          The Albigensian Crusades and Trifunctionality
               The final realization of the works
                    of William the Breton
                              by
                       Stewart W. Riley



     Goerges Dudy, in his book The Three Orders, marks the year
1214 as the end of the evolutionary period of the concept of
trifunctionalism. In the works of William the Breton he finds the
final model of trifunctional society with the king once again in
the primary position. It seems, however, that in this case the
concept had proceeded the actual realization of this model rather
than having sought to legitemize an existing order, as in the
knightly trifunctional concept, or having attempted to revive an
older order, as Gerard and Adalbero had done. This final model
would achieve it's reality through the intervention of an outside
impetus. In the first half of the thirteenth century the most
powerful and widespread heretical movement of the Middle Ages
swept through the Occitanian regions of southern France, lands
far from the Ile de France to which Duby limits his study.
Nevertheless, the conflict caused by the supression of this
heresy in the wars known as the Albigensian Crusades led directly
to the King of France becoming the undisputed head of the social
order, ruling clergy, nobility, and plebians in a hierarchical,
religio-political system that would ensure French supremecy in
Europe for the next three hundred years.
     The Cathar heresy that spawned this conflict was not native
to western Europe. It arose in he region of Bosnia and moved
westwards through northern Italy and into the southern provinces
of France, particularly that region between the Rhone river and
the province of Aquitane now known as Occitania. The Cathars were
a Christian dualist sect, similar to the Manichaeans of the
fourth century. They believed that the material world was
inherently evil and that only denial of this world would lead to
salvation. Cathar doctrine held that Jesus had been sent to
instruct man so that he might escape the imprisonment of flesh.
Jesus was an emanation from God, with only an illusion of a
physical body. The veneration of the cross and communion were
therefore the the height of misinterpretation to Cathars, the
opposite of their most basic tenets. They saw the Catholic Church
as a creature of Satan, built on the vengeful God of the Old
Testament who was also a disguise of Satan. In general the Cathar
ritual was simple and their organization small. A few of the
faithful were elevated to the state known as the "perfect". These
men and women (for both were admitted equally) led lives of
absolute poverty, eating no flesh, avoiding any carnal pleasures,
and traveling incessantly to preach the Gospel to any who would
listen. The far larger body of simple believers were not under
such strict rules but could lead fairly normal lives, only
entering the ranks of the "perfect" just prior to death in a
ceremony called the "consolamentum". It was a religion that
demanded far less, and was far simpler in it's trappings, than
Catholicism. It's doctrine was a direct challenge to Catholic
dogma and this drew many early attempts to reconvert it's
adherents by churchmen, including both St. Bernard and St.
Dominic. The Cathars posed an even greater threat, however, to
the existing social order. Catharism was egalitarian in the
extreme, since all souls were equal and the distinctions of the
material world were only deceptions of Satan. In Occitania the
sect enjoyed widespread sympathy amongst all levels of society.
     The first crusade against the Cathars may be seen as the
clash of two trifunctional conceptions. At the beginning of the
thirteenth century the north of France was still ordered by the
knightly ternary model put forward by Benedict of Sainte-Maure.
The lay princes had not yet come fully under the authority of the
Capetian monarch Philip Augustus and were seeking to be the
"Christian knights" who dominated the social order while
maintaining religious purity. In Occitania the situation was
somewhat different. Here the nobility had come to a more balanced
position in relation to the other orders, a relationship much
more like that conceived by William the Breton than that of
Benedict. Though feudal ties were still present they were much
weaker, with many more crossing lines of duty and service. In the
countryside the majority of the peasents were free men who owned
their own land and paid fairly reasonable cash taxes to their
feudal overlords. In the cities and towns an even closer parallel
to William's model was found. There the bourgeois, the nobles,
and even the episcopal hierarchy formed joint governments, in
many was more similar to the later Italian city-states than to
any feudal society. The only element missing from this model was
that of the king, who in William's conception was ouside the
orders of society, acting as the conduit of the divine will and
maintaining the proper relations of the other three. This ment
that in Occitania the three orders were brought into more equal
positions, sharing secular power and divorcing it from
ecclesiastical concerns. Bishops became lay rulers who could be
no more concerned with heresy than any other. It was this lack of
attention to the dictums of those at the pinnacle of the
hierarchy, first the Pope and later the King, that would lead to
the forcible abolition of this southern ternary model in favor of
one in which the King of France became the supreme authority, in
