Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

X

PERSECUTION

1229: M

ARBURG

Count Paviam was shocked by the gruelling nature of the work in the hospital. Every day, dressed in coarse grey tunics, women would attend the sick: bathing them, changing their linen, cleaning their sores. One, anxious for a paralysed boy who suffered from dysentery, went so far as to put him in her own bed, and carry him outside whenever his stomach began to cramp. Since this would happen upwards of six times each night, her sleep was repeatedly disturbed; but the demands on her time were far too relentless for her to have any hope of catching up with it by day. When she was not working in the hospital, she was obliged to toil in the kitchen, preparing vegetables, washing dishes, being barked at by a deaf and exacting housekeeper. If there was no work to be done in the scullery, then she would sit at a wheel and spin wool: her only source of income. Even when ill herself, and confined to bed, she would still wind thread with her bare hands. The Count, entering her quarters, could only bless himself in admiration. ‘Never before,’ he exclaimed, ‘has the daughter of a king been seen spinning wool.’¹

The Lady Elizabeth had been born to greatness. Descended from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first truly Christian king, she had been sent as a child to the court of Thuringia, in central Germany, and groomed there for marriage. At the age of fourteen, she had joined Louis, its twenty-year-old ruler, on the throne. The couple had been very happy. Elizabeth had borne her husband three children; Louis had gloried in his wife’s demonstrable closeness to God. Even when he was woken in the night by a maid tugging on his foot, he had borne it patiently, knowing that the servant had mistaken him for his wife, whose custom it was to get up in the early hours to pray. Elizabeth’s insistence on giving away her jewellery to the poor; her mopping up of mucus and saliva from the faces of the sick; her making of shrouds for paupers out of her finest linen veils: here were gestures that had prefigured her far more spectacular self-abasement in the wake of her husband’s death. Her only regret was that it did not go far enough. ‘If there were a life that was more despised, I would choose it.’² When Count Paviam urged Elizabeth to abandon the rigours and humiliations of her existence in Marburg, and return with him to her father’s court, she refused point blank.

She stood heir, of course, to a long tradition: to that of Basil, and Macrina, and Paulinus. Thuringia too provided her with a role model, and a royal one at that: Radegund, a queen who, back in the age of Clovis, had cleaned toilets and picked out nits from the hair of beggars. Elizabeth, though, had a much more immediate source of inspiration to hand. She lived in a world that had been set on its head by reformers who, for a century and more, had laboured to wash Christendom clean of its filth, to swab and tend to its leprous sores. The supreme exemplar that Elizabeth had before her was not a saint but an institution: the Church itself. Like her, it had escaped the embrace of princes. Like her, it had pledged itself to a perpetual chastity. Like her, it had enshrined poverty as an ideal. ‘The only men fit to preach are those who lack earthly riches, because – possessing nothing of their own – they hold everything in common.’³ Such was the battle-cry that, back in the age of Gregory VII, had helped to trigger the great convulsion of reformatio. It was the same battle-cry that Elizabeth, giving away all her wealth, becoming one with porters and kitchen-maids, had raised herself.

Yet she had to tread carefully. All those who followed the path to voluntary poverty did. The scorching lava-flow of reformatio, which for decades had swept away everything before it, had begun to cool, to harden. Its supreme achievement – the establishment across Christendom of a single, sovereign hierarchy – was no longer best served by the zeal of revolution. Its leaders had won too greatly to welcome the prospect of further upheaval. Their need now was for stability. Clerks in the service of the papal bureaucracy and scholars learned in canon law had long been toiling to strengthen the foundations of the Church’s authority. They understood the awful responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. Their task it was to bring the Christian people to God. ‘There is one Catholic Church of the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’⁴ So it had been formally declared during Elizabeth’s childhood, in 1215, at the fourth of a series of councils convened at the Lateran. To defy this canon, to reject the structures of authority that served to uphold it, to disobey the clergy whose solemn prerogative it was to shepherd souls, was to follow the path to hell.

Yet that this needed stating, and by an assembled mass of bishops and abbots too, ‘from every nation which is under heaven’,⁵ only served to highlight an awkward truth: that the Church’s authority was not universally acknowledged. There were many, over the course of the century that followed Gregory VII’s papacy, who felt that the potential of reformatio was still to be met. The passions of revolution were not easily calmed. The more reformers who had risen to power in the Church sought to stabilise the condition of Christendom, so the more did those on the extreme fringes of reformatio accuse them of betrayal. A momentous pattern was being set. Revolution had bred an elite – and this elite had bred demands for revolution.

