THE INQUISITION
A POLITICAL AND MILITARY STUDY
OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT

BY

HOFFMAN NICKERSON

With a Preface by

HILAIRE BELLOC

JOHN BALE, SONS & DANIELSSON, LTD.
83-91, GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET
LONDON, W. 1.

1923

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

CONTENTS.

DEDICATORY LETTER.

To R. C. N.

My dear—

This book is rightfully yours for your unfailing help and encouragement. In dedicating it I do but make a payment on account.

It was begun during a term in the New York State Legislature, when I endured Prohibition lobbyists, and cast about for something which might serve as a historical precedent in the way of religio-political oppression on so vast a scale. I was not long before discovering that traditional Christianity had more to say for the Inquisitors than for the Prohibitionists, so that the parallel with Prohibition has been thrust into an epilogue.

My thanks are due to many mutual friends. Among them are M. Joseph Poux, Archiviste du Département de l’Aude; Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church, Carcassonne; Father Villemagne, Curé of Castelnau; Professor Joseph Anglade of the University of Toulouse; M. Galaberd, Archiviste and Librarian of the City of Toulouse, and M. Jules Chalande, also of Toulouse and of the Société Archéologique du Midi de la France. To the studious man, France is a sort of paradise, for the local scholars receive you with enthusiasm and lay themselves out to forward your work.

Our good friend Belloc, the Master of those who would celebrate the Middle Ages in the English tongue, besides his kindly preface, has been good enough to read the manuscript and make several helpful suggestions.

Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have me frank with my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called Anglo-Catholic party in that communion.

Hoffman Nickerson.

34, West 54 Street,
New York, N.Y.
January, 1923.

PREFACE.

Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past.

The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when the wholesome reaction began.

In the first place it was not thorough.

In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition.

Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and aristocratic institutions.

But the second defect was worse still. History may be scrappy and superficial and yet, on the whole, right; but if its whole orientation is warped by a wrong appreciation of the past, then, however detailed and full of research, it is worse than worthless; it is harmful and it had better not have been written at all.

These preliminary remarks apply to the history of Europe as a whole and especially to the history of Europe between the coarsening of the foundational Roman administrative system in the fifth century and the rise of modern culture in the seventeenth.

They do not apply to late local history. Late (post 1600) local history was thoroughly well done. The history of England itself, when it deals only with the England which sprang out of the completed Reformation century (still more the local history of the United States) was detailed and exact. What is more important than exactitude in detail, it was consonant with the spirit of the thing described. The writers on either side of the Atlantic, but especially upon the American side, understood the material with which they were dealing. Here in England (where I write this Preface) the work on later history was also national and well done, though it suffered from no small defect in that the original Catholic England (which was like a foreign country to the writers in question) lingered on as a dwindling minority till at least 1715 and somewhat disturbed the picture; so that our modern English historians are never really at home until they get to the Hanoverian dynasty. Before that they have to deal with a remaining remnant of the vigorous Catholic spirit, and they are perplexed and bewildered by it, so that it vitiates their conclusions. That is why they cannot write of the later Stuarts, and especially of James II, with any proper sense of proportion. They cannot conceive how strong nor even how widespread was the support of the national dynasty, because that support was mixed up with the (to them and in our time) utterly alien Catholic idea.

I say that the main task of an historian writing in the English language is the shovelling away of rubbish; and this is particularly true of the rubbish which has accumulated over the record of the Dark and early Middle Ages (A.D. 500 to 1000; A.D. 1000 to 1500).

From the very beginning of the affair popular history was warped by the spirit of ridicule (Voltaire’s creation propagated in the English language by Voltaire’s pupil Gibbon) against the formation of Christendom and that tremendous story of definition upon definition, council upon council, from which emerged at last the full Christian creed. The decisive conflicts of Nicea, of Chalcedon, were made a silly jest, and generations of boys and young men were taught to think of the most profound questions ever settled by the human mind as verbal quips and incomprehensible puerilities.

Next the gradual transformation of our Catholic civilization from the majestic order of our pagan origin to the splendid spring of the twelfth century was represented with incredible insufficiency as the conquest of the Occident by barbarian Germans, who, though barbarians, possessed I know not what fund of strength and virtue. Institutions which we now know to be of Roman origin were piously referred to these starved heaths of the Baltic and to the central European wilds. Their inhabitants were endowed with every good quality. Whatever we were proud of in our inheritance was referred to the blank savagery of outer lands at no matter what expense of tortured hypothesis or bold invention. This warping of truth was indulged in because the northern part of Europe stood (in the nineteenth century when this false “Teutonic” school had its greatest vogue) for a successful opposition to the rest of Christendom, and for a schism within the body of civilized men.

But the worst fault of all, worse even than the superficial folly of Gibbon’s tradition in our treatment of the great Christian foundation and worse than the Teutonic nonsense, was the misunderstanding of those four great centuries in which our race attained the summit of its happiness and stable culture—the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And of these, the greatest, the thirteenth, was in particular ignored.

Men did indeed (partly because it enabled them to “turn” the position of true history by concession to, partly from the unavoidable effect of, increasing historical knowledge) pay lip service in England, during the later part of the nineteenth century, to the greatness of the true Middle Ages. In his early period, Ruskin is a conspicuous example of a writer who, without in the least understanding what the Middle Ages were like, hating yet ignorant of the faith that was their very soul, could not remain blind to the vivid outward effect of their expression. Even Carlyle, far more ignorant than Ruskin and far more of a player to the gallery, could not altogether avoid the strong blast of reality which blew from those times.

But these concessions, these partial admissions, did but deepen the blindness of such historians and their readers towards the formation and the climax of our race; upon the Dark and the Middle Ages, history as written in the English language was warped beyond recognition.

Then came the reaction towards historical truth: it has already far advanced and the book for which I have the honour here to write a Preface is a notable example of that progress.

“History” (said the great Michelet in a phrase which I am never tired of repeating) “should be a resurrection of the flesh.” What you need for true history is by no means an agreement with the philosophy of the time which you describe (you may be wholly opposed to that philosophy) but at least a full comprehension of it and an understanding that those who worked its human affairs were men fundamentally the same as ourselves. Humanity has not essentially differed from the beginning of recorded, or, indeed, of geological time. Man as man (the only thing which concerns history, or, indeed, the morals and philosophy of mankind) has been the same since first he appears fully developed upon the earth. But in the case of Western Europe during the Middle Ages the thing is far more intimate. We are dealing with men who are not only of our genus but of our very stock; wholly of our particular blood, our own fathers, our own family. What is more, in those ancestors we should take our greatest pride. For never did our race do better or more thoroughly, never was it more faithfully itself, than in the years between the First Crusade and the effects of the Black Death: 1100-1350. Those three long lifetimes were the very summit of the European story.

Now I say that to treat properly of this affair it is not indeed necessary to agree with the philosophy of those men—that is, with their religion. It is certainly not necessary to agree with the details of their action, as, for example, their lapses into cruelty on the one hand or their fierce sense of honour on the other. We may be baser, or more reasonable, or more gentle, or more lethargic than they, and yet remain true historians of them. But what one must have if one is to be an historian at all, and not a mere popular writer, repeating what the public of “the best sellers” wants to have told to it, is a knowledge of the spirit of our ancestors from within.

Now this can only be obtained in one fashion, to wit, by accurate, detailed, concrete record. Find out what happened and say it. Proportion is of course essential; but to an honest man proportion will come of itself from a sufficient reading, and only a dishonest man will after a sufficient reading warp proportion and make a brief by picking out special points.

The trouble is that this period has been dealt with in the past without minute research. There has been plenty of pretence at such research, but most of it was charlatan.

Let me take as a specific instance by way of example:

Freeman’s huge volumes upon the Norman Conquest were long treated as a serious classic. He pretended to have read what he had not read. He pretended to have studied ground he had not studied. He wrote what he knew would sell because it was consonant with what was popular at the time. He attacked blindly the universal Catholic religion of the epoch he dealt with because he hated that religion. But scholarly he was not and did not attempt to be; yet scholarly he pretended to be, and upon supposed scholarship he based his false representation. I will give three examples.

He calls the Battle of Hastings “Senlac.” He found the term not where he pretends, in Ordericus Vitalis, but in Lingard, who was the first man to commit the error. Lingard was the great quarry from which Freeman’s generation of Dons dug out its history without ever acknowledging the source. “Senlac” could not possibly be a Saxon place-name, but Freeman understood so little about the time and was so ignorant of the genius of the language, that he took it for Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps he thought in some vague way he was restoring a “Teutonic” name; more “Teutonic” than Hastings itself!

To this religious motive of his there was undoubtedly added the motive of novelty and of showing off. What the ridge of Battle was originally called by the people of the place, before the Norman invasion, we cannot tell. It may have been “Sandleg” (which would be Sussex enough), or it may have been “Senhanger,” also sound Sussex, or it may have been something ending in the Celtic and Latin “lake.” But “Senlac” it most certainly could not have been; and that Freeman should have pretended to scholarship in a matter of that kind damns him.

The second point is far more striking and can be tested by anyone who visits the localities mentioned in the five principal contemporary authorities. He desires to reduce the numbers involved in the battle; partly from a silly prejudice against anything written by a monk, partly from a desire to belittle the actions of the early Middle Ages and the whole of its civilization, partly (mainly, perhaps) from a desire to be novel. He makes up the estimates out of his head, grossly reducing the forces actually engaged.

We have contemporary evidence which allows for more than 50,000 men upon Duke William’s side and something of the same sort upon Harold’s. The evidence not only of those who saw William’s host mustered and who must actually have handled the lists on the Norman side, such as the Duke’s secretary, William of Jumièges, but the evidence of topography also proves this. Pevensey, the harbour in which the great Norman fleet of 3,000 vessels moored, was a vast expanse of water comparable to Portsmouth to-day; you may still trace its limits accurately enough round the contour of the present marsh. The position held defensively at Hastings by Harold’s command is only just under a mile long and is one of the most clearly defined positions in Europe, absolutely unmistakable. Freeman, with no appreciation of military history, conceives this line of a mile (held by men closely interlocked and in dense formation capable of withstanding hurricanes of cavalry charges for nine hours) to have been held by a handful of men! It is the wildest nonsense, and yet it passed for a generation as history.

Lastly, as an example of bias and charlatanry combined, you have the confident statement that Pope Sylvester had given a Bull to Duke William in support of the invasion. Here Freeman has at least the grace not to give a sham reference in a footnote, for the thing is completely false. If Freeman had taken the trouble or had had the science to look up the Bullarium, or even the letters and documents of Sylvester in Migne, he might have been spared the contempt of all competent critics. As it is he preferred a legendary piece of nonsense in a piece of popular verse to exact history.

The motive through which Freeman invented this Bull was the motive of his place, time, and generation: hatred of the Catholic Church, that is, against the religion of the people with whom he was dealing, and a desire to satisfy the animus of his Victorian readers against the Papacy.

In contrast to nonsense of this kind, haphazard, ill-evidenced and invented history, note the admirable description you will read in the following pages of the battle of Muret.

Here is a real knowledge of ground and, what is more important, a careful estimate of time and movement. I know nothing better in the reconstruction of a mediæval battle than this first-rate piecing together of evidence through common sense upon the flanking surprise movement executed by Simon de Montfort against Foix’s division of the enemy at Muret. It is an unbreakable chain of calculation, and at the same time a full explanation of what happened. This piece of work, in the fifth chapter of the volume here presented to the reader, is as good as anything can be of its kind, and an excellent representative of that new, modern, accurate work now ridding us of the loose stuff which encumbered history through the past two generations. That is the way to reconstruct a mediæval battle in the absence of detailed evidence, to see the movements as they actually took place.

I have laid emphasis on this particular section of the book by way of contrast to the insufficiency of so typical a name as Freeman’s. I ought rather, perhaps, to turn to the book as a whole and then again to certain other specific points of excellence which have struck me.

Mr. Nickerson’s study is mainly concerned with explaining the nature of the early Inquisition; incidentally he gives us a very clear view of the Albigensian War, and what is especially remarkable in the clarity of his view is the arrangement of the episodes. I note that the author has done what is of first importance in all military chronicling, and that is, the division of episodes not in equal measures of time but by their separate military characteristics.

