Crusade, Capitalism, and Colonialism in Medieval France
By: Andrew Thornebrooke
Tags: Christianity, Politics, Travel, History, Education

In the heat of late July 1209, the entire population of Beziers, in what is now Southern France, was slaughtered. Their homes were burnt to the ground and their churches ransacked and looted. The scene is often depicted in grim light, and rightfully so, given the massacre’s contested status as a genocide. Beziers’ demise, along with numerous other accounts of extreme violence and the deliberate depopulation of the region we now call Occitania during the Albigensian Crusades, are often marked as a stain on the dark history of religious violence. Too little attention has been paid, however, to the actual relationship between Christian holy war and the events of the first year of the military campaign in Occitania.

The worst atrocities of the Albigensian Crusades were not a natural corollary of medieval holy war. Rather, the motives driving the French crusaders during the most vicious parts of the war were economic and colonial in nature, and the legitimately religious violence of the conflict was largely confined to ritualistic executions of known heretics.

The big guy probably wasn’t what was on the mind of the French crusaders in Occitania. Source.

With this in mind, I have divided this article into three sections. The first provides a brief account of the military actions taken by the crusading army during the first year of the long crusade. In the second, I examine some prevalent interpretations of the crusade in contemporary scholarship, as well as the irreligious and colonial nature of the violence carried out during the war. Finally, I examine the inherent problems that arise by categorizing the affair as a colonial effort and provide some potential solutions, as well as incorporate theories of colonialism and post-colonial critique to craft a cohesive narrative that supports an understanding of Albigensian military violence within a religious context, and yet devoid of religious meaning. It is my hope that in doing so a more nuanced picture of the Albigensian Crusades may emerge that casts the conflict in its properly colonial and proto-nationalist light.

*1*

In the Spring of 1209, after a decade of assessing a worsening religious situation in Occitania, exchanging letters with the lords of the regions, and the assassination of papal legate Pierre de Castelnau, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade into the region. It would be the first sanctioned holy war in Western Europe, as well as the first to target Christians. At the Council of Avignon, the pope excommunicated Count Raimon VI of Toulouse, and the entire population of the city, including two former papal legates, four archbishops, and twenty bishops, for their alleged failure to expel members of the Cathar heresy from the city.

On March 1st of the same year, Innocent appointed a Master Milo to serve alongside Arnaud Amaury as legatus a latere for the crusade. King Philip Augustus was personally requested to lead the crusade by Innocent III, but Philip declined that either he or his son should personally campaign to the south, given the route between Angevin and German Imperial lands that they would need to take, replying that he was “beset on his flanks by two great and dangerous lions.” In his stead, the barons of France were free to lead themselves on campaign.

By June, the lords of France had mustered in Lyons one of the largest, if rather unstructured, armies in memory. Around 30,000 strong, the crusading army that set out for Occitania was nearly twice the strength as the army that had embarked on the Fourth Crusade only six years earlier. Unhindered by the need for oceanic transport and with ample rivers to carry their equipment and supplies by ship, the army began its march south through the Rhone valley eager for spoils.

Between June and August, the crusading army moved throughout Occitania in an unceasing war of attrition and accumulation. The crusader army destroyed Gontaud and sacked Tonneins even though no heretics had ever been reported in the towns. Thereafter, following a brief siege, the already quarreling secular lords allowed Casseneuil to escape total destruction in exchange for loot and the giving up of Cathar citizens to be burned at the stake. In the face of such violence, Villamur, the entire Jewish population of Beziers, and some dozen other castra and towns fled their homes toward the well-fortified Carcassonne, with many burning their homes behind them.

The rape of Carcassonne is still relived in Occitan art. Source.

Toward the end of July, the army encamped outside the walls of Beziers, preparing itself for a potentially long siege, as the population had been warned of their coming. What began as a confusing skirmish amidst poor crusaders and archers along the walls of the town quickly erupted, however, into a full-scale battle. At some point during this confusion, a group of pilgrims forced their way into the city and the gates were opened. What ensued was the wanton slaughter of everyone in the city. ( There is a great confusion in contemporary scholarship as to what, exactly, happened during the massacre of Beziers. None of the narrative sources agree to every detail.) Caesarius of Heisterbach, twenty years later, would write that upon witnessing the slaughter Arnaud Amaury spoke:

“Kill them all. For the Lord will acknowledge his own.” ( Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.)

