A Most Unique Book
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error is one of a kind
There’s an episode of the 1980s version of The Outer Limits in which a whole town of people just shoop, get scooped up and imprisoned in an alien habitat. Imagine that happens to you. One morning, shoop, up you go, the aliens sit you down, but rather than the unsettling probing of popular culture, they probe you instead with questions about everything you’ve done in the past five years, and then inquire about everybody you know. Most of what they’re interested in seems like gossip. Then they send you back home, where you learn that every person in your town has had the same experience.
Crazy. But this has happened in real life.
At the end of the Outer Limits’ episode, we get a shot of the hole in the ground left behind when the aliens took the whole town, cars stopped where the road falls into it. The real-life version was not quite like that. However, people returned home from visiting relatives after a holiday to find toddlers wandering in the street, animals hungry, food left sitting on tables, and not a person in sight, as if shoop, everybody in town had disappeared.
It wasn’t aliens who did it though, nor was it televised. This happened in France in 1308, and it wasn’t aliens. Perhaps it was worse. It was the Inquisition.
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error is that story and so much more.
shoop
Montaillou and the surrounding villages.
Normally, when I’m writing a post about a book, it’s from my bookshelf, is meaningful to me, or interesting due to age or circumstances. And Montaillou: the Promised Land of Error sorta falls into these categories … but primarily I’m writing about it for a different reason.
It’s just incredible that it exists at all.
History is really good at recording kings, conquerors, Popes. Heck, get granular enough and you can learn about English kings’ feasts and whether they ate duck or pheasant, and/or what each of their party guests gave as a wedding present. These things are all meticulously recorded somewhere. Hone your google-fu and you can find out.
What history is not good at are working moms raising families, regular Joes in the pubs, your cousin who drives a truck and your aunt who’s a nurse. For most of history, regular folks are invisible.
And that’s why Montaillou: Promised Land of Error is amazing. For once the voices of regular people come down to us. Of course, as is often the case, when the powerful took note of these regular folks, it was only to punish them. The difference is: in Montaillou in the early 1300s, they wrote it all down.
The head of the Inquisition squad in Montaillou, the man responsible for the town’s shoop — meaning “mass arrest by local bailiffs” — was a guy named Jacques Fournier. In many Inquisitorial cases, if you were wealthy enough you could wink-wink, grease the palms of the town jailer, or the inquisitor, and everyone would agree it was all a big misunderstanding. Olly olly oxen free. Not so with Fournier. He was like the Sheldon Cooper of Inquisitors. The Leslie Knope of doctrinal adherence. The guy showed up with a no-nonsense attitude and a crack squad of scribes. For every damn thing you said you’d hear the scribbles of doom whispering in the corner. There could be no lies, no misremembering. Everything was cross-referenced. It was like Fournier had the entire town’s Google search history in front of him and wasn’t afraid to weaponize it.
Fournier’s shoop of Montaillou wasn’t random or unexpected. The village was one of the last holdouts of Catharism in France. If you haven’t heard of Catharism (and why would you after Fournier was done with it?) the long and the short of it was this:
For centuries before Martin Luther lucked into winning the not being burned at the stake lottery, folks had been having their own ideas about how Christianity should work. Much like later Protestants, Cathars believed in a personal relationship with God, and that human souls were really the souls of angels trapped in meat bodies. When they died, if they were cleansed by a Cathar holy man, a parfait (a perfect), they could go home to be with God.
Catharism, as a “heresy,” got large enough to threaten Catholicism in Southern France in the 1200s, so of course the church adopted a live-and-let-live policy and everybody was cool.
Wait … no … I read that wrong. The church called for the first ever crusade on European territory against Christians, the “Albigensian Crusade.”
“I get a free pass to heaven by killing some wrong people, and do it locally? Yes, please.”
Usually you had to travel all the way to Jerusalem for a deal like that.
You may have heard some hokey action movie villain say something like, “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.” The quote may be apocryphal, but it’s said to come from this crusade, when retreating Cathars took shelter among the regular citizens of the city of Beziers, and Arnaud Amalric, the abbot commanding the pursuing Catholic army ordered, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius (Kill them. For the Lord knows who are His.)”
