Free EXECUTIONERS (True Crime) by Anne Williams, Phil Clarke, Liz Hardy Page B

thought to have been knights in the employ of the vindicated count.
    The inquisitor’s death was not mourned by the people of Germany. A collective sigh of relief must have swept across the Rhineland, thankful that, at last, true justice had been served. Back in Rome, Pope Gregory IX was incensed by the murder of his trusted weapon against the heretics. He wasted no time in proclaiming Conrad as a champion of the Christian faith and called for the castigation of his killers, but this was not forthcoming. The strength of the German people had been clearly shown by their endurance through interrogation and execution at the hands of Conrad so there was little hope of them surrendering the names of the inquisitor’s executioners. The murder of Conrad of Marburg sent an unsubtle message to the Pope illustrating the general feeling towards the severity of persecution they had suffered and Gregory IX, along with his successors, would never apply such a heavy inquisitorial hand in Germany again.
    The unerring brutality Conrad of Marburg inflicted upon the German people during the first half of the thirteenth century ensured his name was to live on through the centuries as a dark symbol of the Catholic religion and would be forever associated with extreme cruelty. Tales of the macabre surround him to this day. The exact spot where Conrad met his end, marked by a stone on private farmland in the village of Hof Kapelle near Marburg, is thought to be haunted by his ghost and there are reports that tell of Satan worshippers performing black rituals there. How ironic that the very people Conrad wished to exterminate come to carry out their Luciferan rites at the scene of his death.

Robert Le Bougre

     
    By the time Conrad of Marburg was attacked on the road to his hometown in July 1233, another inquisitor was making a name for himself across the border in medieval France. He went by the name of Robert Le Bougre which came from bulgarus, the Latin for Bulgarian, a reference to his being a converted Cathar. It is also from this that we obtained the Modern English word ‘bugger’. His actions as papal inquisitor would prove this a fitting moniker. If one nickname was not enough, Robert would soon receive an even more sinister soubriquet through his extermination of non-Catholic followers – that of Malleus Haereticorum or the Hammer of the Heretics.
    In the year 1233, despite seeing his beloved Conrad assassinated, Pope Gregory IX had not lost any of his enthusiasm for ridding the world of followers of inferior religions. Turning his attention to northern France, where Catharism was known to be rife among its domains and principalities, the Pope called together a mass of Dominican priests hailing from Besançon in the east to ‘make inquisition’ in La Charité-sur-Loire; a small priory town which had become particularly stubborn in its resistance against the Catholic faith. The leader of these papally empowered priests was one Robert Le Bougre. The details of this trip are not known but by the following year, Le Bougre’s zealous deeds and general conduct as an inquisitor were gaining ill favour with the bishops in whose dioceses he put ‘the question’. In 1234, the bishops collectively made known their grievances towards this Cathar-turned-converso putting pressure on Gregory to remove him from office. The Pope reluctantly withdrew his licence – the French clergy had got their way. However, Robert’s suspension was as temporary as the smug grins on the faces of fault-finding bishops, for the following year Gregory IX renewed the debarred Dominican’s commission. Worse still for Robert’s detractors, the Pope was to make it incontrovertibly clear exactly where his loyalty lay by making Le Bougre the Inquisitor General for the entire French kingdom. This appointment came with a further twist of the knife. Gregory IX ordered all bishops to extend all their support and assistance to Robert in his quest to exterminate the