The Corbières, Tuesday August 24, 2010

After spending the night in the Mediterranean city of Perpignan, I returned inland, arcing northwest and then east to Bezier back on the coast. [My first stop, the remains of the Templar Commandery of Mas Deu a few miles out of Perpignan, deserves and will get an entry of its own.] As this was my last foray through the heart of Cathar country, I left my previous day’s fatigue behind and headed expectantly into the Corbières, a mountainous region featured in both my novel’s 20th century Grail hunter and the 14th century character, Guilhem Bélibaste, the “last Cathar Perfect.”

Queribus

While the imposing Pyrenees Mountains form the current boundary between France and Spain, the political separation was not so cut-and-dry in the medieval period. Large sections of what is now southeastern France and northeastern Spain were shuffled among the area’s feudal powers by marriage, war or treaty. Thus, the primary line of defense between the northern and southern powers was situated not in the Pyrenees but well north of them, on the southern ridge of the Corbières, which rises like a natural wall from the Maury River valley below. Strategically positioned along the ridge are seemingly unreachable fortresses, including a cluster of Cathar-related sites: the chateaux of Peyrepertuse, Queribus and Puilaurens. I passed through the valley, reminiscent of the sun-sated wine country of northern California and touted as one of the most beautiful drives in Languedoc, and snaked up the nerve-racking narrow road to the castle Queribus, regarded as the last Cathar stronghold. It was not until 1255, eleven years after the fall of Montsegur, that a French army approached it, causing the remaining Cathars to slip away without a fight.

Given time and energy constraints, I didn’t climb the distance from the parking lot to the fortress, settling instead for video and photos taken from the parking lot below. The same held for the nearby chateau Peyrepertuse. Everywhere in the region the banquet of available goodies was too extensive to taste everything.

Villerouge-Termenès

It was north across the Corbières, with its intoxicating hills and valleys patched with grape arbors that produce some of the world’s choicest wines, that the day’s primary destination lay: a small village rarely mentioned in tourist guides, Villerouge-Termenès. Located about fifty kilometers southeast of Carcassonne, a massive and meticulously restored castle dominates the center of this village. It figured in skirmishes during the Cathar crusades, but its claim to lasting fame is based on one man’s death: in 1321 the last Cathar Perfect, Guilhem Bélibaste, was burnt alive in the castle’s courtyard. And since only a Perfect could perform the religion’s highest sacrament, the consolamentum, his death marked the effective end of the Cathar religion. It is maintained, however, that with his last words, Bélibaste promised that the laurel, symbolizing Cathar spirituality, would again turn green after 700 years.

Villerouge-Termenès, shrine that it is today to this intrepid hero and the generations of Cathars he represented, itself shows proof of the prophecy’s fulfillment. It was in the 20th century, 700 years after the fall of Montsegur, that the great Cathar historians—Peladin, Roche, Gadal and Rahn—disinterred the Cathar phoenix from the ashes to which the Crusade and the Inquisition has reduced it.

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