The Passion of Dolssa (51 page)

Christian theologians in the rapidly growing universities were especially concerned about heresy. They studied arguments written by early Church Fathers against third and fourth century heresies and grew convinced that the same false doctrines had leapt across a thousand years and as many miles, with Satan’s help, to poison Christendom. And Provincia, they were certain, was a hotbed of heresy.

Provincia’s language was distinct from its neighbors’, and so were its local customs. Its traditions centered around
cortezia,
meaning courtliness or courtesy (though it reaches far beyond polite manners).
Cortezia
dictated certain rituals for greeting, bowing to, helping, and giving gifts to others, according to the
onor
(honor and/or wealth) of all involved. A person might be called a good man (
bon ome
) or good woman (
bona femna
) for being noble or rich, landowning or influential, but a life of known holiness could also merit the label. These holy men and women were known collectively as the friends of God (
amicx de Dieu
). They lived in every village, dressed and ate simply, and performed certain prayers, greetings, and rituals to cultivate and spread their holiness. Specific practices and beliefs varied locally, but the holy good men and women were widely respected, routinely asked for their prayers and blessings. They weren’t a church; they embodied a way of seeking everyday holiness that was specific to Provincia.

The friends of God saw themselves as pious Christians, but to Catholic clergy passing through Provincia, they looked like a secret organized religion, and an offshoot of ancient heresies. Ignorance of another culture undoubtedly contributed to these suspicions. Also, the friends of God’s humble ways, with little appearance of hierarchy or priesthood, differed sharply from Catholicism. The Church was already concerned about critics who protested its wealth and ostentation, and wary of groups that protested them via alternate lifestyles. The respect in which the good men
and women were held suggested that holiness could be found in one’s neighborhood, without a priest’s help, despite the Church’s claim to be the only valid source of sacraments essential for salvation. Furthermore, as mentioned, Church clerics’ university training predisposed them to believe ancient, sinister heresies threatened the Church already. The friends of God, therefore, were the demons they’d been searching for.

The Murder of Peire of Castelnau and the Start of the Albigensian Crusade

Dominic de Guzmán visited Provincia in 1204 and was horrified. He founded his Order of Friars-Preachers in Toulouse in 1215 specifically to combat heresy. Pope Innocent III, meanwhile, pressured Raimon VI, count of Toulouse, to purge his lands of heretics. He sent a legate, or papal ambassador, to meet with Raimon in January 1208. When discussions ended badly, the legate, Peire of Castelnau, left. The next morning a squire charged into Peire’s camp and skewered him with a lance by the Rhône River.

Historians believe Raimon never ordered Peire of Castelnau’s death, and think the assassin was from Raimon’s court, acting stupidly and alone, hoping to impress his lord. But Peire’s murder was all the provocation Innocent III needed to proclaim a crusade into Raimon VI’s lands in 1209.

It was the first holy war where Christians were guaranteed salvation for killing other Christians.

Soldiers “bearing the sign of the cross” were promised salvation, spoils of war, and debt relief. Compared to a Jerusalem crusade, a march into the sunny south looked easy. By summer 1209, tens of thousands of “pilgrims” had gathered near Lyon to journey down the Rhône into Count Raimon’s lands.

The first great battle at Béziers was a heartbreaking massacre. Thousands of servant boys tagging along with the crusaders charged the city, climbing walls and sneaking through drains, killing everyone they met, until French knights finally joined them. The boys in their fury heaped corpses on street corners and torched them. The city became an inferno, burning to the ground, incinerating anyone who survived the initial slaughter. Arnauld Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux, papal legate and leader of the crusade, supposedly said, when asked how the crusaders could tell
who was a heretic and who was not: “Kill them all! Truly God will know his own.” (Soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks, I saw the same idea repeated almost verbatim on a bumper sticker regarding Muslims, and how to tell which were terrorists.)

