Pelagius

The history of medieval Catholicism was one of consistently struggling to get a uniformity of belief in the face of constant questioning. Once Christianity became linked with the Roman power structure, differences of opinion about religious matters became “heresies,” equivalent to treason. In the early centuries, differences were resolved in church councils that established correct belief, and later in the West, popes in consultation with bishops determined what was orthodox and what was heretical. Nevertheless, throughout this age of faith church leaders had to wrestle with confronting and suppressing heresies.

Before the twelfth century, heresies grew from a variety of opinions—many left over from earlier deep discussions about the nature of Christ, humanity, and the clergy. The Eastern Church had always had a tradition of actively discussing theological issues, and three important heresies arose there in the early Middle Ages. In the fifth century, discussions about the nature of Christ led to two different opinions: The Nestorians emphasized the split between Jesus’s humanity and divinity, claiming that Mary was the bearer of the human person, but not of God. In response, others emphasized Jesus’s divinity, claiming that the divine portion of God obliterated the human at the Incarnation much like the sea would overwhelm a drop of honey. These were called “Monophysites” (“one nature”). The Council of Chalcedon in 451 condemned both positions arguing that Christ was fully human and fully divine. However, Nestorians and Monophysites continued to flourish in Egypt, Armenia, and even as far away as China.

In the eighth century another serious conflict arose in the Eastern Church that further emphasized the differences between East and West. The Byzantine emperor Leo III (r. 717–741) ordered all icons destroyed to avoid idolatry, and in an autocratic style, he intended for this decree to apply to all Christendom, East and West. This introduced iconoclasm, which raged in the East for a century, during which many mosaics in Constantinople and Asia Minor were destroyed. Ultimately, the iconoclasts were discredited, and icons remained a part of Christian worship.

In the West, the church father, Augustine, spent much of his career battling three heresies. The Manichaeans believed that a good God could not have created evil, so they posited the existence of two gods, one good and one evil engaged in a timeless battle for the soul of humanity. This dualist belief reappeared in the Albigensian heresy that flourished in southern France in the twelfth century.

Augustine also battled against Donatism, which split the North African church for centuries. The Donatists argued that priests who had turned over sacred books during the Roman persecutions should lose their offices. Augustine and the orthodox position was that sins of a priest did not affect the efficacy of the sacraments they perform. The violent proponents of both these positions did not end until North Africa was conquered first by the Vandals then the Muslims.

Augustine’s last struggle against heresy took a more intellectual turn when he penned his arguments against the Pelagians. Pelagius was a British monk who argued that free will was possible, that people could choose not to sin. Augustine, drawing from his own struggles against lust and sin, denied this possibility and claimed that people were burdened by original sin. Augustine’s position became the orthodox one, and Pelagianism was condemned.

By the twelfth century in the West the greatest critique of the church came from those who believed that the church had become corrupted by wealth. There were many groups who advocated following what they called the “apostolic life,” a simple existence embracing poverty, reading the Bible, and preaching God’s word. The most famous of these groups was the Waldensians, who were centered in southern France. Their leader, Valdes of Lyons (also known as Peter Waldo) was condemned as a heretic in 1181, but the movement continued in spite of repression. There are even some Waldensian churches today.

Late in the Middle Ages, other critics challenged the hierarchy in ways that foreshadowed the sixteenth-century Reformation. John Wycliffe in England and John Hus, in what is now the Czech Republic, were influential at universities and questioned papal supremacy and other church doctrines.

In the thirteenth century, the established church felt sufficiently threatened by these various heresies to establish a new court to discover and root out heretical ideas. This court was the Inquisition, and it was different from the many criminal courts in the lands because it was concerned with ideas instead of actions. Consequently, it had to resort to torture to find out what the accused was thinking, instead of other evidence to determine what he or she had done. The progress of the Inquisition contributed to the breakdown of the medieval religious structure.

The castle at Queribus was extensively rebuilt after it fell into royal hands after 1255; this reconstruction shows it in the late 13th century once the work had been carried out. The defences were based on three separate levels, with a polygonal keep dominating the top level of fortifications. The pathway up to this central fortification is protected by two lower stages, each of which covers the progress towards the centre of the castle. The upper right inset shows the entrance to the highest level of Queribus.

The Château de Quéribus stands on the ridge above the vine-ringed village of Cucugnan which marked the French-Spanish border until the seventeenth century. It is spectacularly situated, balanced on a pillar of rock above a sheer cliff, whose crevices nourish a variety of beautiful wild flowers, and lies just a few kilometres north of the main Quillan–Perpignan road.

Because of the extreme, cramped topography of the rock, the space within the walls is stepped in terraces, dominated by the polygonal keep and accessible by a single stairway. Inside, at the heart of the keep, is the remarkable chapel of St-Louis-de-Quéribus, surprisingly high and wide when you consider the keep's tortured position, and supported by a single pillar. The stairs to the roof are broken, but from the window halfway up there are fantastic views to Canigou and Perpignan, with other castles and watchtowers of the Spanish Marches dotting the peaks and ridges. To the northwest you're within easy eyeshot of Peyrepertuse.

