Ever since John’s accession to the Plantagenet lands in 1199, the long struggle between the Angevins and the French Crown had gone on in haphazard raids and skirmishes, interrupted by fitful truces which settled nothing. From February to September, 1200, France had been under a Papal interdict for Philip’s repudiation of his wife followed by a second marriage, after a questionable annulment of the first marriage by the French bishops. Even though the interdict had been imperfectly enforced, still it had sufficiently weakened his general position to make him willing to conclude a truce with John, and to promise the Pope that he would mend his ways. The interdict once lifted, the intriguing and skirmishing had begun again, going more and more in Philip’s favour. In the fall of 1203 major operations had begun. After a successful six months’ siege of Chateau Gailliard, ending in March, 1204, Philip had won all Normandy and deprived John of the entire continental Plantagenet inheritance except Gascony, Guienne, and part of Poitou. With so much freshly conquered land to be administered and so many new vassals to be handled, it was no time to ask the King of France to take on the heavy task of intervening against heresy in Languedoc, or even to weaken himself by allowing any of the forces of his kingdom to do so. He refused to move. There remained the chance of accomplishing something through reform of the personnel of the southern Church by a drastic use of the extraordinary powers granted to the papal legates. These were now three in number, the newcomer being Arnaut Amalric, abbot of Citeaux, and therefore head of the powerful Cistercian order, to which both Raoul and de Castelnau belonged. With the addition of Arnaut (whose surname of Amalric recalls the old family of Amal chieftains among the Goths), the legates attempted to use their power of deposing bishops to its full extent. They proclaimed the deposition of Berenger II, primate of Languedoc! Berenger broke boldly with the legates and refused to quit his archbishopric of Narbonne. He protested violently to the Pope, representing that only his great age and “infirmities” prevented him from pleading his cause in person at Rome, so that his case dragged on. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Beziers, besides refusing to go with the legates to Count Raymond, had gone even further in disobedience to them than his ecclesiastical lord of Narbonne. When asked to demand of the “consuls” of his city that they abjure heresy and engage to expel heretics, he at first refused point blank and encouraged the magistrates not to do so. Under pressure he finally promised to excommunicate them, but failed to do so. Accordingly, the legates suspended him, and ordered him to appear in his own defence at Rome. Shortly afterwards he was assassinated by some treachery “among his own people”—why, our authorities do not state.