each order of his new subjects should be represented in his parliament, that he might ensure their obedience. But he had also taken care, beforehand, to ensure to himself a great majority. All the bishops were absolutely devoted to him; the knights-crusaders had no other interest than his; the inhabitants of the country were intimidated; and the statutes of Pamiers bear the impress of their oppression, and of the suspicions of the conqueror. Amongst fifty-one articles, some of which nevertheless are favourable to the peasants and lowest classes of society, we may remark the prohibition to rebuild any of the fortresses which had been destroyed, without the express permission of the count; the order to all the catholic women, whose husbands were amongst the enemies of Montfort, to quit the estates under his dominion; the order to widows, or heiresses of noble fiefs, to marry none but Frenchmen, during the space of ten years. These marriages, joined to the confiscations and new infeodations which Montfort granted to his creatures, multiplied, in the province, the noble families of the north of France, who adopted, in their legislation, the customs of Paris, and caused the extinction of the greater number of ancient families, who prided themselves on descending either from the Romans or the Goths.5

5 Martene Thesaurus Anecdotorum, tom. i, p. 831 seq. Hist. gén. de Languedoc, liv. XXII, ch. xxxiv, p. 233.

It was not in vain that the count of Toulouse took refuge with the king of Aragon, and implored his protection at the court of Rome. This king was held in high consideration by Innocent III, and had rendered great services to the church. He could not see, without regret, his two sisters, one married to the count of Toulouse, the other to his son, stripped of their inheritance by Simon de Montfort; or that all the princes of those provinces, the allies and the vassals of the crown of Aragon, should be ruined; that Simon should have refused to himself the service which he owed for his viscounties of Beziers and Carcassonne; and that he had not permitted the other feudatories of the province to render it, even in those moments of danger when Spain appeared on the point of sinking under the invasion of the Almohadans; in a word, that he should destroy that dominion, which Don Pedro himself, and the princes of Aragon, his ancestors, had gradually obtained over the south of Gaul.

The ambassadors of the king, Don Pedro, at the court of Rome, did their utmost therefore to convince the pope that Simon de Montfort was only an ambitious usurper; that, whilst he invoked the name of religion, he thought of nothing but his own aggrandisement; that he attacked, indifferently, catholics and heretics; and that he had changed a crusade against heresy into a war of extermination against that Provençal nation of

which the king of Aragon prided himself in being the chief.6

Whether it was that Innocent III had been constantly deceived by his legates, and that the ambassadors of the king of Aragon shewed him the truth for the first time; or whether he felt some pity for the princes and people to whom he had already occasioned so much injury; or whether he at last began to suspect those whom he had rendered too powerful, and thought it more conformable to the policy of the church, to raise from the ground the rival of Simon de Montfort, and oppose him to his conqueror, than to complete his ruin; he entirely changed his language, in the letters, which, at the beginning of the year 1213, he wrote to his legates and to Montfort.

1213. The first of these letters, dated the 18th of January, is addressed to the legate Arnold, archbishop of Narbonne, to the bishop of Riez, and to master Theodise of Genoa. In this letter Innocent III reproaches them with the murder of the viscount of Beziers, the usurpation of provinces, even where there was no heresy, and with the cupidity they had displayed throughout the whole war. He informs them that Raymond had surrendered himself, with his son and all his states, into the hands of the king of Aragon, de

6 Petri Val. Cern. Hist. Albigens. cap. lxx, p. 635.—Hist. gén. de Languedoc, liv. XXII, ch. xxxvi, p. 234.-In Mariana Hist. Hisp. lib. xii, cap. ii, p. 557.

claring that he submitted entirely to the sentence of the church; that this king, in possession of such pledges, announced, on his part, that he was ready to execute the judgment of the church, which he awaited; that he engaged to provide that the son of the count of Toulouse, who had never been suspected of heresy, should be brought up in all the rigour of the catholic faith; and he undertook that the father should proceed to the the Holy Land, or to Spain, according as the pope should command, to combat the infidels, for the remainder of his days. Don Pedro, whose letter Innocent III almost entirely copied into his own, only demanded, that they should cease to preach the crusade against a country which had already submitted; that they should not continue to invite the French, by all their spiritual rewards, to exterminate the Languedocians; that, whatever determination Innocent III should take against the count of Toulouse, they should cease to confound the innocent with the guilty; and that, should they even find Raymond VI in fault, they should not, on that account, punish his son, who was not even suspected, or the counts of Foix and of Cominges, and the viscount of Béarn, who had been involved in the war only for having fulfilled their feudal duties towards the count of Toulouse, their lord. After having inserted in his letter almost the entire contents of that of the king of Aragon, Innocent III reproved his legates in a

language which they were not accustomed to hear from him. He reproached them with their cupidity and ambition; he accused them of having shed the blood of the innocent, and of having invaded lands where heresy had never penetrated; he commanded them to restore to the vassals of the king of Aragon, all that they had taken from them, that the king might not be diverted from the war which he was maintaining against the infidels. Two following letters, written by the pope to Simon de Montfort, are not less energetic, and shew no less that the atrocities of the war in Albigeois, were at last known at Rome."

The king of Aragon obtained equal success in an embassy that he sent to Philip Augustus. He engaged this king to retain his son Louis, who was ready to set out for the crusade against the Albigenses; he, at the same time, announced in the Isle of France, in Champagne and Burgundy, that the pope ceased to encourage this crusade, and exhorted the faithful rather to march to the relief of the Holy Land. The cardinal, Robert de Courçon, legate of the pope in France, declared himself against the continuation of the war; so that the bishops of Toulouse and of Carcassonne, who were again going through the provinces of the North, to arm them against those of the South, found much difficulty in issuing their indulgences.

7 Innocentii III Epistolæ lib. xv, ep. 212, 213, 214.-Hist. Gén. de Languedoc, liv. XXII, ch. xxxvi, p. 234.-Duchesne Script. tom. v, p. 730, 731.