Toulouse
When I was at primary school in the 1970s, French was still taught in most junior schools in England, although I don't know if this was true for the rest of the UK. Now, in these days of the National Curriculum and the time-pressures of daily literacy and numeracy hours, French seems to have slid off the timetables of most state primaries. It's ironic, given we are supposed to be in a time of greater European integration. Mais ...
I remember little of those lessons, I suppose, other than learning the names of the four great rivers of France which cut across the country like giant veins: la Seine, la Loire, la Garonne and le Rhône. Now, thirty years later, I'm reminded of the smell of hot summer classrooms and the map hanging on the wall as I research life in the south of France in the 13th century.
Then – as in Roman times - theRhône and the Garonne played an important role in linking north to south, the mighty arteries, along which was carried all merchandise and raw material exchanged between the North and the Midi. Water mattered, gave power. The Crusades had enriched all the cities of the West, but Languedoc in particular, because of its position as halfway house between Europe and the Near East and Iberia and Africa. And, of course, since medieval warfare was largely a matter of siege rather than pitch battles, it was the lack of – or indeed control over - water that decided the way the dice fell.
People and ideas, as well as goods, were introduced, shared, exchanged. So, the cities of medieval southern France were centres of religious and cultural development, where business, industry and every sort of art and craft flourished. The larger ones – Toulouse, Narbonne, Avignon, Montpellier, Béziers – had schools of medicine, mathematics, philosophy and astrology. At Toulouse, the course on Aristotle embodied recent discoveries by Arab philosophers. They were home to large, successful Jewish communities too. Records show a Doctor Abraham from Beaucaire giving lectures, as well as a respected scholar named Simeon and a Rabbi Jacob. Sophisticated, more tolerant societies than the crude courts of the North.
These Midi cities are beautiful still, despite being ringed by the modern autoroutes and complicated périphérique road systems. For years when our children were smaller, every summer, we drove from the ferry port at Caen down the western flank of France. Le Mans, Alençon, Poitiers, Saintes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Castelnaudary, Carcassonne. A journey that meant summer and heat and a different way of living for six weeks.
I sometimes needed to nip back to England during July and August – for arts funding meetings, literary festivals, the usual English summer things. Wanting to be there and back as quickly as possible, I flew out of Toulouse Blagnac, the home of French aerospace. The car journey from Carcassonne to Toulouse takes about an hour, fifty minutes early in the morning. Just before you arrive, there is a toll to be paid. A few desultory words with the woman in the toll booth …
Blagnac is approached by a terrifying, twisting grey serpent of a road, which winds over and back upon itself. Sheer, featureless concrete walls, like the rim of a race track, cars travelling too fast, knowing where they are going, making it impossible to change lane or indicate or read the signs. Near there – and therefore nearly gone from my family. I have spilled more tears at Blangnac than any other place of departure or arrival in the world.
In Labyrinth, Toulouse is always there, but more as a backdrop than one of the main characters. But so much of what happened in Languedoc in the 13th century is connected to Toulouse. Or rather, perhaps, is because of Toulouse.
For years, for some reason, we never went into the city itself. It was a place that shimmered just outside my imagination, always, frozen in 1218, when Simon de Montfort met his death beneath the walls, killed by a stone flung by a siege engine employed by a group of women. I suppose I was reluctant to muddle things. I already had fixed physical environments for my story – Carcassonne itself in the leading role, Montségur, Béziers and Chartres as supporting actors. I didn't think I could manage another place to bring to life, trying to strip away the modern shop fronts and neon advertising to imagine paved or unmade streets, the smells of medieval city life, people.
There is also the burden – when you're a writer – that you cease to enjoy places and experiences as they happen and instead spend too much time making notes and storing up memories - smells, sights and sounds – just in case they are useful. For once, I wanted to visit as a tourist, sit with no purpose in a café, look around without my notebook in my hand.
But I met the past in the pink stone of the great central buildings of the ville rose.
Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse – a weak, vascillating, unattractive man, a victim of history – his vast lands coveted by the northern French monarchy, by Pedro II, King of Aragon, liege lord from across the Pyrenees, by Pope Innocent III who sought to expel the heretic Cathars from his lands and put in their place the hierarchies of the Catholic Church.
Within his lands, Raymond had to take account of the powerful Trencavel family, viscounts of Béziers and Carcassonne.
In 1208, a vassal of Raymond VI murdered the papal legate Peter of Castelnau, providing a pretext for Innocent III's Crusade against the Languedoc. Raymond tried to halt the Crusade by submitting publicly to an Act of Submission.
The ceremony took place in June 1209. The Count of Toulouse wore a cord around his neck, stripped to the waist with a candle in his hand. He swore allegiance to the pope and his legates. The pope's representative then draped his stole around Raymond's neck, gave him absolution and marched him into the church, beating around the shoulders with a bundle of birch twigs. He had to agree to the following humiliating conditions:
1. To offer apologies to every bishop and abbot with whom he was fighting
2. To relinquish his rights over bishoprics and religious houses throughout his domain
3. To get rid of veterans and mercenaries whom he employed to protect his territories
4. To no longer entrust any Jew with public office
5. To desist from protecting heretics and deliver them to the Crusaders
6. To regard as heretics all those denounced by ecclesiastical authority
7. To abide by the legates' decisions concerning all complaints made against him
8. To observe and enforce observation in others of every clause in the peace treaty drafted by the legates
In reality, even if he had wanted to, the Count couldn't really persecute the Cathar heretics. They probably made up a majority of his subjects. Later, when Foulques, Bishop of Toulouse, asked the chevalier Pons Adhemar why they did not break up the nests of heretics in their territories, Adhemar replied:
'We cannot do it. We were all brought up together. Many of them are related to us. Besides, we can see for ourselves that they live decent, honourable lives.'
Finally, when the time came to leave the church of his mumiliation, Raymond and the pope's party found the crowd was so densely packed around the building that they had to sneak out through the crypt, passing the spot where Peter of Castelnau was buried.