It is a principle too often forgotten even by professional military historians. A war may take twenty years, or fifty, or one. It may, by accident, divide itself naturally into two or three episodes of fairly equal length in time or it may by coincidence fall into episodes corresponding more or less with a successive series of years (e.g.,) Marlborough’s Campaigns in Flanders in the early eighteenth century. But much the greater part of military history is concerned with episodes which have no relation to such more or less equal time-chapters. The general rule is that three or four successive phases of a campaign (or battle) occupy the most disparate lengths of time. The proper way to treat military history is to give to the capital episodes their relative military importance; not, as in the case of a civilian chronicle, to weigh that importance by the time involved.

For instance, no one can read a clear account, however short, of the great European War without seeing it as a siege; it is therefore, like every siege (not raised, nor degenerated into a blockade) essentially divided into three episodes:—

(a) The preliminaries of containment, that is the war of movement prior to the establishment of siege conditions.

(b) The siege itself.

(c) The storming of the siege line and the collapse of the besieged.

Now if we were to take the Great War in years—1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918 would appear. If we divide it into chapters of more or less equal lengths of time we have a confused, meaningless picture such as is given us by nearly all the popular histories as yet published of that great event. However much these accounts succeed in pleasing each its national audience they fail as histories because they think a month of war must be thirty times more important than a day and need thirty times as much telling. The moment we divide the Great War according to its military values the scheme falls into place and becomes clear. You have three divisions, of which you can make, if you like, three volumes or three chapters. The first is absurdly short in comparison with the length of the whole. It only seriously begins with the great shock of August 20, 21, 1914, in Lorraine and in Flanders, and it ends when the Germans went to earth less than a month later—on the Aisne. From that moment onward the war was a siege.

Next you get the second division, the completion of the siege lines in the West to the sea (which is over before the middle of November, two more months), and then the solid three and a half years of effort on the part of the besieged to break out in great sorties and on the part of the besiegers to break down the defence of the besieged.

In mere length of time this episode is prodigious and includes all the better known stories of the war. It lasts for over forty-four months and sees the collapse of Russia; the first sorties of the besieged Prussian alliance through Poland; the tremendous efforts made by the Allies to break the enemy’s siege-lines in Champagne, on the Somme, and in Flanders, on the Asiago plateau and on the terrible Carso Plateau in front of Trieste. It sees the failure of the attack on the siege wall at the postern of the Dardanelles, and even in remote Mesopotamia, as well as in the Balkans. It sees further great sorties, especially the violent struggles of the besieged at the end to get out of their net: Caporetto, St. Quentin, the Chemin des Dames. That second division ends on July 15, 1918, when the last effort of the besieged to get out was made against Gouraud and broken by him in front of Rheims. On July 18, 1918, three days later, the third division begins and lasts exactly four months to the Armistice on November 11. It is nothing but the successive breakdown of the defence, the crumbling of the siege wall and the collapse of the besieged.

See the Great War on these lines, and you see it clearly, as it was. Try to write of it by successive years, and you get nothing but a fog.

Now Mr. Nickerson has done exactly that right thing for the Albigensian War. He clearly divides the struggle into its military episodes; the first great rush; the long struggle of de Montfort; the curious but inevitable fruit of the whole business after de Montfort’s death in the lapse of the South to the crown of France, that is to the North.

In this connection one cannot praise too highly the simple and clear fashion in which the author has presented to the reader the real nature of mediæval warfare. There are two points to be established in which, I think, he has been permanently successful. First, in making the reader understand the narrow limits of time to which any effective work on a large scale by a powerful army was then confined. Secondly, the contrast between the feudal forces which were, as it were, normal to the times, and those supplementary mercenary forces, which, though they were not regarded by the time as normal, were the real backbone of all continuous military effort in the West. It is an idea which one might develop in many epochs of military history besides the Middle Ages. Over and over again a particular form of recruitment is regarded as normal and after use for some generations begins from causes inherent in itself to yield insufficient results; whereupon a supplementary form of recruitment, which for long continues to be regarded as exceptional, becomes, as the close observer may discover, the essential of the new fighting force, e.g., the Auxiliaries and the Legions after, say 180, and especially after 312.

It was one of the advantages of the English, by the way, in the later Middle Ages that the difficulty of transporting large feudal forces over the sea led to an early development of their mercenary forces and produced the highly trained professional bowmen who are the mark of the Hundred Years War.

Mr. Nickerson is also right in saying how considerable was the degree of military organization in the early thirteenth century.

Too often in military history anything earlier than the seventeenth century or the middle of the sixteenth is treated unscientifically by the writer, who seems to imagine that if he gets far enough back he can treat armies as herds moving about at random. The truth is of course that no great body of men ever so moved or could be moved without a high degree of organization, and that when you are dealing with the rapid movement of a very large body the organization must be nearly as detailed as it is to-day. There is a certain minimum of organization below which you cannot fall without breaking down, when it is a case of great bodies moving quickly; and that minimum is so high that it does not vary very much between the very first epochs of recorded history and the latest.

The next point I have to notice is Mr. Nickerson’s presentation both of the Inquisition as an idea and of the contrast between its methods and those of modern times. The task undertaken is the most difficult of any that lies before the historian; yet it is also the most essential. The wrong way of dealing with the remote past when it presents acts or states of mind quite unfamiliar, and even repulsive to us, is to express horror or ridicule and leave it at that. Thus we have Mr. Davis in his typical Oxford textbook upon the Angevin period sneering at the massacre at Beziers as “pious butchery”; thus we have another typical Oxford textbook, Mr. Oman’s, dealing with an earlier period, sneering at the piety of Gildas; and thus we have yet another textbook—from Cambridge this time—in which the Regius Professor of History, Dr. Bury, sneers at a vision of St. Patrick’s as the result of a “pork supper.”

Now that way of writing history, which is, I am sorry to say, still the common way in our English Universities, is worthless. Your business in writing of the past is to make the past comprehensible. More: you ought, as I quoted at the beginning of this, to make it rise from the dead; and that you certainly cannot do if you are so little able to enter into its spirit that everything in it which differs from yourself appears small, repulsive, or absurd. Anyone, however ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that. The whole art of history consists in eliminating that shock of non-comprehension and in making the reader feel as the men of the past felt.

We have a very good example of the same difficulty in the case of travel-books. We all know how intolerably boring is a book of travel in which the writer can get no further than decrying or laughing at the foreigner, and we all know how the charm of a book of travel consists in its explaining to us, putting before us as a living and comprehensible thing, some civilization which at first sight seemed to us incomprehensible.

It is just the same with history. In the case of the Inquisition it is particularly difficult to make the modern reader understand the affair because all the terms have been, so to speak, transliterated; but I think we can arrive at a fairly satisfactory result if we translate the terms involved into things which the modern man is familiar with. Instead of physical torture, for instance, read cross-examination and public dishonour; instead of the sacrifice of all civic guarantees to the preponderant interest of united religion, read the similar sacrifice of all such guarantees to the preponderant interest of a united nation; instead of clerical officers using every means (or nearly every means) for the preservation of religious unity, read civil officers using every means for the preservation of national unity in time of peril. If you do that, I think the modern man can understand. Had you presented to the early thirteenth century the spectacle of the whole male population medically examined, registered, and forcibly drafted into a life where a chance error might be punished immediately by death or by some other terrible punishment; had you shown him men, doubtful in their loyalty to the nation, condemned to years of perpetual silence, secluded from their fellow beings after being made a spectacle of public dishonour in the Courts; had you even sketched for him our universal spy system whereby a strong modern central Government holds down all its subjects as no Government of antiquity, however tyrannical, ever held them down—could you have shown a man of the thirteenth century all this, he would have felt the same repulsion and horror which most modern men feel on reading of the Inquisition, its objects and its methods.

A man who should so explain our modern life to a man of the thirteenth century as to make it comprehensible to him (a difficult task!) in spite of his repulsion and horror at our cruelties, blasphemies, and tyrannies, would be a good historian. The converse also is true.

There are many special points in the book on the consideration of which I would delay did space allow. Thus my own knowledge of the time and place enables me to make certain suggestions. I see that the author inclines to the Cerdagne route for the march of Pedro of Aragon. I should do more than incline—I should be morally certain of it—at least on the evidence to our hand; and that in spite of Pedro’s presence at Lascuarre in August. If, which is very unlikely, further evidence comes forward, we may have to accept the Somport sallent or even the Val d’Aran, but the more I think of it, the more the latter seems to me out of the question. I know the steep and dangerous approaches upon either side, especially upon the Aragonese side. I consider the great difficulty of reaching them from the point of concentration at Lerida. The Cerdagne is the one really open road. It was the only easy pass of value then to large armies; as for the second pass, the Puymorens, into the valley of the Ariege, it is perfectly easy, a mere lift of land. I have crossed it a dozen times under all conditions of weather. Again I would find it most interesting to contrast the procedure even of the late Inquisition with contemporary civilian procedure, e.g., Torquemada’s procedure with Henry VII’s Judges in a treason trial. It is to the advantage of the former. Better still, a trial under Philip III and Cecil’s Judges in his carefully nursed Gunpowder plot.

But such detailed discussion of a hundred matters of history raised in this book would unduly prolong what is already too lengthy an introduction of a work to which the reader must be anxious to turn.

H. Belloc.

Kings Land, Shipley,
Horsham.

THE INQUISITION:

A Political and Military Study of its Establishment.

CHAPTER I.
THE MEDIÆVAL RECOVERY OF CIVILIZATION.

What was the society in which the Inquisition, that great attack upon human liberty, succeeded? To answer this, in the case of that other great attack of which we are the unhappy spectators, it would be necessary to estimate first the chief forces active in the world, and second their modification by local circumstance in America. A man, having done this, is able to get a just idea of Prohibition. He must get into the picture of the great nineteenth century expansion of civilization, and the fact that this expansion was, in great part, due to increased command over material nature through what we call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme importance attributed by our society to power over material things, in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies, and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are, grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos, and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.

What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar “Inquisition” movement?

First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself in elaborately useless pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government, frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have the right to be anything but hopeful.

Although the twelfth century resembled the nineteenth in vastness of achievement, it differed from the nineteenth in the quality of that achievement, and in the nature of the forces which made it possible. Of course the vigour of human will is the prime mover in both cases. In the twelfth century men felt that their strength had been magnified not so much by new processes giving them an increased command over physical nature as by moral forces suddenly making them aware of unsuspected strength within themselves. I do not mean that the nineteenth century felt that it possessed no new elements of moral strength. It did. The ideas of the American and French Revolution thrilled it profoundly; to a lesser extent it was touched by a limited but nevertheless keen, new, sympathy with those very Middle Ages with which we are concerned. Nor do I mean that the Middle Ages enjoyed no greater power over material things than had been possessed by the simple and childlike Dark Ages immediately preceding them. I do say that in the twelfth century, as compared with the nineteenth, the sense of new power over physical nature played a lesser, and the confidence in new powers within man’s own nature played a correspondingly greater, part.

Two causes brought about this greater importance of the moral as compared with the physical factors of power. First, the twelfth century successes were, in all outward and secular things, no more than the partial reconquest of the Roman order which, after a fashion, men still remembered. Whereas the nineteenth century, instead of partly restoring that which had been, and had then been lost, conquered nature and barbarism in regions where such conquest had never been attempted. Hence the twelfth century in the full flush of its achievement was less subject to pride and the illusions which wait upon pride. Second, the moral (and intellectual) life of the twelfth century revolved about a single many-sided institution, the Church, which affected all departments of human life.

It is the task of this chapter to set the stage for the events which follow. The reader must have a notion of the slack and sunken age of Gerbert (the great Pope of the year 1000), secondly the vigorous fighting age of Hildebrand and the great Norman chiefs, of the First Crusade and the Song of Roland, that is, the later eleventh century. Next he must grasp the twelfth century itself, Abelard, the teaching of the Roman law at Bologna, the enrichment and refinement of life, chivalry, “feminism,” and the continuing quarrel of the central and all-pervasive Church with the developing civil governments. Finally, towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the idea of nationality.

There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen strokes of the pen. The analysis must of necessity be slight. I shall try to make it just. Especially the influence of the Church must be grasped and also (a thing often missed in accounts of the time) the limitations of that influence.

Before entering upon such a task, I cannot refrain from warning my reader of the necessary limitations and imperfections of history.