Most of the agitators, preachers who clung to the ideal of living as the apostles had done, of holding all their possessions in common, and of disdaining anything that smacked of the world, railed against the new model of the Church much as Gregory had railed against the old. Roaming the countryside barefoot, carrying crosses of bare and unadorned iron, they lambasted the clergy for failing to practise what they preached: for being leprous with lechery, and pride, and greed. The most radical campaigners went even further. Rather than holding out for further reform, they had come to despair of the very edifice of the Church. Built by popes and bishops out of blood, it lay beyond saving. Corruption was its entire fabric. There was no alternative but to pull it down. Prelates, dreading the spread of these teachings, naturally condemned them as heresy. By the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the panic in papal circles was at full flood. Heretics seemed everywhere. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, a programme for combating their spread was laid out in a detailed canon. ‘Every heresy that rises against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith we excommunicate and anathematise. All heretics we condemn under whatever names they may be known.’⁶

Yet the boundary between heresy and sainthood could be a narrow one. The Lady Elizabeth, while still at court, had shared fantasies with her maids of becoming a beggar. With their help, in her private quarters, she had even dressed up in rags. But this was their secret. Elizabeth had not wished to embarrass her husband. It was not only his courtiers that she had risked scandalising. Out on the roads beyond the great castle of the Wartburg, where Louis had established his court, bands of preachers roamed, summoning the wealthy to do as they had done, and give away all their riches to the poor. Even though some of these preachers were women, Elizabeth had known better than to join them. To become a Waldensian was to risk damnation. Named after Waldes, a wealthy Lyons merchant who in 1173 had been inspired by Christ’s teachings to sell all his possessions, they had repeatedly been refused permission to proclaim their teachings. Appealing to the pope himself, they had been laughed out of court. Clerics had not put themselves through a gruelling course of university education merely to license laymen – idiotae – to pontificate on the scriptures. ‘Shall pearls of wisdom be cast before swine?’⁷ The Waldensians, rather than submitting obediently to this verdict, had responded by turning on the men who had thought to sit in judgement on them. Denouncing the pride and corruption of the clergy with a vitriol that would have done the Donatists credit, they were soon proclaiming their contempt for the very concept of a priesthood. Christ alone was their bishop. This heresy, rank and gross as it was, offered Elizabeth a chilling demonstration of just how far disobedience to the Church might go. That the Waldensians led precisely the kind of lifestyle to which she aspired, holding everything in common, subsisting on alms, only rendered them all the more salutary a warning.

Waldes, though, was not the only merchant to have embraced poverty in the name of Christ. In 1206, a one-time playboy by the name of Francis, a native of the Italian city of Assisi, had spectacularly renounced his patrimony. Taking off his clothes, he had handed them over to his father. ‘Moreover he did not even keep his drawers, but stripped himself naked before all the bystanders.’⁸ The local bishop, impressed rather than appalled by this display, had tenderly covered him with his own cloak, and sent him on his way with a blessing. Here, with this episode, had been set the pattern of Francis’ career. His genius for taking Christ’s teachings literally, for dramatising their paradoxes and complexities, for combining simplicity and profundity in a single memorable gesture, would never leave him. He served lepers; preached to birds; rescued lambs from butchers. Rare were those immune to his charisma. Admiration for his mission reached to the very summit of the Church. Innocent III, the pope who in 1215 had convened the Fourth Lateran Council, was not a man easily impressed. Imperious, daring and brilliant, he gave way to no one, overthrowing emperors, excommunicating kings. Unsurprisingly, then, when Francis, at the head of twelve ragged ‘brothers’, or ‘friars’, first arrived in Rome, Innocent had refused to see him. The whiff of heresy, not to mention blasphemy, had seemed altogether too rank. Francis, though, unlike Waldes, never stinted in his respect for the Church, in his obedience to its authority. Innocent’s doubts were eased. Imaginative as well as domineering, he had come to see in Francis and his followers not a danger, but an opportunity. Rather than treating them as his predecessors had treated the Waldensians, he ordained them a legally constituted order of the Church. ‘Go, and the Lord be with you, brethren, and as He shall deign to inspire you, preach repentance to all.’⁹

By 1217, less than a decade after this proclamation, a Franciscan mission had reached Germany. Elizabeth would grow up profoundly inspired by its example. By dressing in secret as a beggar, she had been paying tribute to Francis. Other demonstrations of her enthusiasm for his teachings were more public. In 1225, she provided the Franciscans with a base at the foot of the Wartburg, in the town of Eisenberg. Three years later, following the death of her husband, she made her way there and formally renounced her ties to the world. Yet no matter how desperately she longed to do so, she did not then go begging from door to door. Elizabeth had properly absorbed the lessons of Francis’ example. She understood that to embrace poverty without obedience was to risk the fate of Waldes. No mortification, no gesture of abasement, could possibly be undertaken unless at the command of a superior. Here, for a princess, the mistress of many servants, was a realisation that was itself a form of submission. So Elizabeth, even as she sat enthroned by her husband’s side, had employed a magister disciplinae spiritualis: a ‘master of spiritual discipline’. Not just any master, either. ‘I could have sworn obedience to a bishop or an abbot who had possessions, but I thought it better to swear obedience to one who has nothing and relies totally on begging. And so I submitted to Master Conrad.’¹⁰

Personal austerity was not, however, the quality for which Master Conrad was principally famed. Across Germany, and even in distant Rome, he was celebrated above all as ‘a most bitter critic of vice’.¹¹ Of humble background and formidable eloquence, he was tireless in his defence of the Church and its authority. Talent-spotters in the papal establishment had taken note. In 1213, armed with a personal mandate from Innocent, Conrad had taken to the roads of Germany, riding a tiny mule, preaching from village to village. ‘Innumerable crowds of people of both sexes and from various provinces followed him, enticed by the words of his teaching.’¹² By 1225, when Elizabeth recruited him as her master, he had years of experience in schooling heretics. Now, with a princess to discipline, he did not hesitate to wield the rod. Even before Louis’ death, he had punished her for missing one of his sermons with a beating so violent that the stripes were still visible three weeks later. It was on her master’s orders that Elizabeth, following her renunciation of the world, had travelled to Marburg, his native town, in the easternmost reaches of Thuringia, there to found a hospital. Deprived first of her children, and then of her much-loved personal servants, she patiently endured his every attempt to break her. Even when punished for offences she had not committed, she rejoiced in her submission. ‘Willingly she sustained repeated lashes and blows from Master Conrad – being mindful of the beatings endured by the Lord.’¹³

