Taking the Cross, page 29
She saw the Painter and Renart, both in position.
At this time yesterday morn, Claris had slumbered in the room next to hers.
The moment of retribution was before her.
Eva nocked an arrow and drew back the bow, kept it pointed at the cobbles. Her cheeks and forehead were hot, her heart pounded in her head as if her very earlobes would vibrate off her skull. The Painter nodded. An alley cat ran noisily past her in pursuit of a spectacularly plump rat. The man in green looked up, shielded his eyes against the breaking dawn. Then he drew back, grasped a door handle. Eva raised her bow. The man turned. Eva loosed. The arrow shot down the alley with a low, angry whistle, plunged itself into his shoulder. The man in green released a yelp of pain. A bright hurling arc flew toward her. She drew back as a silver dagger struck the corner of the house, inches from her face. The owner of the dagger in pilgrim tunic flew toward her as well. She froze. When he drew within two yards of her he was slammed against the back of the house and thrown to ground. Renart grasped the thrown silver dagger and slit his throat. The dagger had jewels upon the handle; emerald, ruby, and sapphire.
The man in green opened the door and disappeared.
The Painter ran up. “Abandon the body, we need take our leave.”
“What of the one in green. He is wounded.” Eva was prepared to change in after him. All fear had departed.
The Painter grabbed them both and pulled them down the alley back toward the street of the jewelers.
They took a roundabout route in their return to the Inn of Renart. The Painter produced another robe from under his tunic and inside it they wrapped all their weaponry to conceal sight and sound of it. When they reached the back door of the Inn, Raphael opened it and Pietro beckoned them in.
Eva’s spirit within no longer rocks but fire.
Her only thought that she wished she had arrow-shot the man in green through the heart.
CHAPTER 35
15 AUGUST 1209
THE FEAST DAY OF THE VIRGIN MARIA
Anfos unlocked the Aude Gate at daybreak. One by one the Carcassonais took their leave from la cite. The Aude Gate was little more than a doorway. All were searched by the knights of the Count of Nevers. All were thus taunted: “You leave only with your shirts and your sins still upon you.” A few merchants foolish enough to wear their finery had their buttons of mother of pearl ripped from their shirts, but were otherwise unmolested.
Andreas observed from the ramparts. It was dawn on the feast day of the Virgin Maria. Another feast day without a feast. He stood with Philippe, the son of Herve de Donzy, at the place where the walls of the Chateau Comtal were also the outer walls of Carcassonne itself. Andreas wore chain mail, his new surcoat, and his belt of weaponry. He wished to make it clear that the battle was not ended until all had safely departed Carcassonne.
The egress of some forty-thousand souls through a narrow portal was not a short-lived endeavor, even with the abandonment of all their worldly goods. The sun rose to its apex and started to make descent. The Count of Nevers enforced the strictures of the agreement. All were allowed safe conduct to go where they would. The Carcassonais went mostly to the south towards Foix and to the West towards Toulouse. A few turned to the east or to the north, presumably to leave the Languedoc altogether.
When fewer than one-hundred remained in the city, Andreas led the boy down from the ramparts, and back inside the Chateau. He returned to his bedchamber and stripped off his belt of weaponry, his surcoat, his armor, and his fine tunic. All that remained upon him was a thin inner tunic; the two amulets, the sling, and the empty pouch concealed beneath.
He would take that chance.
He left the Chateau, walked through the courtyard, out the open Oriental Gate, past the palace of the Bishop of Carcassonne, and joined the line. Only armorless, weaponless knights of Trencavel remained to take their leave.
When Andreas reached the Aude Gate, he released Philippe, who ran to his father. The Count of Nevers nodded his thanks to Andreas, picked up his son, and rode off. Yet four of his knights lingered. One spoke. “My lord has commanded us to escort you where you wish to go. We will take you as far as Toulouse.”
Andreas did not wish to tell them that he would make journey to Montsegur in the Pyrenees. “I go to the mountains. If you will take me as far as the foothills, that is enough for me.”
The châtelain turned to his sergeant at arms. “Anfos, to where will you go?”
“I have many relations in Toulouse. The count of Toulouse will need more knights I think. It will not be long until he is excommunicated once more.”
Andreas smiled. “No, I think not. Godspeed my friend. Paratge.”
“And to you as well. Thousands of living souls owe you this day their very lives.” Anfos set his face toward Toulouse and commenced his journey.
Andreas called out after him. “It is not I to whom their debt is due!”