WWJD? In this case, the J is basically Emperor Palpatine.
Families, shepherds, oversexed priests, magic, and everything in between.
A hundred years later, all that’s left of Catharism is a few hundred people living around the village of Montaillou. And because Fournier shooped them up, we know all about their lives. We know about how they’d sleep a few to a bed; how and who would delouse one another every evening and what they’d talk about. We have every instance where the Cathar mystic (parfait), Belibaste, would trick his shepherd friend, Pierre, into giving him five bucks and then justify not repaying him. How one guy heard his neighbors fighting, climbed on top of their roof, and lifted a tile so he could spy on them. How the priest had numerous lovers, including the local aristocratic widow. How his brother, the bailiff, used his position to enrich their family and jail people who threatened them. How one shepherd’s landlord stiffed them so he went into business for himself.
Everything. I can’t express this enough.
You ever come across an entry in an old local recipe book, where the entry reads something like: Prepare the dough in the usual way… and you have no idea what they considered “the usual way?”
No confusion in this book. And the usual way is strangely familiar if still undeniably foreign.
Of course, it’s this fulsome nature of the book that makes it slightly less accessible than, say, a narrative history that follows a chronological story arc. How else do you relate every detail about hundreds of people to make a book that’s digestible for a modern audience? Thus it’s broken up into categories and topics: households, heresy, relationships, medicine, and so on. Sometimes it can be a little much.
And you think kindergarten teachers have it tough these days with classrooms full of Lukes, Nevaeh’s, Kai’s, and other popular names. It seems like every second guy in Montaillou was named Pierre, or Guillaume. And what is Guillaume’s sister’s name: Guillaumette.
Like she’s a ladies’ hockey team.
To ease us into the academic take, the author focuses largely on three different people, the philandering priest, Pierre Clergue, his corrupt brother, Bernard, and the naive shepherd, Pierre Maury. The brothers ruled the township by monopolizing local spiritual and secular power—sometimes sacrificing enemies to the Inquisition—while Pierre Maury roamed the hills between mountain villages with a whole system of other shepherds, tending flocks for different owners and frequently crossing paths with the Cathar holy men, the parfaits, sometimes sharing the same bed with them even though he wasn’t fully of the “true” faith.
Seriously, Pierre, stop lending money to Belibaste. He’s already sleeping with your girlfriend…
We know all this as the inquisitor, Fournier, would later go on to be elected Pope Benedict XII, and thus all his records were kept in the Vatican Library. In the 1970s, the book’s author was granted access to Fournier’s trove of thousands of hours of interviews and recollections of the people of Montaillou, and collected it into this succinct ethnography. Subsequently, the book went on to be a huge critical and financial success, much to the surprise of the author.
This was the first book on the syllabus for my Medieval History class back in 1996. I was a shit student and never got through it all during class—non-fiction still remains my anti-forte. However, I’ve always been fascinated by this book, never forgot it, and have plumbed its depths on numerous occasions since. One year it even got crammed into my backpack while I lived and worked in the forests of British Columbia for six or seven months, emerging dog-eared and stained to go back onto the shelf in the fall.
Lately, as I’ve been writing fantasy books about shepherds living in a mountain village—and I’m sure this book had an influence in determining that’s who I was writing about—it’s become an invaluable resource as much as an incredible document and window into the past. The eras I’m working with are entirely different, but I imagine a shepherd on a mountain pasture in 5000 BCE could easily sit and have a tea and talk shop with Pierre Maury of medieval France happily.
And the funny thing is, after reading this book, I’m also sure we’d be happy to sit down at a Starbucks and have a fancy coffee with Pierre Maury today, if only to spot him a fiver and advise him, “Dude, stop lending money to Belibaste. Do you remember what happened with your girlfriend?”
In conclusion, this is a book worth knowing about or digging into wherever you find interesting, even if you don’t read it cover to cover. It’s a book about people who wished to live and love as they wanted and were ultimately persecuted for it. I see myself in here. You’ll see yourself in here.
I’m reminded of when Terry Pratchett said: “No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away… The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”
This is a book worth reading so the ripples of the people of Montaillou can travel a little farther.
Highly recommended.
Belibaste…