In 1165, ten miles south of Albi, the bishop had engaged with his opponents in a village square, before a great audience of noblemen and prelates. Much that the good men had revealed about their beliefs that day was deeply shocking to the assembled clergy. In forthright terms, they had dismissed the Old Testament as worthless; declared that ‘any good man, cleric or layman’, might preside over the eucharist; insisted that they owed priests ‘no obedience, for they were wicked, not good teachers, but hired servants’.23 Nevertheless, much that they believed was perfectly orthodox. ‘We believe in one God, living and true, three in one and one in three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’24 Christ had become flesh; he had suffered, died and been buried; he had risen on the third day and ascended into heaven. Such was the creed to which the bishops also subscribed. But this did not reassure them. Instead, it only confirmed them in their darkest fear: that heresy was a plague, rotting away those who might not even realise that they were infected. And plague unchecked was bound to spread.
‘Wounds that do not respond to the treatment of a poultice should be cut away with a knife.’25 By November 1207, when this sombre medical ruling was pronounced by Innocent III, dread that heresy might come to poison all the Christian people had reached a fever pitch. Innocent himself, thanks to a combination of ability and good fortune, wielded an authority of which Gregory VII could only have dreamed. More plausibly than any pope before him, he aspired to sway the fate of the world. Yet the very scope of his power seemed only to mock him. Gazing as he did from east to west, and painfully conscious of the awesome mandate that had been entrusted to him by God, he feared that everywhere Christian fortunes were in retreat. In the Holy Land, Jerusalem had been lost to the Saracens. A campaign led by the kings of France and England to recapture it had failed. A second expedition, launched in 1202 in obedience to Innocent’s own summons, had been diverted to Constantinople. In 1204 it had stormed and sacked the city. A stronghold that for long centuries had withstood the envy of pagan warlords had fallen at last – to a Christian army. Its captors justified their storming of the city by charging that its inhabitants were rebels against the papacy: for the churches of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the age of Gregory VII, had been divided by an ever-widening schism. Innocent, however, appalled by the despoliation of Christendom’s bulwark, lamented the fall of Constantinople as a work of hell. Meanwhile, in Spain, where Christian arms had for many centuries been determinedly pushing back the frontier of al-Andalus, the advance had lately been brought to a juddering halt. In 1195, a particularly disastrous defeat – which had seen an entire field army wiped out, and three bishops killed – had inspired the Muslim general to boast that he would stable his horses in Rome. To Innocent, the reason for God’s anger was glaring. There could be no prospect of reclaiming Jerusalem while heresy festered. Evil as the Saracens were, they were not so evil as heretics. In January 1208, the murder of a papal legate on the banks of the Rhône decided Innocent once and for all. His duty was clear. He could not risk the contamination of the entire Christian people by the Albigensians. There was no alternative but to destroy their heresy at the point of a sword.
Back in 1095, when Urban II had summoned the warriors of Christendom to set out for the Holy Land, he had instructed them, as a symbol of their vow, to wear the sign of the cross. Now, in July 1209, when an immense army of knights unmatched since the time of Urban assembled at Lyon, they too were crucesignati: ‘signed with the cross’. It marked them as pilgrims who, like their Saviour, were so aflame with love of mankind that they were ready to be killed in the cause of redeeming them from hell. ‘The cross that is fixed to your coats with a soft thread,’ a preacher reminded them, ‘was fixed to His flesh with iron nails.’26 Even those in the path of the great force as it lumbered down the Rhine and then along the coast towards the town of Béziers could recognise in the invaders a formidable sense of identification with the sufferings of Christ. A crozada, they called the campaign: a ‘crusade’. Yet although the word would in time be applied retrospectively to the great expedition that had been launched by Urban, the crusade against the Albigensians was war of a kind that Christians had never fought before. It was not, as Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons had been, an exercise in territorial expansion; nor was it, in the manner of the crusades that aimed at the liberation of Jerusalem, an armed pilgrimage to a destination of transcendent holiness. Rather, it had as its goal the extirpation of dangerous beliefs. Only blood could wash Christendom clean of the pollution presented to the Christian people by heresy.
Storming Béziers, there were some who worried how the faithful were to be distinguished from heretics. ‘Lord,’ they asked the papal legate, ‘what shall we do?’ ‘Kill them all,’ came the blunt reply. ‘God knows his own.’27 So, at any rate, it was later reported. The story spoke powerfully of the peculiar horror that shadowed the crusaders’ minds. That a heretic might seem at first glance a dutiful Christian, that the diseased might be mistaken for the healthy, that infection might often prove impossible to diagnose, was precisely what gave steel to their resolve. The risk was a chilling one: that they themselves, if they did not scour the pestilence thoroughly from the lands where it had taken a grip, might fall victim to it. The slaughter in Béziers, merciless and total, set the precedent. Even those sheltering in churches fell to the swords of the crusaders; blood darkened the river; fire, incinerating the survivors and bringing the cathedral crashing down in molten ruin, completed the holocaust. ‘Divine vengeance,’ Innocent’s legate reported back to Rome, ‘raged marvellously.’28
Béziers was reduced to corpse-strewn wreckage in a single afternoon. The cycles of slaughter and ruin that it heralded would last two decades. Only in 1229, by which time Innocent had died and Gregory IX was pope, did a treaty signed in Paris finally bring the killing to a close. The war had long outrun the ability of the papacy to control it. Terror had become the order of the day. Garrisons were blinded; prisoners mutilated; women thrown down wells. Innocent, without whose iron-clad sense of mission the crusade would never have been launched, had havered between exultation at the victories won for Christ and agony at the cost. The crusaders had shown fewer qualms. Although, throughout the campaign, the ambition had always been to win back heretics to the Church, its leaders had never regretted their obligation to punish obdurate defiance with death. In 1211, after the capture of the castle of Cassés, bishops had preached to the good men there, and urged them to turn from error. But to no effect. The effort of the bishops had ended in failure. ‘And since they could not convert so much as one heretic, the pilgrims seized them all. And then they burned them. And they did it with the utmost joy.’29