By August, Raimon VI of Toulouse, the original target of the campaign, had sworn himself to the cause of the crusade, and diverted the unspent military aggression of the army to the land of his nephew and rival. After camping in Montpellier, the army then marched within six kilometers of Narbonne, accepting the viscount Aimery III’s pledge of total military and financial support in exchange for not attacking the city. As a result, the people of Narbonne and a dozen castra and towns under its suzerainty who had not fled were pressed into military service. By the end of August, the crusaders had successfully cut off the water supply to Carcassonne, which harboured not only its own populace but also a large portion of the refugees from across Occitania. The crusaders’ terms for the city were simple and brutal: the people would be allowed to live, but must emigrate from the city en masse, wholly naked “bearing nothing but their sins.” The city itself, and everything left inside, would be given to the soon-to-be appointed commander of the army, Simon de Montfort.

*2*

Interpretations of the extreme violence account for at the onset of the Albigensian Crusades is as varied as the historians who study it. From accounts positing that the massacre of Beziers was an outright genocide, to more traditional military histories which sterilize the cultural shock of the mass depopulation of Occitan natives, the historiographical tradition runs the gamut. For the purposes of this study, I will largely gloss over the unceasing debate about the exact figures of losses at Beziers and in the Albigensian Crusades as a whole, as there are no reliable firsthand accounts of such as there had been with previous expeditions such as the Fourth Crusade. What I shall focus on is how that violence is interpreted within the sources, and how contemporary historiography misses the nuance of differentiating holy war from religious violence.

The most common trend in traditional historiography is to hold the institution of the papacy as being directly responsible on all accounts for the violence inflicted throughout the Occitan conflict. I do not wish to argue against the thrust of such a stance per se (obviously the crusade was a religious action pursued with the backing of an institutionalized Catholic power) but rather, to highlight that, although the framework of crusade allows us to easily grasp the violence as being broadly religious, the motives and actions of the crusaders perpetrating the violence were not generally taken for religious reasons. Instead, I posit that their actions were based largely in economic and colonial concerns, and later given religious overture by the narrative sources.

The well-fortified south of France was only overcome due to the disunified nature of Occitania’s politics. Source.

One useful way to present this concept is via comparison of violence done by the crusading army to soldiers and townsfolk with that done to those explicitly stated to be heretics. In the case of the terms agreed upon at Casseneuil, as is true of most direct accounts of captured heretics, the captured Cathars are overseen by a Catholic bishop or legate until their systematic and ritual execution by burning. Juxtaposed to this is the portrayal of chaotic battle, looting, and murder attributed by the narrative sources at the massacre of Beziers, of which every narrative account is at least moderately ashamed and abashedly adds that the crusade leadership could not have been involved in systemically pursuing such actions. This is not, of course, to downplay the atrocities of the crusade. I aim here rather to note that violence committed by a crusader does not, necessarily, denote a crusading act.

To further contextualize the violence done as a colonial effort, it is important to note how acutely aware the crusaders and Occitans were of the regional depopulation and repopulation that the crusade brought about. William of Tudela recollection of the fall of Carcassonne states “all the inhabitants of that district fled… not one local man remained there, great or small.” And again, of Beziers, he notes the destruction of the native populace, saying the crusaders “burned the women and children, old men and young, and the clerks vested and singing mass there in the church.” Interestingly, Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay’s account of the siege of Carcassonne explicitly narrates that the crusaders wished to take the infrastructure of the city for their own purposes and people:

Bearing in mind that if matters turned out as they had at Beziers, the city would be destroyed. All the goods in it would be ruined and whoever was put in charge of the territory would have no means of maintaining the knights and sergeants needed to garrison it… It was ruled that all the inhabitants should come out of the city naked and then be allowed to go free… and all the contents of the city would be kept for the designated future lord of the territory, for the purpose outlined above.

