4.  THE SIEGE OF MONTSEGUR 1243-1244 

Following the assassinations of the Inquisitors  in Avignonet in May 1242, there were wide spread revolts in Occitania against the French Crown and Catholic authorities. By January 1243 it was all over.  The rebellions failed and the leading local overlord Raymond VII, the Count of Toulouse, in whose territory Montsegur fell, signed a final peace treaty with the French King Louis IX.  Raymond VII who had rebelled previously, and was until then, a strong Cathar supporter, if not a clandestine believer, was once again forgiven by the King and the Church.  But Montsegur was to be destroyed, and Raymond who in the past managed to sidetrack plans of French crusading forays to Montsegur, stood aside this time. 

At a Catholic conclave held in Beziers in the spring of 1243, a call to bring down the “synagogue of Satan” at Montsegur was issued.   The operation was put under the military command of the King’s seneschal of Carcassonne Hugues des Archis, while the church was represented by the Pierre Amiel, the arch-bishop of Narbonne.  By Ascension Day in May 1243, on the anniversary of the assassination, warriors from Gascony and the Aquitiaine, buttressed by local troops pressed into service, began to pour into the valley below the pog at Montsegur.  Over the next ten months, a total of  ten thousand troops would mass beneath the fortress, drawing a tightening perimeter around Montsegur.

MONTSEGUR AS IT MIGHT HAVE APPEARED IN THE SUMMER OF 1243 
DURING THE SIEGE   ( VIEW FROM THE SOUTH LOOKING NORTH  )

MAP OF DEFENSE LINES AND APPROACHES TO MONTSEGUR 1243-44
(click on map to enlarge)   

The Cathars had been living within the fortress and in a small terraced village just beneath the north-eastern slope of the current fortress wall.  Small settlements also dotted the northern face of the pog, which gently sloped downwards away from the fortress like a camel’s back, and finished at yet another manned outpost known as Roc de la Tour–“Tower Rock”–before suddenly dropping off into precarious cliffs.  The main south-western approach to the fortress was very steep and protected by several walls.  Despite all the Catholic troops, there were many secret footpaths leading up to the fortress:  messages, troops, refugees and some provisions continued to infiltrate through the French lines–both into and out of Montsegur.

Pierre-Roger Mirepoix took command of the defense of Montsegur.  From his own vassals he had a total of seventy men:  18 battle hardened knights–including the assassins of the Inquisitors–six light riders and an assortment of infantrymen and sergeants and two or three crossbow men loaned to Pierre-Roger by other lords sympathetic to the Cathars.  There were at least another ten independent knights, making an extraordinary concentration of nearly thirty knights at Montsegur.   Other troops, archers and hired mercenaries rounded out the number of armed defenders at Montsegur to approximately 150 warriors in total.

There are myths that the Knights Templar came to the aid of the Cathars and that this set them on a long path of final destruction at the hands of the Inquisition in 1307.  Many of the descendents of the Templar Grand Master Bertrand de Blanchfort (1156-1169) were Cathar sympathizers based at his family seat a mile from Rennes-le-Chateau, near Carcassonne.   The Templars, in fact, did not participate in the Albegensian Crusade–but only because they did not have the available manpower at the time.   There is, however, one instant on record where the Templars came not so much to the aid of the Cathars, but fought against the French Crusaders.  In September 1213, Templars in the service of the Aragon King Pedro II participated in his failed attack on the French Crusaders of Simon de Monfort at Muret.  These Templar actions, however, were motivated more by their allegiance to King Pedro than by any Cathar sympathies.

Interestingly enough, in 1965 archeologists digging in the Cathar era strata at the terraced habitations, uncovered an insignia from another crusading monastic order–a so-called Khi Recroisete–made in precious white metal, worn by senior members of the Hospitaller Order of St John.

