In September, I’ve had the chance to make the very best kind of Pottsville-Paris connection. I paid a visit to my sister Jane Graup who, for a month, has left Schuylkill County to take up residence in southwest France. She is living in Sorèze, a village located between the cities of Toulouse and Albi, in a region rich in wine, good food, beauty and history.
Sorèze sits at the foot of Montagne noire, Black Mountain, whose crest and slopes were inhabited from prehistoric times until the 13th century. The Romans, who settled in the region, recognized the strategic importance of the mountain and established on its crest an oppidum, an enclosed mountaintop fortress offering protection and a 360° view over the surrounding countryside. Early in the 13th century, the fortress was destroyed and the remaining population moved to the foot of the mountain, to the small village of Sorèze, clustered around a Benedictine Abbey founded in the 8th century.
All that happened long ago. Today Sorèze is a sleepy place where shutters are closed at dusk and the village streets, turned over to a pack of wild cats that insolently stare down the rare passer-by from atop municipal garbage cans. The village also has an elegant hotel with a vast park, housed in what was once a royal military academy. There is an elementary school, a pharmacy, three doctors, a very well-stocked supermarket, restaurants, cafés and, of course, bakeries where crusty baguettes are baked daily for the village’s 2,700 inhabitants.
On the whole, Sorèze seems a very pleasant place to live if you like to turn in early and rise at dawn, which, based on street noises, is what most people do. Early in the morning, they hurry alongside the imposing stone buildings of the royal academy and past the half-timbered façades of houses lining the narrow streets, stone and wood invested with hundreds of years of history.
Tourists with time to linger can stop to read commemorative plaques dedicated to village notables, a quaint version of local history. Or they can climb to the top of Black Mountain, where events eight centuries old still resonate today.
There they’ll find the ruins of the oppidum, destroyed at the beginning of the 13th century. At that time, southwest France was in turmoil, the explosive mix of religion and politics having led to war. Divided in two, France had a king in the north and, in the south, in a region known as Languedoc, many powerful and independent lords ruling over wealthy city-states. In the north, the king managed to subdue his vassals; in Languedoc, the aristocracy escaped his control. Embracing heretical beliefs, they also escaped the control of the Catholic Church.
One of those lords, the Count of Toulouse, refused to obey an emissary of the Pope sent to demand obedience to the Church’s teachings. The count was excommunicated. The papal emissary was murdered. In 1208, in response, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against this new kind of “infidel,” men and women who claimed to be Christian but who rejected the sacraments and the pomp of the Catholic Church. Once they became victims of persecution, residents of the rich cities of the South sought refuge in a string of mountain fortresses stretching across Languedoc, from the Rhone River west to the Pyrenees Mountains.
The crusaders sent to fight them received the same favors from the pope as those who had fought in the Holy Land. This time, they did not cross the sea to Jerusalem but set about destroying the mountain citadels, joining forces with powerful local bishops and archbishops, more warrior than priest.
In that way, the mountaintop fortress above Sorèze was reduced to rubble. With its high walls and its panoramic view, it had the potential to become a refuge for heretics seeking to flee the marauding crusaders, mostly barons from northern France.
While travelling with my sister, I was constantly reminded of this long ago conflict between the Catholic Church and a group of heretics desirous to return to a purer form of Christianity. Though today they are known as “Cathars,” a term derived from the Greek word for purity, they called themselves “good men” and “good women,” sometimes they simply called themselves “friends.” They had no churches or sacraments outside of the laying on of hands. And as they considered dying a liberation from the evils of this world, they resisted, literally, to the death.
Many Cathars were members of the aristocracy, many were protected by powerful lords and though the pretext for fighting was religion, politics played an equally important role. In 1226 the French King Louis VIII undertook a second crusade against the seemingly unconquerable heretics, meeting with partial success: the powerful cities of Languedoc fell under royal control.
In the end Church and King were victorious and this is still reflected in architecture and in the lay of the land. The city of Albi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, became a stronghold of an aggressive and triumphant Church. Both its massive archbishop’s palace and its cathedral, more fortress than church, attest to this. Nearby in the Pyrenees Mountains, many rocky peaks are crowned by the ruins of a fortress, once home to defiant heretics.
One of the last to fall was Montségur. In 1244, after a ten-month siege, 10,000 royal troops could finally claim victory against the 100 warriors and several hundred heretics who inhabited the citadel. Those who renounced their faith were spared. The more than 200 who did not were burned to death. Legend has it they willingly mounted their funeral pyre.
A century later, another crusade traversed France. This one, known as “the Shepherd’s Crusade,” was led by shepherds and vagrants who, in the name of their god, went on a rampage, killing Jews and destroying more than 100 Jewish communities in the South of France. Religious turmoil also marked the second half of the 16th century, when bloody conflicts divided French Catholics and Protestants during a series of eight religious wars.
While with my sister, checking the news, I read about modern warriors killing and destroying in the name of yet another god. Now as then, religion and politics do not mix. History has shown us, over and over again, what lethal partners they make. Meanwhile, I have the joy of my sister’s company as we eat, drink, and be merry, for we never know what tomorrow may hold…
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