Everything at Once

The emperor's name was Alexios Komnenos, and his envoys reached Urban not at Clermont itself but earlier, in March 1095, at a council in Piacenza. He was asking for mercenaries, nothing more: the Turks had crushed his army at Manzikert in 1071 and taken most of Anatolia. He never asked for an army of conquest, let alone all of Europe.

The idle knights were not a new problem either. The church had spent a century trying to control their private wars, banning fighting on certain days and putting certain people off-limits, with limited success. A war in the east let Urban export the problem instead of policing it.

Rome's fight over who was in charge had a name and a rival: for twenty years the popes had been at odds with the German emperors over who appointed bishops, and Urban himself had a rival claiming the papacy and sitting in Rome while he was often shut out of the city.

There was a fourth reason the lesson does not mention. The eastern church had split from Rome in 1054, and an army marching east under the pope's own banner, meant to rescue eastern Christians, was also a chance to bring them back under it.

One case shows what the ruin looked like. Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the commanders, raised money for the journey by handing over Bouillon itself, his own town, to the bishop of Liège for thirteen hundred silver marks. Equipping a knight for the road meant armour, warhorses, servants and two or three years of food.

The privileges a crusader received were eventually written down. A bull for a later crusade spelled out what a man got for going: his family and property placed under the church's protection while he was away, and no interest running on his debts in the meantime.

The port cities that profited were Genoa, Pisa and Venice, each of which came away with a trading quarter in every conquered harbour. The papacy's own gain was less tangible: it had just discovered it could raise an army out of a single field in France.

The killers gave two reasons, where their reasoning survives. One was religious logic turned outward: if we are marching a thousand miles to fight God's enemies, why walk past these ones first? The other was the debt.

Not every authority stood aside. The bishop of Speyer sheltered the Jews of his own city, and most of them survived. The archbishop of Mainz took families into his own palace, and the mob broke in anyway. The emperor, Henry IV, ordered from far away that the communities be protected, and he was ignored.

Some households, facing forced baptism, killed themselves rather than submit to it. You will meet what this produced again in Lesson 31.

Muslim writers of the time put the dead at seventy thousand. Modern historians think the true figure is unknown and far lower than any of the boasts, and that the disagreement barely matters, since every account that survives was written by the winners as a description of a triumph, not a record.

The ransom letters themselves were not discovered until a century ago, found in the storeroom of a Cairo synagogue.

Venice built the fleet as promised, suspending much of its own trade for a year to do it, on a contract priced for a number of men the crusaders then failed to produce. Fewer men arrived, and the money did not.

Before Constantinople there was a first stop. The Doge, Enrico Dandolo, an old man and blind, steered the fleet to Zara, a Christian city on the Adriatic that had broken away from Venetian control. They took it to work off the debt. Pope Innocent III had forbidden the attack, and he excommunicated them for making it anyway.

At Constantinople, Venice's cut included the harbours and islands that mattered most, Crete among them, and Dandolo's successors afterward styled themselves lord of a quarter and half a quarter of the Roman empire.

Innocent's fury was not vague. He wrote to his own legate that men who were supposed to be fighting for Christ had turned their swords on Christians, sparing neither religion nor age nor sex, and had drenched themselves in the blood of their brothers.

Those bronze horses stood over Saint Mark's for the next seven hundred years. Napoleon carried them off to Paris for eighteen years before they came back; the originals now stand inside the basilica, with copies on the front where you can still see them.

Name two of the buildings and you can see how the money actually worked. When Chartres cathedral burned in 1194, its own canons pledged their personal incomes for three years to pay for rebuilding it. Canterbury rebuilt itself on the pilgrims who came to the spot where Thomas Becket was killed in 1170, and churches whose own relics were not drawing enough crowds sent them out on tour, with canons travelling behind the reliquary to collect money along the road.

And on the saying about the stones, understand what I was actually doing. I was not predicting anything about masonry. I was answering the question my friends had actually asked, which was whether God could be measured in square feet.

The region had a name, Languedoc, and its towns were not only Toulouse and Albi but Carcassonne too. The alternate name for these people, Albigensians, comes from that town of Albi.

What did they actually believe? The surviving accounts describe people who held that the visible world was made not by the good God but by an evil power, that bodies and matter were a trap, and that the God of the Hebrew scriptures was that evil power. The way out ran through a rite given by their own ministers, called perfecti, good men and good women who really did live in poverty, and both sexes held that rank.

Whether any of it was ever one organized church is a deeper argument than a single line can hold. Some historians think the tidy system of belief comes mostly from the records of the men who prosecuted it, who found what they had already expected to find. Others think the sources are real enough, and nobody has settled which side is right.

Innocent III had already spent years sending preachers south with no result before the murder of his own legate finally gave him the pretext for a crusade.

At Béziers, the killing did not sort the guilty from anyone else. The whole town went down together.

The war ended in 1229 by treaty, and that treaty is why the south of France remains part of the same kingdom today.

