The atmosphere of mutual suspicion was increased – together with the likelihood of denunciations – by the way that all the parishioners were then interrogated, one by one, with no opportunity for the others waiting in line to hear what was being said by their neighbours. Again and again these in camera interviews proved to have an unnerving effect, demoralising communities all across Occitania, turning their attention inwards on themselves in a most negative manner, and weakening their will to cooperate in a fightback.69
Indeed the Inquisition's sweeping powers had set aside at a stroke all the ancient legal safeguards that had formerly protected individual rights in medieval society. An example was the right for the accused to be represented whilst undergoing interrogation. Theoretically even the Inquisition had to abide by this. In practice, however, no accused heretic was ever represented as he stood before the inquisitors. This was because any lawyer foolish enough to defend an accused heretic would immediately have been suspected and accused of heresy himself. Once that happened (accusation was enough; he didn't have to be found guilty) his arguments would have become inadmissible and he would have stood in immediate jeopardy of his own life.70
The idea of undergoing the full process of interrogation by the Inquisition would have been a terrifying prospect whether one were a heretic or not. Questioning was inexorable and, on top of an array of psychological techniques, it's known that the inquisitors routinely used torture to extract confessions long before the pope gave his official blessing for them to do so in 1252.71 Between the torture and interrogation sessions, the accused would be confined in deeply uncomfortable conditions intended to undermine his will further. Cells of the ‘little-ease’ variety – in which the prisoner had room neither to sit, stand up or lie down – are reported to have been particularly favoured by the inquisitors. Other devices included keeping cells knee-deep in water, or permanently dark, starving prisoners, and shackling them hand and foot in heavy chains.
In the most recalcitrant cases such interrogations could continue over periods of months or even years.72 However, once a confession had been extracted and a judgement made, the chances in law of reversing it were about zero – even if the judgement were manifestly faulty. Since appeals were not allowed the inquisitors literally held the powers of life and death in their hands, without any checks or balances.73 They were amongst their enemies and could do what they liked to them. The consequence was that many Cathars were burnt at the stake, many who recanted on pain of death nevertheless remained imprisoned for life, and countless numbers of those who may not even have been Cathars themselves but who had at one time or another spoken to a Cathar, or had some other such trivial contact with the heresy, were exiled from their homeland for years fulfilling arduous pilgrimages imposed on them by the Inquisition.74
Burning the living and the dead
Seila and Arnold, the first two inquisitors, were the prototypes of a ruthless breed who would continue to rend the enemies of Catholicism for another six centuries. Soon after taking office they were able to arrange a spectacular demonstration of the efficient spy-network already at their disposal when they succeeded in trapping and arresting Vigoros de Baconia one of the leading Cathar perfecti in Toulouse. He was summarily tried, condemned and burnt alive.75
During the two years from 1233 to 1235 the two inquisitors initiated what has been described as a ‘veritable reign of terror’, first in Toulouse and then far and wide throughout Occitania.76 Burnings of individuals and small groups became commonplace and on a number of occasions there were larger catches to be had. In 1234 for example, on their very first visit to Moissac, Seila and Arnold presided over the mass burning of 210 Cathar perfecti who they had condemned as ‘contumacious heretics’.77
Keeping a record as ever, the faithful Dominican commentator William Pelisson tells us that with this splendid auto-da-fé: … great fear was aroused among the heretics and their believers in that land.78
More fear was on the way the following year, 1235, when a general inquisition was held in Toulouse on Good Friday. Voluntary mass confessions occurred as people rushed to implicate themselves and others before someone else did. Threatened with execution one Cathar sympathiser avoided the stake by taking the city magistrate and the inquisitors to a place where 10 perfecti were in hiding: three managed to escape; the other seven were burnt.79
During 1234 and 1235 large numbers of new inquisitors had been appointed from amongst the Dominicans but even so had proved insufficient to the task of interrogation, filing and cross-referencing that the cult of mass confessions had now generated. Franciscans and parish priests were therefore conscripted to help.80 Adding to the overall burden was the matter of the paperwork from earlier investigations of heresy by the episcopal and other authorities. Undertaken before the Inquistion had been formed, and going back as far as 1209, these investigations had produced information, tip-offs and denunciations which the years of war had made it hard to follow up. Now the Inquisition was determined to make good the deficit.
