Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Medieval Quercy (review)

This is a tightly focused, and highly detailed, history of heresy, both Waldensianism and Catharism, crusade and inquisition in the southern French region of Quercy from the mid-twelfth through mid-thirteenth centuries. Claire Taylor, despite her focus on Quercy, has important things to say about larger questions. She challenges the tendency, perhaps most visible in Mark Pegg’s work, of some recent historians to treat heresy as a “construct,” something that existed in the minds of Catholic polemicists and inquisitors rather than in the objective, lived experience of real people. Taylor demonstrates that both Waldensianism and Catharism had an objective existence in Quercy. People clearly distinguished between competing belief systems. Their choice of which faith to follow was based on a careful weighing up of what the heretics and the orthodox church taught. They opted for dissent even though they knew doing so was dangerous. Taylor also argues that the experience of Quercy undermines many of what she terms the standard “structuralist functionalist” explanations for the appeal of heresy. It is often argued that heresy appealed to people who lived where the shortcomings of the local clergy made them incapable of meeting the felt spiritual needs of their flock. This was not the situation in Quercy. There the twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century church was vigorous, the center of the region’s cultural and devotional life, with its popular abbeys in particular establishing a dense network of relationships with the local nobility. Indeed, the nobles of Quercy initially allied with the invaders from the north when the Albigensian Crusade began in 1209.

What made the nobles of Quercy willing to protect heretics in their lands were the social and political changes that came in the wake of the crusade. Key to Taylor’s argument are changes in the nature of fief-holding that the war brought. She follows Paul Ourliac and Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier in arguing that in Quercy, as in Languedoc, the pre-crusade “fief” was very different from its northern counterpart. It was not a piece of land, but the rights to take certain revenues associated with an office, a manse, settlement, or a church. It was a mechanism by which nobles redistributed revenue to their servants. Fiefs created alliances, not subservience, among those who often simultaneously held them from one another. The fief was not necessarily military, and vassals did not owe military service for them. The crusade and its aftermath produced a revolution in the nature of fief-holding:

Fiefs were no longer essentially about the distribution of rights to revenues, the social glue . . . that acknowledged status through wealth but preserved horizontal relationships established between social equals. Fief holding now . . . meant that vassals were obliged to provide men-at-arms for the crusaders’ campaigns, and that castles would be seized from uncooperative vassals.

(p. 211)

This reduction in the political autonomy of the Quercy elite made it willing to tolerate and protect heresy. Ironically, it was only in the course of the crusade and its aftermath that heresy spread widely in Quercy, as its protection became allied with the defense of southern autonomy.

The book does have some flaws. Although Taylor argues that people consciously chose to adhere to heretical beliefs, she also wants to maintain that before c. 1180 people in Quercy were not necessarily aware of the contradictions among the various faith communities. Taylor never successfully resolves this tension. The book’s organization could also be stronger, and some lengthy passages read rather like undigested research notes. However, the conclusion sums up the book’s major points in a crisp, concise, and clear fashion. Anyone interested in heresy and its repression will find this book essential reading.