Fredric L. Cheyette (1932–2015)

This shows what happens if a publisher decides to pump up a scholarly work. It should be titled Political and Social Issues in 12th-Century Languedoc; instead we have Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours, and the back cover blurb calls Ermengard an “extraordinary warrior woman”, conjuring the image of a geek-graphic-novel-chain-mail-bikini-babe. In fact, the book contains precious little about Ermengard, because there’s precious little data available. She seems to have acquired “warrior woman” status by once camping out at a siege and by threatening to don armor in her old age. Doubtless she was an extraordinary woman; simply being a viscountess was extraordinary for the time and place, but there’s so little written about her (and nothing by her; she was illiterate and signed papers with an elaborate sigil) and a whole third of the book discusses events after her death.


I complained recently about a historian who provided too little data in support of his conclusions; author Fredric Cheyette almost provides too much in the way of documentary references, maps, graphs, and quotations. With that understood, there’s much of interest here, although it’s a little tedious to wade through. One of the educating items was the discovery that, at this time, you weren’t (for example) Count of Toulouse; you were a count that happened to live in Toulouse. Noble holdings overlapped extensively, and it would have been impossible to draw a line on a map defining the borders of the county of Toulouse. In fact much of nobility’s wealth and power was not drawn for land and serfs but from various other dues and obligations; a family might be obligated to provide four cheeses and a chicken to some lord every year, or a lord might have the right to a monopoly on wine sales in the month of August or (a disconcerting one) the right to the beds people died in. Cheyette notes that people would have been puzzled by the question “Who is your lord?”; they might owe cheese to one, chickens to another, and their deathbed to a third. The people of Languedoc (Cheyette uses the term “Occitania” for the region) considered the King of France to be their ultimate overlord, but didn’t think of themselves as “French”; the “Franks” lived up north somewhere and didn’t concern themselves much in local affairs. The complexity of these arrangements in a marginally literate society led to an interesting phenomena; contracts and legal documents were cast in a sort of poetry, and were read aloud (as evinced by statements conjuring all those who “read or hear” the text to remember it). I imagine this made things easy to remember; perhaps I’ll suggest that EPA rewrite Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations in blank verse.


This changed during the time under discussion, and Cheyette thinks it was due to the papacy of Innocent III. Innocent apparently wanted to deal with as few temporal lords as possible, and felt the best way to do this was by strengthening royal power and weakening more local rulers. A tool toward this end was the Albigensian Crusade; rather than having to trek all the way to Jerusalem you could get the benefits of taking the Cross merely by smiting those neighbors who were heretics, or who were “soft” on them. It’s unclear if Innocent planned the whole strategy in advance, but that’s the way it ended up; an important factor was a papal letter authorizing temporal rulers to apply capital punishment to heretics. This was a surprise to me; I had always assumed that to be in effect since the days of Constantine but apparently previous heretics had just been exiled, fined, or excommunicated. This decision, of course, was the impetus for the famous statement of Papal Legate Amaury after the capture of the heretic city of Beziers; when the crusaders asked how they were supposed to tell the heretics from the “true” Christians, Amaury replied “Kill them all; God will know his own”. From a strict theological standpoint, this makes perfect sense; if you spared any of the heretics they might seduce others into heresy but solid believers would end up in heaven. I wonder, though, how the crusaders explained to children that they were being decapitated for their own protection.


It took me an unusually long time to get through this; it was my bus reading for weeks and I kept falling asleep. However, I’m glad I never abandoned it.… (mais)

Ermengarde was the viscountess of Narbonne, in what is now southern France, during the twelfth century. Despite her political prominence at the time, and her rule over what was then a very important port city, almost no sources about her life have survived. Even among medievalists she has been a minor figure. Fredric Cheyette sets out to recover Ermengarde from the historical shadows; given that there are only 64 documents which can be securely associated with her, Cheyette does this in large part by focusing on the world in which she lived. As a woman with her own inner life, Ermengarde does remain frustratingly elusive, but Cheyette's mastery of the documents means that he is able to give us a sense of Ermengarde the ruler. Some of the chapters on heresy might need revision in light of recent work on the Cathars by historians like R.I. Moore, but this is overall an excellent book which has held up well over the past decade. It is very useful reading for anyone working on medieval female lordship.… (mais)