On examination of the older records, and the full cross-referencing of all statements, it became clear that many who had formerly been exonerated as good Catholics had in fact been heretics all along. Those still living were arrested and burnt alive. But the remains of those who had already died during the intervening years were not forgotten! Wherever they had been buried they would be assiduously sought out and exhumed so that they too could be burnt.81 Sometimes whole piles of mouldering disarticulated skeletons would be brought in at once, paraded through the streets and then burnt in a heap.82
Such severely demented behaviour (shall we call it necropyria?) would require urgent psychiatric restraint today. In Occitania in the 1230s and the 1240s it was lauded by the Church but naturally caused much anger amongst the relatives of the deceased who were publicly shamed in this way. A particular source of resentment was that the property of posthumously-condemned heretics was subject to confiscation, just as it would be if the heretic were still alive, which had the effect of impoverishing his descendants.83 Inevitably the civilian population began to hate the inquisitors. In one case, in the city of Albi, an inquisitor named Arnald Cathala was beaten up and nearly killed by an angry mob after he went personally to exhume the corpse of an old women, recently revealed as a heretic, who had passed away some years before.84
Even by the late 1230s and early 1240s, despite being the focus of a concerted, well-funded, well-staffed Church operation to wipe them out to the last man, there were still sufficient numbers of Cathar perfecti in circulation – and able with local support to evade the inquisitors – to keep the heresy alive. Evidence of this astonishing persistence in the face of extreme adversity comes from the sheer number of penances still being imposed on convicted heretics. Over just two and a half months in 1241 – 42 Peter Seila, (the reader will recall him as the first inquisitor to be appointed in 1233) imposed penances on 732 heretics in nine different locations.85
The fall of Montségur
One amongst several reasons for the longevity of Catharism in Occitania was that the heretics were able to hold onto their major fortress of Montségur for many years after the French occupation of 1229. It provided a place of refuge to which perfecti could flee to rest and recuperate after risky missions in the occupied territories and its symbolic importance as a symbol of hope and resistance was vast. Its walls were high, believed impregnable, and it stood on top of a remote and inaccessible rocky crag.
In May 1242 two of the most loathed inquisitors, the Dominican William Arnold (again one of the original appointees back in 1233) and the Franciscan Stephen of Saint-Thibery, arrived in the little town of Avignonet with their hit-squad of enforcers. They had been on the road for seven months conducting general inquisitions across most of the region from Lavaur in the north to Fanjeaux in the south and spreading the usual tidal wave of terror wherever they went. Now it was Avignonet's turn.86
Except on this occasion it wasn't. The local bailiff, Raymond of Alfaro, wa
s a Cathar sympathiser and immediately sent word by fast teams of riders to Montségur, 70 kilometers to the south. There the lord of the castle, one Peter Roger of Mirepoix, decided, to take action. On the night of 28 May 1242 he arrived at Avignonet with a group of heavily-armed knights who massacred the entire inquisitorial team of 10. Later one of the assassins, William Golarian, explained that they had mounted the attack so that ‘the affair of the Inquisition could be extinguished and the whole land would be free, and there would not be another Inquisition.’87
Talk about wishful thinking! Far from extinguish the Inquisition, Avignonet proved to be the catalyst that led to Montségur being placed under siege by the forces of the French king – now the young Louis IX (who, as one might expect of a future Catholic saint, prosecuted heretics mercilessly). The siege began in May 1243 and ended, after 10 months of violent assaults and bombardments, with the surrender of Montségur, in March 1244.