The crusade, now called the “Albigensian Crusade” after a nickname northern Frenchmen used for southerners, raged for twenty years. Soldiers ravaged Provincia each summer, butchering and mutilating entire towns of people who wouldn’t surrender. Provençals battled bravely, and both sides suffered tremendous losses. The war’s grim conclusion, with the Treaty of Paris in 1229, established terms that eventually annexed the county of Toulouse into the kingdom of France.

“The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West,” writes historian Mark Pegg, “by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as [Christ’s] sacrifice on the cross . . . A crusader not only cleansed his soul by cutting the throat of a pestilential baker from Toulouse, he cleansed the very soul of Christendom” (
A Most Holy War
, page 188).

Inquisition as an Innovative Solution

Cleansing the soul of Christendom remained an unfinished task after the crusade. The friends of God and their sympathizers still lived in hiding. Inquisition arose as a way to smoke them out. The Dominican Order was commanded by Pope Gregory IX to carry out this work. The friars pursued their task with zeal.

Anyone who had ever associated with the
amicx de Dieu
faced likely punishment. Excommunication meant eternal damnation, and it wasn’t the inquisitors’ only tool. A common sentence was wearing two large yellow crosses on one’s clothes for life. This might seem benign, but it visibly marked those to be shunned in Christendom. Pope Innocent III had already proclaimed in 1215 that Jews and Muslims must dress differently from Christians. (Not unlike during World War II, when Germany required Jews to wear yellow stars on their clothing.) Branding people as alien and dangerous barred them from society, friendship, employment, and trade, as though they were infectiously ill. In the eyes of inquisitors, as “doctors of souls,” heresy was indeed a disease, a spreading contagion.

The inquisitions “into heretical depravity” sliced through communal loyalties. When persecution became a way of life, fear made neighbors betray neighbors, and turned kin against kin.
Cortezia
dissolved forever, giving way to suspicion.

Inquisitors could only issue religious punishments. (In 1252 they were granted permission to use torture to obtain confessions—a privilege also granted to civil courts). Inquisitors never burned anyone. They recommended civil sentences, then “relaxed” the guilty into the custody of lords and their bailiffs (
bayles
), who carried out the punishments. These lords, still smarting from the wounds of war, had no wish to offend the Church by indulging heretics. Most cooperated.

Inquisitors wrote manuals, trained others, and kept detailed records. They were nothing if not efficient in the “business of the faith.” In some cases their inquisitions saved lives. In a post-crusade climate where lords were frantic to avoid the stain of heresy, which could cost them their lands, some lords became reckless butchers. The inquisitors brought a form of due process to the sentencing.

While crusading clergy were often ruthless and bloodthirsty, most churchmen believed they performed a necessary service for God. Some inquisitors rejoiced in destroying heretics; others mourned them as lost souls. Nevertheless, historical records show a clear pattern of the charge of heresy being wielded disproportionately against those who stood in the way of the pope’s or the monarch’s ambitions; against those who criticized inquisitors; or against those with treasures worth confiscating. It was an effective tool for silencing and looting an enemy, and it remained so for centuries in Europe.

It is this tension among faith, violence, and self-interest that I struggled with most in my portrayal of churchmen. While their deeds may have been monstrous, it is too simplistic to portray them as monsters. Humans have the greatest capacity for evil not when they act alone but in committees, bureaucracies, and boardrooms, carrying out agendas they can justify as their painful duty for the greater good.

The Myth of the Cathars

Search anywhere for information about the Albigensian Crusade, or heretics from southern France, and you’ll find them called “Cathars”—in
encyclopedias, tourist literature, even academic works. A full description of Catharism’s doctrines and hierarchy will follow, claiming a centralized structure, a missionary program for obtaining converts, and a vocal objective of toppling the faith of Rome.

There never was an organized church of Cathars. Historical descriptions of so-called Cathars were written decades later, almost all by Italian Dominican inquisitors. No friend of God in Provincia was called a Cathar, least of all by the “heretics” themselves.

