lived up to the conditions, except that he kept putting off crusading to Palestine. In 1237 the light-weight Amaury de Montfort played the fool by calling himself Duke of Narbonne and by making attempts on the county of Melgueil in his own name, and on Dauphiné in the name of his wife. Gregory IX brought him up with a round turn and ordered him off to Palestine. His ill luck held; he was taken prisoner by the Saracens and held for three years until Gregory ransomed him, whereupon he ended his futile life at Otranto, on his way home in 1241. In 1240, there was a last flicker of local independence. The last of the Trencavels scraped up some support in Spain and laid siege to his ancestral city of Carcassonne. There was no movement in his favour among the people, and he was unable to reduce the royal garrison, so he ravaged the countryside before taking himself off and disappearing from history. Seven years later Raymond VII died, in the midst of preparing for his long-postponed crusade to Palestine. Countess Jeanne and Prince Alphonse, who had been duly married, succeeded to what was left of his possessions. In 1271 they died without issue and King Philip III, St. Louis’ heir, took their lands.

Summarizing the four phases of the war, in the first the Crusaders appear in great force in obedience to the Church and take Beziers and Carcassonne. This phase lasts only a few months in 1209.

The second phase (1209-1212) begins with the appointment of Simon de Montfort, nominally to govern the conquered territory and really to root out the tolerant southern houses. Personal interests now take their place beside religious interests. The second phase lasts for three years. Throughout this period Simon de Montfort uses his scanty resources with such ability that he not only maintains himself but also extends his holdings over the greater part of the country in dispute.

The third phase (1213-1224) begins when Simon breaks the formidable intervention of Pedro, King of Aragon. The capital point of Toulouse he is unable to take, or to hold it after it is adjudged to him by the Lateran Council, and he is finally killed beneath its walls. He is successful in that he weakens the prestige of the House of Toulouse due to the long war waged against it in the name of religion.

After Simon de Montfort’s death, for seven years his son continues to lose ground, and finally resigns his claims in favour of the French Crown.

The third, or royal phase, lasts three years (1224-1227). An imminent decision by arms, in favour of the Crown and against the House of Toulouse, is averted by King Louis VIII’s death, and finally, in 1229, a treaty is made, providing for the eventual absorption of Toulouse by the Crown.

The net results are: (first) the establishment of French national unity down to our own day, with no prospect of its dissolution: (second) the re-establishment of the moral unity of Europe, threatened at the beginning of the thirteenth century by the Albigensian movement; which moral unity, so re-established, endured until the convulsion of the sixteenth century, in which the modern world was born.