The Friar of Carcassonne Read Online Free

at the dawn of the fourteenth century, looked to Paris, not to Rome, for authority. The invigorated French monarchy, its law courts, officers, and tax collectors mushrooming throughout the thirteenth century so as to consolidate secular power, stood squarely in the way of the Church by Bernard’s day. It might be just as cruel and oppressive, but it was separate. If he could not fight the Church from within, he felt he could fight it from without. Brother Bernard understood his times—he seized the cudgel of the monarchy to beat back the brutality of the inquisition.
    Aided by the king’s men and by a citizenry whipped into a frenzy by his preaching, Bernard put his convictions into practice in a very public way. In Carcassonne at the turn of the century, Bernard comprehensively sabotaged the inquisition, which he believed not only oppressive but also rotten to the core. At the same time, he stymied the powerful bishop of a neighboring town, Albi, who had used the threat of prosecution to extort money from his rich parishioners. Bernard’s greatest triumph came in 1303, when he convinced the royal constabulary to storm the jail of the inquisition in Carcassonne and remove its long-suffering prisoners. Truly a singular moment in the Middle Ages, the freeing of the men from the Wall, as the prison was known, fired once again the imagination of Jean-Paul Laurens, whose rendering of the event now hangs in the city hall of Carcassonne. For these activities, Bernard won the adulation of townsfolk fed up with living in fear—and incurred the white-hot wrath of the Dominicans, the other great brotherhood of friars, whose members staffed the inquisition in Languedoc. In the days of Bernard’s supremacy, these same friars were openly mocked in the streets of Carcassonne, as townspeople smashed in the windows of their church and made the raucous cawing sound of the crow on seeing them approach.
    But the French monarchy, for reasons of state, eventually turned against the Franciscan; Bernard lost his cudgel. Amazingly, he attempted to find another one—by engaging in a seditious attempt to detach Languedoc from France and attach it to another kingdom. Miraculously escaping with his life in this unsuccessful venture, he then became a leader of the Spiritual Franciscans, a party of the brotherhood intent on hewing to the dictates of poverty preached by Francis of Assisi—even if that meant disobeying the papacy. The pope, not just the king, became angry with Bernard, and his purist Franciscan allies were declared heretics.
    This last twist in his story contains an irony, for against all of Bernard’s high-risk activities looms the ghostly presence of the Cathars, heretics par excellence. A pacific but heterodox Christian credo, Catharism had been mercilessly crushed by the forces of codifying orthodoxy in the thirteenth century, although courageous sympathizers of the creed still trod the byways of Languedoc in Bernard’s day. Indeed, as the flamboyant Franciscan had driven the Dominican inquisitors literally to distraction, the Cathars were able to regroup stealthily in Languedoc for one final flowering of their faith.
    A personal itinerary this perilous usually ends badly. The story of Bernard Délicieux is, sadly, no exception. Arrested in Avignon on the pope’s order in 1317, he was tried in Carcassonne two years later. With so many enemies made, it is hardly surprising that there were more than one hundred counts listed in the docket of charges brought against him. These can be grouped together in four specific areas: obstructing the inquisition, high treason, adherence to heretical notions of poverty, and the murder of a pope through black magic. Délicieux was interrogated, cross-examined, tortured, broken; dozens of witnesses testified against him; and he was sentenced to a harsh solitary confinement that he did not long survive. The inquisition ground on, untrammeled henceforth by any