Rather more than 200 Cathar perfecti had taken refuge there, including Bertrand Marty who had the rank of bishop. Eyewitness reports tell us that on 17 March 1244 they were all ‘brutally dragged forth from the fortress of Montségur.’88 Further down the slope, on a level area, a large rectangular enclosure defined by a wooden palisade had been filled up with firewood, straw and pitch. Now, without ceremony, soldiers set light to the piled firewood and the wretched heretics were thrown in a mass inside the palisade. ‘There,’ as one commentator of the period assures us, ‘they experienced the fire of Hell.’89
The last Cathars
Montségur was a catastrophe, but still it did not mark the end of Catharism. Through the remainder of the 1240s the struggle between Inquisition and heretics went on and there were many more executions. In 1245 – 46, for example, the Inquistion of Toulouse had to deal with cases involving more than 600 villages and towns.90 In one of these villages for which more detailed records are available, Mas-Saintes-Puelles (to the west of Castelnaudry), we know that a staggering total of 420 suspected heretics, roughly two-thirds of the population, were interrogated by Inquisitors Bernard of Caux and John of St. Pierre. This information has come down to us in two of the Inquisition's original registers detailing the interrogations of more than 5,500 different people from 104 different places. It is known that there were originally 10 registers.91
Gripped in the cold, dead hand of such a powerful, vindictive, and impressively well-organised bureaucracy, the Cathar heresy began to falter and then slowly to die. By the 1250s the Inquisitor Rainer Sacconi was able to estimate with satisfaction that there were not more than 200 perfecti left in all of Occitania92 – too small a number, reckons historian Joseph Strayer, ‘to preserve the structure of the Cathar Church.’93 As a result, though the heresy was to persist into the next century, it had been so reduced by the Inquisition that it no longer represented a danger to Catholicism.94
The last upsurge was focussed around the highlands of the county of Foix – an old centre of the resistance. Here in 1299 a perfectus named Pierre Autier, together with a small group of followers began to evangelise amongst the rugged farmers and shepherds of the region. For a few brief years he enjoyed great success and even set in motion something of a revival, but he never really stood a chance. Soon the inquisitors were after him – big names like Bernard Gui, Geoffrey d’Ablis and Jacques Fournier. In 1309, with utter inevitability, Autier was caught. We know that he then underwent 10 months of interrogation by the inquisitors who finally burnt him alive in 1310.
One more prominent perfectus remained to be executed, a certain William Belibaste. Finding the going too hot in Occitania he had become a refugee in a small Cathar community across the border in Spain. There he was reached by an agent provocateur from the Inquisition who worked himself into his confidence and eventually tricked him into making a short return visit to Occitania. When he did so in the spring of 1321 he was captured, thrown into irons, tried and condemned. In the autumn of 1321 he was burnt at the stake.95
He was the last of the estimated 5,000 Cathar perfecti who were formally burnt alive in the name of the Christian God during the 112 years following the start of the Albigensian Crusades in 1209.96 He was also the last Cathar known to history.
A quiet natural death?
Probably the heresy did survive for a few more years in some remote pockets of Occitania to be rooted out by inquisitions too small to have been reported by anyone. But the apocalypse at Montségur in 1244, the long downhill journey thereafter, and the demise of Autier and Belibaste in 1310 and 1321, really did mark the end of it.
