The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Madrid, through the efforts of L ’Institut français en Espagne under its director the celebrated Flispanist, Ernest Mérimée, his son Henri and in recent years their successor, Paul Guinard. My friend the professor from Toulouse University, who had been thirty years before an exchange lecturer in French in the University of Dublin, was during his period in Dublin responsible for persuading the students to study Provençal as well as Catalan, and as a result we used in the faculty to give special lectures on the troubadours and chroniclers of the Middle Ages from the two countries. My professorial friend from Toulouse made a cult of Albigensians and insisted on driving me out through the rain and sleet to visit Muret, the scene of Simon de Montfort’s great victory over the Albigeois.
    “Do you Toulousains and Provençaux think of no other historical events than the war of the Albigensians? Since I started on my pilgrimage I have never been able to get away from it. You are worse than the Irish with Ben Burb, the Yellow Ford and the Battle of Aughrim.”
    “Events change but history is always the same. Politics and religion destroyed the troubadours and jongleurs in southern France as they did everything else.”
    “But you are a good Catholic. I remember how devout you were in the old days.”
    “I am still devout, but I hate politicians and I do not like to see the Church meddling in politics. Raymond VI of Toulouse was a Catholic, though a liberal, but he was excommunicated. Pedro II of Aragon was a rigid Catholic, but it did not save him from destruction at the battle of Muret.”
    “It was,” said I, “the military genius of Simon de Montfort that triumphed at Muret, in spite of the advantages in men on the side of Raymond de Toulouse. Raymond had, in addition to his own army, the troops of Pedro of Aragon, who had arrived from Spain providentially.”
    “Remember,” replied my Toulousain friend, “that there were seven bishops on the side of the Crusaders, and every soldier before going into battle heard Mass and received Holy Communion and kissed the fragment of the True Cross which Fulk, Bishop of Toulouse, held out to them.”
    When we arrived at Muret, a picturesque little walled town of brick with castellated fortress on the banks of the Garonne, nothing would satisfy my friend but to drive round the battlefield in floods of rain, pointing out the strategy of Simon de Montfort in his astonishing surprise sortie, which completely caught Raymond of Toulouse and Pedro of Aragon unawares, and led to an enormous massacre, while the victors, incredible as it may seem, lost only one knight and, at most, eight sergeants.
    Muret was the decisive battle of the Albigensian War: the death of King Pedro, over whose body the victorious Simon de Montfort shed tears, destroyed Aragonese influence in Languedoc politics, and Raymond Count of Toulouse had to flee with his own son to the court of England. 27
    On our way back, when we reached Toulouse, we halted at a place near the riverside where the modern Allée St. Micheljoins the Rue des Renforts. There stood the four-towered fortress called the Chateau Narbonnais, commanding the city walls. It was the centre of the fighting when Simon de Montfort in 1218 besieged Toulouse for the last time. He was at Mass when news was brought to him that the besieged were making a general sortie. “I will not go,” he said, “until I have seen my Saviour.” Not until after the elevation of the Host did he take command. When he had all but driven the Toulousains back within the walls, a stone from a catapult, manipulated by a woman, struck him on the head and he died in a few minutes. My Toulousain friend showed me the traditional spot where he died. When I thought of the death of such a great commander from the stray stone fired by a woman I remembered the words the sad ex-soldier Cervantes puts in the mouth of his idealistic hero Don Quixote: ‘While such a knight fights with all the bravery and ardour which fires gallant hearts, without his knowing how or whence, there comes a random ball discharged by one who, perhaps, ran away in terror at the flash of his accursed machine, and ends in an instant the life of one who deserved to live for centuries to come.’
    “I don’t agree with you,” said my Toulousain friend. “That woman with the catapult was the instrument of God. She rid the world of a sinister fanatic. But the harm, alas, had already been done, and