Given these accounts or depopulation and repopulation, I believe we should take into serious consideration the possibility that the Albigensian Crusade was not an endeavor to root out heretical sects and plant papal-backed institutions. Rather, we should examine the crusade as a French royal conquest turned colonial occupation. It is true that the war was sponsored as holy war, and even one of the first to be fought utilizing a legitimate papal institution for its propaganda and logistics, but the goals of those fighting in the war, both French and Occitan, were quite removed from any pious notions of maintaining the unity of the church. Whether it be the French, who after 1209 would be composed almost entirely of poor or out-of-favor knights fighting for wealth and lands (a pre-reconquista, if you will), or the Occitans, who viewed the “French invader” as a greater threat than heresy ever was. The crusade was about land, wealth, and cultural dominance of the region. It was a campaign which sought and succeeded in making the independent powers of Occitania “forcibly to be French.”

*3*

Having given a brief history of the campaign season of 1209, and its areligious causes and methods, I shall now implement a colonial interpretation of the crusade. I have already established that the violence of the war was in and of itself not religious, and that the motives of the crusaders and citizens acting in the crusade were largely secular, which is to say economic. There remains, however, a number of issues to be addressed in labeling the crusade as a colonial affair. Namely the conceptual classification of what makes a movement “colonial,” how it differs from outright conquest, and how to establish such a phenomenon in the Middle Ages, when so much modern scholarship emphasizes later periods.

Though frequently called “Cathar” castles. There is no evidence of the castles and churches dotting southern France being associated with the Cathar movement. Source.

One key problem in pursuing a study such as this is the methodological quandary of how to define colonialism. Perhaps the most obvious complication with the insertion of the dreaded C word into medieval studies is the Marxist inspired habit present in much of post-colonial critique that asserts colonialism is necessarily a capitalist enterprise, and that capitalism did not exist within the Middle Ages. There are two arguments against this stance that I shall put forward now.

The first argument is that, despite traditional historiographic trends, capitalism did exist within the pre-modern world. Occitania is a prime example of this. The loosely allied, city-based powers of the region, from Toulouse to Narbonne to Montpellier to Marseilles, all held economic groups in common as political power bases. Perhaps the best sources for this are the cartularies of Montpellier and Beziers, which document ad nauseam the political sway of the merchant class, whose wealth afforded them places in the regional city councils. Additionally, the merchants of the wealthy coastal cities were constantly engaged in trade and political maneuvering for greater control of privately owned business interests with other competitors in city states such as Genoa and Venice. The nobles of the region, while acting to assert some regulation on commerce through establishing notariats and guilds, relied on the wealth and power of these merchant assemblies to pursue their own quests for influence. In short, Occitania housed some of the wealthiest, privately owned, business powers on the Mediterranean, and its primary basis for political and military stability was economic.

Cash was king in the thirteenth century too.

The second argument is a methodological one. I assert that colonialism, though certainly based in an economic foundation, is not dependent upon the existence of modern capitalism, nor on intercontinental exploitation of an entirely foreign other. The subjugated other need not conform to the traditional standard of exotic oriental to be oppressed and exploited for economic gain, and derided through Said’s “discourse of domination.” I do not, of course, wish to erode the noble strides being made in the field of post-colonial discourse which examine the relationship of interracial or intercontinental exploitation. Rather, my goal is to unbind the study of such phenomena from the unscientific nineteenth-century notions of race and culture which so much of the field seems to inherit. Colonial exploitation, in the present or the past, is always an intersectional endeavor, and need not be confined to the study of India or Palestine.

These two arguments raise interesting questions as to the way modern scholarship has approached both the Albigensian Crusades and the collective enterprise of colonialism through the ages. Occitania was a region that derived its political power through economic capital, and yet it was subjugated and exploited by a society far more traditionally feudal in its organization. In this regard, it appears to go against the grain of popular narratives which assert capitalist forces inherently fulfill the role of dominator in any colonialist endeavor. Such narratives largely ignore the long history of loot, and while I do not mean to conflate the act of pillaging with the processes of colonialism here, it does need to be stated that the French nobility actively sought to exploit the resources of the largely capitalist Occitan region, and to displace the native population and culture with its own social structure and cultural norms.