The scantiness of record, the bias and the inherent imperfections of human testimony, the tendency of the striking and exceptional fact to get itself recorded and thereby destroy the average (to which I shall return in considering baronial and private wars and comparing them with our strikes); all these things make us see the past not outlined clearly but through a haze.

Finally, we must beware of trying to understand the past too well, when we cannot even understand the present. What evil spell is over the modern male to keep him in such ugly and often uncomfortable clothes? The pedants used to go about solemnly pretending to assay the most inward motives of the great of old time (who were better men than they, and could they come back to the sunlight to deal with these same pedants, would have soused and slimed them in the nearest duckpond for their prying impudence). They went on doing this, I say, until about the year 1905, when Chesterton asked them whether they themselves put flowers on a dead man’s grave in the belief that their dead could smell.[1] Since then they have been a little quieter.

And yet all this seems forgotten by most of the writers and practically all the readers of history. Never mind. When the wretched historians call on the name of “Science,” that modern Mumbo-jumbo idol before whom we are all expected to bow down, let us save our self-respect as honest men by thumbing our noses and wriggling our fingers at such silly superstitions. They are all of a piece with the venerable dotard of an idea that proclaims the Infallibility of the Press and makes people believe a thing “because they see it in print”—pah!

Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization (which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under a system of taxation such as our own time would call socialistic. At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied, more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire, and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably into political office. The manner and stages of this decline (fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done) do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of degradation which was reached.

To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial weighing of evidence in matters of law.

For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of the principal towns of Roman Britain, the centre towards which the road system of the island converged. From early in the fifth to the opening years of the seventh century the place is not even mentioned in any document known: so that (in defiance of all probability) certain foolish scholars have been able to maintain that, in the interval, London did not even exist. Like London, Paris had been a capital, and to this day the blackened remains of its Roman palace that look down upon the comings and goings of the Latin Quarter in the “Boul’ Mich” are well out from the central “island of the city” on which the place began. The amphitheatre is even further away, behind the Pantheon, and anyone can appreciate how necessary it is that a place of public entertainment should not be too far out from the centre of things. And yet towards the end of the ninth century, when the Viking pirates besiege the place, only the little central island is held against them. Admitting fully that neither London nor Paris meant to Britain and Gaul what they mean to-day, still, I repeat, they were both very considerable towns, and it is entirely fair to use them as tests. The cities of Western Christendom had been “minished and brought low.”

Second, as to the loss of the power to build. That loss was well-nigh complete. Any history of architecture in England will parade before its reader the puny relics of Anglo-Saxon building. Paris has a few such things as the rude tower of St. Germain des Prés and a few doubtful stones in the low little church of St. Julien le Pauvre. In Italy, the “carnivorous” Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters, is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000. Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves of a building. Usually they could not even keep them from decay. Even repair was beyond them.

By what processes of law were civil disputes judged in these diminished cities in which architecture was growing ever ruder, feebler, and more squat? These men, our own ancestors, whose ancestors again had enjoyed the Roman law, decided between litigants by a series of tests or “ordeals” which are a catalogue of trivial stupidity. Merely to give the list will be enough to allow the reader to judge them. There was the “wager of battle,” which was not a duel on the point of honour, but a deliberate judicial test; plaintiff and defendant fought, and the victor won his case. Perhaps the greatest man of the Dark Ages, Charlemagne, is found striving against this custom. In his will he provides that disputes between his heirs as to titles to land are not to be so settled. And for it he substitutes a mild form of ordeal much in favour in settling titles to land, that of the cross. The disputants held out their arms horizontally, and he that endured the longest had the land! There was the ordeal by boiling water, red hot iron, or by fire, all three of which scalded or burned the guilty and spared the innocent. Sometimes lots were drawn, and sometimes the truth or falsity of a statement was tested by whether or not the taking of the consecrated eucharist harmed him who maintained the statement in question. Of course all these tests were accompanied by religious ceremony, and were believed to be especially subject to the direct interposition of God. But the mental stature of those who maintained them:—

“Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.”

(We will not speak of them but look and pass on).

The mention of the direct interposition of God brings us naturally to the supernatural bias of the time. Here judgment is not so easy. It is possible to represent the replacement of the old positivism of the educated ancients (by supernaturalism and the transcendental formulas of the creeds) as part of the general decline. It is equally possible to represent it as the one leaven in an unsatisfactory lump. Certainly the divorce between the thought of the (largely positivist) educated class of our own day and that of the populace, now (as ever) full either of religious or political superstition and careless both of philosophic theory and scientific fact, this divorce, I say, is certainly evil. But in the Dark Ages popular superstition ran riot without qualification or corrective.

It is a commonplace that the officials of the Church retained a measure of organization and discipline when civil government was going to pieces, that the Church was the central institution of the time, and that most of its outstanding personalities were churchmen. What is not always seized is the extreme importance of the monastic institution. The monk scholars, whom the Church alone sheltered, could at least hand on the knowledge of the great books of the past, although when they wrote they could make only huge, dull commentaries on those same books.

How then did such a time get any business done at all? Economically, by raising the slave to a serf; politically, by an increase of local power.

With the decay of communications and police, the slave could simply run away and could not be brought back. Clearly, to get any work out of him at all, it must be made to his interest to stay. This was done by requiring of him only a fixed and comparatively small amount of his produce as dues for the land he tilled, and permitting him to enjoy the surplus which he could increase up to the limit of his power. This arrangement “worked” after a fashion. In giving to the labourer more dignity and independence, it had an intimate (although apparently quite unconscious) connection with the Church’s doctrine of an equal worth of all souls in the sight of God.

Politically, the financial exhaustion of the central governments, and the slackening of communications, as the great Roman roads were not kept up, helped to throw more and more power and initiative upon local governors; until at last, instead of appointed officers they became almost local kings who could, and did, hand their offices to their sons as they could their property. This last capital change did not occur until midway in the ninth century, the second of three centuries of attacks from without which broke upon the degraded Roman society and almost destroyed it.

I have spoken of the society as degraded Roman because I believe that the entire weight of the evidence is against the idea of a conquest of civilization by rudely noble “Teutons” who then proceed to invigorate the decaying Roman system. The fact is that the coming of the little barbaric war bands, who were not “Teutonic” at all but of mixed bloods, was only a step, although an important step, in a long and gradual process of decay from within. No contemporary writer, except St. Jerome, seems to have seen anything particularly significant or striking in the event when the barbarian “Auxiliaries” (who for a hundred years had made up the chief part of the imperial armies) sacked the city of Rome itself. Such forces were the “Colonial troops” of the time who would occasionally run amuck in the course of their squabbles with other bands of auxiliaries, or with the impoverished government which had contracted to pay them. Throughout the greater part of the Empire, they seem never to have dreamed of an organized campaign against civilization although they indulged in occasional outbreaks of plundering and disorder. I have not space here in which to combat the vague notion of a sudden destruction and thereafter a distinctly “Teutonic” renewal. Let it suffice that not one single institution not common to all primitive folk, such as the council of warriors or of the elders of the tribe, appears. The tie of personal devotion and loyalty to a chieftain, which they brought with them, belongs not only to every barbarian but also to every schoolboy.

Another line of reasoning which would tend to prove the gradual nature of the decline and the absence of definite break with the past would be to trace the considerable beginnings in the “lower” or later Empire, of the tendencies recognized as marking particularly the Dark Ages. Depopulation, building with the fragments of older and better work, in letters the replacement of any criticism of life by glamour and marvels, all these go back to the fourth and sometimes even to the third century. Nor does the list end here. The fourth century saw cavalry replace infantry as the main reliance of armies, and the third century already saw the wise man thought of more as a magician than a philosopher.

Upon this degraded Roman society fell the triple scourge of Mohammedan, Viking and Magyar. It is perhaps the best answer to the assertion that the “Teutons” had poured new life into Western Christendom to note that it barely weathered the storm. For most of these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb. All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for. They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By 900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle.

Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and Magyar) the conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession, and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know that many of our public men think of government not as something to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help seeing that it was to his own immediate personal benefit to see that his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a free man.

These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of any sort of defence and production. The men who established them (or rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds growing on a ruin.

This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king, continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory, and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage of their own needy little vassals to them.

There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors, kings, and nobles alike, to make of the officers of the Church the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to “invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a disintegrating tendency.

There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming principally from the monks and especially from the new order of Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement. Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared, sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year 1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.

The great Gerbert, Pope in the year 1000 under the name of Sylvester II, stands as a symbol. Great as an intriguer, to us he is even greater as a scholar. He had studied mathematics and “al-gebra” (the word is Arabic) with the Arabs in Spain, and like every scholar worthy of the name he loved the classics. His mathematics made him feared as a wizard, and when writing to a friend in Italy for unchurchly, Latin books, we find him asking that they be “procured quietly,” promising that he will tell no one of the favour done him.

I have called Gerbert a symbol of his time. To call that time the “Dark Ages” is just to a degree that few of the stock epithets of our school are just. They were the morasses from which the Mediæval rise begins.

For, after the doubtful pause of which I have spoken, Europe arose. The Normans conquer England and Sicily, and set up systems of government and administration fit to be models for all the West. The Hildebrandine reforms free the Church from the feudal anarchy, and the Church in her new strength fills Christendom with a new sense of unity and common purpose. This common purpose hurls Europe against Asia, in the tidal wave of the First Crusade, which breaks down the barrier between East and West and begins a new day.

It is important to note how short was this Norman-Hildebrandine period, and how many-sided was its accomplishment.

At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus, if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it. Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it. The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century. Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great accomplishment falls into the little space of years I have marked out. It is an astonishing time.

In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in “Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private, specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over, has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.

And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm, reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. The new Norman race was ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war, that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.[2] In military engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles, they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too. Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages had begun.

What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to feel it in their buildings and writings, but the answers to such questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time, with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its

“Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,”

as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to their death.

Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to the lawman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.

In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned. They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a new time, the twelfth century.

I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but also the barrier between Europe and the East. But the expression of a tidal wave is incorrect in suggesting a levelling and destructive force. For what followed was the continuation and enlargement of what the Norman-Hildebrandine eleventh century had done, with greater riches, complexity and refinement. There appear, also, new forces, but there is no conscious break with the immediate past.

In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great sense of the State.

So also building was continued, and the bases of design do not change, but the severity of the older work begins to be lost in encrusted masses of sculptured detail. Most of the carving strikes us as crude; a good deal of it is meant to be grotesque and much of the rest is grotesque—unintentionally. But there is vigour about it; and an effect of richness, through painstaking repetition of simple motifs. This richness of decorative sculpture links up naturally with the new social tendency to refinement in manners.

With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin.

This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the corresponding change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father, now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God. What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and pretty things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life, so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the tremendous outpouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.

Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism. If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess has never lasted long.

The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes of men and women worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,” practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the Gothic. All these things they did, not because of any rule or precept but spontaneously, for their own sake, as things that ought to be done.

While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century, out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in fact, free. The independent “villeins” of “Aucassin and Nicolette” or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of to-day.

Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years ...” (as Belloc says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate, is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders, ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in substance, universities.

I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower) of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century.

So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads, buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and, like God, seeing that its works were good. Its cities were growing fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests until their extent was reduced almost to what it is to-day.[3] No new process to spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping energy of its own vigorous will.

In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings, Christendom feels a great calamity.

The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.

While the pointed arch was beginning to be seen in building, the texts of Aristotle were coming in from Spain. Abelard’s time had known of Aristotle only his Logic. But now scholars might read in Latin (translated from the Arabic) the Physics, the Metaphysics, and Ethics. Thus, these men, with their keen and active minds, were suddenly face to face with one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, intellect of all mankind. Upon the crowds of students full of discussion and debate, believing confidently that they could build themselves a tower of logic that would reach heaven, the effect was electric. For such men to have for their study Aristotle’s enormous range of thought, to feel his luminous common sense, was to give them more than their youth had dreamed, the discovery of a new world.

Meanwhile, behind the endless political squabbles, the vast idea of nationality could be seen just looming up, faint and dim, but enormous. It harked back to the dim, prehistoric forces that had wrought out the words “Gaul,” “Britain,” “Italy,” and “Spain.” Such words had never been represented by governments. They had stood always for ideas only. But in France, where ideas have power, a sort of underlying force in men’s minds was conjuring up, behind the king, the nation. This force acted through the Roman law which was illuminating the active intellect of the time, but the soul of it was a blind instinct.

