The Council of Bourges, 1225

A Documentary History

Richard Kay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351892247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Never before had France had a church council so large: almost 1000 churchmen assembled at Bourges on 29 November 1225 to authorize a tax on their incomes in support of the Second Albigensian Crusade. About one third of the participants were representatives sent by corporate bodies, in accordance with a new provision of canon law that insisted, for the first time ever, that there should be no taxation without representation. Basing himself on the rich surviving records, Professor Kay paints a skilful portrait of this council: the political manoeuvering by the papal legate to ensure the tax went through, and his use of this highly public occasion to humiliate members of the University of Paris; and, on the other hand, his failure to win a permanent endowment to support the papal bureaucracy, the bishops' effective protests against the pope's threat to diminish their jurisdiction over monasteries, and a subsequent 'taxpayers' revolt' that challenged the validity of the tax. The book also draws out the importance and implications of what took place, highlighting the council's place at the fountainhead of European representative democracy, the impact of the decisions made on the course of the Albigensian Crusade, the reform of monasticism, and the funding of the papal government which was left to rely on stop-gap expedients, such as the sale of indulgences. In addition, the author suggests that the corpus of texts, newly edited from the original manuscripts and with English translation, could be seen as a model for the revision of the conciliar corpus, most of which still remains based on 18th-century scholarship.

CHAPTER 1

THE SECOND ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE
BEFORE 1225

In November 1225, Romanus, the papal legate to France, was trying to induce the king to join the Second Albigensian Crusade. Louis VIII had set two main conditions as the price of his participation: first, he wanted a clear title to the county of Toulouse; second, he wanted a financial subsidy from the French church. The legate was willing to meet both these conditions in the popes name, but if they were to be legally binding, he had to consult the churches of his legation before making the decision. For this reason Romanus summoned representatives from fifteen ecclesiastical provinces to meet with him in council at Bourges on 30 November 1225. To understand the questions that were considered there, we must survey in this chapter the origin and progress of the Second Albigensian Crusade during the decade prior to 1225. We shall pay particular attention to Raymond VII and Amaury de Montfort, the two claimants to the county of Toulouse, who both appeared before the Council of Bourges to be heard and judged. We shall also follow the vacillations of Pope Honorius III, who declared the crusade but could not decide how to use it. Most especially, we must trace in detail his negotiations with the king of France, which culminated in the legation of Romanus and the Council of Bourges.

The Catharist “heresy” was the source of all these problems. In the twelfth century, this Manichaean alternative to Catholic Christianity had spread widely through western Europe. By the end of the century, the center of the infection was clearly in Languedoc, where the city of Albi lent its name to the heretics, who were commonly called “Albigensians.” As the local clergy proved ineffective against the heretics, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) attempted to cure the disease by extraordinary remedies. Competent preachers, such as the future St Dominic, combated the heretics through popular preaching, learned disputation, and exemplary living. Papal legates replaced incompetent prelates and urged the feudal lords of Languedoc to repress the heretics; the least cooperative and most important ones they excommunicated, including the overlord of the area, Raymond VI de St-Gilles, count of Toulouse. Finally, when the pope’s legate was murdered in January 1208, Innocent became convinced that the lords of Languedoc were as incompetent as the local clergy, since they were either unwilling or unable to maintain law and order. Therefore the pope proclaimed a crusade against the Christian land of Languedoc: heresy was to be uprooted, and those local lords who did not cooperate were to lose their lands to the crusaders.¹

Exposition en proie was a powerful incentive. The lure of land quickly brought an army of volunteers from the north of France, who chose as their leader Simon de Montfort. During the first phase of the conquest, Raymond VI of Toulouse cooperated with the crusaders, but papal legates kept raising the price of appeasement until, at the Council of Montpellier in 1211, the demands became ruinous. The count was expected to apprehend heretics and either expel them from his lands or turn them over to the Church, which would often mean that he would have to wage war on his vassals. Moreover, he was held responsible for the maintenance of law and order in his county. Paradoxically, the council also required Raymond to disarm: he was to dismiss the mercenary troops on whom he relied in any war against his vassals, and he was even expected to destroy his own fortifications. Finally, he was deprived of the last vestige of control by the requirement that he join the Templars or Hospitallers and go crusading in the Holy Land.²