To suffer was to gain redemption. In 1231, when Elizabeth died of her austerities at the tender age of twenty-four, Conrad did not hesitate to hail her as a saint. As gold is purified by fire, so had she been purged of sin. The same strictness that had brought her to an early grave had brought her to heaven. Proof of this was manifest in the numerous miracles reported at her tomb. A woman who had stuck a pea in her ear when she was a young girl regained her hearing; numerous hunchbacks were healed. Most telling of all, perhaps, from Conrad’s own point of view, was the story told of a Waldensian widow, whose hideously disfigured nose had been beautified upon an appeal to the Lady Elizabeth. The lesson taught by this edifying report was one fit to reassure Conrad that all his sternness, all his flintiness, was justified. Sixteen years previously, at the Fourth Lateran Council, it had been prescribed for the first time that all Christians should make annual and individual confession of their sins. The venerable reassurance of Columbanus, that any fault might be forgiven, had received the official seal of the Church’s approval. God’s mercy was for everyone. All that it required was a genuine repentance. Even the most obdurate heretics might ultimately be brought to heaven.

It was with a renewed sense of urgency, then, that Conrad, in the wake of Elizabeth’s death, embarked upon a fresh campaign to win them back for Christ. He did so armed with an innovative array of powers. For decades, a succession of popes had been labouring to enhance the legal resources available in the fight against heresy. Impatient with a tradition that had always tended to emphasise charity over persecution, they had introduced an escalating battery of punitive measures. In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution. Now, in 1231, there came a fresh refinement. A new pope, Gregory IX, authorised Conrad not merely to preach against heresy, but to devote himself to the search for it – the inquisitio. No longer was it the responsibility of a bishop to bring heretics to trial, and sit in judgement on them, but rather that of a cleric especially appointed to the task. Even though, as a priest, Conrad could not himself ‘decree or pronounce a sentence involving the shedding of blood’,¹⁴ he was licensed by Gregory to compel the secular authorities to impose it. Never before had power of this order been given to a campaigner against heresy. Now, when Conrad rode on his mule from village to village, summoning the locals to answer his interrogation of their beliefs, he did so not merely as a preacher, but as a whole new breed of official: an inquisitor.

‘In all things he broke her will, to ensure that the merit of her obedience to him would increase.’¹⁵ So Conrad had justified his handling of Elizabeth. Now, with all of Germany his to discipline, he could not afford to soften. The truest kindness was cruelty; the truest mercy harshness. The swarm of heretics that confronted Conrad were not readily to be redeemed from damnation. Only fire could smoke them out. Pyres needed to be stoked as they had never been stoked before. The burning of heretics – hitherto a rare and sporadic expedient, only ever reluctantly licensed, if at all – was the very mark of Conrad’s inquisition. In towns and villages along the Rhine, the stench of blackened flesh hung in the air. ‘So many heretics were burned throughout Germany that their number could not be comprehended.’¹⁶ Conrad’s critics, unsurprisingly, accused him of a killing spree. They charged him with believing every accusation that was brought before him; of rushing the process of law; of sentencing the innocent to the flames. No one, though, was innocent. All were fallen. Better to suffer as Christ had suffered, tortured in a place of public execution for a crime that he had not committed, than to suffer eternal damnation. Better to suffer for a few fleeting moments than to burn for all eternity.

With Master Conrad, the yearning to cleanse the world of sin, to heal it of its leprosy, had turned murderous. That made it no less revolutionary. The suspicion of the worldly order that had brought Gregory VII to humble an anointed king before the gates of Canossa was one that Conrad more than shared. As Elizabeth’s master, he had forbidden her to eat food ‘about which she did not have a clear conscience’. Anything on her husband’s table that might have derived from exploitation of the poor, that might have been extracted from peasants as a tribute or a tax, she had dutifully spurned. ‘As a result, she often suffered great penury, eating nothing but rolls spread with honey.’¹⁷ The Lady Elizabeth had been a saint. Her peers were not. In the summer of 1233, Conrad dared to accuse one of them, the Count of Sayn, of heresy. A frantically convened synod of bishops, in the presence of the German king himself, threw out the case. Conrad, nothing daunted, began to prepare charges against further noblemen. Then, on 30 July, as he was returning from the Rhine to Marburg, he was ambushed by a group of knights and cut down. The news of his death was greeted with rejoicing throughout Germany. In the Lateran, though, there was indignation. As Conrad was laid to rest in Marburg, by the side of the Lady Elizabeth, Gregory mourned him in sombre terms. The murderers, so the pope warned, were harbingers of a rising darkness. All of heaven and earth had shuddered at their crime. Their patron was literally hellish: none other than the Devil himself.

