The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea Page B

unusually harsh: He had to give up all rights over any religious foundation in his domains, hand over seven of his castles, never again use mercenaries, let the legates pass judgment on any complaint filed against him, apologize to all the bishops and abbots he had offended, dismiss all Jews from his service, and treat as heretics all those who were designated as such by the Church.
    And he had to submit to this day of disparagement, half-naked before his people, beaten by the clergy, for a crime he continued to deny having ordered and for which he had not been tried, much less convicted. He was indeed being treated as if hewere a latter-day Henry Plantagenet atoning for the murder of Thomas Becket, a comparison that escaped no one, least of all Pope Innocent, who remembered his boyhood in the Campagna.
    When the service in the church of St. Gilles came to an end, Raymond was at last free to go. Only he could not; the dense throng of curiosity seekers in the nave would have made any attempted departure out the front door a gauntlet of further shame. The count was hustled down a stone stairway leading from the altar to the crypt, out of which there was a subterranean exit. The priests forced Raymond to make one last stop—at the grave of Peter of Castelnau. This was their final reproach to the nobleman whom they had at last bludgeoned into obedience. Raymond stood, in the words of the chronicler, “naked in front of the tomb of the blessed martyr … whom he had assassinated. This was God’s just judgment. He was forced to pay respect to the body of him he had scorned during life.”
    Fourteen days later, the count of Toulouse traveled north with his knights to join up with the crusading army as it descended the left bank of the Rhône. He was a Saint Gilles, of the family that stormed Jerusalem in 1099. Raymond had announced after his scourging that he wanted to take up the cross, hound the heretics, punish all those who sheltered the Perfect. He did not say that all he really wanted was to make sure that the crusaders stayed off his lands; they could not very well harm the possessions of one of their own. Events would show that the count of Toulouse had not changed in the slightest and that his aversion to persecution remained strong. Raymond the penitent was, in fact, unrepentant.

     
    Trebuchet, mangonel, chatte, chain mail, destrier, gonfalon, halberd, crossbow, pike, ballista—the old words and weapons of warfare transmit a blunt message of ancestral trauma that neither rarity nor foreign origin can soften. The army that Raymond rode out to meet, at the river town of Valence, bore these awful weapons in its baggage, ready to shout down the debates of Dominic and the Cathars with the unanswerable argument of force. The monstrously large host, which had assembled in Lyons, stretched out for four miles on the march, its supplies bobbing alongside it on a flotilla of barges. There would be few sights more terrifying in all of the thirteenth century.
    Like all great feudal armies, the crusading force of 1209 counted among its multitude hundreds of mounted knights, the armor-clad killers at the apex of the belligerent pyramid. Nobles instructed since boyhood in the hack and chop of hard-ridden collision, the knights were the commanders and, paradoxically, the main participants of any pitched battle. Each, according to his means, came with a retinue of grooms, handlers, infantrymen, and archers, whose loyalty to their lord outweighed any other consideration.
    Less honor bound were the bands of
routiers
(mercenaries) that accompanied the army. Some of these routiers were mounted brigands, others foot soldiers in the cause of pillage. All were the shock troops of the feudal fighting machine, seconded by the unruly
ribauds
(whence the English word
ribald
), the unwashed mass of ragtag adventure seekers with nothing to lose and nothing to hold sacred. It is commonly thought that medieval society was an unmoving, if unpleasant,