A death in the New Forest and a man worth mourning

On August 2, 1100, William Rufus was struck by an arrow during a hunting party in the New Forest and died on the spot. His body was left there in the forest, although it would eventually be retrieved for what seems to have been a modest burial. His younger brother Henry raced for Winchester to claim the royal treasure and the crown. Was it an accident? Or murder? No way to tell at this point in time. Hunting accidents were certainly common in the MA, but over the centuries, suspicions of murder did occur to people. Lacking proof, I suppose we have to give Henry the benefit of the doubt. From what we know of the man, though, he was quite capable of acting to remove an inconvenient barrier between him and the throne, even if he happened to be related to said barrier. Henry did not have a warm and cuddly side.
And on August 2, 1222, died a man who would be even more maligned than Richard III, Raimond de St Gilles, the sixth Count of Toulouse. Raimond had his flaws, but he did not deserve the horrors that descended upon him and the people of the South during the Albigensian Crusade, one of the darker chapters in the history of the medieval Church. Because it was necessary to justify this blatant power—grab, he was painted by chroniclers in the most lurid of hues, accused of being a dissolute womanizer, a man without honor or scruples, a heretic damned to eternal hellfire. But his real sin was one we’d see as a virtue today. He was that rarity in the MA, a ruler who was genuinely tolerant, unwilling to persecute his subjects because of their religious beliefs, and he would pay a high price for that tolerance.
He died an excommunicate even though he’d sought repeatedly to gain absolution. He was never a heretic, you see, never a Cathar, and stayed faithful to the Church that treated him so shamefully. When he suffered a stroke on that hot August day in 1222, he was standing outside a church in Toulouse, listening as the sympathetic priests raised their voices so he could hear the Mass. And he asked to become one of the Knights Hospitaller. Had he been a Cathar as his enemies claimed, he’d have asked for the consolamentum, the Cathar rite that was given to their dying. (On his deathbed, Charles II was received into the Catholic Church—very unpopular in 17th century England--although it is not certain if he was still lucid by then.) Instead, Raimond begged for the Last Rites of the Roman Church and was denied. The Hospitallers were more merciful. They did admit him into their Order. But he was still not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground and his coffin remained unburied in the commandery of the Hospitallers in Toulouse as his son tried desperately to secure a Christian burial for him. They used his desperation to force him into making yet more concessions, but their promises were never kept.
When Geoffrey de Mandeville, rebel and outlaw and scourge of God, died during Stephen’s reign, he, too, was an excommunicate and was denied Christian burial. But his sons petitioned the Church on his behalf, and the ban was lifted even though he’d not died in a state of grace, showed no contrition whatsoever. So this man, of whom it was said the grass withered wherever he’d walked, a man who’d spilled enough innocent blood to swim in, was buried in hallowed ground, whereas Raimond de St Gilles’ body would be eaten by rats.
Today, the Albigensian Crusade is a source of tourist revenue to the French government. Tourists flock to “Cathar Country” to see the haunting ruins of their castles, to hear the stories of a land that fell under the shadow of the Inquisition. We recoil from the statement that the papal legate is alleged to have said when the crusaders sacked the town of Beziers after they refused to surrender their Cathar neighbors (200 in a population of about 9,000). When he was asked how the soldiers could tell Cathars from Catholics, his response was; “Kill them all. God will know His own.” Some historians now doubt that he said it. I do not; in his letter to the Pope, he could hardly contain his joy at the deaths of the thousands of men, women, and children of Beziers. There are few in our time who’d sympathize with the Albigensian crusaders, so sure they were doing God’s blessed, bloody work. But who remembers Raimond de St Gilles?