A Great and Holy War

When clerics pondered the mysterious upsurge of heresy, they tended to glimpse in its shadowy outline something all the more disturbing for appearing not altogether unfamiliar to them. Conrad, when he interrogated Waldensians, refused to accept that he faced some minuscule and upstart sect. Instead, he distinguished something altogether more menacing. They belonged, so he believed, to an institution that was almost the mirror image of the Church: hierarchical in its organisation, universal in its claims. Writing to Gregory IX, Conrad warned that the true loyalty of heretics belonged to the Devil, ‘who they claim was the creator of the celestial bodies, and will ultimately return to glory when the Lord has fallen from power’.¹⁸ Sinister rituals parodied those of the Church. Initiates into the ranks of Satan’s followers were obliged to suck on the tongue of a giant toad. Faith in Christ was banished upon the kiss of a cadaverous man, whose lips were as cold as ice. At a ritual meal, devotees would lick the anus of a black cat the size of dog. The entire congregation would then hail Satan as Lord.

Gregory IX, on reading this sensational report, took an unprecedented step: he gave it his full imprimatur. Similar stories had long been current – but never before had they received confirmation from a pope. Christian scholars had traditionally condemned talk of devil-worship as superstitious folly. No one with any sense or education took it seriously. It smacked too much of paganism. Only gullible peasants and novices afraid of their own shadow feared that demons stalked the earth, recruiting adherents, hosting covens. Belief in such nonsense was itself the work of the Devil. Such was the solemn verdict of Gratian and other canon lawyers. ‘Who is there that is not led out of himself in dreams and nocturnal visions, and sees much when sleeping which he had never seen waking?’¹⁹

Yet this bracing scepticism did not preclude the learned from dreading the existence of an infernally inspired conspiracy. The Waldensians were not the only heretics in the Rhineland who, in the decades before Conrad’s ministry, were identified as belonging to a distinctive and pernicious sect. In 1163, six men and two women were burned in Cologne for belonging to an obscure group called Cathari – ‘the pure ones’. More executions of Cathars followed, here and there, although never in any great numbers. The precise nature of their beliefs remained obscure. Some, in the manner of Conrad, identified them with Devil-worshippers, and suggested that they derived their name from the cat that devotees of Satan were reputed to kiss on its anus. Some confused them with Waldensians. Some conflated them with other, equally enigmatic groups of heretics: ‘those whom some call Patarenes, others Publicans, and others by different names’.²⁰ Only scholars well-versed in the history of the Church knew who the Cathars had actually been: schismatics who, back in the time of Constantine, had been singled out for a dismissive mention in a canon of the Council of Nicaea. That now, almost a thousand years on, they were suddenly popping up in the Rhineland only emphasised just how dangerous, just how undead heresy could be. Always there in the shadows, a constant danger, it endured across space and time.

Except that most of the Christians identified by nervous Church officials as ‘Cathars’ did not remotely think of themselves as heretics – nor indeed, come to that, as Cathars. Just as the dread of Devil-worship drew on the fantasies of the uneducated, so was the fear of a revenant heresy, stirred up from its grave, nourished by scholarship. The clerics who staffed the Curia, and provided the immense apparatus of the Catholic Church with its bureaucrats, and lawyers, and teachers, had too easily forgotten that they themselves were the innovators. Radicals who criticised them for betraying the cause of reformatio were counterbalanced by large numbers of Christians who lived still ignorant – or resentful – of its claims. Remote from the cathedrals and the universities, old habits of worship died hard. This was especially so in those regions of Christendom where a central authority barely existed, where the writ of kings was weak, and that of bishops too. Clerics schooled in the classrooms of Paris or Bologna, venturing off the beaten track, might well find themselves among entire populations who cared nothing for reformatio, and felt only contempt for those it had brought to power. To label these deplorables ‘Cathars’ was pointedly to ignore what they actually were: Christians left behind by the new orthodoxies of the age.

Nowhere were the resulting tensions more evident than in southern France. Here, where local loyalties were as intense as they were splintered, Paris seemed a long way away indeed. In 1179, a council convened by the pope specified ‘the lands around Albi and Toulouse’²¹ as an especially noxious breeding ground of heresy. Papal legates who visited the region found there a fractious, disputatious people, resentful of many of the founding ideals of reformatio: the claim to authority of the Church’s international hierarchy; its demands for obedience, and deference, and tithes; the insistence that an insuperable divide distinguished the clergy from those to whom they ministered. Sacral authority, among those dismissively termed ‘Albigensians’ by papal agents, was not viewed as a prerogative of priests. Anyone might lay claim to it. Out in the fields that surrounded Albi and Toulouse, a peasant might well be more honoured than a bishop. A widower who won a name for himself as a model of courtesy and self-restraint; a matron who secluded herself from the world: these were honoured as boni homines, ‘good men’, ‘good women’. The very holiest were believed to approach the perfection of Christ himself: to become ‘friends of God’. There was no gesture they could make so humble, no gesture so everyday, that it might not be suffused with a sense of the divine. Deeply rooted in the local soil, the Christianity of the good men was one that cast reformatio as the heresy, a thing of ‘ravening wolves, hypocrites and seducers’.²²

In 1165, ten miles south of Albi, the bishop had engaged with his opponents in a village square, before a great audience of noblemen and prelates. Much that the good men had revealed about their beliefs that day was deeply shocking to the assembled clergy. In forthright terms, they had dismissed the Old Testament as worthless; declared that ‘any good man, cleric or layman’, might preside over the eucharist; insisted that they owed priests ‘no obedience, for they were wicked, not good teachers, but hired servants’.²³ Nevertheless, much that they believed was perfectly orthodox. ‘We believe in one God, living and true, three in one and one in three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’²⁴ Christ had become flesh; he had suffered, died and been buried; he had risen on the third day and ascended into heaven. Such was the creed to which the bishops also subscribed. But this did not reassure them. Instead, it only confirmed them in their darkest fear: that heresy was a plague, rotting away those who might not even realise that they were infected. And plague unchecked was bound to spread.

