respect with which his high dignity inspired the guards of the gates, took Simon de Montfort by the arm, mingled the two sons of that count, and a great number of knights, in his suite, and in this manner entered the city. However, when the citizens of Montpellier saw these knights marching, on horseback, through their streets, a universal cry, to take arms and defend their liberties, soon assembled them in crowds. They barricadoed the streets, and surrounded the church of Notre Dame, where the council was sitting, and Simon de Montfort thought himself happy to escape from the city through a by-way.*

This little check did not prevent Simon de Montfort from succeeding in the principal object of his ambition. The council of Montpellier was composed of five archbishops, of Narbonne, of Auch, of Embrun, of Arles, and of Aix, with the bishops their suffragans, to the number of twentyeight. These fathers decreed, with a unanimous consent, as the monk of Vaux-Cernay assures us, that Simon de Montfort should occupy Toulouse, and all the other conquests which the Christian crusaders had made, and should govern them in quality of prince and monarch of the country.5 Count Raymond VI, who, before every thing,

4 Petri Vall. Cern. Hist. Albig. cap. lxxxi, p. 654. Hist. gén. de Languedoc, liv. XXII, ch. lxxvii, p. 266.

5 Petri Vall. Cern. Albig. cap. lxxxi, p. 654.—Concilia Generalia, tom. xi, p. 103.

and at any price, wished to be reconciled to the church, offered no resistance to this decree. He left to the monarch, his sovereign, the care of protesting against so strange an invasion of the secular power. He delivered the Narbonnese castle, the palace of the sovereigns, to the bishop Fouquet, who came with armed men to take possession of it, and went to lodge, with his son and the two countesses, at the house of a private individual of Toulouse, named David de Roaix. The prelate demanded, at the same time, hostages from the city, and caused to be delivered to him twelve out of the twenty-four consuls, whom he conveyed to Arles.6

The conquest of the province appeared to be compleated. The greater part of the Albigenses, with thousands of Catholics, had perished by the executioners. The light of the first reformation was extinguished in blood, and even Simon himself was much more occupied with governing his conquests, than with exciting new persecutions. But the movement impressed on the minds of the people, by the preachers of the crusade, did not cease with the suppression of heresy. There were no longer any Albigenses to sacrifice, but thousands of missionaries still continued to ramble about the towns and villages, stirring up the people, by promising them the joys of paradise in re

6 Petri Val. Cernai, Alb. cap. Ixxxi. p. 655.—Guil. de Podio Laurentii, cap. xxiv, p. 680.

compense for the blood they should shed. This new method of gaining indulgences was so much more easy than the crusade to the holy land; the expedition might be accomplished with so little fatigue, expence, or danger, that there was not a knight who did not wish to wash away his sins with the blood of the heretics; and thus each spring produced a new swarm of crusaders. At the commencement of the year 1215, prince Louis, son of Philip Augustus, wished, in his turn, to perform a pilgrimage, and to serve forty days against the Albigenses. He arrived at Lyons the 19th of April, with a much more considerable force than he could have assembled, if he had only been going to combat temporal enemies, such as the Flemings or the English. The bishop of Beauvais, the counts of Saint Paul, of Ponthieu, of Séez, and of Alençon, the viscount of Melun, the lords of Beaujeu, and of Montmorency had desired to participate, with a great number of knights of less illustrious names, in this work of sanctification; and immense was the number of citizens, peasants, and adventurers, who had followed his standard, to live for six weeks at discretion in Languedoc, to pillage houses and castles, and to sing, in chorus, the hymn Veni Creator, around the stake at which the heretics were burning.

When Simon de Montfort and the legate were informed of the approach of this army, which was

but

marching against them although the war was terminated, and which had no country to ravage that now become their property, they were greatly alarmed. They feared that Louis, if he once got into the country, would either defend the count of Toulouse, his near relation, or the rights of the crown, usurped by the council of Montpellier. Simon de Montfort went to meet him at Vienne, and from that time never quitted him. The legate, on his side, took care to inform the prince royal, that coming, as a crusader and pilgrim, into a country conquered by the crusaders, he neither could nor ought to oppose himself, in any thing, to the arrangements which had been made by the ecclesiastics."

But the suspicions of these two ambitious adventurers were without foundation. Neither prince Louis nor his knights had any political object, but came into the south solely to fulfil their vows. He visited, in company with Simon, the cities of Montpellier, Beziers, Carcassone, and Toulouse; he permitted the count of Toulouse and his son to go and seek an asylum with the king of England; and returned by Montauban, at which place it appears that Simon de Montfort took leave of him.

8

It was now two years since Innocent III had summoned, for the year 1215, an œcumenical or general council, in which the whole church should

Petri Val. Cern. Hist. Albig. cap. lxxxii, p. 656.

8 Hist. gén. de Languedoc, liv. XXII, ch. lxxxi—lxxxvii; p. 268–273.

be called to decide the great interests which were then simultaneously in discussion. This, which was the twelfth of the general councils, and the fourth of those of Lateran, was composed of seventy-one metropolitans, of four hundred and twelve bishops, and nearly eight hundred abbots. Two of the patriarchs were present, and the two others were represented by their deputies. The two orders of the Franciscans, and the Dominicans, those terrible soldiers of the pope, received then the sanction of the universal church; a new expedition, for the defence and recovery of the Holy Land, was resolved upon, which was the fifth crusade; some heresies were condemned, and some canons established for the discipline of the church; and amongst them we ought particularly to remark the twenty-second, which imposed on each Christian, for the first time, the obligation of confessing himself once in the year, to receive the communion at Easter, and which transformed a habit of devotion into a duty, the observance of which was, from that time, enforced by the heaviest penalties. In fine, the council of Lateran put an end to the preaching of the crusade against the Albigenses, and disposed of the countries conquered by the crusaders.9

Count Raymond VI, his son Raymond VII, and the counts of Foix and Cominges, had all

9 Labbe Concilia Generalia, t. xi, p. 117. 240. Raynaldi Ann. Ecclesiæ 1215, § i, c. xx, p. 241.