The lead knight of Raimon Roger Trencavel I, Viscount of Carcassonne, Albi, and Beziers went to horse along with the four knights of Nevers and they began the ride south.
The châtelain glanced back to see Armand Amaury and Simon de Montfort enter Carcassonne through the Aude Gate.
Andreas turned his head away and forced himself to look upon the Pyrenees Mountains.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I was in college, I came across a book entitled The Occult and the Third Reich. This book discussed not only the general interest of the Nazis in the occult, but Hitler’s particular fascination with the Albigensians (or Cathars) as potential possessors of the Holy Grail. A fascination so great that he sent individuals into the Languedoc in the 1930s and 1940s in search of the much coveted relic.
Much of The Occult and the Third Reich is devoted to the Albigensian Crusade. It was the first time I read about the Crusade against heresy. One of the individuals sent by Hitler in pursuit of the Grail, Otto Rahn, wrote of the Albigensian Crusade as the Crusade Against the Grail. The grail relic he sought, and believed the Cathars to have borne, was not the cup of Christ.
I was surprised I had never heard anything about this crusade before, and I read whatever I could get my hands on about the Languedoc, Provence, Albigensians, Waldensians, the Trencavels, the Occitan language. I learned of the Beguines and the many movements toward freedom that were birthed during this age. Tyranny is found here as well, as the Inquisition began after the Crusade, around the year 1230, as a concerted effort to round up the remaining Cathars not ensnared in the net of the Crusaders.
The question that arose for me as I read more books and articles about the Crusade against heresy was this: In such a confusing age, when Christians were battling Christians, what does it look like to be a true Christian, live like a true Christian? It’s a question that provokes me still. Taking the Cross grew out of my attempts to answer it.
One of the unique aspects of the Albigensian Crusade from a historical perspective is that there are three surviving contemporary accounts. This is extremely uncommon for events that took place before the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Two of the accounts were written by chroniclers in favor of the Crusade. While the third account, the Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise (Song of the Albigensian Crusade), by far the best known of the three, was written by two different natives of the Languedoc, the first half written by one very much in favor of the Crusade, and the second half by one very strongly opposed to it. The Chanson is an epic poem written in Occitan, the language of the troubadours. It was meant to be sung at the courts of nobility. The oldest surviving copy of the Chanson dates from the year 1275, and is at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
One of the prominent Occitan words in the Chanson is paratge. This word was to the Languedoc of 1209 what the word freedom is to Americans today. It captured the heart of what they held most dear. Paratge is often rendered in English as nobility, but is essentially an untranslatable word. It speaks to an entire way of living and thinking about life, an entire code of ethics about how one should treat others. Embodied within it, among other things, are concepts of grace, forgiveness, right living, balance, tolerance for others, honor, excellence, and nobility of soul. It was written of the Crusader Simon de Montfort in the Chanson that he besmirched paratge.
Most historical accounts of the Crusade written in recent years, including The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea, focus completely on the Catholic – Albigensian/Cathar dynamic of the Crusade. Most recent works of fiction set in the Languedoc in the early thirteenth century do the same, such as Daughters of the Grail by Elizabeth Chadwick, and Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, and essentially distilled to a message of Good Cathars – Bad Catholics. However, the spiritual dynamics of the Languedoc in 1209 were far more complex.
There was a document compiled by Rainaud, the Bishop of Beziers that listed the names of two hundred and twenty two heretics in Beziers. While the majority of names on the list are Cathar Perfects, a handful of the names have the letters val next to them, indicating valdenses. However, there were likely more than a dozen valdenses or secret friends of Vaudes – or Peter Waldo – in Beziers, because they tended to be more covert and less prominent in society, being called as they were the Poor of Lyon. While the highborn of the Languedoc tended to be drawn toward the Cathars, many of the so-called lowborn were valdenses.
The sack of Beziers did occur on 22 July 1209, the feast day of Mary Magdalen. There is no historical evidence I found that any of the Bitterois survived until sunset that day. Perhaps there was an individual or two, like Andreas, that somehow escaped to warn Viscount Trencavel. While there are some differing perspectives among historians about whether or not the Crusaders arrived at Beziers on 21 July or 22 July, there is nearly universal agreement that the massacre of the city happened on 22 July. The churches of the city, including the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, were packed full by those seeking sanctuary where there was none. The rotiers did burn the city upon having their plunder stripped from them by the crusading knights. Beziers was deemed to be cursed and sat vacant for years afterward, a ravaged, urban, fallow field. To put the scale of the Medieval slaughter of twenty thousand Bitterois in perspective, Rome and London both had around twenty five thousand residents at this time. In 1209, Beziers was one of the more populated, and wealthier, cities in Europe.
The Beguines had their beginning in the second half of the twelfth century in what is now Belgium. The movement spread throughout Christendom during the thirteenth century until they too were eventually branded heretics and persecuted by the Inquisition. Part of the reason that I chose the city of Orange as the setting of the beguinage that is Eva’s home is because of the subsequent ties that the Principality of Orange would have with the Low Countries, the Netherlands in particular. Though what we know now as the color orange was called red-yellow during the Middle Ages, this color came later to be called orange and to be associated with the city of Orange, France. It is where the Dutch Royal House of Orange derives both its color and its name.
The initial acceptance of the Beguines is an example of what would typically happen before the Albigensian Crusade, where a new religious movement would be absorbed into the Catholic Church rather than repulsed by it. The treatment of the Waldensians was atypical of previous centuries, but would become for several centuries the new normal. In 1209, by contrast, the same year that the Waldensians were being hunted by the Crusade against heresy, a new order led by a budding monk named Francis from the city of Assisi was recognized by Pope Innocent III, and the Franciscans came into being.
Viscount Raimon Roger Trencavel was taken hostage by the Crusaders outside Carcassonne after being granted safe-conduct. There is much debate as to what actually happened in the pergola of the Count of Nevers. Some, such as O’Shea, argue that in no wise would Trencavel have surrendered himself. The chronicler of the Chanson says Trencavel made himself a prisoner. There is widespread assumption but less evidence that Trencavel was at the least a Cathar credente. This is based primarily on the fact that Trencavel’s tutor, Bertran de Saissac (mentioned in chapter 11) was a Cathar Perfect. Yet there were many spiritual influences in the Languedoc, and Trencavel could have chosen any number of routes before his death in the fall of 1209.
The Carcassonais indeed took their leave from la cite on the Feast Day of the Virgin Mary, 15 August 1209, with naught but their shirts upon them.
Whether all left with their sins still upon them as well is another matter.
Thankfully, no church official truly has the authority to condemn a person for or absolve a person from their sins. Perhaps here is where we begin to answer the question of where the true Christians were during the Albigensian Crusade. The true church is unseen and is composed of those, whether Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or none of the above, who have surrendered their lives to blessed Jhesu and no other man, whether that man be president or bishop, king or pope. Jhesu alone has authority to forgive sins. For He said “behold the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” It is found not in the Holy Land, the Languedoc, Rome, or any other earthly place. Jhesu, born of the Virgin Mary, born of flesh and Spirit, calls for surrender of body, soul, and spirit still today. May you know this sweet surrender and choose to have the King of the unseen church and his kingdom come to reside within you as well.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I have researched, written, and rewritten Taking the Cross over the past eight years, I have been continually humbled by the literally dozens of people that have provided help in some form. The people of Bridgewood Community Church have supported me in so many ways. I would not even try to list everyone here, but know that if you have provided ideas, feedback, encouragement, inspiration, and/or prayer, I am truly grateful. I can’t say how much it meant to have people still asking “how’s the book going?” three, four, and five years in. Jim Olson, I will always be grateful to you for “calling me out” and encouraging me to follow my calling. Diane Stores and Janet Nelson, I could not have written this novel without the freedom you have helped bring to my life. Julie Hawkinson, who read several drafts and greatly helped improve the flow of the story, and who kept saying she was waiting for the next installment. Allison Bottke, who first asked me eight years ago “when are you going to write a novel?” and opened up her extensive network of literary contacts to me. Kyle Duncan, who encouraged me to keep going and finish a complete novel. Keith Wall, who gave invaluable feedback for my first draft, including encouraging me to continue alternating the chapters between Andreas and Eva. My publisher, John Koehler, for seeing the possibilities in Taking the Cross and taking a chance on a first-time novelist. My editor, Joe Coccaro, who worked hard not only to help me keep the thirteenth century voice I was striving for but to improve on it. Extended family members who provided feedback, encouragement, and prayer, particularly Shara Anderson, Stacy Olson, and Heidi Gnadke. An extra thanks to Heidi for her excellent photography. My wife, Tricia, who helped me develop the characters, especially Andreas and Eva, and did so many of things needed to keep a household running while I worked two full time jobs (the second job being this novel). God has used you to help raise me up from the miry clay and set my feet on the rock. We have walked through so much together. I love you. Trenton and Logan your cheerful encouragement is always inspirational to me. I am truly blessed.
Chad Gibson, Taking the Cross