‘Wounds that do not respond to the treatment of a poultice should be cut away with a knife.’²⁵ By November 1207, when this sombre medical ruling was pronounced by Innocent III, dread that heresy might come to poison all the Christian people had reached a fever pitch. Innocent himself, thanks to a combination of ability and good fortune, wielded an authority of which Gregory VII could only have dreamed. More plausibly than any pope before him, he aspired to sway the fate of the world. Yet the very scope of his power seemed only to mock him. Gazing as he did from east to west, and painfully conscious of the awesome mandate that had been entrusted to him by God, he feared that everywhere Christian fortunes were in retreat. In the Holy Land, Jerusalem had been lost to the Saracens. A campaign led by the kings of France and England to recapture it had failed. A second expedition, launched in 1202 in obedience to Innocent’s own summons, had been diverted to Constantinople. In 1204 it had stormed and sacked the city. A stronghold that for long centuries had withstood the envy of pagan warlords had fallen at last – to a Christian army. Its captors justified their storming of the city by charging that its inhabitants were rebels against the papacy: for the churches of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the age of Gregory VII, had been divided by an ever-widening schism. Innocent, however, appalled by the despoliation of Christendom’s bulwark, lamented the fall of Constantinople as a work of hell. Meanwhile, in Spain, where Christian arms had for many centuries been determinedly pushing back the frontier of al-Andalus, the advance had lately been brought to a juddering halt. In 1195, a particularly disastrous defeat – which had seen an entire field army wiped out, and three bishops killed – had inspired the Muslim general to boast that he would stable his horses in Rome. To Innocent, the reason for God’s anger was glaring. There could be no prospect of reclaiming Jerusalem while heresy festered. Evil as the Saracens were, they were not so evil as heretics. In January 1208, the murder of a papal legate on the banks of the Rhône decided Innocent once and for all. His duty was clear. He could not risk the contamination of the entire Christian people by the Albigensians. There was no alternative but to destroy their heresy at the point of a sword.

Back in 1095, when Urban II had summoned the warriors of Christendom to set out for the Holy Land, he had instructed them, as a symbol of their vow, to wear the sign of the cross. Now, in July 1209, when an immense army of knights unmatched since the time of Urban assembled at Lyon, they too were crucesignati: ‘signed with the cross’. It marked them as pilgrims who, like their Saviour, were so aflame with love of mankind that they were ready to be killed in the cause of redeeming them from hell. ‘The cross that is fixed to your coats with a soft thread,’ a preacher reminded them, ‘was fixed to His flesh with iron nails.’²⁶ Even those in the path of the great force as it lumbered down the Rhine and then along the coast towards the town of Béziers could recognise in the invaders a formidable sense of identification with the sufferings of Christ. A crozada, they called the campaign: a ‘crusade’. Yet although the word would in time be applied retrospectively to the great expedition that had been launched by Urban, the crusade against the Albigensians was war of a kind that Christians had never fought before. It was not, as Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons had been, an exercise in territorial expansion; nor was it, in the manner of the crusades that aimed at the liberation of Jerusalem, an armed pilgrimage to a destination of transcendent holiness. Rather, it had as its goal the extirpation of dangerous beliefs. Only blood could wash Christendom clean of the pollution presented to the Christian people by heresy.

Storming Béziers, there were some who worried how the faithful were to be distinguished from heretics. ‘Lord,’ they asked the papal legate, ‘what shall we do?’ ‘Kill them all,’ came the blunt reply. ‘God knows his own.’²⁷ So, at any rate, it was later reported. The story spoke powerfully of the peculiar horror that shadowed the crusaders’ minds. That a heretic might seem at first glance a dutiful Christian, that the diseased might be mistaken for the healthy, that infection might often prove impossible to diagnose, was precisely what gave steel to their resolve. The risk was a chilling one: that they themselves, if they did not scour the pestilence thoroughly from the lands where it had taken a grip, might fall victim to it. The slaughter in Béziers, merciless and total, set the precedent. Even those sheltering in churches fell to the swords of the crusaders; blood darkened the river; fire, incinerating the survivors and bringing the cathedral crashing down in molten ruin, completed the holocaust. ‘Divine vengeance,’ Innocent’s legate reported back to Rome, ‘raged marvellously.’²⁸

