The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade

Abstract

Highlighting the Trencavels' weak position, she demonstrates how, unlike other southern noble families such as the counts of Toulouse, they lacked the cordial relations with the Cistercians which could have afforded them some protection (they backed the 'wrong side' in patronizing local bishops), and how their relative insecurity within their own lands and among their neighbours undermined the possibility of mounting any effective resistance. Ecclesiastical policy determined upon their wholesale removal as a feasible method of minimizing antagonism from the higher nobility as a whole, while providing the crusaders with the base they required.

Elaine Graham-Leigh, The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005). 187 pp. ISBN 1-84383-129-5. £5o.oo/$90.00.

This important book poses a penetrating question. Why were the Trencavels the only members of the higher nobility to suffer complete destruction as a result of the Albigensian Crusade, without protest or positive response from their subjects and neighbours? In her meticulous and original analysis Graham-Leigh takes us through an engrossing detective narrative, to conclude that the crusaders attacked Beziers and Carcassonne in their first campaign for the specific reason that they were Trencavel towns. While Carcassonne served a tactical purpose of providing the crusaders with a base for further operations, she argues that a more compelling factor in targeting the Trencavels was papal policy: Innocent III sought 'not to destroy the noble families of Languedoc but to persuade them to fight with them'. Highlighting the Trencavels' weak position, she demonstrates how, unlike other southern noble families such as the counts of Toulouse, they lacked the cordial relations with the Cistercians which could have afforded them some protection (they backed the 'wrong side' in patronizing local bishops), and how their relative insecurity within their own lands and among their neighbours undermined the possibility of mounting any effective resistance. Ecclesiastical policy determined upon their wholesale removal as a feasible method of minimizing antagonism from the higher nobility as a whole, while providing the crusaders with the base they required. While there is inevitably a certain amount of speculation at various points in her argument, the thesis is a plausible one and rests on wide-ranging, astute, and thought-provoking analyses of individual records. The new light her book sheds on the south, inter alia with respect to Aragon, is remarkable and contains some arresting suggestions, such as that the Anonymous Continuator of the former's song may have been a court poet at Foix. It contains invaluable maps and genealogies of the Languedoc nobility, an introduction to historical sources for the south, and an interesting critical account of previous attention to the crusade's history.

For typographical and linguistic errors, replace Asbridge by Ashbridge, p. ix; V by V., feudal by féodales, p. xi; cathares by cathare, p. 3; oïl by oil, p. 6; mitigate by militate (!), p. 8, Chanson d'Antioch by, not Chanson d'Antioche (the Old French text) but Canso d'Antioca, the quite different Occitan one, p. 24; Patterson by Paterson passim. Guilhem Augier Novella's planh should be consulted in the edition of M. Calzolari (Modena, 1986), II, 85 (see also E. Ghil in L-Âge de parage: Essai sur le poetique et le politique en Occitanie au XIIIe siècle, New York, 1989) and compare S. Aspérti's Bibliografia elettronica dei trovatori: www.bedt.it, for this and other troubadour texts. Jan Rüdiger's Aristokraten und Poeten. Die Grammatik einer Mentalitdt im tolosanischen Hochmittelalter (Berlin, 2001) provides important complementary insights into written and spoken culture in the south (compare Graham-Leigh, pp. 12-14). His revised dating of the Anonymous Continuation of the Song of the Albigensian Cmsade, July 1218 to June 1219 (p. 429), would simplify the issues Graham-Leigh raises on pp. 86 and 128.