This growing and vigorous time that had made and done so many new things, had forgotten what it was to feel a check, until, towards the end of the century, Saladin broke the Syrian Franks at Hattin, and took Jerusalem. The disaster did not seem hopeless. Christendom began forthwith to hum with preparation for a new crusade. Nevertheless, this first great experience of failure throws into high relief, as it were, the buoyancy of the time, and gives us, therefore, a point from which we may survey its accomplishment and seek to fix its spirit.

First of all, it is necessary to insist upon the straightforwardness, the downright directness of that spirit. It is true that the Courts of Love preached far-fetched doctrines, but they were a conscious revolt against grossness of manners, a sort of counter-excess. With this exception, the time nowhere attempted extravagance. The elaborate sculpture of its buildings is framed in structural lines that are firm and even severe. As yet the Gothic (which was to be the expression of the mediæval temper in its completeness and in its decline) gives only here and there a hint of its coming. Height is indeed attempted, but everywhere the general lines of the buildings remain square and solid. Wherever the architect has expressed his own thought in altering the inherited arrangement of the Roman column and arch, the change tends towards frankness and logic. Each part aims to express its function, whether structural or decorative, in relation to the whole. The classic forms begin to be rationalized so as to be not a façade but living parts of the structure; the column begins to be wedded to the arch. As in architecture, so in the other arts and handicrafts. In general, clothes were cut on simple and serviceable lines without hint of theatricality or excess, either fitting close to the body, or falling in simple and graceful folds. Arms, and especially armour, remained light and simple. In the second half of the century the cylindrical pot-helm, completely covering the face, came in and took the place of the open conical helmet with its nose-guard. Already before the new fashion in helmets had come in, the mail shirt had had its sleeves lengthened to the wrist, and now mittens and separate leg coverings of mail were in use also. But the heavy body armour of plate that was to encumber the warriors of later centuries was unknown. The horse-equipment, too, was simple, made for use and not for parade. In all things the time observed simplicity and, as it were, a natural and effortless logic in the outline of that which it made.

The seeming contradiction between the simplicity everywhere aimed at by the men of the twelfth century and the confusion of their society was the natural and inevitable result of the conditions which limited their action. They, with their keenness of mind, could almost remember ancestors who had been half barbarians. The material with which they had to work was painfully scanty. It was not only that the time, with its fluidity and the swiftness and extent of its social changes, had as yet found no formula that might approach a definition of its inmost spirit. That difficulty was met a generation later in the mid-thirteenth century, with Aquinas, St. Louis, and the culmination of the Gothic. The underlying trouble was that, even at their best, the Middle Ages had no sufficient accumulation either of knowledge or of material resources. For want of ordered and detailed knowledge, the complexity of problems could not be grasped, and for want of resources the material disasters of the fourteenth century were to be fatal to the mediæval experiment. As yet, about the year 1200, synthesis and such near approach to perfection as is permitted to man were in process of attainment. There was no muddle-headed modern illusion of the necessary goodness of change under the name of “progress.” It was because the new things that they had made were certainly good that men felt that they had reason to hope.

Our books over-emphasize the deficiencies of the Middle Ages as compared with ourselves. But it is true that they were unable to transform completely the unpromising material they had at hand.

Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus, in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity. Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day. Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea, more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes (often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole. But to protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers, government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to give the commander some notion of the enemies’ position and movements.

One must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager spirit.

Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without regret.

This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use of Latin, made for understanding and community of feeling between localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality” and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together. This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one of another.

We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in so many schoolbooks. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly. Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent—

“Half devil and half child ...”

Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability. But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have been.

The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham priest, covered with an ass’s false head burlesqued the mass before the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay. So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia, religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross and some refined.

I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned. Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will be active. Accordingly we find the moral and intellectual forces opposed to the Church clearly defined.

In the great Investiture quarrel between the papacy and the secular governments from the Empire down, the faith and morals of the Church were not at stake. But, at the same time, the claims of her champions in her good effort to untangle herself from feudalism were so extravagant that they suggested a downright theocracy, actual government by the ministers of religion, which has always been hateful to men of our European stock. Further, the twelfth century man, in so much fighting against the infidel, had learned that his enemy was no such bad fellow after all. We find at least one ruler, Henry Plantagenet in the heat of his quarrel with Becket, crying out that he would rather turn Mohammedan than yield to the Church! And the outburst does not seem to have weakened his position. Evidently the world was moving fast in his day. The noble, so far surpassing his fathers in riches, luxury, and refinement, often failed to see eye to eye with the churchman. The story of the time is full of despoilments of the Church and consequent excommunications. Now and then a commune, at the height of political struggle with its bishop, would physically maltreat him (or even kill him) and go off into a short spasm of blank irreligion.

Moreover, the Church had foes, or at least very lukewarm servitors, of her own household. We have seen that the student was usually still in minor orders. But now he was no longer shut up under strict control in a monastery, but free to wander at will. Under no constraint, and full of his classic learning with its glorification of every passion and appetite, he carelessly kicked clear over the monkish interpretation of the Christian ethic, and as often as not went wild altogether from any sort of check on his desires. John Addington Symonds has collected, and translated into English out of the original Latin, a number of these students’ songs, under the title of “Wine, Woman and Song.” They are often charming, but I cannot imagine literature better calculated to enrage a monk, or indeed anyone of a puritanic cast of mind.

Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about “the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of to-day.

Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders, Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is, in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” ... was ... “laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”[4]

Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation was strained.

Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for it a different, hostile body of doctrine.

In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine which has usually been called Albigensianism (inasmuch as one of its chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next chapter shall consider.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905.

[2] By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.

[3] “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New York, Geographical Review, September 1920: “In Central Europe the period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.”

[4] “... tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39.

CHAPTER II.
LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.

I have chosen to call the district in question “Languedoc” because the literature which was the mark of its distinctive culture was written in the “langue d’Oc” (in contra-distinction to the North French langue d’Oïl which later became the master idiom), and because the actual fighting to be described in the fourth chapter took place within (or just outside) the territories later known as the Province of Languedoc under the French monarchy, until the old administrative divisions were wiped out by the Revolution. I have rejected the various more definite names given by recent historians to the heretical movement in question because the word “Albigenses” is in general usage, and because I believe that general usage ought not to be lightly disturbed by the preciosity of individual scholars careless of the bewilderment of the non-specialist reader.

First, then, of the general physical characteristics of the country with which we are concerned. The southern half of France is definitely bounded by great mountain chains. The Alps separate it from Italy, the Pyrenees from Spain. It is true that there is a little room for doubt in the Roussillon and around Nice where the Pyrenees and the Alps respectively approach the Mediterranean Sea, but, on the whole, the natural boundaries are quite clear, and modern France in establishing them has resumed the natural frontiers of ancient Gaul, one of those major divisions of Europe that go back beyond recorded history. This southern part of France, besides the mountains which limit it, contains within itself a lesser mountain mass central to itself, the Cévennes. It contains two principal river basins, on the east that of the Rhône, which flows almost due south to the Mediterranean, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Alps; on the west that of the Garonne, which flows in a general direction north-west to the Atlantic, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees. It contains also a curved strip of coastal plain from the mouths of the Rhône west and south to the eastern Pyrenees, and between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees a region of moderate uplands, broken by a single notch, so low that the highest point of its watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean lies below the 200-metre line.

With the upper basin of the Rhône this study has little to do. The lower Rhône country enters into our story, although not as the main theatre in which its events took place. We are mainly concerned with the upper Garonne basin, the strip of Mediterranean coastal plain curving from the lower Rhône to the Pyrenees, the mountain slopes which border upon these two regions and the passage, or gap, of Carcassonne which connects them. For in that space (roughly of a hundred by a little over a hundred and fifty English miles) was decided the failure of the first attempt to break the moral unity of mediæval Christendom. And in that struggle the Inquisition for the first time definitely appears.

Even this small stretch of country presents great differences of climate and of appearance.

The landscape of the coastal plain between the Rhône and the Pyrenees is of the typical Mediterranean sort which hardly changes all around the inland sea. The sea itself is intensely blue and the boats upon it are rigged with slim lateen sails pointed like sharks’ fins. Within sight of the sea are mountains, great stark masses of rock like the bare bones of the world. No forests, but between the sea and the mountains extends a strip of land systematically cultivated down to its last square inch, showing everywhere the vine and the olive, and built up in terraces wherever there is a slope. This strip of land is always narrow—from the town of Beziers, for instance, both mountains and sea are full in sight. When rain falls it comes down fiercely as it does in America, unlike the gentle misty rains of England and Northern France. Usually the air is so clear that all outlines come out sharp and strong—one thinks of the trenchant Latin phrase and the fixed lines of classic columns. The sun is dazzling and powerful, and the roads are full of white dust. The houses are of stone, flat topped or nearly so, and generally roofed in red tile.

The people, as befits the heirs of an immemorial and still vigorous civilization, are loud-voiced, vivacious in gesture, ceremonious in compliment, and both easy and dignified in repose.

Westward from Narbonne, a sharply defined valley, deep and regular like a vast trench, seems to open a path toward the Atlantic. A man going east or west is held to this valley; to leave it is to be caught in the deep irregular gorges of the Montagne Noire (which is the southernmost outlier of the Cévennes) to the north of the valley, or in the equally hopeless gorges of the Corbières (which are the north-eastern outliers of the Pyrenees) to the south of it.

This valley culminates in what may be called the gap of Carcassonne, for in the neighbourhood of that town it is deepest and most clearly marked, although the actual water parting between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is somewhat to the west.

The Montagne Noire, the northern limit of the gap, is well named, for it is all of dark slatey rock. The Corbières, on the contrary, are of white limestone, and a man standing a little way above the valley floor can see behind them the snow peaks of the high Pyrenees.

To the west of Carcassonne the hills are lower but the gap continues none the less, with Montreal and Fanjeaux, each on an outstanding buttress of hill, for sentinels upon its southern side. Of these two Montreal stands out against the horizon as one looks west from Carcassonne, and in turn hides Carcassonne as one looks east from the height of Fanjeaux. West from Fanjeaux the hills become mere downs, and the landscape quite loses its Mediterranean look and becomes that of the Toulousain.

About Carcassonne itself the landscape is of an intermediate sort between the Mediterranean and the Toulousain. Between the bare hills one still sees the olive, but more rarely than on the Mediterranean side, and (as in the Toulousain) grain fields begin to alternate with the vine.

The Toulousain, although it is altogether of the south, is a different sort of country from the Mediterranean slope. In the first place it is not a mere strip of land between sea and mountains, but a broad, fan-shaped arrangement of valleys running together in the general neighbourhood of Toulouse, and separated only by ridges or downs regular in outline and no great height. As on the Mediterranean side the ground is minutely and intensely cultivated; still one sees more trees and shrubs growing freely, although by no means as many as in Northern and Central France. The type of cultivation, too, is different. One no longer sees the olive, and the vineyards are outnumbered by grain fields. Furthermore, it is not the valleys alone that are cultivated, the flat or gently rolling summits of the downs are worked as well.

Although the people are the same, their houses are different from those of the Mediterranean in that their material is brick. Indeed, one sees no masses of rock in the Toulousain, and the bits of stone in the larger buildings are brought from outside the district.

In spite of these physical differences in their country, the men of the three regions have a distinctive character of their own. The north Frenchman will tell you that they are noisy and boastful, fond of jewellery and all sorts of display, better suited to politics than to soldiering. And yet both Joffre and Foch are from the Pyrenees. Certainly the Southern Frenchman’s skin is darker and his speech is not quite the same as that of the Northerner; it is nearer to the old Latin speech in that Gascon and Provençal alike have followed the Italians and Spaniards in keeping the grand broad vowels that make the southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. In the early Middle Ages this tongue of theirs, the langue d’oc, was spoken as far north as Geneva on the east and Poitou on the west (the first troubadour that we know was Count of Poitiers, not far from the central Loire), but the royal province afterwards called Languedoc was much smaller, and included, roughly, only the land already marked off as the theatre of the Albigensian war.

Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and intense local patriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing. The schoolboy remembers how throughout the Commentaries there is continually talk of calling drafts for the cavalry from “Tolosa et Narbone.” This country came to be called “The Province,” par excellence; the name survives in the modern word “Provence.”