Béziers was reduced to corpse-strewn wreckage in a single afternoon. The cycles of slaughter and ruin that it heralded would last two decades. Only in 1229, by which time Innocent had died and Gregory IX was pope, did a treaty signed in Paris finally bring the killing to a close. The war had long outrun the ability of the papacy to control it. Terror had become the order of the day. Garrisons were blinded; prisoners mutilated; women thrown down wells. Innocent, without whose iron-clad sense of mission the crusade would never have been launched, had havered between exultation at the victories won for Christ and agony at the cost. The crusaders had shown fewer qualms. Although, throughout the campaign, the ambition had always been to win back heretics to the Church, its leaders had never regretted their obligation to punish obdurate defiance with death. In 1211, after the capture of the castle of Cassés, bishops had preached to the good men there, and urged them to turn from error. But to no effect. The effort of the bishops had ended in failure. ‘And since they could not convert so much as one heretic, the pilgrims seized them all. And then they burned them. And they did it with the utmost joy.’²⁹

When Gregory gave his mandate to Conrad of Marburg and other inquisitors, he could do so in the full confidence that persecution worked. Innocent’s surgery on the diseased body of Christendom had manifestly been a success. The enemies of Christ were everywhere in retreat. In Spain, below the Sierra Morena, the great mountain range that stretches across the south of the Iberian peninsula, God’s favour had granted Christian arms a decisive victory. The Saracens’ defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa in the summer of 1212 had left them fatally exposed. Two decades on, their greatest cities – Cordoba, Seville – stood on the brink of capture by the king of Castile. Meanwhile, in the heartlands of the Albigensians, those among the good men who had survived the exterminating zeal of the crusaders were fugitives, skulking in forests and cattle-sheds, their days of haranguing bishops in village squares gone for good. To Gregory, and to many others, it seemed evident that a great conspiracy had been defeated. Before their defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa, the Saracens were reported to have been plotting to march to the rescue of the Albigensians. The Albigensians themselves – now that the good men were broken, and the reality of what they had been distorted for good – were increasingly seen as the agents of an entire heretical church. This church was said to have existed since ancient times; to have derived from Bulgaria; to span the world. Scholars knowledgeable in the heresies of antiquity traced its ultimate origins to a prophet in Persia. ‘They follow him in believing that there are two sources of life: one a good god and the other an evil god – in other words, the Devil.’³⁰

Such was the measure of the crusaders’ victory: that ghosts summoned from the unimaginably distant age of Darius would come to have a more vivid presence in the imaginings of the Christian people than those of the good men and good women themselves. The fantasy that the Albigensians had belonged to an ancient church consecrated to a belief in rival principles of good and evil – a church that in time would be given the name of ‘Cathar’ – would prove a particularly vivid one; but it was no less of a fantasy for that. The readiness of Gregory IX to sanction a belief in satanic conspiracies was nurtured by the blood of those who had perished in the Albigensian crusade. The slaughter had demonstrated that a diseased limb might indeed be amputated from the body of Christendom – but it had shown as well just how hard it could be to distinguish rottenness from solidity, dark from light, heretic from Christian.

The dread of this realisation – and of what it might mean for those entrusted by God with the defence of his people – would not rapidly go away.

The Eternal Jew

Shortly before the great victory of Las Navas de Tolosa, another Christian army, preparing for battle against the Saracens on the Portuguese coast, had seen riding in their vanguard a force of angelic horsemen. ‘Clad in white, they had worn red crosses upon their sur-coats.’³¹ The sense of Spain as a great battlefield between good and evil, between the heavenly and the infernal, had a long heritage in Christendom. The reconquest of lands lost to the Saracens had been tracked by the leaders of reformatio with an obsessive interest. It had literally helped to build Cluny. The abbey’s church, the largest in the world, had been paid for with the loot of al-Andalus. In 1142, its great abbot, Peter the Venerable, had crossed the Pyrenees, the better to understand what the Saracens actually believed. Meeting with scholars fluent in Arabic, he had employed them on a momentous project: the first translation of the Qur’an into Latin. Better persuasion than compulsion – such had always been Peter’s motto. Sure enough, the translation delivered, he had addressed the Saracens directly, ‘not as our men often do, with arms, but with words, not with violence but reason, not with hate but love’.³² Yet these emollient sentiments had not prevented Peter from feeling thoroughly appalled by the Qur’an. No more monstrous a compound of heresies, confected as it was ‘from both Jewish fables and heretical teachers’,³³ could possibly have been imagined. Even its vision of heaven blended gourman-dising with sex. Cluny it was not. Far from building bridges, Peter’s translation of the Qur’an had only confirmed Christians in their darkest suspicions of its contents. Islam was the sump of all heresies, and Muhammad ‘the foulest of men’.³⁴

The Qur’an, though, was not the only book to have been plundered from Saracen libraries. In 1085, Toledo, the ancient capital of the Visigothic monarchy and a celebrated centre of learning, had fallen to the king of Castile, the greatest of the various Spanish realms. Within only a few decades, a vast team of translators had been assembled by the city’s archbishop: Muslims, Jews, monks from Cluny. They had much to keep them busy. As well as texts by Muslim and Jewish scholars, Toledo had a treasure trove of Greek classics, works by ancient mathematicians, doctors, philosophers. These, although long available in Arabic translation, had been lost to the Latin West for many centuries. One author in particular was the focus of Christian obsession. ‘Only two books by Aristotle are still known to the use of the Latins.’³⁵ So Abelard, shortly before 1120, had lamented. Within a decade, his complaint was out of date. Iacopo, a Venetian cleric long resident in Constantinople, had embarked on an astonishing labour that would see, by the time of his death in 1147, various works by Aristotle translated directly from Greek.* To this stream of translation the efforts of the school in Toledo had soon added a flood. By 1200, almost all of Aristotle’s known works were available in Latin. University teachers committed to the proposition that God’s creation was governed by rules, and that reason might enable mortals to comprehend them, fell on the writings of antiquity’s most renowned philosopher with a mixture of avidity and relief. That an authority such as Aristotle had been given voice again promised to set their own investigations into the functioning of the universe on a more rigorous footing than ever before. Paris in particular had fast become a hotbed of Aristotelian study. The sense of excitement generated by its schools had attracted students from across Christendom. Among them had been two future popes: Innocent III and Gregory IX.

