For a medieval saga of heresy, witchcraft or sedition to work really well, it requires the payoff scene where the hero or heroine gets burned at the stake. This is the template that has reaped such a rich harvest with Joan of Arc, John Hus, Thomas Cranmer, the Knights Templar and that old standby, Savonarola. In a pinch – say, in the case of William (Braveheart) Wallace – the tried-and-true technique of hanging, drawing and quartering will do, as will more traditional methods such as flaying, stoning, beheading, impalement and crucifixion.
But if an author gets to the end of his narrative and the shadowy medieval figure he is attempting to rescue from putatively undeserved oblivion fails to be set ablaze, the historian finds that he has backed himself into a real corner. Nobody remembers Custer if he doesn’t wind up dead at the Little Big Horn. Nobody remembers John Wilkes Booth if he doesn’t shoot Lincoln. And in a medieval setting, the formula for achieving immortality is unforgivingly rigid: No flame, no fame.
Stephen O’Shea recognizes that he has given himself a tough nut to crack in The Friar of Carcassonne. The book is largely the saga of Franciscan brother Bernard Délicieux, a courageous civic leader who laboured mightily to lift the yoke imposed on the people of southwestern France by the Inquisition in the late 13th and early 14th century. Délicieux is a heroic figure, to be sure, and his tale is well worth telling, but perhaps not at book length. Since his revolt against the Inquisition, which was led by the remorseless Dominicans, mostly consisted of legal squabbles, audiences with the king of France and ceaseless litigation, this book has a jarringly Jesuitical flavour.
As opposed to the electrifying drama in O’Shea’s earlier book, The Perfect Heresy, an enormously entertaining account of the Albigensian Crusade, where people were getting blinded, incinerated and put to the sword by the thousands, The Friar of Carcassonne suffers from a shortage of high-voltage drama.
The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) was one of the major events in European history, the first time Christians waged a purely religious war against other Christians. As has been noted elsewhere, the defeat of the heretics turned Paris’s gaze southward, transforming cold, northern France into a more sensual Mediterranean nation. This completely changed the nation’s temperament: Charlemagne, Clovis and Charles Martel were Germans; Louis XIV sure wasn’t.
Unfortunately, the events that transpire in O’Shea’s new book are largely a postscript to that pivotal event. By the time the book starts, late in the 1200s, the Albigensians – known as Cathars in France – have gone underground, and the church has decided to root them out. This footnote episode – taking place almost a century after the final Cathar defeat at Montségur – is filled with intrigue, perfidy and villainy. But there are no battles, no massacres, no hideous atrocities. Nor does anyone make a pronouncement that will ring down through the ages like the monk presiding over the massacre that kicked off the Albigensian Crusade who, when asked by the French troops how they could distinguish Christians from heretics, tartly remarked: “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.”
