Read Online The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea - Free Book Online

imprisoned: “Wretches, why do you not confess so that you can be set free? Unless you confess, you will never leave this place, nor escape its torments!” To which the prisoners reply: “My lord, what do we say? What should we say?” And the jailers reply, “You should say this and this.” And what they suggest is false and evil; and those wretches repeat what they have been told, although it is false, so that they may avoid the continuous torments to which they are subject. Yet in the end they perish, and cause innocent people to perish as well.
    The authors of the petition had every interest in painting as bleak a picture as possible of the inquisition at Carcassonne. Yet the document speaks eloquently across the centuries of the indignation felt by educated people at the excesses of fanatical persecution. To brook the power of the inquisitor took courage—and Brother Jean Galand was a formidable figure, having spent more than a decade actively torturing and imprisoning people. Of the trio of lawyers behind these appeals, two would spend years in the Wall. The third, Raimond Costa, possessed survival skills so astonishing that he later became the bishop of Elne, near the Kingdom of Majorca’s capital, Perpignan, and thus was beyond the jurisdiction of the inquisitors in France. In this extraordinary environment of accusation and antipathy, defenders of Galand claimed that the appellants had tried to steal an inquisition register out of fear that they had been named as heretics.
    Opinion is divided over whether this actually happened, but given the importance the registers would assume in stoking la rage carcasson-naise in later years, the story cannot be discounted entirely. Certainly if their names appeared in the register, the would-be thieves had good reason to make it disappear—or at least find out what had been alleged about them. In any event, the theft did not occur. The accusers’ story held that when the bribed clerk of the inquisition had let agents of the Carcassonne agitation into Galand’s private chambers, they discovered, to their dismay, that the inquisitor, away on business in Toulouse, had shrewdly taken with him the key to the strongbox that contained the register. Even if not true, that friends of the inquisition could credit their foes with such audacity reveals how toxic an atmosphere existed between the citizens of the Bourg and the inquisitors of the Cité.

    Events in the following decade are as murky as Carcassonne’s cri de coeur to the king is clear. The monarch eventually had the citizens’ charges investigated and, in 1291, instructed his seneschal (his governor in the south) to have no further truck with the inquisitors. No royal official was to arrest anyone at the inquisitor’s behest, except in cases of notorious heretics, such as a Good Man or Good Woman whose spiritual deviancy was common knowledge and established beyond a reasonable doubt. Agents of the king were to judge whether a suspect should be apprehended—the Dominicans were not to be taken at their word. Young Philip, his dramatic conflict with the pope still in the future, no doubt wished to appease his angry subjects. In keeping with the course he charted throughout his reign, he felt no qualms at swatting away buzzing intermediary irritants—in this instance, the Dominicans—that interfered with the direct relation he sought to establish between ruler and ruled. Philip did not want the inquisition halted—heresy had to be stamped out—but neither did he want the Dominicans sowing havoc in his kingdom.
    The whip hand now lay in the hands of the king’s men in the south, many of whom hailed from the region (although the seneschal was usually from the north). A few came from families tainted with heretical connections, in a much more direct way than the heretical notoriety of their birthplace, as was the case with the powerful Guillaume de Nogaret.