The history of Quéribus is similar to that of Puilaurens, though the fortifications visible today are thirteenth century. It was the last stronghold of Cathar resistance, holding out until 1255, eleven years after the fall of Montségur. The successful siege and surrender of the castle in 1255 concluded the military phase of the Albigensian Crusade. Never reduced by siege, its role as a sanctuary for the Cathars ended with the capture of the luckless Chabert. Chabert de Barbera, the region's de facto ruler, was captured and forced to hand over his strongholds here and at Puilaurens to secure his release.

Son of a rich Genoese merchant, the troubadour Folquet de Marselha was himself a wealthy merchant in Marseille by ca. 1178. Around 1200, he, his wife, and two sons entered the Cistercian abbey of Le Thoronet, of which he became abbot. As bishop of Toulouse from 1205 until his death in 1231, he helped found the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and organize the Albigensian Crusade. According to the Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, Folquet was responsible for the deaths at the stake of 10,000 Albigensians.

Of Folquet’s nineteen certain songs, fourteen are love songs (thirteen have music preserved); the others are two crusade songs, two debate poems, and one planh. In song as in deed, he praised courtly love before rejecting it, in a learned and literary style that builds on his assimilation of Latin and Occitan sententiae. Yet his carefully refined and subtle artistry remains original and abstract, preoccupied with aesthetic and moral issues. His poetry and music were admired and imitated.

The last of the great fiefs of the Midi to be restored to the crown, the county of Foix was also one of the last to be created during the Middle Ages. The town and castle of Foix, noted as early as the 7th century, formed part of the large county of Comminges- Couserans. A partition of the inheritance of Count Roger le Vieux in 1002 left the territory of Foix to a cadet, Bernard-Roger, whose sons Roger I (d. 1064) and Pierre- Bernard (r. 1064–70) ultimately assumed the title count of Foix. The domains of the counts included the cities of Foix and Pamiers, the towns of Lézat, Saverdun, and Mazères to the north and Tarascon, Lordat, and Aix-les-Termes to the south. During the Albigensian Crusade, Count Raymond-Roger, whose sister Esclarmonde sheltered and assisted heretics at Pamiers, was a determined enemy of Simon de Montfort. With the elimination of the viscounts Trencavel and the extinction of the house of Toulouse, Foix emerged in the mid-13th century as the most important independent fief in lower Languedoc. In 1290, its territory increased with the marriage of Count Roger-Bernard III to Marguerite, heiress of the viscounty of Béarn.

The apogee of the counts’ power came in the 14th century, when they profited from the weakness of royal authority during the Hundred Years’ War and the strategic position of their own domains to play a critical role in the politics of the kingdom. Against the determinedly pro-French position of his rivals the counts of Armagnac, the brilliant and lettered Gaston III Phoebus (r. 1343–91) pursued a policy of official neutrality in favor of the English and engaged in frequent hostilities with both the house of Armagnac and the duke of Berry, royal lieutenant of Languedoc. His successor Jean I (r. 1412–36) continued the pro-English alliance until the accession of Charles VII, from whom he accepted the lieutenancy of Languedoc. At the death of François Phoebus (1483), the county of Foix passed to the house of d’Albret and was united to the monarchy with the accession of Henry IV.

A historical epic retelling the events of the Albigensian Crusade, the Chanson is an invaluable historical and literary resource. The author of the first 131 laisses (2,772 lines), Guilhem de Tudela (fl. first quarter of the 13th c.), began writing in 1210 and ceased in spring 1213; he is a relatively impartial though dry reporter of events. Approving of the crusade, condemning the heretics, he defends, however, southerners whose orthodoxy was unquestionable. In 1228, an anonymous author continued Guilhem’s story. Sympathetic to the southern cause, he recounts in detail those events to which he was an eyewitness; the style is more animated and much more dialogue is reported. His story stops in the midst of a description of the 1218 siege of Toulouse. Using as model the Chanson d’Antioche, the work is composed of 9,582 Alexandrine lines, divided into 214 assonanced laisses; the last line of each laisse (of only six syllables) links to the next, capcaudada in Guilhem de Tudela’s portion, capfinida in the second part of the work. Only one manuscript is extant (B.N. fr. 25425), with pen-andink illustrations, dated ca. 1275. Two prose chroniclers of the Albigensian Crusade appear to have had access to this text for their redactions.

Guilhem de Tudela and Anonymous. La chanson de la croisade albigeoise, ed. Eugène Martin-Chabot. 3 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957–1961.

——. La chanson de la croisade albigeoise, trans. Henri Gougaud. Paris: Berg, 1984.

D’Heur, Jean-Marie. “Sur la date, la composition et la destination de la Chanson de la croisade albigeoise de Guillaume de Tudèle.” In Mélanges d’histoire littéraire, de linguistique et de philologie romanes offerts à Charles Rostaing, ed. Jacques De Caluwé et al. Liège: Association des Romanistes de l’Université de Liège, 1974, pp. 231–66.