Incidentally it is interesting to note that “Provincia” was not confined to the Mediterranean lands. Scarcely had the Romans occupied these than they went forward, over the gap of Carcassonne, the saddle between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees, where the railway and the canal go to-day. They took the upper Garonne country, then as now centreing about Toulouse as its chief town, and connected it for administration with the Mediterranean coastal plain from the Rhône to the Pyrenees.

This arrangement, after enduring for five hundred years under the Romans, reappears in the Dark Ages under the Counts of Toulouse, and, first under them and later under the Kings of France, lasts for eight hundred years more. It is astonishing to see how closely the Roman administrative division called “Narbonensis Prima” of B.C. 100 corresponds with the province of Languedoc of the French monarchy of A.D. 1790.

Everywhere she went Rome stamped upon the land its permanent form. But nowhere, outside of Italy itself, does she seem to have “Romanized” more thoroughly than in “Provincia.” To this day, “The valley banks of the Rhône ... have still a greater mass of imperial remains than the city [of Rome] itself,”[5] and the churches of Toulouse show the round arch and the small Roman bricks.

When the Empire became Christian, Toulouse still grouped itself, as it does to this day, around its municipal building, the “Capitol.” That building and the “Place du Capitole” continued central in the town. The churches of Toulouse are fitted in like after-thoughts in the town plan. They do not dominate everything as do the cathedrals of the old towns of Northern France, as Notre Dame must have dominated mediæval Paris. This difference in town-planning[6] seems to be accompanied by a greater measure of continuity in municipal institutions: mediæval Toulouse called her chief magistrates “consules.”

In the decline, when the Roman auxiliaries were fighting their aimless civil wars (much as if the “colonial troops” of to-day were to become dominant in armies and go about setting up their Europeanized leaders as chief executives), Toulouse was for a time the capital of one of their shifting sovereignties, that of the Visigoths, whose power, at its greatest, extended from the Loire and the Alps clear down to Gibraltar. After a few years, another little group of auxiliaries, the Franks, defeated the Visigoths, drove them out of south-western Gaul clear down to the Pyrenees, and took Toulouse. But although the Frankish chiefs would now and then raid Spain itself for plunder, they never cleared the Goths out of the coastal plain from the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees. So matters stood when the first of the three great scourges of the Dark Ages, the Mohammedan Saracens, fell upon Europe.

In their first rush north from Spain, the Mohammedans swept the Mediterranean coastal plain. Narbonne resisted them, and saw its people duly massacred, but some of the cities seemed to have surrendered (as many of the Spanish towns had done) on condition that their laws should be respected. The “Visigothic” State was a flimsy affair. That part of Gaul which submitted to the Saracens corresponded almost exactly to that which the Goths had held. Carcassonne, Beziers, Agde, Maguelonne, Lodève, and Nismes had Mohammedan garrisons. East of the Rhône they went beyond the Gothic boundaries, and for three or four years, with the support of local rebels, held Arles and Avignon.

Toulouse they never could take. Once they raided up the Rhône and Saône and burned Autun, but with Toulouse in Christian hands they could never hope to do much with the central Rhône valley. It was the successful defence of Toulouse, quite as much as the victory of Charles Martel, that checked their greatest effort in the familiar year 732. Coming over the west central Pyrenees, they turned north-east to attack Toulouse, compelled (like Wellington in 1814) to deal with such a centre of population and communications in order to secure their right flank for a move northward. So that when Toulouse held out, their stroke which took Bordeaux and failed against Charles Martel near Poitiers, was no longer a regular campaign, but merely a plundering raid on a great scale.

It is worth insisting on the resistance of Toulouse to the Mohammedan invasions in order to emphasize the importance of the town. But although the infidel could not take Toulouse, he held Narbonne, eighty miles away, for forty years. He was in Saragossa for just over four hundred years until 1119, and Saragossa, the great town and road centre south of the Pyrenees (corresponding to Toulouse to the north of them), is only 250 miles from Toulouse as the crow flies. Sometimes, from either city, the crest of the mountain chain can be seen. The two faced one another, Toulouse as the untaken pivot of the Christian defence, Saragossa as the bastion of the long, but finally unsuccessful, defence of Islam. For about the same length of time as that which separates Americans of 1920 from the death of Christopher Columbus, Saragossa stood for Asia in the face of Christian Europe.

Naturally, Languedoc felt the Moslem influence in every sort of way. The other two foes of the Dark Ages, the Viking and the Magyar, appear and ravage the country but leave no trace except ruins. Alone of the three the Mohammedan remained long close by, and he differed from the other two in that he knew that cities were meant to live in, as well as to burn, and in that he had ideas of a sort of his own. It was too much trouble to keep fighting him all the time, and, in the intervals of peace, his ideas sifted in through the intercourse, north and south, over the border. In his train, as it were, came also the Jew; already, in the early eighth century, an archbishop of Lyons was troubled by the “aggressive prosperity” of Jews in Southern Gaul.

In vain we ask ourselves how much all this fighting and plundering left standing of the institutions of the country, and how far it destroyed them. Later we find the cities governed by elected magistrates under the name of “consuls,” while similar magistrates in the French towns outside of Languedoc go by other titles. At first blush this seems to suggest that the Roman municipal organization had been kept up. But whether or not this is true, we cannot tell. The weighty opinion of Brutails is against the idea of continuity. He makes the point that in Roussillon no title deed reposing on any right of ownership before the Mohammedan invasion has come down to us. He reminds us that Charlemagne’s father and grandfather when driving out the Saracen pillaged the country quite as heartily as any misbeliever. Still, the Roussillon of which he writes was the last foothold of the Saracen in Gaul, whereas Toulouse, as we have seen, was never theirs. Therefore the question remains doubtful.

The sudden eleventh century rise out of the sleepy Dark Ages into the true Middle Ages shows us the Counts of Toulouse among the greatest lords in Europe. The office had become hereditary around the middle of the ninth century, about the same time as did so many of the imperial offices. Count Raymond IV, sixth in descent from the first Count who had handed down Toulouse to his son, was the richest of the chiefs that took the Cross for the First Crusade. Already, between the “Provençal” southerners and the North French who were still called simply “French,” there was bad feeling, at least on the part of the latter. A “French” chronicler seems to lump Burgundians, Auvergnats, Gascons, and “Goths” (that is, men from the Rhône-Pyrenees coast plain) all together under the name of “Provençals,” and says that they excelled in nosing out foodstuffs, and were accordingly very useful in times of famine, but had little stomach for fighting. The antagonism is significant. Whether it was justified or not is another matter; the accusation of cowardice does not clearly appear in the records of the fighting, and does not seem to have affected Raymond’s position. One fancies that, in such an age, his riches would not have kept him among the half-dozen leaders of the Crusade had his eleventh century Provençals been really notorious cowards. Certainly the North Frenchman’s prejudice against the “meridional” as a soldier remains to this day.

Even before the Counts of Toulouse appear as one of the richest families in Europe, we can trace the beginning of the troubadour poetry. It is probably the most distinctive contribution by the lands, now Southern France, to the world’s history. The word troubadour to-day means a poet of lyric love.

The twelfth century was its golden age, although we can just hear its notes beginning in the eleventh, and dying away in the thirteenth.

The language of the troubadour poetry was the “langue d’oc” (as opposed to the North French “langue d’oïl” or “langue d’oui”). It was spoken over a stretch of country far more extensive than was later the province of Languedoc. Thus there were troubadours in the central mountain mass of Auvergne and in the broad Atlantic coastal plain from the Pyrenees up to the Loire. Nevertheless, Toulouse remained its centre.

The first thing that strikes its readers is the familiarity of many of its rhythms. The Greek and Latin classic rhythms have to be learnt. The “Song of Roland,” with all its power, strikes uncouthly on the modern ear. But the troubadour poetry, after seven centuries, sings itself as if it had been written yesterday, in such stanzas as this of Bernard de Ventadour:—

“Quan la douss avra venta

Deves vostre pais

M’es vejaire qu’ev senta

Odor de paradis.”

Notwithstanding English blank verse from the sixteenth century on, and notwithstanding the pathetic efforts of our contemporary crew of “free versifiers” feeling ignorantly back to unrhymed rhythms such as the ancients knew, notwithstanding these, I say that Provençal stanza, with its rhyme and regular accents, still represents exactly the sort of lyric rhythm we use. As far as verse form goes, the troubadours were beyond all question the first of the modern poets, in the easy skill and variety of their measures, some simple, some as intricate as any verse ever written. Dante revered them second only to Virgil.

What is most important to us is the picture they give of their society. First of all they represent the chief end of man to be the worship of woman. We have seen in the last chapter that feminism in religion, i.e., the cult of the Virgin, was one of the twelfth century master-passions. In Italy, towards the end of the thirteenth century, poets intertwined love with philosophy, somewhat as the Platonists had before them. The troubadours concerned themselves not at all with philosophy and little with religion. Here and there they bring in religion as a sauce to flavour more piquantly their love for their lady, very much in the manner of our modern decadents. Thus the poet may protest that he loves his lady “more than God loves Our Lady of Puy de Dôme.” Incidentally, the devotion of the poets is almost always for someone else’s wife.

The essential thing about all this “courteous love” is that it is unmistakably the most cultivated and civilized thing that had been since Rome had fallen asleep.

Furthermore, the appearance of the troubadour poetry in Southern Gaul is still another fact proving that the Dark Ages were not a murder but a sleep. The foolish historians of the last generation who attributed the vigour and the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages to an infusion of “Teutonic” blood, got a hard knock when Belloc[7] noted that after the Dark Ages a comparatively high civilization expressing itself in poetry full of the “romantic” idealization of woman arose in precisely one of the districts least affected by the handfuls of barbarian auxiliary troops of the fifth and sixth century. The soul of Europe was not moulded anew by the barbarians of the northern forests. That soul fell asleep, as it were, from weariness, and then having slept, it awoke and sang.

The courtly fashion set by the troubadours overspread Christendom. Indeed, it became a characteristic of the later twelfth century, as we saw in the last chapter. Treitschke has a lively passage on the “chivalrous, polished” time of the Hohenstaufen in Germany, “the age of gallantry and the Minnesingers, quite distinctly feminine in its universal attempt to adorn itself with womanly graces,”[8] in contrast to the harsher time which had preceded it. But the fact that the new fashion so quickly became European must not blind us to the fact that it began in Languedoc. The troubadour poetry is already fully developed in William Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, who was born in 1071. The first Hohenstaufen king did not reign over Germany until 1138, and it was Count William’s granddaughter Eleanor, Queen to Henry II, who first brought the cultivation of Provence to England about the middle of the twelfth century.

Even in the troubadours, however, the near savagery of the Dark Ages had been merely overlaid and not destroyed. Vivid memories of a time at once feeble and gross swelled up in them sometimes. One poet, that Sordello whose name Dante and Browning have combined to keep alive, when singing the death of a brave knight, amiably suggests that a long list of coward princes would do well to eat of the dead man’s heart to better their courage! The idea was familiar to our Red Indians.

Unfortunately, as events were to prove, their society which still kept something of the underlying spirit of the savage, was losing the spirit of the soldier. The statement needs qualification, especially in the case of one of the greatest troubadours, Bertran de Born, who was never happy without a fight unless he was rhyming about one. But, although a striking exception he was only an exception. Even if none of the troubadour poetry had survived, we could perhaps prove that the “Provençal” was less warlike than the North Frenchman, or even than most Christians of the time, by the fact that local wars had to be fought with a larger proportion of mercenaries than was the case elsewhere; so large indeed that their roving bands became a serious “social problem,” as we shall see. Even if we assume that the high proportion of mercenaries was due to the wealth of Languedoc, still it is hard for us to imagine any twelfth-century hero of song or story, outside of Provence, who would lose himself so deeply in day dreams of his beloved as to be captured by his enemies, like Aucassin in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” without so much as striking a blow in his own defence.

The evidences of the wealth and refinement of this cultivated and unwarlike society are not confined to the written records of chroniclers and poets. Their buildings prove the same thing. For combined breadth of composition and elegance of detail the porches of such churches as St. Trophimus at Arles or the great church at St. Gilles, are equalled by nothing in the Romanesque. Often their detail is exactly that of the antique world to which they looked back over the intervening lowlands of the Dark Ages.