Yet the resurrection of a sage who had lived long before Christ, nor had any familiarity with scripture, presented challenges as well as opportunities. If numerous aspects of his teaching – the fixity of species, or the unchanging motion of sun, and moon, and stars as they revolved around the earth – could readily be integrated into the fabric of Christian teaching, then others were more problematic. The very notion of a rationally ordered cosmos, so appealing to natural philosophers, continued to unsettle many in the Church. Aristotle’s insistence that there had been no creation, that the universe had always existed and always would, was a particularly glaring contradiction of Christian scripture. How, then, when crusaders were struggling to cleanse southern France of heresy, could students in the kingdom’s capital possibly be permitted to study such a noxious doctrine? Anxieties in Paris were heightened by the discovery in 1210 of various heretics whose reading of Aristotle had led them to believe that there was no life after death. The reaction of the city’s bishop was swift. Ten of the heretics were burned at the stake. Various commentaries on Aristotle were burned as well. Aristotle’s own books on natural philosophy were formally proscribed. ‘They are not to be read at Paris either publicly or in private.’³⁶

But the ban failed to hold. In 1231, Gregory IX issued a decree that guaranteed the university effective independence from the interference of bishops, and by 1255 all of Aristotle’s texts were back on the curriculum. The people best qualified to learn from them, it turned out, were not heretics, but inquisitors. The days of annihilating entire towns on the grounds that God would know his own were over. The responsibility for rooting out heresy had now been entrusted to friars. Taking the lead was an order that had been established by papal decree back in 1216, to provide the Church with a shock force of intellectuals. Its founder, a Spaniard by the name of Dominic, had toured where the good men were to be found, matching them in all their austerities, and harrying them in debate. In 1207, two years before the annihilation of Béziers, he had met with a good man just north of the city, and argued publicly with him for over a week. To friars schooled in this tradition of militant preaching, Aristotle had come as a godsend. The obligation of the Dominicans was to question, to investigate, to evaluate evidence. Who better to serve as a model for this approach than history’s most famous philosopher? Aristotle, far from lending succour to the enemies of the Church, was successfully summoned to its defence. Institutionalised by the universities, and licensed by the papacy, the study of his philosophy was made ever safer for Christian scholars. If the standard of investigation into heresy benefited from this trend, then so too did investigation into the workings of the universe. To fathom these workings was to fathom the very ordinances of God.

The labour of reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine did not come easily. Many contributed to it; but none more so than a Dominican called Thomas, a native of Aquino, a small town just south of Rome. The book he worked on between 1265 and his death in 1274, a great compendium of ‘things pertaining to Christianity’,³⁷ was the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken to synthesise faith with philosophy. Thomas Aquinas himself died thinking that he had failed in his efforts, and that, before the radiant unknowability of God, everything he had written was the merest chaff; in Paris, two years after his death, various of his propositions were condemned by the city’s bishop. It did not take long, though, for the sheer scale of his achievement to be recognised and gratefully acknowledged. In 1323, the seal was set on his reputation when the pope proclaimed him a saint. The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology the conviction that revelation might indeed co-exist with reason. A century after the banning in Paris of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy, no one had to worry that the study of them might risk heresy. The dimensions that they had opened up – of time, and of space, and of the unchanging order of the stars – were rendered as Christian as scripture itself.

To those who read him in the decades that followed his death, Aquinas seemed like a voice from the radiance of heaven. To Christians long fearful of heresy he offered a double reassurance: that the teachings of the Church were true; and that the light of that truth was manifest even in dimensions that might seem to threaten it. Aristotle was not the only philosopher cited by Aquinas in his great work. There were other pagans too; there were even Saracens and Jews. His readiness to acknowledge them as authorities was a sign, not of any cultural cringe, but of the opposite: an absolute confidence that wisdom was Christian, no matter where it might be found. Reason was a gift from God. Everybody possessed it. The Ten Commandments served not as prescriptions, but as reminders to humanity of what it already knew. They were manifest in the very fabric of the universe. The love of God for his creation was the centre of a circle, to which all parts of the circumference stand in an equal relation. ‘So orderly has everything been fashioned which wheels through mind and space that to contemplate its harmony is to taste of Him.’³⁸

Yet this very sublimity had its shadow. If all of eternity were Christian, then it rendered those who persisted in the ways of heresy, obdurate in their folly, only the more damnable. The slaughter of the Albigensians had set a precedent that was not readily forgotten. Dominicans, for all the care they brought to their work as inquisitors, the painstaking manner in which they applied the methods of Aristotle to the task of identifying heretics, were not immune to fantasies of mass extermination. In 1274, the same year that Aquinas became convinced that his life’s labours had been in vain, a former head of his order, Humbert de Romans, urged crusaders at a council held in Lyon to take their inspiration from Charles Martel, ‘who killed 370,000 of those who came against him with very little loss of his own men’.³⁹ Saracens, heretics, pagans: all, if they threatened Christendom, were to be viewed as legitimate targets for eradication.