Little wonder that Raymond VI refused to comply and began to oppose the crusaders. His resistance was shattered, however, at the battle of Muret (12 September 1213),and Simon took possession of the county of Toulouse. The Roman church reserved the right to divide the spoils, for which purpose the Fourth Lateran Council heard the respective claims of Raymond and Simon and voted by a three-quarters majority in favor of de Montfort (November 1215). In accordance with this judgment, Innocent III passed sentence on 14 December 1215.³ Raymond VI was condemned as incompetent, because he could maintain neither the peace nor the faith in his lands, and therefore was deposed from all his offices and sent to do penance in exile. He was to receive an annual pension as long as he humbly obeyed the Church. Simon de Montfort received all the lands that the crusaders had conquered from the heretics, together with the cities of Toulouse and Montauban, which were identified as the chief centers of the heresy. Unconquered parts of the St-Gilles domains were held in custody by the papacy on the understanding that they were reserved for Raymond’s son and heir, Raymond VII, who was then eighteen, “after he becomes of legal age, if he shows himself worthy to obtain the whole or only a portion, just as shall seem more expedient.”⁴

Although the decree does not specify precisely what lands had been conquered, it would seem that the fiefs that Raymond had held from the French crown were intended, or at least this was how the French crown implemented the pope’s decree, for at Melun on 10 April 1216, King Philip II Augustus invested Simon with them all: “Know that we have received as our liege man our dear and faithful Simon, count of Montfort, for the duchy of Narbonne, the county of Toulouse, the viscounties of Béziers and of Carcassonne; namely, for the fiefs and lands that Raymond, former count of Toulouse, held of us…”⁵ What was left for young Raymond were apparently some of his father’s lands that lay in the Empire, or as the pope put it in December 1217, “a part of the lands your father possessed on this side of the Rhone,” that is, on the east bank.⁶ The papacy did not specify, however, what portion it had reserved for Raymond VII; at most, the possibilities included the marquisate of Provence, the county of Venaissin, and the eastern part of the duchy of Narbonne.⁷

This settlement, which seemed to end the affair, was soon shattered by young Raymond VII, who in May 1216 crossed the Rhone, took the city of Beaucaire on the west bank, and held it all summer against the unsuccessful attacks of Simon de Montfort.⁸ The next year both Church and crown sent slight assistance to Simon. The new pope, an octogenarian who had been consecrated as Honorius III on 25 July 1216, sent Cardinal Bertrand to reestablish peace on 19 January 1217; while Philip Augustus, on his part, sent a hundred knights for six months’ service with Simon in the summer of 1217.⁹ Despite these reinforcements, Montfort suffered a far more crushing blow from another direction. Old Raymond VI had spent the previous year in Spain; now he marched across the Pyrenees with an army of Aragonese and Catalan mercenaries, rallied his old vassals, the counts of Foix and Comminges, and recaptured Toulouse itself on 13 September 1217.¹⁰ Again Simon de Montfort besieged his enemies, this time with more disastrous results, for not only was a ten months’ siege of no avail, but on 25 June 1218 Simon himself was ignominiously killed by a stone that was thrown from a mangonel operated by the women of Toulouse.¹¹ His son, Amaury de Montfort, inherited the county of Toulouse.

The Second Albigensian Crusade: early years, 1218–1221

During the siege of Toulouse, the papacy had supported Simon with an epistolary campaign that was no more effective against the Raymonds than were military operations. No sooner had the news of the capture of Toulouse reached Rome than Honorius directed his legate in Occitania to warn King James of Aragon that he should recall those mercenaries whom Raymond VI had brought from Aragon. When no action was taken, the request was made again on 27 December 1217, this time not only to the king but also to the real power in the kingdom, the regent Don Sancho.¹² Since Raymonds forces continued to be more than a match for Simon’s, we may infer that these demands had no practical effect.