Further, we have seen that the society for which the troubadours sang was close to the Moslem, and was moved by currents Asiatic in their origin both Moslem and Jew. Moslem coins circulated freely there. The fact is proved beyond reams of learned stuff by such unconscious evidence as that of one troubadour’s simile:—

“... Like a child which a man makes stop crying with a ‘marabotin’ ...”

The poet does not think it necessary to stop and explain that a marabotin was a Moorish penny, and being unconscious his testimony cannot be challenged. Of the Universities, while Bologna studied law and Paris theology, Languedoc in her greatest University, that of Montpellier, studied medicine. This fact again proves her intercourse with the “Paynim,” for it is a commonplace that the Arabs of Spain were the great physicians of the Middle Ages. Saracen slaves, and negroes brought from Africa by Saracens to be slaves, continued to be held there centuries after slavery was extinct everywhere else in Christendom. As for the Jews, they were so many and so prominent that some chroniclers called Languedoc “Judea secunda.”

In such a society, it would have been strange if the different forces which worked against the Church had not been active. No word remains to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:—

“In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There go old priests, and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before altars, and in old crypts, and are clothed with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags, who are naked and footbare, and sore, who die of hunger and want and misery. These go to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do. But to Hell I am willing to go; for to Hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who die in tourneys and in glorious wars, and good men-at-arms and the well born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair courteous ladies which have two or three friends besides their lords also thereto. And the gold, and the silver go there, and the ermines and sables; and there go the harpers, and jongleurs, and the kings of the world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, with me.”[9]

It is clear that the idea of “Heaven for climate and Hell for company” is not new. Nietzsche himself has nowhere put it better. And it is perhaps significant that of all that glittering company of servants of the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, first of all come churchmen—the “fine scholars.”

Of course, all this sort of thing is not heresy. Logically it might just as well have ended in mere negation. These volatile southerners with their envy of the riches of the Church and their contempt, too often well deserved, for her ministers—so that instead of saying like most Christians “Rather than do so and so I would be a Jew,” they said, “I would rather be a priest”—might have gone on their way without troubling themselves about things not of this world. Nevertheless, they lived in an age which hardly took Nature and her secrets seriously, so absorbed were its thinkers in the nature of God and man and their relation to each other. The other world of the supernatural was as real and vivid to them as, in a different way, it was to the New England Puritans. Irrespective of their own temper, the currents of their time carried them away from secularism and mere denial.

Like practically all keen and vivid times, the twelfth century was full of religious debate. Among the learned the discussion turned largely upon philosophy. The speculative and transcendental doctrines of the Church might be called in question. In this way heresy, that is religious error among those who claimed to be Christians, might arise from intellectual speculation upon intellectual and philosophic themes. Thus the early Church, in the high Imperial time before the Dark Ages, thought of heresy first of all as erroneous speculation. But theology and morals are not and can never be really separate. The very idea of their possible separation could not have arisen except in an age so bent upon “observing” as to be contemptuous of reason. Theology and morals being merely mutually indispensable different sides of religion, it therefore follows that speculative heretics tended to become moral heretics. Now, in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, the scholars were always in minor orders. At least outside of Italy, learned heretics were rare. Therefore a good deal of speculative heresy and near-heresy could, and did, exist without doing much harm to the Church as an institution. A scholar who fell foul of authority with regard to some article of faith was punished of course, but his punishment was merely a matter of internal Church discipline about which the “general public” usually knew or cared very little.

It was very different when a dissenter, instead of confining himself to philosophy, went further and took the logical next step of “stirring up the people” by attacking not only the doctrine of the Church but also the moral conduct of her officials. To-day when a man attacks the idea of property as such, we smile. But when he attacks the excessive inequality of its distribution, that is more serious, because, however false some of his conclusions may be, a part of his major premise is undeniably true. Just so, in the twelfth century, the Church realized that her wealth laid her open to envy, and the evil conduct of many of her ministers was a scandal. Her own true leaders, those who were the most zealous for her honour, spent much of their energy in trying to bring about a wider distribution of morals within the ranks of her own clergy, just as to-day those who believe in the idea of private property would do well to work for a wider distribution of that. Accordingly heresy in the Middle Ages, although necessarily arising, like all heresy, in speculation, based its propaganda upon moral protest.

The tireless Lea has made a long list of preachers who went up and down crying against the wealth and vices of the clergy. Sometimes they opposed a crude abuse of Christian symbols as tending towards idolatry. Sometimes they taught that the sacraments had no virtue when administered by a priest unshriven from mortal sin. This idea, however strongly it might appeal to natural feeling, was utterly anarchic. For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse of established Churches. The early twelfth century shouters began by playing lone hands, like our own Billy Sunday and his tribe. Their stormy careers left little definite trace. At most they set in motion a general criticism of the wealth and pride of the Church in comparison with the poverty of her founder and of the humility which she taught.

After a while these sporadic reformers, each setting up his own little whirlpool or eddy, began to be merged into distinguishable currents each flowing in a definite direction. In the third decade of the century we begin to hear of “Waldenses,” members of a religious body so called after its founder Waldo, a rich but unlearned merchant of Lyons. The Waldenses began in reform and ended in heresy. They are heard of principally in Languedoc, in North-Eastern Spain, and in Lombardy. They were loosely organized, consequently their teaching varied; but, in general, they prized the letter of the Gospel and minimized the distinction between clergy and laity. They translated the Scriptures into the vernacular, read them zealously, and applied rigorously their commandments against lying or oaths of any sort whatsoever. To forbid even “white” lies is certainly harmless enough, although if pushed to an extreme it partakes of the character of impossibilism and eccentricity which the Catholic Church has always avoided. But, in a society knit together by the feudal oath of allegiance, to say that a Christian man ought not to take any sort of oath smelled of nihilism and anarchy. So too, the Waldensian enlargement of the functions of the laity. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that even in those times it might have been wise to enlarge the part to be played by laymen in the work of Christian teaching, still nothing but harmful irregularities could be expected from the Waldensian idea that “any good man” might perform the Sacraments. For instance, take their practice of confession to a layman. Personal and private confessions give to the one who hears them great power for good or evil in families and communities. If his secrecy cannot be guaranteed by the strongest possible means we must admit (whatever our view of confession in general) that the thing would be dangerous. Further, the Waldenses seem to have gone beyond even the Quakers, in that they had their doubts as to the moral right of judges to punish. Nevertheless, Waldensianism had considerable momentum.

At first they insisted vehemently that they were good Catholics, and came not to destroy but to fulfil. After being forbidden to preach by the Archbishop of Lyons, they appealed boldly to the Lateran Council of 1179. When that Council forbade them to preach without permission from the local bishop the turning point came. Waldo, their leader, preferred his own private judgment to obedience to constituted authority, and refused to abide by the Council’s decision. In a phrase that many have since used he said that he preferred to obey God rather than man.

Still they were slow to break completely with the Church. Not until 1184, five years after the Council, were they definitely excommunicated by the Pope, Lucius III. This was done at the Council of Verona, an assembly of which we shall hear again. Even then, a distinction was sometimes made between them and more pestilent forms of heresy. The fact that, as late as 1218 in the ninth year of the Albigensian crusade, a sort of Waldensian Council including delegates from north and west of the Alps could meet in Bergamo may possibly stand as evidence of an easy-going attitude of the authorities toward them. To-day, the Protestant remembers affectionately that their Provençal translation of the Scriptures, or at least of the New Testament, was the first rendering of the Bible into the vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and the most that a militant Roman Catholic can find to say of their system is that it was a “vapid degradation of religion.”[10] Now “vapid degradations” do not produce great wars like the Albigensian crusade or great systems of persecution like the Inquisition established after that crusade. For my own part I am convinced that, had the Waldenses been the only heretical body in the field, there would have been no crusade against heresy and perhaps no Inquisition.

The movement which called out such resistance from those who repeated the ancient creed of Europe was of a different sort. On its negative side it echoed the same charges brought against the Church by the isolated heretics and by the Waldenses, repeating them so exactly that certain superficial Protestant scholars once maintained that it was little more than a protest against Roman abuses. Even Limborch, whose learning forces him to admit that it was more than this, naively remarks à propos of their genial custom of starving themselves to death as the highest possible act of faith:—

“’Tis rather to be wondered at, that in so barbarous an age, they should throw off so many errors rather than that they should retain some.”[11] It now seems certain that the movement based itself on a philosophy fundamentally hostile to Christianity and nauseous to us who have breathed no other air than that of Christendom.

Before considering the nature of this philosophy, and of its logical developments in the sphere of morals, let us reject the various names by which it has been called by modern scholars, and refer to it as the “Albigensian” movement. It is true that “Manichean,” “neo-Manichean,” and “Catharist” (after the habit of the sect of referring to themselves as the “Cathari” or “pure”), are more descriptive. “Albigensian” is sanctioned by usage, and usage should prevail over the preciosity of the pedant.

The un-Christian creed of the “Albigenses” began to sift into Western Europe soon after the year 1000. It was very old, for it represented one of the few fundamentally different ways of looking at life, and it is probably indestructible as long as the world endures. Its central idea is that the universe is dual and was created by two Gods, or if you will, two principles, of about equal strength, one Good and one Evil. The attempt to reconcile this idea with Christianity is as old as Manes who lived in Mesopotamia in the third century and founded the heretical sect of the Manicheans. Back of Manes, again, at the very beginning of recorded history, we find the Persians with a dualist religion which they attributed to a shadowy prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. To-day three striking examples of its survival come to mind. First, Dualism, with its scorn for matter as inherently evil, is not far from Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science. Second, in 1909, Paul Elmer More, one of the foremost of American scholars and critics, who would rank among the great critics of all times did he but possess the gift of vivid phrase, published a book, “Studies in Dualism,” which bore on its title page the following quotation from another modern worthy, Sir Leslie Stephen:—

“Manicheanism may be disavowed in words. It cannot be exiled from the actual belief of mankind.”[12]

Third, in 1917, under the influence of the war, H. G. Wells (whom I hesitate whether to characterize as a sort of prose Shelley, “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” or as an æolian harp upon which almost any passing wind of doctrine can play) thus sets forth the thoughts of his imaginary Englishman mourning for the death of his soldier son:—

“His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the Gnostics and the Manicheans which saw the God of the World as altogether evil. For a while his soul sank down into the uncongenial darknesses of these creeds of despair....

“Is the whole scheme of Nature evil? Is life in its essence cruel?”[13]

I hasten to add that the Manicheans, following the little-known Gnostics, made matter the evil principle in Nature, as opposed to spirit, the principle of good.

We have seen that it had come originally from the East. Manes himself, away back in the third century, had been a Mesopotamian, and in the fourth century his disciples seem to have been widely distributed from Persia to the Atlantic. They were hated. “Manicheans and Mathematicians (i.e., sorcerers) were alone excepted from the general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.”[14] They reappear, under the name of Paulicians, in the East Roman Empire, during the tenth century, and thence passed into Bulgaria. Later, in Western Europe, they were often known as Bulgars, “Bougres,” or “Buggers.” From Bulgaria they spread westward into what is now Bosnia, and from Bosnia westward again into Northern Italy. By the middle of the eleventh century they were numerous and influential throughout Lombardy and especially in Milan.

Lea suggests that without the impulse these people gave to extreme asceticism, and especially their contempt for marriage, Pope Gregory VII would not have been able to get his decrees forbidding the marriage of priests obeyed in Northern Italy.

“Vernon Lee”[15] gives ... “a very curious anecdote, unearthed by the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his extremely suggestive book on mediæval heresies. A certain priest of Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a saint. The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his death; and in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his intercession, it became necessary to proceed to his beatification. The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when, in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a Catharus, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan, the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming of Christ. It was quite probable that he had spat upon the crucifix as a symbol of the devil’s triumph; it was quite possible that he had said masses to Satan as the true creator of all matter. Be this as it may, that priest’s half-canonized bones were publicly burnt and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows that the Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and foul, had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, should have found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of the early Middle Ages. In those stern and ferocious yet tender-hearted and most questioning times, there must have been something logically satisfying, and satisfying also to the harrowed sympathies, in the conviction, if not in the dogma, that the soul of man had not been made by the maker of the foul and cruel world of matter; and that the suffering of all good men’s hearts corresponded with the suffering, the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of the Spirit. And what a light it must have shed, completely solving all terrible questions, upon the story of Christ’s martyrdom, so constantly uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediæval men!”

