The Sack of Béziers

What happened

The Albigensian Crusade — a campaign of papally-authorised warfare against the Cathar (or Albigensian) movement in the Languedoc region of southern France — was proclaimed by Pope Innocent III in March 1208, following the assassination of his legate Pierre de Castelnau by a member of the household of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse. The crusade was the first major papally-sanctioned military campaign against a population substantially within Latin Christendom rather than against external Muslim or pagan adversaries.

A crusader army of approximately 10,000 — under the field command of Simon de Montfort and the ecclesiastical command of the papal legate Arnaud Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux — arrived before the walls of Béziers on 21 July 1209. The city had a population of approximately 14,500 to 20,000, predominantly Catholic, with a Cathar minority of perhaps several hundred. The Bishop of Béziers, Renaud de Montpeyroux, had been within the walls negotiating; he had presented a list of approximately 220 named Cathars and demanded their surrender, refused by the Catholic population which would not surrender its neighbours.

On 22 July 1209 — the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene — an unauthorised sortie by Béziers militia against crusader camp-followers escalated into a general assault. The crusaders took the city by storm. The massacre that followed killed the entire civilian population without distinction of religion: men, women, children, Catholic and Cathar alike. Contemporary chroniclers' estimates of the death toll range from 7,000 (the lower estimate, by the Chanson de la croisade albigeoise) to 20,000 (the upper estimate, by Caesarius of Heisterbach). Modern scholarship favours figures in the range of 10,000 to 15,000.

The crusaders set fire to the cathedral of Saint-Nazaire, where part of the population had taken refuge. The cathedral burned with the people inside.

The Amalric attribution

The most-quoted line associated with the massacre — "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" ("Kill them all. The Lord will know His own") — is attributed by Caesarius of Heisterbach, in his Dialogus miraculorum (c. 1219–1223), to Arnaud Amalric in response to a soldier's pre-assault question about how to distinguish Catholic from heretic. The attribution is reported at second hand a decade after the event; modern historians treat it as plausible but not independently corroborated.

What is independently documented is Arnaud Amalric's own letter to Pope Innocent III written shortly after the massacre, in which the papal legate reports the destruction of Béziers in terms of satisfaction: "Nostri non parcentes ordini, sexu, vel aetati, fere viginti millia hominum in ore gladii peremerunt" ("Our forces, sparing no rank, sex, or age, put nearly twenty thousand to the sword").

Wider record of the crusade

The Sack of Béziers was the opening atrocity of a twenty-year campaign that included subsequent massacres at Marmande (1219) and Lavaur (1211), the institutional destruction of Cathar regional infrastructure, and the political subjugation of the Languedoc to the French crown. The campaign concluded formally with the Treaty of Paris (1229) and the establishment of the medieval Inquisition in Languedoc in 1233 to complete the work of identifying and prosecuting surviving Cathar believers.

The Albigensian Crusade is the principal medieval case of a papally-authorised military campaign producing mass civilian casualty against a substantially Christian population, conducted under direct ecclesiastical command.

Sources

• Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, c. 1219–1223 (modern critical edition: Strange, ed., 1851; English translation Scott and Bland, 1929).
• Chanson de la croisade albigeoise, contemporary occitan verse chronicle, 1213–1218.
• Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, Historia Albigensis, c. 1213–1218.
• Arnaud Amalric, letter to Pope Innocent III on the destruction of Béziers, August 1209 (text in Patrologia Latina, vol. 216).
• Jonathan Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade (Faber & Faber, 1978; reissued Routledge 1999).
• Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Joseph R. Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades (Dial Press, 1971).