The Council of Montpellier throws into high relief the sharp cleavage of opinion in Languedoc. Montpellier was the most Catholic of the southern cities. As has been seen in the last chapter, its lord had been the first in the region to take official action against heresy. The orthodoxy of the place had never been questioned. Nevertheless, the popular feeling there was so bitter that de Montfort could not even come within the walls to attend the meetings of the Council for fear of being mobbed. He was forced to stay at the House of the Templars, outside the walls, and there confer with those who came to him. One day he did enter the town with his two sons and an escort of a few knights, in answer to a special invitation from Cardinal Peter. Whereupon the citizens moved at once, quietly armed themselves and manned the gate by which he had entered and the street by which he was expected to pass. Some even entered the Church of St. Mary in which the Council sat. Count Simon, whose worst enemy had never called him coward, was glad enough to be smuggled away through back streets. On the other hand, the Council itself was Montfortist to a man. After legislating copiously on the reform of the clergy, the local abuses in laying tolls, repression of heretics and those who should favour them, &c., it decided unanimously to depose Raymond and set de Montfort in his stead. Cardinal Peter, however, on the plea that his instructions gave him no power to do so, refused to obey the Council and hand over the parts of Raymond’s lands, especially Toulouse and Montauban, which had surrendered to him as Innocent’s representative and not to de Montfort. The decision, he truly said, had been expressly reserved for the coming Lateran Council. Whereat the Montpellier assembly promptly sent off the Archbishop of Embrun to Rome to ask the Pope to recognize de Montfort as lord and even as king (“dominum et monarchum”) over the lands of the heretics! The castle of Foix and the citadel of Toulouse known as the “Château Narbonaise” had received papal garrisons, the latter under the command of Bishop Fulk. The dispossessed knights, known as “faidits,” were given the privilege of moving freely about the country on condition of going unarmed, with but one spur (!), mounted on palfreys but not on war horses, and avoiding fortified places. Rome showed no signs of relaxing her grip, but was unmistakably beginning to show mercy and, above all, was refusing to support de Montfort in the more ambitious of his designs.