Free The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea Page B

suspected involvement with vehement heretical depravity. The import of the proclamation would have escaped only the dim-witted. Fabre had entrusted his mortal remains to the Franciscans, no doubt in the hope that he would be spared posthumous indignity were the Dominicans ever to accuse him of heresy, on either real or trumped-up charges. He had given a large bequest to the Franciscan convent. If the friars proved powerless to protect him, the Dominicans knew, other burghers of Carcassonne would hesitate before entrusting themselves to the Franciscans, for fear that they too could be molested, their families ruined, their remains incinerated, never to be resurrected on Judgment Day. They would decide that the charity strategically dispensed at death’s doorstep was best directed elsewhere.
    Worse, if the Friars Minor were shown to have sheltered a heretic, they too were guilty of abetting heresy, and thus contact with them endangered one’s immortal soul. Fabre had been watched by six praying friars for weeks as he lay dying: had they just stood aside when the Good Men Bernard Costa and Guilhem Pagès paid a visit to hereticate him? D’Abbeville’s accusation called into question the spiritual respectability of all Franciscans.
    News of the inquisitor’s announcement rocketed up the Franciscan hierarchy. Alarmed provincial leaders huddled in meetings, trying to decide what action to take. The accusation was as serious as could be made: the convent at Carcassonne stood charged, implicitly for the moment, with encouraging heresy. According to the taxonomy established at Tarragona sixty years earlier, the brothers were favorers, perhaps even supporters, of Catharism. They could be locked up in the Wall. No doubt the Dominican leadership was rubbing its hands in glee at the discomfiture into which the Franciscans had been thrown.
    Time was of the essence. The Franciscan hierarchy decided to appeal directly to the inquisitor, however unusual or unprecedented that might be. When the inquisitor, as an administrator of God’s justice, delivered his sentence, it was taken as a matter of faith to be just and deserved. Appeals were rare (partly because defending a heretic cast a cloud of suspicion on the defender), but an appeal to Nicolas d’Abbeville and his colleague Foulques de Saint-Georges had to be made; some face-saving compromise had to be reached, to avert the grievous harm the Friars Minor faced. Two men were designated by the Franciscan leadership to engage with the Dominicans. From Carcassonne word then came from the brothers that a third man was needed—the prior of the convent, Bernard Délicieux.
    On July 4, 1300, the three Franciscans crossed the Aude and made their way up the Trivalle and through the gate of the Cité to the house of the inquisitor. They came unannounced but not unprepared—Bernard had seen to that. They were eventually ushered inside, a tactical error by the Dominicans. The inquisitors were under no obligation to receive the Franciscans, either cordially or frostily, but once they were confronted with Délicieux and his confrères, an official proceeding can be said to have begun. Certainly that was the light in which Bernard chose to cast it. Thus on the basis of this meeting, an appeal, a transcript of the discussion and further explanations in writing, could be required.
    Bernard began to lay out his case. Foulques must have strained to keep his cool in the presence of the man who had jeered at him the previous winter. Bernard likely reasoned that to arrive at a conviction of Castel Fabre his beloved Dominican brethren had used Registers X and XI, compiled some years earlier by Jean Galand, inquisitor at Carcassonne. If Délicieux did mention these documents in the discussion, the color would have drained from the faces of his Dominican listeners, for much of the agitation of the past fifteen years had cited the registers as a cause of