Montsegur, Sunday, August 15, 2010
History
As I hope the linked You Tube video I shot from its heights proves out, Montsegur appears awesome, sacred, even without its history, a grand tragedy of the classical sense.
[CLICK HERE TO SEE THE MONTSEGUR VIDEO ON YOU TUBE.]
In the Middle Ages the Montsegur region was ruled by the Counts of Toulouse and the Viscounts of Carcassonne, noble houses sympathetic to the Cathar cause. Arguably the best known of Cathar castles, the Château de Montségur served as safe house, monastery, and finally military stronghold for the Cathar faithful and their defenders in the brutal last years of the Albigensian Crusade.
Anticipating defeat and persecution by the invaders in the cities and lowlands of the Languedoc, Cathar leaders, early in the thirteenth century, induced Ramon de Pereille, the lord of Montsegur, to fortify this castle, strategically deep and high in the Pyrenean foothills.
After the 1229 Treaty of Paris ended the official crusade with the Languedoc under French control and the Inquisition stationed there to complete the task of cleansing the area of any vestiges of heresy, Montsegur became headquarters and one of the few safe areas for the Cathar community. Here, missionaries, exhausted by months of undercover ministry to their scattered flock, could rest and pray before returning to their difficult and dangerous work. And from here resistance fighters called “faidits—outlaws who had been stripped of lands and goods by the Roman Church—would stage occasional raids to keep the occupiers at bay.
In the spring of 1242, one such war party, led by Pierre-Roger Mirepoix, now lord of Montségur, killed the two hated head Inquisitors of Toulouse, along with several of the priests’ party, while they slept in the keep of the Avignonet castle. News of this daring feat sparked a short-lived revolt throughout the region, but in the spring of 1243, the church Council of Beziers issued a call to destroy the “synagogue of Satan” as they called Montsegur. Troops poured into the valley below the lofty peak, ten thousand by year’s end under the command of the French King’s seneschal, Hughes des Arcis.
To defend the mountain, Pierre-Roger Mirepoix had a mere thirty knights and only another 120 troops, archers and mercenaries. Nevertheless, despite the lopsided numbers, the Cathars, with the height and home field advantage, held out into the winter.
Then, shortly before Christmas, the French brought in a group of skilled climbers who scaled the sheer cliff face and seized a position on which catapults were constructed to bombard the fortress with stones.
The Cathars continued to resist despite the enormous hardships of mid-winter but finally had to surrender on March 2, 1244, and then only after having negotiated a two-week truce to allow the individual members to ponder their fate: abjure their faith and live or be burned at the stake. The perfects among them all chose the latter, and they were joined by 25 others who chose the ultimate Cathar sacrament of the consolamentum and a cruel death.
Approximately 225 believers were burned en masse in an open field at the foot of their sacred mountain. Next to that field, there has long been a monument, still there, inscribed with these words: IN THIS PLACE ON 16th MARCH 1244, MORE THAN 200 PEOPLE WERE BURNED. THEY CHOSE NOT TO ABJURE THEIR FAITH .
After the surrender, the castle of Montsegur built by Raymond de Pereille was destroyed. The ruins that crown the mountain today are the remains of a later French fortress constructed to guard the frontier with Spain. The foundation stones of the terraced Cathar habitations, however, can still be seen clinging to the mountainside behind the fort’s stone walls.
Mystery
Even after 800 years, mysteries, medieval and more contemporary, swirl around Montsegur. To mention just a couple:
In 1244, likely during the truce between March 2-16, it was reported that four Cathars climbed down the steep northern-eastern slope and squeezed through the enemy lines, taking some unspecified valuables with them. Their possible destinations, now the subject of legends, include several locations in the region, which were on my itinerary, to be described in coming blog entries.
It is generally believed that the cache taken out was the Cathar church treasury, destined perhaps for some remaining communities in Italy. Still, some claim it consisted of items more exotic, from the Ark of the Covenant to the “Holy Grail” of the Last Supper. And likely the contingent carried copies of Cathar sacred books, rare as all others would be destroyed by the Inquisition. It is also quite possible that one of them was a Perfect, a minister who could after the surrender pass on the faith to future generations with the required sacramental rites.The form of the treasure and its eventual resting place are legion and no one has claimed, at least publicly, to have found it yet. For centuries treasure hunters have come and dug in the region around Montsegur. Rennes-le-Chateau with its own treasure tale, the subject of the previous entry, is only an hour’s drive away.
But the most bizarre of all was the Nazi-connected crowd that allegedly came to Montsegur with pick and shovel in the ‘30s and ‘40s, daring to call themselves seekers of the Holy Grail. Montsegur became the destination for expeditions by Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage Society”), the SS agency that specialized in weaving ancient Aryan links to contemporary Germany through archeology and anthropology.
Montsegur came to Himmler’s attention through the explorations and works of Otto Rahn, the very character on whose life my novel in progress, The Perfect, is based, and who thus was the one who brought me to Montsegur as well. Rahn explored the ruins of Montsegur in the early 1930s and wrote two books that conjoin Montsegur and the Cathars with the Holy Grail story as presented by Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Seduced by Himmler’s promises that membership would afford continued support for his research, Rahn joined the SS in 1936. Speculation as to what he did or found in the following three years until his mysterious death in 1939, after courageously but foolishly resigning from Himmler’s gang, is already the subject of several books and websites. I reserve my own take on the rest of his convoluted story for The Perfect.
But Himmler apparently did not forget about Montsegur and its treasure upon his protégé’s defection and death. Some sources place SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, an engineer dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe,” in the Montsegur area on a top secret mission in February 1944. Then on March 16th of the same year, on the 700th anniversary of the fall of Montsegur, Nazi planes supposedly traced patterns—variously described as swastikas or Celtic crosses—over the ruins swarming with devotees observing the anniversary.
And a final spine-tingling note related to the above. Guillaume Bélibaste,
the last known Cathar Perfect, said these words in the Langeudoc dialect on his way to be burned at the stake: “Al cap des sest cens ans verdegeo le laurel” (“At the end of 700 years, the laurel will be green once more.” He seemed to foresee a Cathar resurgence seven centuries in the future. If the Nazis knew about this prediction and commemorated or mocked it with their fly-over, they did so in vain; a year later their empire lay in ruins shabbier than what was left of the Cathar castles after 700 years.
But for me, having travelled now for some days in a land that presently pays high honor to a people and a way of life once deemed exterminated, I felt that Belibaste was right. The laurels had turned green again; the Cathar summer had returned to the Languedoc.
********If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed .
Order a copy of The Anathemas, a Novel about Reincarnation and Restitution.
Copyright 2012 by Victor E. Smith. All rights reserved. Let us know your thoughts on this post. Put in your comment is the space provided below. Thank you.