all respects replacing even the Pope as interpreter of divine
will upon Earth.
     The first Albigensian Crusade, from 1208 to 1224, was
largely the affair of northern nobles following the crusading
traditions of their knightly order, a form of divine service that
earned the knight an indulgence for all his sins. The Montfort
family took the lead in these adventures but in the end did not
succeed in either eliminating heresy or in changing the southern
balance of power except to unite the normally fractious southern
nobles and townships in temporary alliance against them. King
Philip Augustus remained aloof from these early fights, ignoring
Pope Innocent III's call in order to consolidate his own
holdings. It was not until 1218 that the royal family would be
directly involved in southern affairs, when Philip sent his son
Louis (soon to be Louis VIII) south at the head of a force of
crusaders. Louis was not anxious to lead a crusade, having been
under the onus of an excommunication imposed by Innocent in
connection with his attempted invasion of England. Now, however,
the crown needed the Church's support to legitimize it's newly
won powers and lands in the north of France. The Church, for it's
part, was losing it's best supporters in the south as the Counts
of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges counterattacked the Montfort
family's holdings (the head of that family, the infamous Simon de
Montfort, had recently been killed while besieging Toulouse).
Innocent's successor, Pope Honorius III, now made the fateful
error that would come to change the entire balance of power
between Papacy and monarch. He offered Philip financial support
from the Church as an inducement to aid the Montforts, the amount
being half the crusading tax levied on the French clergy, a
conciderable sum. This set a pattern that was to be repeated in
many later crusades, a precident that would lead the Papacy into
a dangerous dependency on the Kings of France and finally in the
fourteenth century into the captive Papacy at Avignon.
     In 1224 the first Albigensian Crusade ended witha truce that
allowed the Montforts to escape the south with their honor, but
not their holdings, intact. In 1223 Philip Augustus had died and
Louis VIII was now on the throne of France. It was he who would
lead the second Albigensian Crusade against the southern Counts.
Once again Louis demanded large sums from the Church in order to
finance the crusade, as well as the right to quit the crusade
whenever he chose and the Church's support in claiming the lands
of the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VII. In 1226 he led the largest
force of crusaders yet assembled into Occitania. His only major
engagement proved to be one of the more important of the
Albigensian Crusades. At the city of Avignon on the Rhone river,
Louis won a protracted seige and control of the town. Avignon was
not a French city but was rather a city of the Holy Roman Empire,
though it did owe nominal allegiance to Raymond from some of his
holdings in Provence. This conquest of what was essentially an
independant republican city-state was a clear indication of what
the fate of the rest of the Occitanian social order would be
under French rule. Louis VIII, however, did not live to extend
his rule beyond the reconquest of the Montfort holdings. On 8
November 1226 he died as he returned from the field for the
winter.
     It was left to his successor, Louis IX (in time to become
St. Louis) and his mother Blanche of Castille, who was his regent
early in his reign,
to finally bring Occitania under the control of the crown.
Blanche was able to negotiate an end to the war with Raymond that
placed the inheritance of the County of Toulouse in the hands of
the crown. Later, in 1242 Louis himself would quell the last
rebellion of Raymond with ease with leaving this agreement
intact. Thus when Raymond died in 1249 Louis came to control the
largest and richest kingdom in Europe. After 1229 Raymond had
been forced by his agreement with the crown, and the threat of
royal force of arms, to allow the newly formed Holy Inquisition
(directed by the Dominican order, old foes of the Cathars) to
operate freely in Toulouse. In a series of gruesome massacres the
Cathar Church was systematically wiped out, destroying both the
religious and secular equality that it had helped to engender.
     With the triumph of Louis IX the realization of the ternary
form laid down in the Philippiad of William the Breton was
finally achieved. Louis had become the one element outside the
orders of society. Even the Pope was now fitted into his place in
the ecclesiastical order, becoming only a powerful prince who
served the King in the spiritual realm as other princes did in
the material. The social orders of France were now locked into
the form that they would retain until the Revolution of 1789
would finally overthrow them. The wealth of Occitania and the
subordination of the Catholic Church to the will of the crown had
been the keys that had ensured the supremacy of the French
monarchy.Without the egalitarian Cathar heresy to spur the Church
into action, the way for the establishment of this enduring order
would have been much obscured.


                         Works Cited

Duby, Georges. The Three Orders. trans. Arthur Goldhammer.
     (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Strayer, Joseph R. The Albigensian Crusades. (New York, NY: The
     Dial Press,1971).