Montségur
When did I see it first? I almost saw Montségur in March 1992. My husband Greg, our 14-month old daughter Martha and I were spending Easter escaping the weather and monotony of London in the rain. In Carcassonne, it was a gentle day. Soft light, soft air, perfect for a visit to the mountains.
I'd first gone to the Languedoc three years earlier, in 1989. Pregnant and uncomfortable, I'd bought myself all the guidebooks. There, in halting translated French, I'd read about the Cathars. The following summer, I'd found more detailed books about them, about this part of southwest France in the 13th century. I had, I suppose, fallen in love with both the place and the Cathar story, the story of the fall of Montségur, a mountain citadel set high in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
As my interest had turned to – well, not obsession quite, but passion certainly – a need to see the place had been growing. Now, Easter 1992, I was quite desperate to go. To stand in the place where, in TS Eliot's words, 'prayer has been valid'. Something about seeing the place for myself, about winding through my fingers the invisible strings that pull ideas and people and myths together. All imagined connections, of course, and based in sentiment and a romanticised belief in the spirit of place. But a powerful need nonetheless.
Our first mistake – but of course we had no choice – was to take the mountain road. We drove south out of Carcassonne, down through Limoux – beautiful in summer with its central square and rocky river winding through the town – and turned right towards Puivert. The pale spring sun gave way to grey rain, then sleet. We turned on to a road that twisted and turned until we all three felt carsick and dizzy and disorientated, with the temperature dropping.
By the time we got to the village of Montségur, snow was hitting the windscreen and visibility was down to a few metres. We found somewhere to park and unpacked ourselves from the fuggy, steamed-up car. The mountain itself was invisible, a quarter of a mile further through the village, hidden in the snow clouds. Wherever we tried to walk, we seemed to be walking straight into the wind, which was shrieking and caterwauling down the narrow streets, whipping round the corners of anonymous buildings.
Everything appeared closed. No tourists yet, nobody local mad enough to be out in this strange – was it unseasonal? – blizzard. But we did find one restaurant. Two dogs lying in front of an open fire. Long, polished refectory tables, beautiful framed photographs on all the walls, in between the bricks and the beams. Empty.
When the owner appeared, it felt almost rude to ask for lunch. But he was delightful and turned out to be George Serrus the author of one of the many guidebooks about Montségur I'd got stacked up on my shelves.
A demi-pichet of red wine, steak, chips, a tomato salad for me (vegetarian – catastrophic in France) and baguette and fruit for Martha. A perfect afternoon, the time disjointed and stretched out. Peculiar light, snow, the strangeness of being the only guests in a mountainside restaurant. I looked out every now and again, wondering if, by now, I might glimpse the castle, crouched and grey, just visible at the tip of the mountain.
And, oddly, despite my attraction – loyalty even – to the Cathars, to Montségur, to my plans to write a set in Languedoc, I didn't go back. Not for six years. And I only went then because I had a major decision to take and it felt like the most obvious, the most appropriate, place to go to make it.
April 1998. Bright and clear. Clouds scudding fast across the sky in the cold, exhilarated air. A promise of spring, a strong smell of box hedges at the bottom of the path to the citadel where the tourist board had now built a ticket office. But too early in the season for tourists – there was no one there to take my money. But there was snow still and I slipped on the flat stones, even though I went slowly.
I was dressed stupidly. Thin jacket, trainers, cotton trousers. The cold sneaked around my legs, making my toes and knees ache. As I went higher, I could see Greg, Martha and Felix building a snowman below on the gentler slopes, close to where the Cathars were burnt alive. Their voices, the echo of laughing and shrieks, floated up to me, kept me company among the ghosts and the legends.
Writing this now, trying to remember that first climb, is hard. I have been back to Montségur many times and, in a way, all visits have become concentrated in that one, first experience. But I think it is true to say this.
In April 1998 – when I got to the top and walked through the ruin of the Great Gate into the courtyard of the castle – that the sun pierced the clouds, just for a moment. I looked out over the Cap Saint-Barthélémy and saw a slash of white sun strike the grey of the rock around and about. And I think that I felt, just then, that if there ever was a God, then it was in such a place as Montségur where you would understand faith.
And the decision that had taken me there? The novel. I now knew how I was going to start it.
But that was in the future. About the place itself, this is was I discovered …
Perched impossibly high above the village of Montségur - with three sides of the castle hewn out of the mountainside itself - sits a ruined fortress. When the sky is clear, the peak is visible from the road and looks down over the valleys towards the grey wall of the mountains of the Pyrenees. In 1204, the leaders of the Cathar Church in the Languedoc petitioned the seigneur of Montségur, Raymond de Péreille, to rebuild the crumbling castellum and strengthen its fortifications. In 1243, the mountain was besieged.
