The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea Page A

BUNDLE OF BIRCH CUTTINGS came whistling through the hush and landed with a crack on pale white flesh. The sharp twigs came down again and again. The crowds surging up the steps of the church at St. Gilles watched in fascination as their lord was scourged like the meanest of villeins. It was always a pleasure in the caste-conscious Middle Ages to watch the high and mighty humbled in public. Stripped to the waist and chafed by a rough cord around his neck, Count Raymond swore over sacred relics his undying obedience to the pope and his legates. The twenty or so bishops in attendance, like the northern chronicler who recorded the episode, must have been pleased to see Raymond so thoroughly humiliated.
    Count Raymond, now in his early fifties, had given his consent to this public scourging in his ancestral fief. This day—June 18, 1209—may have been an agony of mortification, but it was also the culmination of eighteen months of frantic diplomacy.Ever since Peter of Castelnau was felled by an assassin, Raymond had maintained that he was innocent of the crime. For him to have ordered one of his men to kill the legate, he claimed, would have been a blunder of monumental proportions, even if he had had angry words with Peter in that fateful January of the year previous. All his life Raymond had avoided confrontation, preferring to defer promises and drown disagreement in a murky pool of diplomacy. Had he wished to murder Peter, he insisted, he certainly wouldn’t have had it done a stone’s throw from his own home. Besides, the poisonous monk had made many enemies in Languedoc.
    Still, Raymond was the prime suspect in what would remain an unsolved murder mystery. It would have upset the designs of too many people not to have the crime pinned on the count. Furthermore, his pretensions to diplomatic genius were undermined when he sent Raymond of Rabastens as one of his advocates to Rome. Rabastens, the spendthrift who had reduced the diocese of Toulouse to indigence, would have been a noxious presence to Innocent III—the pope had expended five years of effort to oust Rabastens in favor of Fulk.
    Not that Rabastens stood much of a chance anyway. From the moment the news of Peter’s murder reached Rome, the curia was crying for Count Raymond’s hide. On March 10, 1208, Innocent called for a crusade, which was to be preached by the wrathful Arnold Amaury and the eloquent Fulk. The two white-robed furies ranged across Europe, asking for armed support in crushing the Cathars. The kings and emperors of the north equivocated. They were too busy fighting among themselves to accede to this proposed breach of feudal custom. They had no quarrel with their vassals in Languedoc; why should they take up arms against them? But Innocent, Arnold, and Fulk insistedthroughout 1208, bombarding the lords with letters and exhortations. Finally, King Philip Augustus of France relented and released his most powerful barons to go and make war on their southern kinsmen. Nobles whose names are unfamiliar now—Eudes, duke of Burgundy; Hervé, count of Nevers; Peter of Courtenay, count of Auxerre—then commanded respect and awe because of their vast estates and the mass of mounted knights they could field. These nobles, accompanied by tens of thousands of footsoldiers, were heading south as Raymond underwent his degrading penance.
    Raymond’s scourge was Milo, a curial notary who had been named the new papal legate. So great was the crush of onlookers that the two principals, penitent and punisher, had difficulty leaving the square to regain the sanctuary of the church. They elbowed their way past the crowd and squeezed through a portal in the facade. The pairing of the two men owed nothing to chance. It was Raymond who had been instrumental in Milo’s promotion—in his rush to come to terms, he wrote to Innocent that he was willing to negotiate with anyone except Arnold Amaury. Even so, the conditions that Raymond accepted at Milo’s prompting were