With Master Conrad, the yearning to cleanse the world of sin, to heal it of its leprosy, had turned murderous. That made it no less revolutionary. The suspicion of the worldly order that had brought Gregory VII to humble an anointed king before the gates of Canossa was one that Conrad more than shared. As Elizabeth’s master, he had forbidden her to eat food ‘about which she did not have a clear conscience’. Anything on her husband’s table that might have derived from exploitation of the poor, that might have been extracted from peasants as a tribute or a tax, she had dutifully spurned. ‘As a result, she often suffered great penury, eating nothing but rolls spread with honey.’17 The Lady Elizabeth had been a saint. Her peers were not. In the summer of 1233, Conrad dared to accuse one of them, the Count of Sayn, of heresy. A frantically convened synod of bishops, in the presence of the German king himself, threw out the case. Conrad, nothing daunted, began to prepare charges against further noblemen. Then, on 30 July, as he was returning from the Rhine to Marburg, he was ambushed by a group of knights and cut down. The news of his death was greeted with rejoicing throughout Germany. In the Lateran, though, there was indignation. As Conrad was laid to rest in Marburg, by the side of the Lady Elizabeth, Gregory mourned him in sombre terms. The murderers, so the pope warned, were harbingers of a rising darkness. All of heaven and earth had shuddered at their crime. Their patron was literally hellish: none other than the Devil himself.
A Great and Holy War
When clerics pondered the mysterious upsurge of heresy, they tended to glimpse in its shadowy outline something all the more disturbing for appearing not altogether unfamiliar to them. Conrad, when he interrogated Waldensians, refused to accept that he faced some minuscule and upstart sect. Instead, he distinguished something altogether more menacing. They belonged, so he believed, to an institution that was almost the mirror image of the Church: hierarchical in its organisation, universal in its claims. Writing to Gregory IX, Conrad warned that the true loyalty of heretics belonged to the Devil, ‘who they claim was the creator of the celestial bodies, and will ultimately return to glory when the Lord has fallen from power’.18 Sinister rituals parodied those of the Church. Initiates into the ranks of Satan’s followers were obliged to suck on the tongue of a giant toad. Faith in Christ was banished upon the kiss of a cadaverous man, whose lips were as cold as ice. At a ritual meal, devotees would lick the anus of a black cat the size of dog. The entire congregation would then hail Satan as Lord.
Gregory IX, on reading this sensational report, took an unprecedented step: he gave it his full imprimatur. Similar stories had long been current – but never before had they received confirmation from a pope. Christian scholars had traditionally condemned talk of devil-worship as superstitious folly. No one with any sense or education took it seriously. It smacked too much of paganism. Only gullible peasants and novices afraid of their own shadow feared that demons stalked the earth, recruiting adherents, hosting covens. Belief in such nonsense was itself the work of the Devil. Such was the solemn verdict of Gratian and other canon lawyers. ‘Who is there that is not led out of himself in dreams and nocturnal visions, and sees much when sleeping which he had never seen waking?’19
Yet this bracing scepticism did not preclude the learned from dreading the existence of an infernally inspired conspiracy. The Waldensians were not the only heretics in the Rhineland who, in the decades before Conrad’s ministry, were identified as belonging to a distinctive and pernicious sect. In 1163, six men and two women were burned in Cologne for belonging to an obscure group called Cathari – ‘the pure ones’. More executions of Cathars followed, here and there, although never in any great numbers. The precise nature of their beliefs remained obscure. Some, in the manner of Conrad, identified them with Devil-worshippers, and suggested that they derived their name from the cat that devotees of Satan were reputed to kiss on its anus. Some confused them with Waldensians. Some conflated them with other, equally enigmatic groups of heretics: ‘those whom some call Patarenes, others Publicans, and others by different names’.20 Only scholars well-versed in the history of the Church knew who the Cathars had actually been: schismatics who, back in the time of Constantine, had been singled out for a dismissive mention in a canon of the Council of Nicaea. That now, almost a thousand years on, they were suddenly popping up in the Rhineland only emphasised just how dangerous, just how undead heresy could be. Always there in the shadows, a constant danger, it endured across space and time.
Except that most of the Christians identified by nervous Church officials as ‘Cathars’ did not remotely think of themselves as heretics – nor indeed, come to that, as Cathars. Just as the dread of Devil-worship drew on the fantasies of the uneducated, so was the fear of a revenant heresy, stirred up from its grave, nourished by scholarship. The clerics who staffed the Curia, and provided the immense apparatus of the Catholic Church with its bureaucrats, and lawyers, and teachers, had too easily forgotten that they themselves were the innovators. Radicals who criticised them for betraying the cause of reformatio were counterbalanced by large numbers of Christians who lived still ignorant – or resentful – of its claims. Remote from the cathedrals and the universities, old habits of worship died hard. This was especially so in those regions of Christendom where a central authority barely existed, where the writ of kings was weak, and that of bishops too. Clerics schooled in the classrooms of Paris or Bologna, venturing off the beaten track, might well find themselves among entire populations who cared nothing for reformatio, and felt only contempt for those it had brought to power. To label these deplorables ‘Cathars’ was pointedly to ignore what they actually were: Christians left behind by the new orthodoxies of the age.
Nowhere were the resulting tensions more evident than in southern France. Here, where local loyalties were as intense as they were splintered, Paris seemed a long way away indeed. In 1179, a council convened by the pope specified ‘the lands around Albi and Toulouse’21 as an especially noxious breeding ground of heresy. Papal legates who visited the region found there a fractious, disputatious people, resentful of many of the founding ideals of reformatio: the claim to authority of the Church’s international hierarchy; its demands for obedience, and deference, and tithes; the insistence that an insuperable divide distinguished the clergy from those to whom they ministered. Sacral authority, among those dismissively termed ‘Albigensians’ by papal agents, was not viewed as a prerogative of priests. Anyone might lay claim to it. Out in the fields that surrounded Albi and Toulouse, a peasant might well be more honoured than a bishop. A widower who won a name for himself as a model of courtesy and self-restraint; a matron who secluded herself from the world: these were honoured as boni homines, ‘good men’, ‘good women’. The very holiest were believed to approach the perfection of Christ himself: to become ‘friends of God’. There was no gesture they could make so humble, no gesture so everyday, that it might not be suffused with a sense of the divine. Deeply rooted in the local soil, the Christianity of the good men was one that cast reformatio as the heresy, a thing of ‘ravening wolves, hypocrites and seducers’.22