The mountain's steep sides become almost vertical as the summit of Montségur approaches. Only from the west was there any faint hope of success attack. It was on this west side that – as the Crusade against the Cathars progressed – that an increasing number of huts were constructed, hard up against the walls of the citadel for protection. These refugees – parfaits and credentes – reinforced their homes with timber palisades, not only for protection against would-be attackers, but also to prevent the makeshift dwellings from slipping away down the sheer mountainside.
By October 1243, even though Montségur had been under siegefor 5 months, the garrison had lost only three men. So Hugues des Arcis, commander of the Crusader army – which was made up of northern barons, Catholic inquisitorsand press-ganged fighters from the conquered Languedoc – bought the services of a group of Basque mercenaries. Single-minded, ruthless and skilful, they clambered up the mountain and pitched camp just 80 yards from the castle walls as the bitter mountain winter set in.
The 400 people inside the fortress of Montségur were not in imminent danger. But garrison commander, Pierre-Roger of Mirepoix, decided to withdraw his men from the outworks on the vulnerable eastern side. It was a mistake that changed the course of the battle.
Armed with a local traitor's intelligence about the only safe path up the mountain, the mercenaries succeeded in scaling the vertiginous slope on the south-eastern side. Knifing the sentinels, they took possession of the Roc de la Tour, a spike of stone rising up on the easternmost point of the summit ridge. When day broke and the Basques saw how high they had climbed, they shook with fear at the near vertical drop and the jagged rocks below. The defenders could do nothing but watch as the catapults and mangomels were winched up to the Roc.
At Christmas, the attackers took the barbican. Now they were within only a few dozen yards from the fortress. It was still inaccessible - in that the attackers would have had to make their way along a ridge less than six feet wide with a sheer drop on either side - but it allowed them to install a new siege gun. The southern and eastern walls of the citadel were within range.
From the moment when the crusaders took possession of the barbican, Pierre-Roger de Mirepoix realised that it was only a matter of time before the fortress fell. In the valley below, the standards and banners of the Catholic Church and the fleur-de lys of the French King – tattered and faded now after ten months of first heat, then rain, then snow - were still flying. The crusader army numbered between six and ten thousand. Inside were no more than 100 fighting men.
A meeting was held with the leaders of the Cathar church, Bishop Bertrand Marty and Raymond Aiguilher. Explaining the seriousness of the situation, Pierre-Roger persuaded them that the time had come to smuggle out the Cathar treasury to a place of safety. It was their last chance.
Two Cathar credentes - Matheus and Peter Bonnet, were chosen for the task. Preparing themselves for a tough journey in the bitter cold, they strapped the treasure to their backs and stole away out of the castle under cover of night. Avoiding capture by the crusaders and the sentries posted on the passable roads leading down from the mountain through the village, and made their way south into the SabarthèsMountains, part of the great grey wall of the Pyrenees that separates France from Spain.
Matheus arrived back alone at the end of January, to report the success of their mission and bringing two crossbowmen. This time, the enemy sentries posted on the last passable road were from Camon sur l'Hers, in the fiefdom of Mirepoix, and they let him pass. He talked of reinforcements, of troops from the King of Aragon, who would come in the spring. But, in reality, by now the siege was too tightly drawn for reinforcements to break through.
In mid-February, the attackers pushed forward yet again. Time was running out.
On 1 March 1244, after a final attempt to dislodge the Basques from the Roc de la Tour, a single horn sounded on the ramparts of the ravaged stronghold. Raymond de Péreille and Pierre-Roger of Mirepoix walked out of the Great Gate and surrendered to Hugues des Arcis, the seneschal of Carcassonne. The battle was over.
It had been a harsh and freezing winter on the rocky mountainside and in the valley below. Both sides were exhausted. Negotiations were short and the terms offered were generous, as if neither side had the strength to fight any further. The Act of Surrender was signed on 2 March 1244 with Peter Amiel, the Archbishop of Narbonne. Ten months after the banners of Catholic Church and State had first fluttered bright in the valley below the mountain, Montségur had fallen.
The Act of Surrender demanded that:
- hostages would be given
- the fortress would become the property of the Catholic Church and the French crown.
- the 400 or so inhabitants of the fortress would be pardoned for their past crimes, including the murders of the inquisitors at Avignonet
- the men-at-arms would be set free with only light penances, once their crimes had been confessed to the inquisitorial registers
- all who abjured their heretical beliefs would also be allowed to walk free, punished only by the obligation to wear a cross on their clothes
- anyone who would not recant their Cathar faith would be burnt at the stake
It was usual, at the conclusion of a siege, to seal bargain by handing over hostages. They included Bishop Bertrand's brother, Raymond, the old knight Arnald-Roger de Mirepoix and Raymond de Péreille's young son, Jordan. What was not usual was the granting of a period of two weeks' grace. Yet, the request was granted.