Other coats-of-arms discovered and not successfully identified by the archeologists working at Montsegur:

• 131/72  CLOU DE CEINTURE armorie.  Decor d’emaux champleves en forme d’ecu fransais gironne de huit pieces, bleues et rouges opposees deux a deux.  Blason non identifie.  L.: 18mm, l. : 16mm, ep. : 0.5 mm.  Sondage:  terrasse 2, habitats N.O., carre G2a42
  

• 138/72  CHAPE OU BOUCHE DE FOURREAU (?) de dague armoriee.  Decor d’emaux cloisonnes en forme d’ecu espagnol portant deux serres de pace.  Les ongles sont rouges, les pattes bleues.  Blason non identifie.  L. : 60mm, l. : 38mm, ep. : 38mm.  Sondage :  terrasse 2, habitats N.O., carre G2a34

  [Groupe de Recherches Archeologiques de Montsegur et Environs (GRAME), Montsegur:  13 ans de rechreche archeologique, Lavelanet: 1981.  pp. 104-105.]

Montsegur was relatively self-sufficient with a good reservoir system of cisterns for water and A metal forge for weapons and an ample supply of wood to fire it.   Meat and dairy products were not in high demand by the strictly vegetarian Cathars and supplies continued to trickle in.  Furthermore, the pog on which Montsegur is perched, is riddled with an astonishing network of hidden caves which are still being discovered and explored today.  What role they might have played in penetrating siege lines is still an unanswered question.

The civilian population of Montsegur consited of some fifty to one hundred Cathar perfecti and an assortment of refugees, followers, believers, wives, children and other family members, servants, craftspeople and court officials –an estimated total of approximately five hundred people of both sexes and all ages.  

The siege unfolded slowly for the first eight months, with Catholic forces painstakingly attempting to take the slopes of the mountain to position powerful trebuchets — catapults — within range of the castle.  Yet the slopes proved to be so impregnable that by the end of 1243, the Catholic troops were severely demoralized by their lack of progress.  The break came in January 1244, when Gascon mountain troops climbed up  the north-eastern tip of the pog in the middle of the night and captured the lowest point of the plateau–the Roc de la Tour.   From there, Catholic troops began to effectively fight their way up towards the fortress–capturing positions for a trebuchet and using the resources of the plateau to construct the catapult and mine the stone missiles for it.  Today the slopes of the plateau are still dotted with piles of stone missiles shaped in workshops set up by the attacking troops.

After two months, towards the end of February, the Catholic catapult was close enough to launch the stone missiles with deadly accuracy.   The progress of the French attack can be charted by the weight of the balls.  At first only light stone missiles weighing between 25 and 35 kilograms (55 — 77 lbs)  could be fired from the initial positions established by the Royal forces.  By the end of the siege, the troops were close enough to lob 80 kilogram missiles ( 176 lbs) into the inhabited terraces with devastating effect.

Stone missiles uncovered by GRAME archeologists on the terrace habitations in 1970

The Cathars attempted several sortie counter-attacks to dislodge the crusaders but it was too late–heavy reinforcements had poured up through rear part of the pog and were now dug in.  It appears that the majority of the combat fatalities at Montsegur occurred in the months of January and February–in skirmishes on the northern slope and under the increasing bombardment of stone missiles.  Again, the Inquisition records give us glimpses into some of the fatalities:

•  Knight Jourdain du Mas is given consolamentum under special circumstances in February 1244 –he is in a coma after being struck by a stone missile–and cannot consciously acknowledge the procedure before dying; [Doat 22, 209a, 241a, 281b, 253b.]
• Knight Betrand de Bardenac, given consolamentum before dying “after Noel 1243”; [Doat 22, 209a, 241b, 254b.]
• Sergeant Bernard Rouain, given consolamentum at his death from wounds on February 21, 1244  [Doat  24, 79b.]
• Sergeant Bernard de Carcassonne, consolamentum at his death on February 26, 1244; [Doat 22, 254a – 24, 207a.]
• Pierre Ferrer,  Catalan and bailiff of Pierre-Roger Mirepoix, consolamentum upon his death from wounds sustained, March 1, 1244  [Doat 22, 255a.] 
• Sergeant Guillaume d’Aragon, participant in the Avignonet assassinations, killed at an undetermined date.  [Doat 22, 205a.]