My friends were not inventing the idea. There was scripture for it: a prophet before me had once called down fire on his enemies exactly that way. They were asking whether I would do the same.

On the weeds, the part usually left out is the reason for waiting. Do not go pulling growth out of the field, because you will take the wheat with it. Let both grow until the harvest. The sorting was never your job.

The council itself was enormous, the largest church assembly held up to that time, with more than four hundred bishops attending. Canon 21 applied only once a person was old enough to know right from wrong, and it required communion at Easter as well as the yearly confession.

The secrecy cut both ways. A priest who repeated what he heard was to be removed from his post and shut in a monastery for life.

Canon 68 is where your image of a badge comes from; Lesson 31 tells that part.

And a whole industry of handbooks grew up to tell the parish priest what to ask. Thomas of Chobham wrote his around 1216, Raymond of Penyafort in the 1220s, John of Freiburg at the end of the century. They were copied across Europe and later printed, listing the questions by trade and by sin.¹³

Moral life became a checklist, and somebody else had written the questions.

The court answered to Rome, not the local bishop, which is what set it apart from an ordinary trial. Its name comes from inquisitio, an inquiry: the tribunal arrived in a town, preached, and announced a period of grace in which anyone could come forward, confess and name others before the formal proceedings began.

Withholding witnesses' names was not incidental. It removed a defendant's best ordinary defense, the ability to say that witness is my enemy and here is why.

The 1252 authorization for torture came in a bull from Innocent IV addressed to the Italian cities. It came with limits and supposed safeguards, and inquisitors found ways past them.

When a court condemned someone, the technical term was relaxing him to the secular arm, handing him to the civil authorities, who did the actual burning. The handover even included a formal request for mercy, one both sides understood was not to be granted. A ruler who refused to carry out the sentence could himself be dealt with under canon 3.

The confiscated property itself was shared out by local arrangement between the civil authority and the tribunal, which used its share to cover its own costs.

Some of the tribunal's own registers survive today, and you can read them.

Valdes had made much of his fortune lending money at interest, which turns the giving away from a mood into something closer to restitution. He paid two clergymen to translate the gospels so he could read them himself.

The document that condemned him, Ad abolendam, was issued on 4 November 1184 at Verona, and it named several other groups besides his followers. Four years before that, Valdes had signed an entirely orthodox statement of faith, so heresy was never the charge against him.

The parish system he threatened ran on tithes, offerings, burial fees, marriage fees and paid masses, and the men who would lose that income were not poor themselves: the archbishop of Lyon held estates, and so did every bishop in the region.

The order to search out heresy was specific. Bishops were to go through their own dioceses once or twice a year, compel local men to swear to report it, and enforce the sentences themselves or lose their offices.

The break with his father was public and physical: Francis took off his clothes in front of the bishop and handed them back to his father. He went on to repair a ruined chapel with his own hands before others began gathering around him.

Innocent III was, at that same moment, preaching the crusade against the south of France, which makes the timing of his other answer worth noticing. Nothing about Francis's approval was written down. He got it at all mainly because a cardinal inside the papal court spoke up for him, and a written rule did not follow for another fourteen years. Later accounts say he and his companions had their heads shaved in the clerical style and swore obedience on the spot.

Francis was not an isolated case either. Innocent reconciled several other poverty movements in those same years, including groups made up of former followers of Valdes.

The building over his grave went up fast. Construction began in 1228, the year he was declared a saint, and inside twenty-four months the whole basilica was standing.

Name the massacres, because the pattern is easy to miss without them. In 1487 a pope authorized a crusade against the Waldensians in the Dauphiné, and an army went into the valleys after them. In 1545, on the order of a French court at Aix, troops destroyed the Waldensian villages of Mérindol and Cabrières in Provence; the dead ran into the hundreds at least, and survivors were sent to the galleys. In the spring of 1655, in Piedmont, soldiers went through the valleys killing again. It is remembered as the Bloody Easter, and the English poet John Milton, who read the reports, wrote a furious sonnet about it that is still in every anthology: Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints.

In 2015 the pope walked into one of their own buildings, in Turin, to ask forgiveness. Eight hundred and thirty-one years, counting from the decree that first condemned them, is a long time to wait for an apology.

A nun answered to an abbess, and the abbess answered to a bishop. A Beguine house answered only to a woman the members themselves had chosen, and the chain of authority stopped there. The women supported themselves by weaving, nursing and caring for the dying, kept no property beyond what they needed, and were free to leave and marry whenever they chose. Where they worked the cloth trade in numbers, the guilds complained about the competition.

Marguerite Porete's trial and death had their own detail worth keeping. She refused to answer her judges at all, for a year and a half, and contemporaries recorded that she went to her execution with a composure that moved the watching crowd. Her book kept circulating anonymously afterward, in four languages, copied inside monasteries, until a scholar finally matched it to her name in 1946.