During the three weeks after Christmas 1217, a series of letters issued from the papal chancery in rapid succession. The consuls and citizens of Toulouse, Avignon, Marseilles, and St-Gilles, together with the inhabitants of Tarascon and Beaucaire, were ordered to abandon the cause of Raymond unless they wished to remain excommunicate and suffer exposition en proie. Raymond VII was admonished for imitating his father and for not waiting to inherit the portion that Innocent had reserved for him. The count of Foix, the people of Montpellier, and various rebel barons were enjoined to lay down their arms. Philip Augustus was urged to aid Simon de Montfort, and those who were already supporting Simon were praised and encouraged. The bishops of Occitania were asked to send Simon men and money and to give his enemies neither aid nor counsel.¹³ Finally, on 3 January 1218 the archbishops of Reims, Sens, Tours, Rouen, Bourges, Lyon, and Bordeaux, and their suffragans, were ordered to urge all those who had not taken the Cross for the Holy Land to aid Simon, for which the bishops were authorized to grant a suitable indulgence.¹⁴

Thus Honorius at this point stopped short of renewing the crusade, but the failure of the siege of Toulouse six months later led him to take the final step. On 11 August 1218 the pope repeated the request to the French episcopate that he had made in January, but this time he added a plenary papal indulgence to all who undertook to assist Simon, which was more attractive than the one offered earlier by the French prelates. This new appeal was made not only to the provinces of France listed above, but also to those of Besançon, Tarentaise, Embrun, Aix, Arles, and Vienne—all six of which were later to be represented at Bourges—and of Cologne, Trier, Mainz, and Salzburg, and to the Cistercian abbots as well.¹⁵ In effect, the Second Albigensian Crusade had been declared.

Like its predecessor, this was to be a papal crusade, but with an important difference: Capetian participation. The French crown had not taken part in the First Albigensian Crusade as long as John of England remained a threat to France. Only after John and his allies had been defeated decisively at Bouvines and La Roche au Moine in July 1214 did Philip Augustus authorize a royal expedition into Languedoc, which his heir-apparent, Prince Louis, who had taken the Cross in 1213, finally led in 1215.¹⁶ By then, of course, the crusade was over, so royal intervention had merely helped Simon de Montfort to consolidate his position in the lands he had already conquered.¹⁷ Now in 1218 Honorius hoped that Philip Augustus would lend more timely aid to the Second Albigensian Crusade, and on 12 August the pope exhorted the king to send an army into Albigeois. At this point Honorius still regarded the house of Montfort as the Church’s bulwark against heresy in Occitania; to maintain it, he confirmed the title of Simons son and heir, Amaury de Montfort, to all the lands that Innocent III had assigned to Simon after the Lateran council.¹⁸ Thus the papacy could not attract Philip with an exposition en proie, but other powerful inducements were available if the king would fight as a crusader rather than simply as de Montfort’s suzerain.

Early in September, Honorius wrote two letters that were calculated to involve the king in the crusade. One guaranteed special papal protection for the persons and lands of all who would crusade in Albigeois, but especially for the king and kingdom of France.¹⁹ Previously he had offered them the spiritual privileges of a crusade, notably indulgences, but now he added to this the protected status for crusaders and their families and possessions that was one of the most valued temporal privileges that canon law conferred on a crusader.²⁰ By stating the terms explicitly in writing, Honorius assured the king and his vassals that the usual privileges, temporal as well as spiritual, were available to them in this unusual crusade against Christian lands. This papal guarantee in itself was hardly enough to persuade the king to take the Cross, however; the real incentive was contained in the other letter, dated 5 September 1218, which promised Philip that, if he would undertake the crusade, he would receive, among other financial benefits, half of the tax that Honorius was then collecting from the French clergy.²¹

The idea was a stroke of genius. Even more than most feudal monarchs, Philip Augustus was always eager to supplement his cash income, and the proceeds of the Saladin tithe of 1188 had shown him h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• CHAPTER 1 The Second Albigensian Crusade before 1225
• CHAPTER 2 Cardinal Romanus and his legation to France 1225
• CHAPTER 3 Organization of the council
• CHAPTER 4 Granting the Albigensian tenth
• CHAPTER 5 Collecting the Albigensian tenth
• CHAPTER 6 A proposal for financing papal government
• CHAPTER 7 The rejection of fiscal reform
• CHAPTER 8 Monastic reform and repentant masters
• Afterword
• Documents
• List of documents
• Introduction to the documents
• SECTION 1 Narrative accounts of the council
• SECTION 2 Franco-papal negotiations preliminary to the crusade
• SECTION 3 Collection of the tenth for the crusade
• SECTION 4 Proposals for financing papal government
• SECTION 5 Monastic provincial chapters
• SECTION 6 Miscellaneous
• Bibliography
• Index