Why did they request this stay of execution. What needed to done that had not already been done? After all, the treasure was safe, the negotiated Act of Surrender was good. Easter fell within the first two weeks of March …
In nay case, the mangomels, catapults and other siege engines fell silent. Inside the fortress, life fell into a new and peaceful rhythm, unknown for nearly a year. The surviving parfaits fasted in preparation for Easter and those who were preparing to die took their leave from families, friends and soldiers.
The inquisitional register list the objects given by the parfaits to their protectors, touchingly reminiscent of gifts they might have given in the golden age of the Cathar church – cloth, wax, wool, clothing, handfuls of beans. It brought back to mind the time of peace and expansion in the 12th century, when the travelling parfaits supported themselves by their own labour.
The commander of the garrison, Pierre-Roger, was presented with a coverlet full of coins. Bishop Bertrand Marty gave him oil, salt, pepper, wax and a piece of green cloth. Other heretics gave him dried haricots and fifty jerkins for his men. The parfait Raymond de Cuq presented William Adhemar, sergeant-at-arms, with a wagon-load of wheat. Marquesia de Lanatar, who had decided her faith mattered more to her than her life, gave all her belongings to her granddaughter Philippa, Pierre-Roger's wife. Others gave wax, pepper, salt, shoes, a purse, breeches. Someone gave a felt hat.
Not a single one of the parfaits betrayed their faith. On Sunday 13 March, when only a few days of freedom remained, 21 credentes –including women, knights and men-at-arms – asked to be given the consolamentum and received into the hierarchy of the Cathar church. In doing so, they were volunteering their bodies to the flames of the inquisitors' pyre and their souls to God.
Some 3000 feet below in the valley, the crusaders were beginning the task of constructing a wooden palisade on the south western face of the mountain. Gathering wood from the winter forests and destroying the last bedraggled huts of the decimated village of Montségur for firewood, they gathered straw and faggots, soaking them in pitch to help the damp timber to catch. Ladders were propped up against the walls. Inside the pen, there was a backbone of wooden stakes to which the heretics would be tied.
During the night of 15 March, four people – three of them men, the fourth never identified – were being hidden somewhere beneath the walls of Montségur. Their mission was, once the fortress had been surrendered and the seneschal's men had taken the remaining prisoners away, that the four fugitives would lower themselves on ropes over the western wall and escape.
The terms of surrender were clear. Everyone was to be handed over, to the flames or to the Inquisitors. No exceptions. So why would the garrison and Cathar parfaits risk jeopardising the safety of everyone for the sake of the four? What – or who – needed to be protected from the crusaders and the Catholic Church.? A holy object, a book perhaps, needed for the celebration of Easter. Or were they charged with rescuing the Cathar treasure that had been smuggled to theSabarthès Mountains two months before?
The four were never caught.
Finally, at dawn on Wednesday 16 March 1244, soldiers of the crusading army arrived at the Great Gate to take the heretics to execution.
Leading the 200 condemned heretics was Bishop Bertrand Marty, an old man now. He was barefoot and dressed only in coarse dark robes, waiting in silence as he and his companions were shackled and roughly dragged down the couple of hundred yards of steeply-sloping mountainside that separated the fortress of Montségur from the wooden palisade. With him was the wife of Raymond de Péreille's wife, Corba, and their daughter Esclarmonde, four knights, four lone soldiers and two with their wives, two messengers, one squire, one crossbowman and one merchant. Ordinary people, strong enough to die for their faith.
Watching the scene from the ramparts of the fortress, were mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, friends. Soon, their 'confessions' would be taken down, the only record of what had taken place in the small mountain fortress. Nineteen testimonies have been preserved to this day, all of them given before the inquisitor Ferrier. They tell us much of what took place, but what is not said speaks louder.
The procession of shackled prisoners was led down the narrow and step track to the clearing at the base of the hill. Even lower down, there were still patches of snow on the ground. One by one, awkward and clumsy in their chains, they climbed the ladders propped against the wooden walls and jumped down into the pyre to be tethered like animals to the stakes.
At a sign from theArchbishop of Narbonne, burning faggots were thrown to each of the four corners. The men of God – Catholic priests, bishops, monks, the inquisitors Ferrier and Duranti – began to chant psalms to cover the sound of the voices of the dying, psalms celebrating the mercy and goodness of God's as the crackling of straw and flame grew louder and the rough hems of robes caught alight.
By mid-morning, 220 had choked or burned to death. A sickening black cloud floated over the valley of Montségur, carrying particles of smoke and dust to the hills and mountains of the Pyrenees. Everywhere the smell of burning, a sickly sweet smell, caught in the cold air.
The Cathars of Montségur lay forgotten here for many years. It was only in 1960 that a small stone memorial was erected on the approximate site of the mass execution. Now, winter or spring, there are always small tributes laid at the food of the stèle. Flowers, scraps of poetry, ribbons …
