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Chapter Three. An Urban Underground
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[ 95 ] CHAPTER THREE AN URBAN UNDERGROUND Heresy in Montpellier (1318–1328) He rented a house for the aforementioned Guilhem, paid the rent (or part of it), and carried him from one hiding place to another on his shoulders because of his illness. —Johan Orlach of Montpellier O nce the Beguin networks in places like Cintegabelle, Clermont l’Hérault, Lodève, and Narbonne had been cracked by the inquisitors of Languedoc, the resistance moved to Montpellier. Montpellier must have seemed like the perfect place to hide, because it was one of the last cities any inquisitor would have expected to have heretical sympathies. In so many ways, medieval Montpellier was an anomaly among the cities of the Midi. Unlike Narbonne or Nîmes, Carcassonne or Marseille, Montpellier had no august Roman or Greek past to boast about, no marble antiquities or ancient walls and traditions. Montpellier was the self-made man, the Johnnycome -lately, new money—almost a Horatio Alger hero of the south. As late as the tenth century, the city was no more than a mere farm on a hill, mentioned for the first time in a charter of 985,1 but by the middle of the 1 Montpellier enters the historical stage in 985 in a charter found in the cartulary of the Guilhems (Liber instrumentorum memorialium: Cartulaire des Guillems de Montpellier, ed. Société Archéologique de Montpellier [Montpellier, 1884–1886], 125–126), which documents the donation of a manse “at the top of Monte pestelario” to the ancestor of the family soon to become the seigneurial overlords of the growing city. A mere hundred years later in 1090, Montpellier was already a town with walls, whose lord participated in a division of property between Montpellier and Montpelliéret, the settlement on the [ 96 ] Chapter Three thirteenth century, it was the undisputed commercial and intellectual capital of Languedoc. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, Montpellier’s population had probably risen to 40,000, making it also the largest city in the south.2 Such rapid growth seems extraordinary. Montpellier had no particular natural resources and little native industry. It was not a seaport, like Marseille , or on a major river, like Toulouse. To the north, east, and west lay forests and garrigue (Mediterranean scrubland) all the way to the Cévennes; to the south, the swampy salt ponds that line the coast. The site was, however, located close to two major roads, the Cami Romieu or “Pilgrims’ Road” that led pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella and passed directly through town,3 and the Roman via Domitia, which crossed the breadth of southern France just north of Montpellier. A third trade route, somewhat less frequented in the Middle Ages, the Cami Salinié or “Salt Road,” ran along the Mediterranean littoral south of Montpellier and also probably dated from Antiquity.4 Montpellier was also only ten kilometers from the Mediterranean, close to the Roman port of Lattes, still used extensively in the Middle Ages. This conjunction of factors certainly helped to make the city a prominent center for commerce, but Montpellier’s rise in the commercial world was due also and especially to the far-thinking policies of its early lords, the Guilhems , who actively promoted the city as an international market and as a center of cloth-finishing.5 The merchants of Montpellier became known as the purveyors of a particularly vivid scarlet cloth, and those who manufactured and traded in textiles, especially silk, were near the top of the social next hill (ibid., 69–72). For a more detailed introduction to the site of Montpellier and the city’s early history see Ghislaine Fabre and Thierry Lochard, Montpellier: La ville médiévale (Paris, 1992), 17, and Kathryn Reyerson, “Commerce and Society in Montpellier : 1250–1350,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974, x. 2 Jacqueline Caille, “L’élan urbain en Languedoc du XIe au XIVe siècle: L’exemple de Narbonne et de Montpellier,” Archéologie du midi médiéval 13 (1995): 79–90, esp. 84. 3 According to the twelfth-century text of the Liber Sancti Jacobi, the first of the four routes through France that lead to Santiago passes from Saint Gilles du Gard to Montpellier to Toulouse and then to the Somport pass which leads into Spain. Jeanne Viellard, ed., Le Guide du pélerin de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, 5th ed. (Paris, 1990), 2. The earliest pilgrimage route through Montpellier itself actually took the path of the present-day rue...