The same author noting what seems to be the intentionally hopeless, repulsive, and horrible nature of twelfth century (or, as she puts it, pre-Franciscan) Italian sculpture, goes on to argue from this that such “Nightmare pessimism had honeycombed the twelfth century Italian mind.” How uncertain was the popular distinction between orthodox and heretical asceticism is attested by many humorous-pathetic stories like that of the priest of Milan. What the distinction actually was may well be considered later in connection with the Dominican order.

The man of European stock cannot but wonder why any Christian people, especially the volatile Provençals, could accept so savage a creed. Perhaps people ready to “... jump the life to come” might be attracted by the moral latitude allowed the Albigensian “Believers” during life, and would, meanwhile, banish the thought of death, as so many moderns do, or else hope to be “consoled” even at the last gasp. But this is guesswork. What is certain is that the sect prospered.

We have seen that the Middle Ages, although weaker than we in the observation of Nature, had a stronger faith in logic, and were, therefore, bolder in the application of formally reasoned, logical, ideas of life. Accordingly, those of them who were possessed of the dualistic idea proceeded to all sorts of perfectly logical extremes in showing their hatred and contempt for matter.

Thus their fully initiated members, or “Perfect,” were sworn never to eat meat, eggs, milk, cheese or anything which was the result of sexual procreation. Fish was permitted because they thought that fish did not reproduce themselves by the coming together of the male and female! To eat any sort of food which came from a warm-blooded animal might be murder, for they believed in the transmigration of souls, and therefore such an animal might be the dwelling-place of a human soul. This, again, was perfectly logical; to be born again, after death, in another body was, according to this theology, a proper and necessary punishment for sin. All sexual acts which might possibly produce offspring were forbidden to the “Perfect”; they must purify themselves by fasts and elaborate ceremonies if they so much as touched a woman by accident. The propagation of human beings, with their sinful, material bodies, was clearly the worst of crimes. Hence the “Perfect” would sometimes tell a pregnant woman that she had a devil within her. Marriage was a perpetual state of sin; it was worse than adultery and fornication because the married felt no shame, and were, therefore, more likely to persist in cohabitation. It was even whispered that, just as sexual intercourse out of marriage was better than intercourse between married people because the married felt no shame, so, too, any unnatural form of intercourse from which children could not be conceived was better than natural cohabitation. Finally, the horrible and perfectly logical climax to all this was that suicide was the deed above all others most pleasing to God.

It was one of the charges against the sect that their professed hatred for life and its pleasures was accompanied by promiscuous sexual orgies. Nor is there anything improbable in such accusations: they have been true of occasional heretical bodies from the earliest Christian times to Rasputin and certain contemporary Russian sects. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to prove that such sexual orgies were ever regularly practised or officially encouraged by the sect. The weight of testimony would rather seem to prove their extreme asceticism, out of which would naturally come occasional excesses of self-indulgence on the part of the “weaker brethren.”

Naturally, with such a régime as that laid down for them, the Albigensian “Perfect” were few. The sect made up its numbers by including also “Believers,” who were admitted on their mere promise to renounce the Catholic faith and to receive the Albigensian “Consolamentum” or initiation of the “Perfect,” at least in the hour of death, as many of the early Christians used to receive baptism. The lives of the “Believers” were as unrestrained as those of the “Perfect” were strict. Except to “venerate” or do homage to the “Perfect” according to certain prescribed forms and ceremonies whenever they met, their religion seems to have laid upon them no prescribed duties whatsoever. They were allowed to marry and to eat meat. To be sure they could not be finally saved without undergoing the “Consolamentum,” and, when this was once received, the jaws of the system closed upon them with a ferocity so extraordinary that we shudder at it as we shudder at the lurid horrors imagined by Poe. But this ugly possibility weighed light in comparison with the easy absence of any code of morals for everyday living. Clearly, Albigensianism aimed to meet all tastes.

If we ask why such a life as that of the Albigensian “Perfect” ever attracted anyone, we must go back one step further and ask why asceticism, deprivation for its own sake, has always had such power over mankind. It is one of the unanswerable mysteries of the human soul why men have so often felt that their God, or Gods, would be pleased at seeing the worshipper voluntarily submit to deprivation, discomfort and pain. It has been argued that limitation in pleasure is necessary for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being and that asceticism (itself a word derived from the training of the Greek athletes) merely sets one free for undivided effort. But this does not meet the case. For the fact is that there is always in man the tendency to condemn pleasure for its own sake, as evil in itself, as if there was something holy in the mere state of being deprived or uncomfortable. And this curious state of mind is as strong to-day as it ever was, witness the extraordinary savageness of the campaign waged by what an Englishman would call the “Dissenting” religious bodies in America to-day against any pleasure or amusement that strikes them as “sinful.” Finally, it is also the fact that many who would not dream of denying themselves a certain amount of physical satisfaction of different sorts will applaud ascetics. Accordingly, the Albigensian system addressed itself to a fundamental instinct of human nature.

Finally, it must be remembered that the Albigenses claimed to be purifying, not destroying, Christianity. Just so, the Humanitarians of to-day reduce Christianity to “Social Service” and throw over supernatural teaching altogether. In most cases the Albigensian system had certain outward likenesses to the Catholic. Their distinction between “Perfect” and “Believers” was somewhat like the Catholic distinction between clergy and laity, or that between monastic people and people “living in the world.” The form of their promise to renounce “Satan” (i.e., the Catholic Church), by which one became an Albigensian believer, was a little like baptism, and their “Consolamentum” was like Communion and Extreme Unction combined. They claimed to be true followers of Christ, they particularly reverenced the Lord’s Prayer, and they even went through a form of Lord’s Supper. The fasts of the “Perfect,” except when prolonged into the “Endura,” were not altogether unlike the Catholic fasts. As to the points in which they differed from the Church, they made the usual heretical claim of following “purer” traditions. Certain modern scholars see reason for believing that they possessed apocryphal writings dating from the apostolic or post-apostolic age.[16] In their propaganda they laid stress upon the negative side, that is, of their opposition to the “corruptions” of Catholicism, and thus secured for themselves the support of much of the prevailing dissatisfaction with the Church.

Why their practice of fasting themselves to death, in what they called the “Endura,” did not drive away converts is the hardest question to answer concerning them. That the “Perfect” voluntarily practised it was bad enough. What was worse was their treatment of believers who had received the “Consolamentum” when thought to be on death-beds and had then been so unlucky as to begin to get well. The “Perfect” had probably learned by experience that “Believers” who had been “consoled” on their death-bed and had then recovered, were not likely to follow the extraordinarily strict rules for the “Perfect” as all “consoled” persons were bound to do. For them, the relapse of a “consoled person” was the greatest conceivable horror. Therefore, when a “consoled” sick person showed signs of recovery the “Perfect” forbade the family to give the patient food, and, if the family showed signs of weakening, they stationed themselves by the bedside or took away the sufferer to some place of safety where they might starve him or her to death in peace!

How such amiable folk ever led away much people after them is a riddle. And yet, despite the appalling features of their system, during the eleventh century Manicheanism is found sprouting up here and there throughout Western Europe. In the second half of the eleventh century we find it powerful in Northern Italy, and especially in Milan, but it seems not to have had any deep root north or west of the Alps before 1100. We hear of Manicheans at Toulouse in 1018, at Orleans in 1022, at Cambrai and Liège in 1025, and at Châlons in 1045. By the middle of the century they had penetrated north into the Germanies as far as the city of Goslar. Nowhere do we hear of their appearance without hearing also of their persecution.

It is one of man’s deepest instincts to defend that which he holds sacred, and to the man possessed of a religion, nothing is so sacred as his gods. What can be more natural than to wish to punish offences against the gods? Limborch has a long account of “Persecution among the Pagans.” For us it will be enough to remember that Athens itself put Socrates to death on the charge of teaching men not to believe in the gods of the city. And this in spite of the fact that Bacon truly says, “... the religion of the heathens consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their church were the poets.”[17]

Roman tolerance was born of the necessities of ruling over many races, none of whom except the Jews had an exclusive, “Jealous” God. Almost all the other people of the Empire were willing to accept the gods of strangers as differing from their own merely in name. Naturally, when one fanciful story about a god or goddess was as good as another, the educated man cared little about the whole body of myths. As an administrator, this same educated man was easily able to be “tolerant” to all religions because he cared little or nothing for his own, and was, in reality, indifferent and therefore not “tolerant” at all in the strict sense of the word. St. Paul’s Gallio, so much maligned by fools but so worthily celebrated by Kipling, is a fine specimen of the type. Such a man was devoted solely to the public interest. His feeling would not be as clear cut as our national patriotisms: “Rome” was almost the whole civilized world, so that the chance of her perishing was unthinkable. Nevertheless, she could still be an object of affection; her government represented the definite benefit of order. Devotion to her was not vague emotionalism like that of our internationalists of to-day. After a fashion she could be worshipped.

On the other hand when any religion or religious practice seemed to threaten the government upon which order reposed, the Roman magistrate struck at once. The rediscovered Roman law, remember, was to be a great force actively informing the twelfth century.

In adopting Christianity, Europe exchanged a religion in which one god, or one story about a god, was about as good as another, for a religion which claimed a definite, historical founder who had left behind him a corporate teaching body, the Church. To such a body, the out-and-out pagan or disbeliever is an open and possibly generous enemy. Whereas he who proclaims himself a fellow Christian, but meanwhile falsifies the Church’s doctrine by twisting and altering it to suit himself, is a traitor, a snake in the grass compared to whom the heathen is an angel of light.

Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential, of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. She must, therefore, contend especially against the heretic, the enemy from within, who would disfigure the faith by which she lives; and she has done so, from the “false teachers” and “heretics” whom St. Paul so often urged his flock to avoid, down to the poor creatures who would reduce her Saviour to the stature of a “social uplifter” or the walking delegate of a labor union. To keep the faith is a perpetual warfare.

Make what you will of the body empowered to interpret and define Christian doctrine and of the means of defending that doctrine when defined: the necessities of some sort of definition and authority will remain as long as the Christian name endures.

Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “... Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”[18] Later, he would find Christian Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors, including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences, and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force. Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare, our imagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin, Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19] Even in those sleepy days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the refutation of heresy.

But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple, would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein defined) he cannot be saved?

Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day. But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; in the modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture indeed.

But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they repented, although too late to be rescued.

The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner of the punishment we shall in a moment return.

We hear of the execution of heretics here and there throughout Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them, as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned.

If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic, there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion, as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities. Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law, methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience.... You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses, sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ... a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate even in words ... the framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous instances ... Savonarola is one in point ... that the judges often appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead. The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain could have existed, but it did exist.”[20]

It is possible to go even further than the passage quoted above. For, if the culprit had died, it was thought worth while to dig up his corpse and at least burn that. Certainly, then, it would seem as if there was something almost sacramental about burning the heretic.

Study of the discussion of witch-burning in the “Golden Bough” suggests the idea that heretics were burned, as witches were, because it was believed that fire was the one adequate means of purifying the community from the pollution which they had brought upon it. If this is so, then heretic- and witch-burning is connected with the most primitive superstitions, not only long before Christianity, but before the possibility of any systematized religion.

On the other hand, burning alive conformed after a grisly fashion to the letter of an old saying that “the Church abhors bloodshed.”

Cardinal Newman has left us an interesting passage combining extreme hatred for the heretic, or rather for the heresiarch (i.e., the active preacher of heresy and corrupter of the faithful), with the typical modern sensitiveness to the sight of physical pain:

“Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs I had said: the latter should meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter; and so far as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable toward himself. I cannot deny that this is a very fierce passage; but Arius was banished, not burned; and it is only fair to myself to say that neither at this nor at any other time of my life, not even when I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a Puritan’s ears, and I think the sight of a Spanish auto-da-fé would have been the death of me.”[21]

It would be a study in itself to work up the evidence as to the toughness of the mediæval mind with respect to disagreeable ideas and to the actual infliction of pain. To-day, in America, we have our lynchings, and we have the ugly stories of torture inflicted in revolutionary Russia. But, on the other hand, we have a crew of drivellers against capital punishment, and many people can hardly bear the idea of hell. As Zarathustra puts it, of the God of the Christians:—

“When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.”

“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother.”

“There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22]

Whereas in the Middle Ages—

“The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23]

With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover (like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he cheerfully risked being roasted eternally.

