The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea Page B

twentieth century. Where Saisset departed from the norm was in openly hectoring the local lords of his region to ally with the Kingdom of Aragon and secede from France. This was treason. Many of the other customary medieval accusations of moral turpitude—heresy, simony, sorcery, fornication, and blasphemy—came to be leveled at Saisset, but there can be no doubt that his talk of secession was what first caused the king to sit up and take note.
    In 1301, Philip ordered two of his loyal servants, Jean de Picquigny and Richard Leneveu, to go to the south and investigate the matter. They were appointed as enquêteurs - réformateurs , posts that gave them authority greater than the seneschal’s. Leneveu was an important prelate of Normandy; Picquigny, a nobleman and experienced royal magistrate ( vidame ) from the great Picard center of Amiens. These men, viceroys in a sense, were precisely the type of grandee Bernard Délicieux had to meet in order to amplify his campaign against the inquisition. Bernard Saisset’s troublemaking had given the mischief-maker of Carcassonne the opening he needed.
    The post held by Picquigny and Leneveu was a Capetian innovation, having originated during the reign of the saintly and punctilious Louis IX. The first enquêteurs had been Franciscan friars. They had shaped the office and its duties—making sure the prerogatives of the king remained free from encroachment, seeking the cause of complaints from his subjects and working to redress them, and ensuring that the king’s agents in the provinces were fulfilling their duties in an appropriate manner. Given such sweeping powers, the opportunity for all kinds of personal treasure hunting was boundless; fortunately for Philip, and for the people of the south, the pair he sent to Languedoc in 1301 seems to have been irreproachable.
    By the middle of that year, Picquigny and Leneveu had found ample grounds to charge Saisset with high treason. They ordered him arrested and, in exercising secular authority over a man of the Church, set off the tremendous struggle between king and pope that culminated in the Outrage of Anagni. While adding further piquancy to the relation between Crown and Church that forms a backdrop to Délicieux’s agitation, the fate of Saisset matters less than the acquaintances made by the men sent to investigate him. For Leneveu and Picquigny took up with dangerous company.
    Leneveu, the Norman priest, hovered in the wings of the drama told two decades later at Délicieux’s trial, whereas Picquigny played a role front and center. Multiple testimonies speak with one voice: the great magistrate from Amiens fell under the spell of the friar of Carcassonne. Starting in the summer of 1301, Picquigny sought Bernard’s counsel on all of his major decisions. As he was a man of the world accustomed to wielding authority, his allegiance to the friar bespeaks the force of character Bernard Délicieux possessed. To have won over such a great man, the friar had to have been a formidable presence, and not just when he mounted the pulpit. His was a personality that impressed the great and the small alike and inspired affection and admiration, as is abundantly clear from the course of his career.
    Picquigny’s principal character trait seems to have been loyalty. He would stick with Délicieux throughout the turbulent years to come, but, above all else, he was a truly faithful courtier of King Philip’s, keenly interested in keeping Languedoc equally faithful to their monarch. Men of the south, he had seen in the matter of Bernard Saisset, harbored no great love for the men of the north. To keep the kingdom united, prosperous, and loyal, the people of the Midi had to know that the king’s justice was impartial and fair.
    This was an echo of the argument Bernard Délicieux would advance repeatedly to Picquigny against the Dominican inquisitors: they were untrustworthy, they abused