Ghil, Eliza Miruna. L’âge de parage: essai sur la poétique en Occitanie au XIIIe siècle. New York: Lang, 1989.

Centered on the city of Agen in southwestern France, the seat of the bishopric and county, the Agenais comprised an irregular territory lying between the rivers Garonne and Dordogne. On the west, it included the town of Marmande; on the east, the towns of Tournon and Puymirol; and on the south, Moissac and Auvillars.

From the 9th through the 12th century, the Agenais fell under the authority of the dukes of Gascony and Aquitaine. In 1196, to secure peace on his southern borders, Richard the Lionhearted granted the Agenais in fief to Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. This transfer brought the Agenais into the center of the turbulent events that commenced with the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 and concluded with the victory of France in the Hundred Years’ War. Simon de Montfort attacked the region in 1212, capturing the fortress of Penne d’Agenais, where Cathar heretics were found and burned. In 1219, the crusading army of the future Louis VIII of France assaulted Marmande, which suffered pillage and massacre. By the Treaty of Meaux in 1229, Raymond VII of Toulouse retained the Agenais. On his death in 1249, it was occupied by his son-in-law Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of Louis IX.

The Agenais remained thereafter an object of contention between France and England, where Henry III asserted his claims as duke of Aquitaine. In 1259, the Treaty of Paris conceded the Agenais to England should Alphonse of Poitiers die without heirs. This eventuality came to pass in 1271, but the county was not restored to Edward I of England until 1279. Quarrels between Edward and Philip the Fair rekindled hostilities in the Agenais; from 1293, French seneschals and English administered portions of the disputed territory. The Agenais suffered heavily during the Hundred Years’ War. Restored to England briefly by the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, it returned definitively to France in 1370. At the close of the Middle Ages, the Agenais, like the Quercy, recovered slowly from rural depopulation and economic depression.

 

Situated in a strategic position on the Aude River between the Toulousain and the Mediterranean port of Narbonne, the city of Carcassonne (Aude) served throughout the Middle Ages primarily as a military stronghold and center of administration. Occupied at least since the 1st century A.D. by the Romans, Carcassonne was a major Visigothic stronghold after the 5th century, before becoming one of the largest walled cities in western Europe during the later Middle Ages. In the Carolingian period, the fortress of Carcassonne became the seat of a county; a comital dynasty appeared in the early 9th century. During the 11th and 12th centuries, Carcassonne was at the center of the vast domains controlled by the family of Trencavel. The city, twice lost and regained by the viscounts, played a pivotal role in the struggles between the counts of Toulouse and Barcelona.

The Albigensian Crusade of 1209 ended the dynasty of the Trencavels. Under Simon de Montfort and, after 1226, the king of France, Carcassonne became the seat of a sénéchaussée. In 1240, the final attempt of the young Raymond Trencavel to recover his domains failed in the desperate siege of Carcassonne. Trencavel’s retreat left the bourg, which had joined his rebellion, abandoned and destroyed. It remained depopulated until 1248, when Louis IX had it reconstructed on the left bank of the Aude. At the end of the 13th century, the bourg was again the center of agitation, led by Bernard Délicieux against the Inquisition in the Midi. In 1305, fifteen burghers, including the consuls, were hanged for attempted insurrection and treason against the king of France.

Although Carcassonne never achieved the importance of Béziers, Narbonne, or Nîmes, its economic prosperity, particularly as a center of textile manufacture, reached its height in the first half of the 14th century. After 1350, the city declined rapidly both in commercial and military importance. The raid of Edward, the Black Prince, in 1355 again left the bourg destroyed; in 1384, complicity in the revolt of the Tuchins subjected the burghers once more to crippling penalties.

The city consists of a rectangular castle, 247 feet by 148 feet, and double curtain walls separated by grassy lists; the outer ramparts (about 5,000 feet long) have some twenty reinforcing towers or strongholds, and the inner ramparts (about 3,600 feet), twenty-five. The so-called Palace of the Viscounts was actually built, according to Héliot, in the 13th century by Simon de Montfort and especially Louis IX. Constructed of rough-worked sandstone, it is surrounded on three sides by a deep moat and protected by nine towers. Its main entry, between two half-round towers, is defended by a bridge and a semicircular barbican. Within, in lieu of a central keep, is an open courtyard flanked by a high watchtower. Construction on the walls was continued under Louis’s son Philip III, who was responsible for several of the more remarkable towers, notably the Tour du Trésaur and Tour de l’Inquisition. A number of the towers have their own well and could be independently defended in the event other sections fell. The principal entry to the town, the Porte de l’Aude, was defended by a series of barbicans and outer works; those entering were required to approach first parallel to the line of defense, then perpendicular to it, thus exposing themselves to fire from every angle.

In its present state, and in spite of major restorations by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century, Carcassonne is one of the finest examples of a medieval walled city. Its ramparts and towers, with their crenellations, arrow loops, embrasures, potlug holes, hoarding, walks, and battlements, provide an outstanding example of medieval military architecture.