As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between mediæval and modern as follows:—

“Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the papers say about the execution of those condemned to death; they reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man. What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado, roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan. These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24]

Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part, although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.

With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse, and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people of Albi prevented the bishop and a neighbouring abbot from imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126 we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In 1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more.

The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate.

The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it. To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist, a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentrics found in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order. Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose ground.

Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one important occasion.

The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage ... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’ replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites, whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25] One has a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels.

Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi, after preaching to a throng which packed the cathedral, he called upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,” St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip. After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing precisely as if he had never come.

In 1165, at Lombers near Albi, we find Catholic priests publicly debating against representative “Albigenses” in the presence of Pons, Archbishop of Narbonne, and sundry bishops, besides the most powerful nobles of the region, Constance, sister of King Louis VII of France and wife of Count Raymond V of Toulouse, Viscount Trencavel of Beziers, and others. When the verdict went against the heretics, no action whatsoever seems to have been taken against them: it was a mere tournament of words, “a matter of public interest” as we should say. Two years later the heretics openly held a council at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The president came all the way from Constantinople to attend, delegates from Lombardy were present, “bishops” were elected for various vacant sees, and a committee was appointed to settle a disputed boundary between the “dioceses” of Toulouse and Carcassonne. Clearly we have here to do with an organized religious body, emphatically a “going concern,” acting fearlessly in the open.

With the year 1178 we get the first suggestion of vigorous direct action against the heresy. Count Raymond V of Toulouse wrote to his brother-in-law, Louis VII of France, deploring the progress of heresy and the abandonment of orthodox religion throughout his lands, and connecting this condition with an alarming increase of brigandage and public disorder. The King of France had just made peace (or rather truce) with Henry II of England, so that the long struggle between the French Monarchy and the Angevin house was at rest for the time being and the two kings were free to combine against heresy. The other great chronic political controversy, between the Papacy and the “Holy Roman” Empire was also inactive, Pope Alexander III having got the better of Frederic Barbarossa and his anti-Pope. Accordingly, the Pope was free to spur on the kings to action. At first it was proposed that Louis and Henry march into Toulouse with a joint army. But, finally, it was decided merely to send to Toulouse a mission of high clerical dignitaries with power to act. Lea suggests that the enthusiasm of the kings had cooled off during the long time spent in preliminary discussion. Mother Drane holds that the Pope preferred peaceful measures.

When the mission reached Toulouse they were insulted in the streets. Nevertheless, they went on to draw up a long list of heretics, and finally determined to make an example of a rich old man named Peter Mauran who seems to have been one of the first citizens of Toulouse. They proceeded against him under the canon promulgated by the Council of Tours, which prescribed imprisonment for convicted heretics and confiscation of their property. After much palaver and wordy shuffling by the accused he was adjudged a heretic. To save his property he recanted and offered to submit to such penance as might be imposed. Accordingly, “stripped to the waist, with the Bishop of Toulouse and the Abbot of St. Sernin busily scourging him on either side, he was led through an immense crowd to the high altar of the Cathedral ... (and) ... ordered to undertake a three years’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to be daily scourged through the streets of Toulouse until his departure, to make restitution of all Church lands occupied by him and of all money acquired by usury, and to pay to the Count five hundred pounds of silver in redemption of his forfeited property.”[26]

The results of these measures were only temporary. After his return from Palestine, Mauran was three times elected chief magistrate of the city. In the same year in which he had first been tried, the Third Lateran Council cursed the heretics of Languedoc, together with those who favoured them, and included as heretics the marauding bands of wandering mercenaries who, when out of employment, drifted about as brigands. Further, the Council took the unprecedented step of declaring a Crusade against all these enemies of the Church and of proclaiming a two years’ indulgence to Crusaders. So that in 1181, Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux and Cardinal, was able to raise a military force with which he invaded the Beziers district and took the castle of Lavaur, capturing in it many prominent heretics. But two of the captured Albigensian “bishops,” upon recanting, were promptly given Catholic benefices in Toulouse, and, all told, Henry of Clairvaux’s little crusade was no more than a flash in the pan.

The Lateran Council’s curse upon bandits, lumping them with heretics, raises the question of how closely the anarchical side of Albigensianism may have been connected with public disorder. The twelfth century men were great bandit-slayers. Probably there were more bandits to be slain because there was more wealth worth robbing in Western Christendom than formerly. The mercenary soldier, a man without a country, hired by the princes of the time for their big or little wars, was not far from the bandit, even when in campaign. In England the name of King John’s mercenaries was hated and feared for generations. In his times of unemployment, when he was drifting about the country he tended to become the bandit pure and simple. Always he was unbound by social and conventional restraints and ties, wanting especially reverence for the Church, which was usually the chief protection for the property of that greatest and richest of mediæval corporations. We are told that one of Richard Cœur de Lion’s mercenaries, quite wantonly it would seem, once ... “broke off an arm of a statue in the Church of Our Lady at Chateauroux, whereupon the figure bled as if it were alive; and John (afterwards King John) picked up the severed arm and carried it off as a holy relic.”[27] But we are not told that the fellow himself was in the least abashed by the miracle, or that he was punished for his sacrilege. However, in twelfth-century Northern and Central France, when banditry became annoying, the bandits by no means had it all their own way. Their career was often short and ended by steel or rope. The community went for them mercilessly, much as men did in our own Wild West.

In Languedoc (as we have seen) with its wealth, its Jews, and its nearness to the Moslem, reverence for the Church was less. Further, it may well be that the nobles were more dependent upon mercenaries inasmuch as their vassals were less warlike. We shall find the unhappy Raymond VII refusing to dismiss his hired soldiers, no matter under what pressure. Finally, some heretics denied the moral right of all private property whatsoever; most of them attacked the Church for the great wealth which it possessed, and practically all would refuse to take oaths, and denied the moral force of them when taken, although the feudal oath of allegiance from the vassal to his lord was the chief bond of civil society. In silent witness to the difference these things made, we find many of the southern churches, especially the country churches, were fortified. Whereas in the North, in spite of all the continual quarrelling between priest and noble, the church building nearly always depended for its protection on its sanctity alone.

The churches of Languedoc were not fortified for nothing. Speaking of the bandits, Lea remarks that the chroniclers, who were themselves mostly Churchmen, “... insist that their blows ... fell heavier on church and monastery than on the castle of the seigneur or the cottage of the peasant.” Naturally, since they would get little plunder from the cottage and many hard knocks from the castle. “... They ridiculed the priests as singers, and it was one of their savage sports to beat them to death while mockingly begging their intercession, ... ‘Sing for us, you singer, sing for us’; and the culmination of their ... sacrilege was ... their casting out and trampling on the holy wafers whose precious pyxes they eagerly seized.”[28]

Exactly how much connection Albigensianism had with disorder we cannot say. On the face of it, such teaching tended rather to non-resistance. But in an age so direct, so extreme in brutality as well as in tenderness (as for brutality in speech a leading Albigensian argument against transubstantiation was that it involved the excretion of the body of Christ into latrines), in such an age, I say, it is improbable that the heretics greatly disapproved of anyone who attacked their enemies, the Churchmen. Even assuming that the godless mercenary-turned-bandit was not, strictly speaking, a heretic at all, he was certainly favoured by the atmosphere of heresy.

As the twelfth century neared its close Albigensianism must have seemed “the coming thing” in Languedoc. Although we hear of none of the greatest nobles of the region as having been “hereticated,” yet many individuals among their immediate families had been, especially among the women. In general, the heretics were enthusiastic and the Catholics uncertain and troubled. The Orthodox were still able (as in the affair of Mauran) to win “test cases,” but they must have felt that their hold was slipping.

From the point of view of those resolute to suppress heresy, the only real gain of the whole twelfth century was that both the canon and the civil laws on the subject had become more defined. Even as late as the middle of the century, we find St. Bernard calling the burning of heretics “excessive cruelty,” and favouring imprisonment as a maximum punishment.

The heresy made its only appearance in England in 1166. Henry II, the very man whom we have seen so angry against Becket as to threaten to turn Mohammedan, seems to have felt free to take a line of his own. He had them stripped to the waist, flogged, branded on the forehead, and turned adrift, strictly forbidding everyone to give them any aid and comfort whatsoever. This was effective enough in its way, as they must have soon died from hunger and exposure, but the point is that there seems to have been no recognized procedure to be followed.

This want had been partly met, in the last two decades of the century, by three laws.

In 1184, at the Diet of Verona, the “Holy Roman” Emperor, Frederic Barbarossa, and the short-lived Pope Lucius III, had conferred on heresy. Although in disagreement about many important matters, they seem to have agreed perfectly about the treatment of heretics. They published a joint decree. The Pope on his side directed that the bishops, who had always had jurisdiction in matters of heresy, should make, or cause to be made, an inquiry, or “inquisition,” into the possible existence of heresy in every parish where the presence of heretics was even suspected. Even those whose manner of living differed from that of the ordinary Catholic were to be questioned as to their faith. The accused were to be tried in the episcopal court and such as should be convicted (if they refused to “repent” and acknowledge their errors) were to be handed over to the secular authorities “in order that they may receive the punishment they deserve (animadversio debita).” This last formula was vague, perhaps intentionally so. All secular magistrates were to take an oath before the bishop that they would enforce the laws against heresy, and those who refused to act after having been duly called upon to do so were to be excommunicated. Furthermore, all Catholics were forbidden to do business with any city which might sustain a pro-heretical magistrate in failure to act.

The Emperor, on his side, was not behindhand. He decreed that any magistrate excommunicated for refusal or neglect to proceed against heretics should lose his office and be debarred from accepting another. All those convicted, or to be convicted, of heresy were put under the imperial ban, which meant banishment, confiscation of goods, destruction of their houses, public infamy, debarment from office, &c. There is no explicit mention of the death penalty. “Animadversio” had meant death in ancient times, and the twelfth-century lawyer was apt to be both a great pedant and a great imperialist. Nevertheless, the formula had become vaguer.

The other two enactments are those of secular princes, acting alone.

Count Raymond V of Toulouse, he whom we have seen appealing to his suzerain Louis VII of France against heresy, at some time during his long reign of forty-six years (from 1148 to 1194) decreed not only banishment but also death by fire for heretics. Probably this was done in connection with Henry of Clairvaux’s mission which condemned Mauran, or with the short “Crusade” of 1181. What action, if any, was taken under it we do not know. In 1209 we shall find the municipality of Toulouse writing to Pope Innocent III to the effect that “many” heretics had been burnt under it. But we must remember that the letter was written when the city was threatened by Montfort and his Crusaders, and its magistrates were correspondingly anxious to make a case.

The third of the three laws against heretics was enacted by King Pedro II of Aragon, who later got himself killed in his attempt to protect the protector of heretics, Raymond VI of Toulouse! In 1197 Pedro banished the Waldenses and other heretics from his lands as public enemies to himself and his realm, and announced that if any of them were found when the months of grace had expired, their goods were to be confiscated and themselves burned. Of course, this was only a threat, and in all human probability no one stayed to risk the stake. The significant thing is that the threat is made against the Waldenses as the heretics par excellence.

But, although it was a gain to have the legal machinery for punishing heretics, still the gain did not amount to much if there was no organized force capable of putting the machinery in motion. Except for the banishment of Mauran and the little Crusade which took Lavaur in 1181, no real action against the heretics of Languedoc had been taken. In 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier and condemned heresy in the strongest terms, but his thunders died away without an echo. No progress whatsoever had been made against heresy in Languedoc when, in 1198, Innocent III became Pope.

Why did Rome wait so long before moving in the Albigensian matter? The Curia must surely have known, for decades past, that things were steadily going from bad to worse in Languedoc. It has been suggested that all the moral forces and diplomatic skill that the Papacy could muster had been needed to make head against the redoubtable emperors, Barbarossa and his son, Henry VI. But this, at most, can be only half the answer. In the first place, the Curia had been and was entirely competent to carry on several major controversies at the same time, with the sure touch of a skilful juggler keeping three or four balls going at once. In the second place, even in the last fifty years, crowded as they had been, still there had been intervals of peace between Papacy and Empire. One such interval had been seven years long, and still the Papacy had made no move in Languedoc. Probably the answer is that none of the popes, not even Alexander III, and still less his short-lived successors, had possessed the tremendous energy and courage of the newly-elected Pope.

FOOTNOTES: