Brave Old World

By Mayo Mohs

MONTAILLOU: THE PROMISED LAND OF ERROR

by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie;

translated by Barbara Bray;

Braziller; 383 pages; $20

The plot is absurd. A parish priest says Mass, hears confessions, baptizes, performs weddings. Yet his sympathies lie with a bold underground of heretics, Cathars who see the world as the realm of Satan and the church as a device of hell. The cleric actively supports these zealots who will neither touch women nor eat meat, men who preach heresy to his parishioners. At the same time he uses his powers of flattery and persuasion to seduce most of the nearby females, including a local noblewoman, the chatelaine, and his 14-year-old cousin. When the Inquisition comes to town, he turns double agent, denouncing his fellow heretics to the investigating bishop.

But this is no novel. The village is real, a town called Montaillou, clinging to a mountainside in the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. The time is the beginning of the 14th century. The priest is Pierre Clergue, a clergyman who might have made Boccaccio blush. In French Historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's brillant reconstruction, the reader learns how the villagers thought, ate, hated and loved--and even what they said to one another in public and in private. Such rare detail has made this lively volume a surprise bestseller in Europe.

That we know any of Montaillou's indiscretions is the work of a tireless Inquisitor: Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers. A learned, tough-minded Cistercian monk, Bishop Fournier took charge of the local Inquisition. Montaillou's heretics --spiritual heirs of the Albigensians who had been so bloodily crushed the century before--became his target. In the process he left a thick record of testimony from the accused and witnesses.

Montaillou had once seemed an ordinary mountain town, each family clustered around a house that gave it not only shelter but identity. There was little class distinction and considerable sharing of resources. The villagers were united in fierce anticlericalism, and with reason. The regional ruler, the Count de Foix, had defended his fief from exorbitant church taxes. But when the aristocrat died, the bishops of Pamiers imposed ever more onerous tithes. The new church exactions doubtless influenced many villagers to consider the teachings of the Cathar parfaits (perfect ones, the heresy's elect).

The itinerant parfaits preached stirring sermons (there was hardly a book in town, and only four of its more than 200 people could read). Conversions came quickly. Unlike the parfaits, ordinary believers did not need to abstain from mutton and love; they had only to receive a deathbed absolution. At that point, they were expected to embark on the endura, a suicidal fast that sped them to heaven. A fellow traveler like Parish Priest Pierre Clergue could turn the Cathar teachings upside down: "Since everything is forbidden, everything is allowed." Clergue was rare in his rapacity, but not in taking concubines. Observes Le Roy Ladurie: "At an altitude of 1,300 meters, the rules of priestly celibacy ceased to apply."

Montaillou is rich in flawed humanity. Little Grazide Lizier, the 14-year-old who happily yielded to her cousin the priest, testifies: "In those days it pleased me, and it pleased the priest ... and so I did not think I was sinning, and neither did he. But now, with him, it does not please me any more. And so now, if he knew me carnally, I should think it a sin."

Until the Inquisition's crackdown, the villagers were more confused than threatened by theological conflict. Some chose to "fish from both banks," as one witness put it. Pierre Maury, a goodhearted shepherd who followed the seasons across the Pyrenees into Catalonia and back again, explained, "I want to use what I earn from my work to do good to both sides. Because really I do not know which of the two beliefs is the more valid. Although, in fact, I support rather the faith of the heretics. But that is simply because my communications and relations with the heretics are greater than with the others."

Eventually, a growing power struggle between the Cathar Clergue family and a prominent Catholic family blew the whole affair into the tribunals of the Inquisition. Father Pierre and his brother Bernard, the corrupt bailiff of the town, were sentenced to prison, there to die soon after. One Cathar--a not-so-perfect parfait given to shady business dealings and fornication--was burned at the stake. Beatrice de Planissoles, the chatelaine, was released along with her latest swain, another priest--but Beatrice was sentenced to wear the yellow cross of repentant heretics. As for the zealous bishop, he went on to become the zealous Pope Benedict XII. Harsh and unbending still, he at last corrected some of the ecclesiastical abuses that had first disturbed the flock long ago at the forgotten little town of Montaillou. -- Mayo Mohs

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