Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the RenaissanceJacob, P. L.
History
Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance
Jacob, P. L.
Europe -- Social life and customs; Manners and customs -- History; Middle Ages; Renaissance
Simon de Montfort, who was at the head of the expedition, accepted
the effects of the Viscount of Béziers, and continued the war against
the heretics. In 1213, before the walls of Muret, he defeated Peter
II., King of Arragon, an ally of the Albigenses, who was besieging the
town, and he afterwards stripped the Count of Toulouse of his domains,
against the wish of Innocent III., who would have preferred that the
count’s hereditary rights, and still more those of his son, should have
been respected.
Simon was supported by Louis, son of Philip Augustus, who lost no time
in fulfilling the vow which he had made to take up arms against the
Manicheans of Languedoc, and, as the battle of Bouvines (1214) had
led to a five years’ truce between the Kings of France and England,
he joined the Catholic forces in the following year. In 1218 Toulouse
rose in revolt, and Simon de Montfort was mortally wounded by a
stone during the siege. His son Amaury put himself forward as heir to
his father’s domains, and endeavoured to establish his claims to the
countships of Béziers and Toulouse, but he eventually abandoned them in
favour of the French monarch. Very rigorous measures were taken to put
down the heretics. An order issued by the bishop of Toulouse decreed
that “the inhabitants of the districts infected with heresy shall pay
one mark in silver for every Waldensian found within their boundaries;
the house in which he is captured, those in which he has preached,
shall be razed to the ground, and the property belonging to the owner
of these houses confiscated. The goods of the pervert shall also be
confiscated, as well as those appertaining to any person neglecting to
wear or to display the two coloured crosses which should be sewn on to
the breast of the penitent’s garment.” The Holy See, on its part, was
not remaining inactive during this time, as in 1215 the fourth Lateran
Council had excommunicated the Manicheans, the Waldenses, and the
Albigenses. The third canon of that council declared that “the heretics
who are condemned shall be handed over to the secular arm, in order
that they may receive their merited punishment; the clerks shall be
previously unfrocked.”
Just before this council terminated its sittings, Dominic, presented to
Pope Innocent III., obtained, as a recompense for the services which
he had rendered to the Church militant, leave to found the order of
Preaching-Brothers, who from him took the name, by which they are more
generally known, of _Dominicans_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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