Yet against the most determined of all Christ’s foes, there could be no campaign of slaughter. The Jews, Humbert de Romans reminded the council of Lyon, were not to be eliminated. At the end of days, so it had been foretold, they would be brought to baptism; but their fate it was, until then, to serve the Christian people as living witnesses to the workings of divine justice. ‘Although,’ as Innocent III had put it, ‘the Jewish perfidy is in every way worthy of condemnation, nevertheless, because through them the truth of our faith is proved, they are not to be severely oppressed by the faithful.’⁴⁰ A pallid and mocking display of mercy. Founded as it was on the conviction that the Jews, unlike the Saracens, presented no threat to Christendom, it took for granted their superannuated quality: that they and all their laws, their customs and their learning had been superseded, and now lay withered in the dust. Yet the backwardness of the Jews was not quite as manifest as the Church authorities liked to pretend. Unlike the Waldensians, they had a degree of erudition that put most Christians to shame. Aquinas was not alone in admiring the achievements of their scholarship. Even the pope’s own household had long been managed by Jewish administrators. As a pupil of Abelard had freely acknowledged, ‘A Jew, however poor, if he had ten sons would put them all to letters, not for gain, as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law – and not only his sons, but his daughters.’⁴¹

Perhaps it was hardly surprising, then, that the course of reformatio, impatient as it was of rivals, should have brought much suffering to Jews. The ideals that it proclaimed – of a Christendom cleansed of corruption, of a Church robed in light – had provoked among many Christians, in towns and villages across Europe, an escalating hostility to their Jewish neighbours. Long before Conrad of Marburg’s letter to Gregory IX, warning the Pope that heretics were consorting with demons, Jews had been fingered as willing agents of the Devil. They were sorcerers; they were blasphemers; they were enemies of the Church, who, whenever they had the chance, would pollute the sacred vessels used in the eucharist with their spit, their sperm, their shit. Darkest of all, they were murderers. In 1144, the discovery of a young boy’s corpse in a wood outside the English city of Norwich had prompted a priest eager for a local martyr to concoct a host of sensational accusations: that the boy had been kidnapped by the local Jews; that he had been tortured as Christ had been tortured; that he had been offered up as a sacrifice. The story, although widely discounted, had not entirely been discredited; and so, like a plague, it had begun to spread. In time, as similar tales were reported, a further hellish refinement had been added: that the Jews, in a grotesque parody of the eucharist, were in the habit of mixing children’s blood into their ritual bread. That this claim was condemned as a libel first by an imperial commission, and then, in 1253, by the papacy itself, did nothing to stop its spread. Two years later – again in England – another mortal blow to the good name of the Jews was struck. The discovery in Lincoln of the body of a small boy named Hugh at the bottom of a well saw ninety Jews arrested for the murder on the orders of the king himself. Eighteen were hanged. The dead boy, entombed in Lincoln cathedral, was hailed by locals as a martyr. That the papacy pointedly refused to confirm this canonisation did little to check the growth of the cult of Little Saint Hugh.

‘We are confined and oppressed,’ Abelard had imagined a Jew as lamenting, ‘as if the whole world had conspired against us alone. It is a wonder we are allowed to live.’ A century on, there were few Christians ready to follow Abelard’s example and think themselves into Jewish shoes. As never before, the ambition of the Church to provide a salvation to peoples of every race and background had become a weapon to be turned against all who spurned its offer. The Jews, whose claim to the great inheritance of scripture was no less passionate than its own, and whose devotion to learning had long served Christians as a standing reproach, presented an adversary infinitely more formidable than the good men. Yet the Church, confronted by such a threat, had no need of crusaders to do its work. Clerics in the age of Aquinas could feel more confident of putting Jews in their place than ever before. With theology enthroned as the queen of sciences in universities across Europe, and with friars specifically licensed by the pope to defend and promote the faith, they were able to view Jewish pretensions with mounting contempt. It was a measure of this, perhaps, that increasingly, when referring to the scriptures that were the common inheritance of both themselves and the Jews, they no longer used the word biblia as a plural, but rather as a singular: the Bible. In other ways too, any hint of a common fellowship that Jews might once have shared with Christians was being systematically razed. No longer, it had been ordained at the Fourth Lateran Council, were they to dress as those they lived among dressed, but were instead ‘at all times to be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their clothing’.⁴² Christian artists, for the first time, began to represent Jewish men as physically distinctive: thick-lipped, hook-nosed, stooped. In 1267, sexual relations between Jews and Christians were banned by formal decree of a church council; in 1275, a Franciscan in Germany drew up a law code that made it a capital offence. In 1290, the king of England, pushing the logic of this baneful trend to its ultimate conclusion, ordered all the Jews in his kingdom to leave for good. In 1306, the king of France followed suit.*

A Church that proclaimed itself universal had, it seemed, no response to those who rejected it, save persecution.