Tuesday 30th June 2015
Massacre At Beziers - 1209
Eight hundred years ago, in an opulent monastery atop a tree-covered
cliff, a brutal, barbarous massacre took place, unbefitting of the glorious
scene otherwise painted by this picturesque French town.
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| The Cathedral de Saint Nazaire, the site of the massacre. |
In the early thirteenth
century, Catharism was the majority religion of the Languedoc region in
Southern France. This faith was extremely similar to that of the Catholic
Church, whose beliefs would dominate Europe until the Lutheran uprisings of the
sixteenth century. Across Languedoc, Cathars and Catholics lived in harmony and
a great number of the latter sympathised with the former. It was a near utopian
society – the Cathars were staunch supporters in egalitarianism and saw men and
women as equal, an unconventional and radical view for that era. Their religion
also permitted euthanasia, a topic of vigorous debate even in the modern world,
and encouraged vegetarianism due to their belief that, after death, man could
be reincarnated as either a human or an animal depending on whether he had been
a good servant of God in his past life.
Yet these beliefs
infuriated the Catholic Church. Their laws dictated that men were superior to
women and that meat was a necessary requirement for religious sacrifices, after
which it was to be eaten. It is the view of many modern historians that the
Catholic Church’s adamant view of the Cathars, and their sympathisers, as
heretics was largely due to the economic losses they had suffered when Cathars
refused to pay church tithes to them. Anti-Cathar propaganda became widespread
across the Holy Roman Empire and also France, its vassal. However, such
campaigns had little affect in the Languedoc region, where the Cathars remained
accepted by the minority of non-Cathar-Catholics.
After several years
of war through propaganda, Pope Innocent III and the Catholic Church eventually
found a valid reason for the invasion of Languedoc when, on the fifteenth of
January 1208, their missionary, Pierre de Castelnau, was assassinated on the
orders of Raymond, Count of Toulouse, who supported Catharism in his lands in
Languedoc. Thus, Innocent ordered the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars
of Languedoc, which inherited its name from the predominantly Catharist city of
Albi to the North of Languedoc.
Early in 1209,
the crusaders amassed at Lyon, numbering in the region of 10,000 men. They
marched on Languedoc, capturing several small villages in the East of the
region. On the twenty-first of July, the crusaders arrived at the town of
Beziers, in the South of the region. Terrified by the insurmountable might of
the army camped outside his town, Renaud de Montpeyroux, the Bishop of Beziers,
sued for peace. In response, Arnaud Amalric, a papal subordinate who was
commanding the Crusade, presented him with a written list of two hundred and
twenty two names, consisting mostly of prominent Cathars but also encompassing
the town’s leaders, who had permitted its practice.
When de Montperyoux called a council to the cathedral, the offer was
refused on account of the loss society would sustain at the abolishment of
Catharism. At that point, the Bishop pleaded with the town’s Catholic
population, imploring them to accompany him out of Beziers and to safety. To
this, all but a small number refused – unwilling to abandon their brethren at a
time of such despair.
On the
twenty second of July, as the Crusader army prepared for their siege, some
civilians from Beziers made brief excursions to attack the routiers – foot soldiers
– who were assembling siege towers by their walls. Enraged by these attacks and
also their dispensability in the eyes of the Crusader knights and papal
missionaries who led the campaign, the routiers broke down the town gates and
flooded onto the sparsely defended ramparts.
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| Arnaud Amalric, who ordered the slaughter at Beziers. |
Within
the city, there was untold panic and the chaos that ensued led to many deaths,
as men and women attempting to protect their treasured possessions from the
fevered, looting routiers were impaled on spears and their children were
murdered. Having once been a quaint, peaceful town, Beziers had become the
physical embodiment of both chaos and death. Corpses littered the streets and
women were raped and ravaged. Cathars and Catholics alike sought refuge in the
grand Cathedral de Saint Nazaire, where, by their own laws, the crusaders could
not harm them. However, when the routiers demanded orders, Amalric allegedly
replied “Kill them all, God will know His own.” This referred to the clergy’s
belief that Catholics who sympathised with Cathars were impure and unworthy of
their distinguished faith.
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| The Massacre at the cathedral. Note Amalric in the left of the painting. |
With that one, barbaric command, nearly fifteen thousand people, were
slaughtered in a religious purge that would endure for twenty years and claim
the lives of a further nine 985,000 lives. The abhorrent massacre at Beziers is
a stark reminder of the atrocities committed in the name of religion – even when not necessary.
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