CHAP. V. common object, which was to recover the entire south of France from sentiments and from jurisdictions inimical to both. The inhabitants of this region were in advance of surrounding countries, in respect to mental cultivation. This was owing, in a great measure, to the blending of the feudal and the civic elements, each retaining and contributing its peculiar character. The nobles preserved the chivalrous spirit, their devotion to the weaker sex, the love of luxury, the cultivation of minstrelsy and song; whilst the civic class, whether patrician or plebeian, far more numerous and prevalent than in the north, received a far better education in youth, and improved the knowledge so acquired by social habits and intermixture.* In Italy, from some cause, the civic and feudal population quarrelled and rushed into internecine wars, which, fostered and fanned by the feuds between Pope and Emperor, distracted the Italians for a time from intellectual occupation or enjoyment. Languedoc and Provence were comparatively exempt from this strife. The townspeople lived contented under the sovereignty of their counts, who respected their privileges, and shared their opinions and their pleasures. In this phase of society had sprung up, in Languedoc, the language and literature of the Troubadours. Such light literature, however, took its birth from graver studies. There were schools at Toulouse, and a Spanish monarch, the King of Arragon, being suzerain of the country, the learning of the Arabs crossed the Alps, and was cultivated in the south before it was known in the north. As to the Church of Rome, it taught nothing. Its doctrine was for the most part a negation of all that free and rational minds imagined or *One of the conditions which Rome afterwards sought to impose was, that the nobles should abandon residing in towns, and should live with and clothe themselves like peasants. V. asserted. The sole guide in its decisions was what CHAP. would enhance the grandeur of the Church, not what was consonant to either truth, to human or divine nature. Audacious to invent, and tyrannical to impose a dogma, it disdained to support it by philosophy or learning, although the use of logical and scholastic quibble was had recourse to by a few sanguinary pedants. The doctors of the Church soon flung away even these for the only arguments congenial to them, those of the torch and the sword. Amidst this reign of spiritual ignorance and tyranny, wherever there was a school, there was of course a heresy. Wherever men set themselves to think and to teach, they did so in a spirit different from the monks. Every man who cultivated his mind. became necessarily a heretic, and any one who uttered a rational opinion, committed treason against the reigning absurdity. In fact, it was the position of the nineteenth century that was presented by the thirteenth, except that bigotry was far more preponderant, and the protest of intellect infinitely more weak. The Provençals did all that was possible. They anticipated Voltaire, overwhelmed the clergy with satire, and neutralised the religion, at least, of Rome in the south. Unfortunately, perhaps, the schism took a more formal and philosophic mode of dissent. The doctrines of the Paulicians, popular in Bulgaria and in many countries of the East, had penetrated, with the return of the crusaders, into their homes. The Paulicians agreed with the Provençals in their contempt of the wealth, tyranny, and ignorance of the clergy. They rejected those doctrines respecting the Eucharist and Absolution, which seemed invented rather to give authority to a priesthood than truth and strength to a religion. To this they joined a horror of the Old Testament, a belief in the principle of evil as more permanent and more ancient than the biblical Satan, and an exaggeration of the Christian doctrine of flesh warring against spirit, CHAP. V. which made them repudiate marriage and eschew animal food. Of this heterogeneous creed, the clergy fastened upon the doctrine of the permanent principle of evil as unscriptural and heretical. It was too abstruse to be entertained or, indeed, understood, save by a few dreamers. But the monks represented the whole religion as Manichean, and the certainly blameless habits of abstinence and continence as proceeding from a doctrine of old condemned by the Church. On the other hand, the reformers of the south, like all their successors, when they found their tenets proscribed and their lives sacrificed by Rome, denounced it "as that Babylon which John mentioned in the Apocalypse as the mother of fornication, drunk with the blood of the saints."* Whatever semblance or leaning to the Manichean doctrine might have been taught or professed at Albi or Toulouse, certain it is that there was nothing of the kind in the tenets of that sect, which was confounded with the Albigenses in papal maledictions. In the mountains of Piedmont and Dauphiné, and in the valleys running up towards Monte Viso, the king of these mountains, there existed from the earliest times, and still exist, congregations of Christians who had never acknowledged the supremacy of Rome, or accepted its peculiar dogmas and teachings. These mountain Christians, called Vaudois, wherever they came in contact with Roman doctrines or pretensions, always repudiated them, and rejected in the same manner as the Albigenses all the tenets and usages adopted for the sake of the sanctity and power which they communicated to the priesthood. The Vaudois knew nothing of the two principles and were untainted, with any of the peculiarities, of the Paulicians. They had a Bible in their own language, as well as certain ancient books and poems inspired from Holy Writ, and in close accord Chronique de G. de Puy Laurens. ance with it; by these the Waldenses held in the twelfth, CHAP. by these they still hold in the nineteenth century. From such countries very little money could flow into the papal treasury, and less than in any other country to the clergy. It was then the rule that every testament should be drawn up in the presence of the clergy and sanctioned by one of them; and it was on these occasions always imperative to bequeath something to the Church. This universal legacy duty the Languedocians refused. Tithes in Languedoc, too, had fallen into the hands of lay chiefs and impropriators.* No appeals came from thence that called for papal interference. The Pontiff, who shared the jurisdiction of the sovereign in such countries as France, England, and Germany, could not tolerate being excluded from Languedoc. He therefore despatched certain monks to perambulate the country, and collect proofs of the heresy of the inhabitants. Their lukewarmness in matters of religion would not prove sufficient, unless it could be attributed to actual heresy. The papal envoys (Dominick, the founder of the monastic order of his name, was one of them,) who went upon this mission towards the commencement of the century soon found contradictors, and besought the authorities to exterminate them. Not meeting with acquiescence in their sanguinary demands, they exercised their legatine power in deposing the prelates of the region. The lay population were too deeply affected with contempt for Rome to be scared by such measures. The legates therefore besought several nobles of border lands to invade and war upon the Toulousans and Albigenses. These were afraid to face the enmity of the Count of Toulouse, who would not undertake to be the instrument of papal vengeance, however ready to confirm the papal tenets. The Church was therefore obliged to look farther for champions; and Pope Inno * See Laferrière, Hist. du Droit Français, tom. iv. p. 462. V. CHAP. V. cent imagined to proclaim a crusade, the armed votaries |