It’s not just the name that’s wrong. The entire story surrounding them as a unified and organized religion, with coherent beliefs and a mission to destroy Catholic Christianity, is pure fantasy.

The label “Cathar” is found in the fourth century in the writings of St. Augustine and the Council of Nicea. No link exists between fourth-century Cathars and the good men and women of Provincia. Where thirteenth-century Church intellectuals saw similar ideas, they presumed shared origins. So they described the
amicx de Dieu
in language that sometimes copied verbatim Augustine’s descriptions of his Cathars.

In reality, many of those interrogated by inquisitors couldn’t explain what the good men and women believed at all. Their impact may have had less to do with doctrine, and more to do with tradition, or family and friendship ties. The good men and women were part of the fabric of life in Provincia, just as farmers and fishermen, priests and prostitutes were. None of them needed a religion to explain its presence.

In the nineteenth century, however, European and American scholars, studying the records of the Cathars written by Catholic scholars, presumed without question that they were a church. They proposed the paradigm that remains popular: that Catharism was the most famous heresy of the Middle Ages, that it was the instigator of both reform and repression within the Church, that it was an early but crushed form of proto-Protestantism. This deeply romantic image of the tragically pure, martyred Cathars still lingers in some academic publications, and in plenty of popular fiction. Cathar legends, castles, and tourist attractions thrive today.

Dolssa is not one of the good women. She is a Catholic mystic. But her fate is wrapped up in that of the friends of God, since she was born in the waning years of the crusade, and the dawn of the inquisitors. In the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade, even deviance as pious as hers could be deadly.

The annihilation of the good men and women, the vanishing of
cortezia
, and the success of the Cathar myth serve as reminders that the victors in the belief wars will always be the chroniclers whose testimonies last, the historians whose interpretations spread, the writers of the books that are not burned. The best way to squash an inconvenient idea is to not to combat it but to quietly burn its records, discredit and suppress its voices, and deny their existence. Where denial is impossible, fabricating a new story about them and their origins will work just as well.

This is why Holocaust deniers frighten me, as do those who overlook genocide, and those who use legislative means to rewrite textbooks. If truth matters one iota, we can’t be content to write history as we’d like it to have gone. We must tell it, to the best of our biased and hampered ability, exactly as it was.

Church chroniclers may have pointed a false trail, but the inquisitors who transcribed the testimony of every peasant or noble interviewed did us a tremendous, if accidental, service. Even in the act of silencing heresy, they preserved the voices and values of a world on the brink of extinction. Though people answered questions in fear for their lives, and often agreed to answers inquisitors supplied for them, their passionate, flawed, vibrant humanity echoes through dusty parchment pages, perceptible to those modern historians willing to devote the time and study, as my Friar Arnaut did, to examining what the sources actually said. This novel is dedicated, with deep affection, to two of them.

GLOSSARIES

About the Use of Foreign Words in This Novel

Occitan
is the name used today for the Romance language still spoken in southern France, Monaco, and parts of Italy and Spain. It descends recognizably from a language used during the Middle Ages that scholars call Old Provençal. It was the elegant, poetic language of the troubadours whose songs were sung in courts throughout Europe.

In France today, Occitan stubbornly survives, though the number of speakers continues to decline. I chose to use Old Provençal words as linguistic reminders of a once-flourishing language and culture that gradually succumbed to war, oppression, and annexation.

Finding authoritative sources for a language spoken in the thirteenth century was difficult, especially for an English speaker with limited French. Old Provençal had many different dialects and no standardized spellings. I drew from several sources mentioned in the bibliography, prioritizing those that seemed oldest and most authoritative. Ultimately I chose to codify my own lexicon for use in this book, and occasionally I did borrow a word or two from modern Occitan. I also used some words from Latin, with smatterings from other European languages then in use, since trade, church, and legal matters took place in a multi-lingual context then, as now.

To me, Old Provençal read strangely at first, but its strangeness became its beauty.