Simon de Montfort

If Philip II Augustus, the King of France was not interested in taking up arms against the Cathars and the lords of Languedoc, a northern noble named Simon de Montfort was keen on it. The Seigneur de Montfort-l'Amaury, was also the 5th Earl of Leicester. The de Montfort family were descendants of the Counts of Flanders.

Simon was said to be a very pious man – at least from a Catholic point of view. In 1209, he took on the role of the Captain-General of the Albigensian Crusade. He went with Philip’s blessing, but Phillip apparently turned a blind eye to Simon's methods. Simon’s first target was Béziers a territory which fell under the lordship of Raymond VI of Toulouse. Béziers became a hallmark of what was to come, as well as Simon’s ruthless character.

 

 

On July 22, 1209 Simon and his forces came to the town of Béziers. The Catholics were given the opportunity to leave before the Crusaders besieged the city. They refused and fought with the Cathars. Their combined forces were defeated outside the walls and those left were pursued back inside the walls of the town. Those who took refuge in the Cathedral of St. Nazaire and the Eglise de la Madeleine were not spared. The Cathedral was set ablaze and those inside the Church were mercilessly butchered. As the Cathedral collapsed, those who escaped were also slain. Those who remained inside were either crushed or burned to death.

Simon became notorious, and not in a good way. He was seen as a cruel, harsh and treacherous man of no honor and bad faith. He was a terror, with a reputation for slaughtering entire villages. In the village of Minerve, Simon burned 140 Cathars who refused to recant their faith. Prior to the sack of the village of Lastours, it was reported that he took prisoners from the nearby village of Bram and had their ears, noses and lips cut off, and gouged out their eyes. He left one poor soul with one eye, to lead them into the village – a warning to those who would not recant.

Simon de Montfort went on to defeat Peter II of Aragon in the Battle of Muret. The counts of the Languedoc were vassals of the King of Aragon. In 1212, Peter learned that de Montfort had partially sacked Toulouse and exiled Raymond. Raymond happened to be Peter’s brother in law at that time. Raymond went to Peter, asking for assistance. Together they crossed the Pyrenees and arrived at Muret in September 1213 to confront de Montfort's army. They were joined there by Raymond’s militia he had gathered from Toulouse, and the armies of the counts of Comminges and Foix. Raymond tried to convince Peter to starve out Simon’s forces, but Peter rejected the idea and proceeded to mount the battle. The number of Peter’s forces far exceeded those of Simon’s, which no doubt led him to be more than a bit over-confident. Simon’s forces numbered less than a thousand, but approximately a fourth of those were knights and not just regular cavalry or infantrymen. They were also battle-hardened and Simon was – for whatever else might be said of him – a savvy tactician.

Peter was so over-confident he refused his royal armor and instead donned the armor of a common cavalryman. In the disarray and madness that followed, Peter was thrown from his horse and was killed – in spite of or perhaps because of his protestations that he was the king. With their king and leader gone, the Aragonese and Catalan armies fled back over the mountains and deserted the battle. Simon de Montfort had won yet another victory. In military terms, it was a hollow victory, but that never stopped Simon from counting. He was appointed the Count of Toulouse and Duke of Narbonne in 1215.

Raymond and his allies continued their battles to regain their lands with some successes. The battles raged on in the years 1216 and 1217. In the later quarter of 1217, Raymond returned to Toulouse and Simon saw his chance to get Raymond once and for all. Simon besieged Toulouse for nine months. He finally met his end on the 25th of June, 1218. According to a song or chanson written about the Albigensian Crusade, his head was smashed by a rock catapulted from a mangonel operated by the women of Toulouse.

Simon was buried in the Cathedral of Saint-Nazaire at Carcassonne. His body was later moved home to Montfort l'Amaury by his son. There is still a tombstone in the Cathedral called "of Simon de Montfort" in the South Transept. Reportedly the inscription on the stone envisaged Simon as a saint in heaven, enjoying the favor of God's reward for his deeds in life. His enemies left him a far different epitaph:

The epitaph says, for those who can read it
That he is a saint and martyr who shall breathe again
And shall in wondrous joy inherit and flourish
And wear a crown and sit on a heavenly throne.
And I have heard it said that this must be so -
If by killing men and spilling blood,
By wasting souls, and preaching murder,
By following evil counsel, and raising fires,
By ruining noblemen and besmirching paratage,
By pillaging the country, and by exalting Pride,
By stoking up wickedness and stifling good,
By massacring women and their infants,
A man can win Jesus in this world,
Then Simon surely wears a crown, resplendent in heaven.

[http://www.midi-france.info/190403_paratge.htm]

I invite you to read the page from which the above quote was taken and compare the idea of ‘paratage’ that was espoused by the Cathars to the principles and practices of ‘God’s warrior’ Simon de Montfort and his Church.

Until we meet again, walk in peace and love my dears,

Rayvn

The not so innocent Pope & the Cathars

Before going any further with this, I want to reiterate that I went into this all as a skeptic and a bit of a cynic because there were too many holes in the things I’d read – at least as near as I knew. I am a dogmatist’s nightmare. I live by Fox Mulder’s credos of “Question everything!” and “The Truth is Out There.” I have since before Fox Mulder even existed. My father raised me to be like that.