A superb framework to utilize in this regard is Homi Bhabha’s hybridity. Hybridity rightfully eschews the traditional and reductionist framework of separate and distinct mass cultures, employing instead an understanding of complex systems of interaction and development. Using this framework it is possible to conceptualize of France and Occitania not as monolithic entities which objectively existed in reality but, rather, as amalgamations of linguistic, social, and cultural norms, which were in constant interaction with one another, and thus constantly changing one another. To this end, the Albigensian Campaigns, while an effort to increase the influence of the individual French lords and their retainers, should be seen as an intercultural process of development. This development persists today in Southern France, where residents of cities such as Marseilles and Narbonne are often in contested status with Parisians as to what constitutes their Frenchness.

It’s a pity that Marx has to come up even in medieval studies. Source.

With this framework in place, it becomes clear that the role of religion in the crusade was much more ornamental than meaningful. Yes, it provided a narrative framing for the explanation of events after the fact, but rarely served as justification for planned events. The primary role of religion during the conflict was in the hybridization of Occitan and French norms regarding the proper place of secular rulers to determine how to address heresy. Though the French had often worked closely with the papacy, the regional powers of Occitania held the interfaith ongoings of their cities and how to handle them as being the purview of local authorities. In this regard the two sides may be more similar than initially thought, as Philip Augustus himself found complaint with the pope’s request for military levies as an overreach into royal authority. The relationship of violence and religion in the conflict, then, should be addressed more easily by placing the religion of the Middle Ages, like any other age, into its appropriate material reality, through which it both was produced and maintained much the same as any political system.

Max Horkheimer wrote of the relationship between governance and religion, that “when the authoritarian state seems to engage in historic conflict with religion, the essential issue is whether the two shall compete, be coordinated, or go their separate ways.” The Albigensian Crusades serve as a prime example of this. On one side of the coin, the French worked in cooperation with the papacy in engaging in holy war, while on the other side, the Occitan lordships largely chose to compete, choosing only to cooperate when it would directly serve their interests, as is the case with Raimon VI’s swearing allegiance to the crusade.

Ultimately, the violence of the crusade should be seen as an attempt to secure lands and wealth through colonial means, under the legitimation of sanctioned holy war. In framing the conflict thus, I hope to forge what has been referred to as the connection between theory and social life-processes. At the crusade’s start in June of 1209, the peoples of Occitania were largely independent from France, both politically and culturally. But by 1229, the entire region would be subsumed by the French crown, the majority of its regional leadership killed or deprived of power, and its cities repopulated with ambitious northerners. In framing these events in the lens of hybridity and colonialism, future scholarship should be better able to approach the realities of how and why such horrific violence was carried out.

*4*

The massacre of Beziers, one of the most senseless acts of violence of a great many acts of violence during the onset of the Albigensian Crusades, seems to have been motivated little by religion. Indeed, time and again throughout the first year of the conflict, whether it be the destruction of Gontaud, the mass killings at Beziers, or the forced exodus of Carcassonne, the violence that the Occitan populace was subjected to seemed to carry little weight in terms of religion. Often, the primary sources directly describe the killing of heretics as vaguely ritualized burnings at the stake, while the mass murders and forced emigrations of Occitan peoples seems to have held little, if any, religious reasoning or justification.

The knights of the Albigensian crusades were, perhaps, more Christopher Columbus than Lionheart. Source.

I have strived to present an examination of the relationship between Christianity and violence in the crusade, informed by theory, but not dominated by it. Future scholarship should take into account the possibility of French colonial endeavors and the politico-economic nature of the Albigensian Crusades instead of merely focusing on its position as a holy war. Additionally, post-colonial critique should steer away from being solely based in racialist ideas of the influence of early modern empires, and allow for the study of medieval Christian on Christian violence as an integral facet in the history of colonial exploitation. This is not to say that the center of the discipline should not focus on interracial violence and exploitation but, rather, that in denying itself access to this vibrant area of inquiry, the field is limiting its own capacity to examine the origins of what would ultimately become the global colonial endeavor.

In finishing this examination, I should think it not inflammatory to suggest that the Occitan campaign, while initiated and justified by the auspices and signs of holy war, was carried out in reality by the desire for wealth, political influence, and cultural domination. The violence witnessed to in the sources, terrible as it may be, was the result of economic motivation and desire, not religious fervor or hysteria. In sum, The Albigensian Crusades were colonialist wars, and the violence of such wars is always horrific, regardless of the religion of those killing and dying.

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© 2018 Andrew Thornebrooke