Numerous Cathars fled Occitania. As well as nearby parts of Spain, where Belibaste would have done well to stay, another favoured refuge close to home was amongst their co-religionists in northern Italy. But the inquisitors were at work there too. In November 1276 all members of the Cathar community of Sirmione were arrested. And in February 1278 ‘about 200’ were rounded up and burnt in Verona – the headquarters in exile of the Toulousan Cathar Church.97
Longer-term it seemed like the only secure refuge was in the ancient Byzantine Empire where the Bogomils, the mother church of Catharism, remained relatively strong during much of the 14th century. As late as 1325, four years after Belibaste had perished at the stake, we find Pope John XXI complaining to the leader of Bosnia about the heretics who are fleeing to his country and taking shelter there.98
Indeed although lands in the Byzantine Empire did not strictly-speaking come under the jurisdiction of the pope in Rome, but of the patriarchate in Constantinople, there had been constant papal interference in this part of the world since the early 13th century – round about the same time that the Albigensian Crusades began in the west.99 For example Pope Gregory IX, who created the Inquisition in 1233 to smash the Cathars, deposed the Catholic bishop to Bosnia at around the same time for failing to take action against the Bogomils and replaced him, significantly, with a Dominican. Gregory also declared a crusade against Bosnia to root out heresy there. The crusade, which continued until 1240, was willingly led by the Duke of Croatia. ‘In practice,’ notes Bernard Hamilton, ‘this was a Hungarian war against Bosnia that was given Crusade status …’100 On another occasion, in 1238, the pope incited his ally King Bela IV of Hungary to mount a crusade against Bulgaria as well. Any possibility that this might go ahead, however, was stopped by the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241 – 42.101
By the 14th century the Ottoman Turks were on the move, eating up and incorporating into their Islamic state many areas of the former Byzantine Empire. They conquered Bulgaria in 1393 and thereafter Bogomilism was never heard of again in that land; indeed the last surviving report of Bulgarian Bogomilism comes to us from no later than 1370.102 It lasted longer in Bosnia but was finally wiped out there after the invasion of Sultan Mehmed II (called the ‘Conqueror’) in 1463.103 By the end of the 15th century the population of Bosnia was almost entirely Muslim.104 As the historian Malcolm Lambert has researched: After a major expenditure of effort on refutation and, above all, police work, the Cathars were finally put down by the Western Church; by contrast Byzantine Bogomilism died a quiet natural death …105
Though the Inquisition never reached the wild lands of Bulgaria and Bosnia, its brutal success in Occitania, and the growing numbers of Cathars fleeing east to tell of horrors they had witnessed, must have been profoundly discouraging for the whole Bogomil movement. This perhaps explains the loss in energy that becomes apparent in Bogomilism from the early 14th century onwards – after which, though still thriving in the East, it seems to have abandoned all sense of its world mission. The Muslims brought about its final demise but even without their role the Catholic and Orthodox Churches had by then become so vigilant concerning heresy that there would have been no second chance for the Bogomil faith to evangelise and gain converts in the Christian world.
After Occitania was lost, all was lost. The millennial opportunity had come, and been seized, and then snatched away. An ancient Gnostic religion offering a stark alternative vision of Christianity had
mysteriously reappeared after centuries in darkness, flourished mightily at first and made a bid for universality, only to fail utterly in the end …
Or had it?
Renaissance
In the summer of 1460, shortly before the last embers of the Bogomil faith were stamped out by Sultan Mehmed II’s invasion of Bosnia, a Tuscan monk named Leonardo da Pistoia rode unobtrusively into the Florence on a donkey. Attached to his side was a bundle of cloth in which a small collection of books had been packed.
Leonardo, who had travelled a long way, took his precious cargo directly to the Doge of Florence, Cosimo de’Medici.
An intellectual nuclear bomb was about to explode.
Part II:
The Sacred Cities
[As] the embodiment of the Italian Renaissance, the Medici were enormously rich and through their wealth and character ruled Florence, controlled the Papacy, and influenced the policies of an entire continent.
Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall
For want of a better term, I shall call it ‘astral magic’ …
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE OTHER SECRET RELIGION
In the summer of 1460, shortly before the last embers of the Bogomil faith were stamped out by Sultan Mehmed II’s invasion of Bosnia, a Tuscan monk named Leonardo da Pistoia rode into the Florence on a donkey. He had been away for several months on a dangerous mission to Macedonia for his learned and immensely wealthy master, Cosimo de’Medici, the Doge of Florence, who employed him to procure rare and ancient writings. Already a vast library of extraordinary scrolls, codices and books had been built up. Yet Leonardo knew that Cosimo would remain dissatisfied until he had in his hands certain very specific and once widely-circulated books suppressed by the Church and lost to the world for close to a thousand years. Cosimo was convinced that these books must still exist somewhere – and had ordered Leonardo to seek them out and buy them no matter what the cost.