This tends to be a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. I consider it one of my strengths, but it’s also one of my weaknesses. I will seldom take anyone’s word for anything – unless I know from experience that they do their homework fairly thoroughly. This leaves me room to learn and figure out things for myself, which is the whole point of undertaking one’s own ‘grail quest’. You don’t find your own grail by reading about someone else’s adventure. That is to say, you can use these things as sign-posts and maps, but the map is not the territory, and you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. For you see, there are bits of truth mixed in with all the fallacies and outright fictions.  On the negative side, it takes a lot longer to ‘get there’ but once you have arrived, the journey and the conclusions are yours and yours alone. You made them and you ‘own’ them. They don’t belong to anyone else but you. This is the difference between ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’. Knowledge is knowing the things other people say. Wisdom is learning and knowing it for your-self and therefore equal to ‘understanding’.   

 

That being said let us continue now with the story.

Albi is a commune in Southern France in the department of Tarn. It is also a city on the Tarn River, located about 85 kilometers northeast of Toulouse. Albi is an Occitan word but it is also a Latin word, meaning ‘white’ or ‘fair’. This word is the root of other words like Albany, and Alban – another name for Scotland. The root word gens means ‘people’ or a lineage of people. Albi is also an Arabic word that means ‘my heart’ or ‘beloved’.

This region was first settled in historical times in the Bronze Age, somewhere between 3000 and 600 BCE. It would seem that those who came there were coming back to a place buried deep in their ancestral memories from the days when people lived in caves and drew interesting pictures on the walls. That period of time was, ironically enough, called “the Magdalenian.” The Magdalenian period was named after the type site of La Madeleine, a rock shelter located in the Vézère valley, in the commune of Tursac, in the Dordogne department of France. Before it was called the Magdalenian period, it was originally termed "L'âge du renne" (the Age of the Reindeer). This might seem an odd bit of information to throw in at the moment, but it becomes a link to the Scythians later on in the story. Or perhaps I should say ‘earlier on’ in the story.

Toulouse, located in the department of Albi was the capitol of the Languedoc, a region that was once separate from France. It was the seat of Catharism and in fact the flag and coat of arms of the Languedoc is the Cathar cross. The name Languedoc comes from “langue d’oc”, for the people there spoke the Occitan language.

Catharism (from Greek: katharos, pure) was a name given to a Christian religious sect with dualistic and gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries. Catharism had its roots in the Paulician movement in Armenia and the Bogomils of Bulgaria which took influences from the Paulicians. Though the term "Cathar" has been used for centuries to identify the movement, whether the movement identified itself with this name is debatable. In Cathar texts, the terms "Good Men" (Bons Hommes) or "Good Christians" are the common terms of self-identification.

Like many medieval movements, there were various schools of thought and practice amongst the Cathari; some were dualistic (believing in a God of Good and a God of Evil), others Gnostic, some closer to orthodoxy while abstaining from an acceptance of Catholicism. The dualist theology was the most prominent, however, and was based upon an asserted complete incompatibility of love and power. As matter was seen as a manifestation of power, it was believed to be incompatible with love.

The Cathari did not believe in one all-encompassing god, but in two, both equal and comparable in status. They held that the physical world was evil and created by Rex Mundi (translated from Latin as "king of the world"), who encompassed all that was corporeal, chaotic and powerful; the second god, the one whom they worshipped, was entirely disincarnate: a being or principle of pure spirit and completely unsullied by the taint of matter. He was the god of love, order and peace.

According to some Cathars, the purpose of man's life on Earth was to transcend matter, perpetually renouncing anything connected with the principle of power and thereby attaining union with the principle of love. According to others, man's purpose was to reclaim or redeem matter, spiritualising and transforming it.

This placed them at odds with the Catholic Church regarding material creation, on behalf of which Jesus had died, as being intrinsically evil and implying that God, whose word had created the world in the beginning, was a usurper. Furthermore, as the Cathars saw matter as intrinsically evil, they denied that Jesus could become incarnate and still be the son of God. Cathars vehemently repudiated the significance of the crucifixion and the cross. In fact, to the Cathars, Rome's opulent and luxurious Church seemed a palpable embodiment and manifestation on Earth of Rex Mundi's sovereignty.

The Catholic Church regarded the sect as dangerously heretical, although the actual reason for its spread was most likely the discredit of the Church itself in the medieval society. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism]

Pope Innocent III, reigned as Pope from 1198 to his death in 1216. He was one of the most powerful and influential popes in the history of the papacy. He claimed supremacy over all the kings and royal houses of Europe. He used his position well to his advantage and that of advancing the interests of the Church of Rome. A strong opponent of anything that threatened the Church, he declared the Third Crusade, to once again attempt to stop the intrusion of the Muslims into the Holy Land. He also knew about the Cathars and knew that this ‘heretical’ movement was growing uncomfortably popular – not only amongst the people, but amongst his own clergy. He himself estimated that probably 80% of his clergy were at least sympathetic to the ideas of the Cathars. The royal houses of the Languedoc were also very sympathetic to the Cathars, if not Cathars themselves. Not only was the Roman form of Christianity being threatened, but he feared the Church itself would implode from within, if he did not stop this heresy dead in its tracks.

The Lords of the Languedoc and Toulouse moved into his sites, because of their Cathar allegiances and sympathies. Being the cunning, ambitious, power-mad and clever man that he was, he devised a plan to enable him to declare yet another crusade – this time on European soil. We shall learn more of that in the next installment.

Have a beautiful day/evening my friends!

Love, Rayvn