The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea

grievance.
    Nicolas d’Abbeville cut him off and told the Franciscans they were not welcome and that they had no business being there. He quit the room abruptly, leaving the friars to be evicted from the premises by Foulques. This rudeness was, significantly, grounds for appeal—the irregular termination of the meeting needed to be explained, the proprieties of procedure respected.
    The Franciscans returned to their convent and conferred with their fellow friars. No doubt sympathetic lawyers were summoned from the Bourg for advice. Some time toward day’s end, Bernard and his companions left the lower town and made their way back up to the Cité. They knocked on the door of the Holy Office. It swung open and Foulques de Saint-Georges stood before them. They asked him for a transcript of their interview with the inquisitors earlier in the day. Foulques informed them that no such document would be drawn up and that they would not be allowed inside again. He shut the door in their faces.
    The next step required the writing of a formal, notarized appeal regarding the inquisitor’s actions at the meeting and the charges against Castel Fabre. A duly empowered notary was fetched from another town. No such official in Carcassonne had sufficient backbone to brave the ire of the inquisitor. Bernard dictated, scribes transcribed, the notary awaited with his seal. Copies were made for distribution.
    Bernard Délicieux stated what had been whispered for years: Registers X and XI contained outright fabrications. The registers, the appeal argued, had been used and abused thoroughly, to cow the poor people of Carcassonne and its countryside into submission and to imprison and torment the innocent. Even for one as headstrong as Bernard, this was a stunning accusation to make in public, given the aura of menace surrounding the Holy Office.
    In the case of the late Castel Fabre, the appeal maintained that the two men alleged to have hereticated him, Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès, never existed. They were men without a past, a trade, a residence, having left no trace of their passage. They had been invented by the inquisition to bring down Christian men and women with concocted tales of mysterious Good Men moving wraith-like through the vineyards to spread the sickness of heresy. If they had ever, or still, existed, Bernard demanded the inquisitors show proof.
    At his trial two decades later, Bernard repeated the charges to the closed faces of the judges in front of him. Two former supporters, called as hostile witnesses, remembered Bernard saying at the time of the Castel Fabre incident that the inquisition always found those who adored the heretics and never the heretics who had been adored. Clearly, the Franciscan believed that the registers contained a mountain of lies.
    The appeal was completed after a few days of work, and Bernard and his entourage trooped back up to the Cité and knocked on the inquisitors’ door. This time there was no answer. That had been foreseen, for a hammer was produced and Bernard Délicieux, like Martin Luther two centuries later, nailed his appeal to the door. He then addressed the crowd that had gathered, at last using his tremendous gifts of oratory in the service of a wider cause. The problem, Bernard told his listeners, was no longer just the scandalous prosecution of Castel Fabre, but the scandalous abuse of power by the Dominicans of Carcassonne.
    The inquisitor’s masterstroke had turned out to be a blunder. Now everyone in the Cité and the Bourg, from the seneschal on down, had reason to suspect the inquisition. Bravery of the type displayed by Délicieux was unlikely to have been spurred by insincerity or frivolous gamesmanship, and it would resonate as far as Paris and Rome.
    The Franciscans returned to their residence in the Bourg, leaving their appeal to flutter in the hot summer wind. There was a reason no one had answered the door—the inquisitors had