CATHARISM: WOMEN DURING THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE
BY ELIZABETH DAVEMAN

In the tumultuous period that was the late Middle Ages what with the natural disasters such as the plague and recurring famines, there were also catastrophes that were completely man-made. Among these figure the Hundred Years War, the crusades to the Holy Land and that most tragic event of all perhaps, the Albigensian crusade, as it was the one that pitted Christian against Christian, and sometimes even neighbour against neighbour. All wars are man-made disasters of course, and although they often start out as a matter of principle, a moral disagreement or a sense of injustice, that initial conflict seems to become blurred with the passage of time and the hardening of resolve, the accumulation of injuries and the desire for revenge. But what was the place of women in this specific calamity? Were they just victims of war as is so frequently the case; were they just bystanders?

First let's review the conflict itself. Catharism appeared in Western Europe in the twelfth century, starting out as a view of Christianity that diverged from Church doctrine primarily in its dualism. It believed in two gods, a good one as reflected in the gospels and an evil one, as represented in the Old Testament. The evil god was responsible for everything bad in the world, and that included everything material, for our bodies, for flesh and decay. The good god was spiritual and salvation was achieved by finding release from the material. According to this view, what was essential was to reject the world, to seek purity. Humans were actually angels, they thought, trapped in material form, and they needed to shed their material bodies. Purity had to be sought; Cathars believed that this did not happen in one lifetime, as the spirit left the body upon death and was repeatedly reborn until a person achieved spiritual perfection and was freed of the shackles of life to be reunited with God. We see in Catharism also a reaction to the excesses and corruption of the clergy. Related to this was its rejection of Catholic sacraments; they scorned communion and certainly transubstantiation: 'if the body of Christ was as large as a mountain, it still would have been consumed long ago by now' was something they were known to say. Cathars had only one sacrament, called the consolamentum, the consolation. A believer was consoled upon acceptance of the Cathar doctrine through a laying on of hands and readings from the gospel of John, which made him or her one of the 'Good People', referred to by Catholic opponents scornfully as 'Perfects', as we still do today. The consolation was performed again when one was close to death, after which moment the believer would not eat again so as to ensure his or her purity; this period was called the endura. Women could be Perfects as well as men, although their role was somewhat different. Good Men would preach to others and perform the consolation; there were no priests in Catharism. Good Women were not as likely to perform a laying on of hands, although it was known to be done; what they did do was talk to village women, explaining the faith and often converting them. Sometimes they would establish houses of refuge for women. One Catholic priest of the time, Pierre d'Avrigny, complained that 'Men may invent heresies but it is women who spread them and make them immortal'. And spread Catharism they did, encouraging other women to listen to the words of a given Good Man after which they would not want to listen to anyone else (that is any priest or Catholic) again. Arguably the most renowned of the Good Women was Esclarmonde of Foix who was ordained as a perfect and oversaw a house for women in Pamiers. When there was a prominent debate between Catholics and Cathars in Pamiers in 1207, she spoke out as she was known to be eloquent and of firm opinions. This annoyed a Cistercian monk present who perhaps was unable to refute her on her level and reverted to a familiar misogynist stratagem, telling her to 'Go back to your distaff and spinning, Madame; it is not proper for you to speak in a debate of this nature'. Clearly she wasn't fazed as later she moved on to be in charge of another house in Montségur.

Just as there were no priests in Catharism, there were no churches, only a house of one of the believers where people would gather. There were no tithes or fees either, rather donations were made by believers to help the Good People. In itself, Catharism was a very gentle religion, a faith which resembled Buddhism in its emphasis on renunciation of the world, its belief in reincarnation, and primarily in its desire to be freed of the cycle of material rebirth. In the beginning it coexisted more or less quietly next to the established Catholic Church, but over time, friction developed and then outright hostility. The taxes imposed by the Church were a source of annoyance for the population on the one side, and on the other, the Church feared the undermining of its authority. Pope Innocent III attempted initially to combat the movement by persuasion, sending preachers such as Bernard of Clairvaux, the elegant speaker whose writings are still read today, to try to reform the wayward. These preachers were sent to southern France and northern Spain, where Catharism was mostly concentrated, but they had no success, indeed they were ridiculed by their listeners. That did not go well, and tensions mounted. When one of the pope's emissaries was killed on his journey back to Rome, Innocent felt he had no choice but to turn to force, calling for a crusade against the apostates. There were Inquisitions set up in which people were interviewed for hours, sometimes many days in a row. Curiously enough, it is those carefully recorded interviews with their detailed questions that have become very valuable sources of information for us today about daily life during that period.

