Castelnau
I'm sitting on the terrasse of a café-bar in southwest France. The sun is high in the sky; the sky is a deep, bright summer blue. Our children are splashing their fingers in the fountain. The waiter has brought me a carafe of local rosé – dry, light and full of fruit flavours – and a bowl of ice, because it has to be very cold and I'm an ice addict.
The bar is on the north side of a small square in a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Within two minutes walk there are at least a dozen places to eat and 5 or 6 opportunities to buy postcards and ice creams. A few hundred yards away, the river Aude snakes its way past the grey stone houses, under an ancient bridge and on down to Carcassonne. The river banks are littered with smooth flat stones that absorb the heat of the sun and hold it until late in the evening, like little basking turtles.
I am holding a book open in my right hand; the fingers of my left fiddle with the stem of my wine glass. At the next table, someone lights a tiny cigar and the smoke wafts past me, despite the stillness of the air.
It is the second or third time I have read the book. It begins like this:
'On 10th March 1208 His Holiness Pope Innocent III issued a solemn call to arms, summoning all Christian nations to launch a Crusade against a country of fellow-Christians. This Crusade, he claimed, was not only justifiable but a matter of dire necessity; the heretics who inhabited this land were “worse than the very Saracens”.'
As always, questions … What gave him the right? How did this man reconcile the teaching of Jesus with the violence he preached? What extraordinary force of self-belief gave this man the force of will to put might above right?
Then my thoughts – as always – drift to the victims. I think of these people of southwest France and their prosperous agricultural economy. I think of the bustling, successful towns, the religious tolerance and independence (relative, of course) of women, the itinerant troubadours – minstrels – and the songs, poems and proverbs of the language of the south, the langue d'oc.
Vâou mâi un rë q'un ëspëro. (Better a little than hope.)
Life can be hard. What do you prefer – a meagre certainty or a vague promise?
Fâi lou pous cronto la ribiëiro. (He digs his well by the river.)
The well-digger's job is cold, claustrophobic, dirty, solitary and hard. What's more, the fresh river water is at hand and the job doesn't even need doing. Open your eyes!
Iêou m'ën tënë âou përgami q'ës pu for që lou papië. (I prefer parchment, it's stronger than paper.)
Ancient books handed down over hundreds of years – paper documents destroyed by five minutes caught out in the rain … Perhaps we should have more respect for the proven past than the novelties of the present.
L'iôou de moun vëzi ës pu bël që lou mîou. (My neighbour's egg looks better than mine.)
Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Gna pa d'ôli sans crâsso. (No oil without scum.)
You must accept that even the most important and useful jobs - squeezing oil with its many uses from olives – will include some inconvenience.
The Cathars lived under the tacit approval of their liege lords, Raymond-Roger Trencavel and Raymond of Toulouse. This enraged the Pope Innocent who demanded action against the widespread Cathar Church. So the pope sent Peter of Castelnau – a Cistercian monk from the abbey of Fontfroide near Narbonne – to persuade Raymond to carry through his promise to expel the Cathars from his domains. Raymond complained bitterly of the humiliation of being harangued by the pedantic, self-righteous monk.
Towards the end of 1207, Castelnau managed to establish a league of southern barons who agreed to hunt down heretics. Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, was asked to join in the brutal persecution of his own subjects. When he refused, Castelnau publicly excommunicated him at a stormy interview at the church of Saint-Gilles, in Raymond's lands in the Rhône valley. The following morning, just as the papal party was about to cross the Rhône, an officer in the service of the Count of Toulouse – but not necessarily under his orders – ran Peter of Castelnau through with a sword. He died on the spot.
What would I have done? How would I have lived under such threats? I don't know. Compromise or fight? I don't know.