The 'Good People' went underground, and the Inquisitions tried to ferret them out. Sometimes, just as Jews in hiding were denounced to the authorities by neighbours out of fear or by spiteful enemies out of vengeance, the names of Cathars were given up. Those who knew they were being sought moved around from one safe house to another, walking mostly by night and led through the mountains in the dark by local sympathizers. Cathars who were condemned were asked to recant, and if they didn't, they were burned: dozens, sometimes hundreds at a time. Whole towns were slaughtered.

Woman ‘interviewing’ a prospective wet nurse

It is the case that she took her two youngest children with her on at least one campaign; we know that they were with her in Toulouse in the Château Narbonnais when it was sieged. She repeatedly brought troops to the south for her husband. She travelled to Paris once to beg for reinforcements from the king. She reputedly encouraged soldiers to not lose heart, and one admiring chronicler even records her exceptional generosity when travelling with a group of troops: seeing the fatigue of some of the soldiers, she dismounted and gave her horse to two of them, choosing to walk herself. Even after the death of her husband at the siege of Toulouse in 1218, she led combatants one more time from the north back down to the scene of battle. Although Alice was active on the high end of military action, we should note that she was by far not the only woman to have participated in combat. Noblewomen, commoners and children dragged the siege engine into place in the battle of Toulouse; they were also combatants fighting to protect the castles where they took refuge.

A very different kind of woman, neither a Cathar perfect, nor a militant Catholic supporter was one Béatrice de Planisolles, a woman of minor nobility who led a very full life indeed. Married three times, on the last occasion by means of a remarkable legal construction to a priest (!), mother of five girls and two boys to whom she seemed to have been devoted, she also managed to find time between marriages for two other lovers, one a very prominent priest[1]. Béatrice tells us her story through her depositions at the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier before whom she appeared nine times. He was looking for Cathar sympathies in her and it was clear that she did have them, but her denials were steadfast; moreover, she had always been careful to keep up appearances, going to Catholic confession and mass for example. She was prudent in her daily movements to avoid behaviour or encounters that could identify her as a follower She did know a great number of Cathars, however, and her testimony did lead to the identification of other believers.

[1] Béatrice deserves an article of her own, if only for her description of the prophylactic techniques of one of her lovers.

Much later she and her last husband were also imprisoned for heresy, but were released after a period of a year. After their reprieve she – but not her husband - was condemned to wear the 'yellow cross' identifying her as a fallen person. This was the stigma of the Cathars which was sewn onto one's outer garments, both front and back, a heinous precursor to the yellow star in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Independent thinkers, believers, proselytizers, on the one side, resistants in-between and military helpmeets on the other side. Women in the late Middle Ages were not just victims in the Albigensian war, they were active – sometimes wary, sometimes relentless – but definitely willing participants in a tragic conflict.

The infamously ruthless abbot turned soldier, Arnaud Amalric, had all of the townspeople of Béziers marched out of the gates in the massacre of 1219, Catholics and Cathars alike and ordered them killed, reputedly saying 'Kill them all, God will know his own.' The Crusaders came primarily from the north, from 'France', as distinguished from the Languedoc, with huge armies of knights and their vassals. Initially, they may have come to purge the area of heresy, but as the conflict intensified, politics became part of the brew. And we shouldn't forget greed: not only that of the instigating clerical and political powers who took conquered towns and counties for themselves, but also of the soldiers, mercenaries and bandits who joined in for the plunder of the castles and villages that were conquered.

Perhaps the most notable example of this combination of motivations is seen in the person of Simon de Montfort, the renowned commander of this would-be holy war. A northerner, lord of Montfort l'Amaury near Paris, Simon was a veteran of the third crusade to the Holy Land and a devout believer; he maintained that his fighting was 'the work of Christ'. Greatly admired as a tactician by military historians (a curséd breed in themselves in their single-minded fixation on battle), Simon may have started out with the intention of combatting heresy, but as the years wore on, his motivations devolved, and the accumulation of property for himself became a clear attraction. It was also political: there was the struggle between him and the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, a rivalry which ultimately led to Simon's death. Finally, it became personal for him; at the end, he clearly was driven simply by the need to win. The destruction and the loss of human life was of no consequence, but then it never had been to him. What interests us, however, is the female dimension in this story and that we find in Simon's wife, Alice de Montmorency. Like most women in the Middle Ages, Alice was the mother to many children, seven in all, but life was hardly focussed on babies. She would have turned them over to wet-nurses early on in any event, leaving her free to do other things, as it turned out to help her husband in his work.