Now under bombardment, the terraced habitation outside the walls of the fortress had to be evacuated for the safety of the fortress walls.   By the end of February, Pierre-Roger understood that there was no hope of relief from the outside and that Montsegur could not hold out much longer.

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THE SURRENDER OF MONTSEGUR

Peter Vronsky is an author, filmmaker, artist and historian. He has been shooting and producing investigative reports and network television news specials, music videos and documentaries since 1975. He has worked  extensively in Europe, the former Soviet Union, South Africa and in Canada and USA.  Vronsky is  the creator of a body of formal video art works exhibited internationally and a cited historian of the phenomenon of serial murder, of Lee Harvey Oswald’s journey to the USSR in 1959-1962, the Siege of Montsegur during the Albigensian Crusade in 1244 and of the disappearance of Ambrose Small in Toronto in 1919.  Vronsky is the author of two books published by Penguin-Berkley on the history and psychopathology of serial homicide:  Serial Killers:  The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004) and Female Serial Killers:  How and Why Women Become Monsters (2007) .   

Vronsky is currently a Ph.D. candidate in  in the fields of  espionage in international relations and criminal justice history at the University of Toronto where he is writing his doctoral thesis on the security crisis in Upper Canada during the Civil War period and Fenian Crisis.   Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the Forgotten 1866 Battle that Made Canada,  is scheduled to be published in 2011 by Penguin Canada. Vronsky lectures in history of the Third Reich, the American Civil War, Espionage and International Relations in the 20th century at Ryerson University in Toronto.   Vronsky lives in Toronto and Venice, Italy. [more]

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Transcript OSWALD: Before being admitted into one of the colleges the candidate has to pass an entre… an entrance examination. Those who have previously obtained scholarships at, or stand on the foundation of one of the colleges, are admitted without being examined. After being admitted, the freshman or “fresher” can… mat… ehh … matriticulate, that is, become a member of the university. TITOVETZ: mat-ri-cu-late…

OSWALD: …matri… I’ll have to look that one up. Matri… yeah, okay. A matriculated student…

Transcript of Original 1960 Audio: OSWALD: “Before being admitted into one of the colleges the candidate has to pass an entre… an entrance examination. Those who have previously obtained scholarships at, or stand on the foundation of one of the colleges, are admitted without being examined. After being admitted, the freshman or “fresher” can… mat… ehh … matriticulate, that is, become a member of the university.” TITOVETZ:  “mat-ri-cu-late…”

OSWALD:   “…matri… I’ll have to look that one up. Matr… yeah, okay. A matriculated student…”

MONDO MOSCOW:
THE ART & MAGIC OF NOT BEING THERE

1991  90 minutes  Documentary

A look at how Stalinism still impacts on Moscow’s underground arts and culture today.

A Italo-Canadian Coproduction ofPROFESSIONAL VIDEO – SERGIO PASTRELLO and OCEAN CORPORATION

For TV Ontario and CityTV

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On June 1, 1866, Canada was invaded by a thousand heavily armed Irish-American Fenian insurgents who crossed over the Niagara River from Buffalo, N.Y.  Approximately 22,000 Canadian volunteer militia were called out in Upper and Lower Canada (or Canada West and Canada East as Ontario and Quebec were known between 1841 and Confederation in 1867.)  On the morning of June 2, 850 Canadian militia soldiers were deployed to interdict the Fenians near the small town of Ridgeway, approximately ten miles west of Fort Erie.

           
The Canadian soldiers really were mostly teenage boys and young men—farmers’ sons, shopkeepers, apprentices, clerks and two volunteer rifle companies of University of Toronto students hastily called out the day before to face an invasion from the United States by Fenian insurgents bent on driving the British out of Ireland by striking into Canada. 

The thousand Fenians who came across the Niagara River from all corners of the United States were almost all battle-hardened recently demobilized Civil War veterans.  They carried weapons with which they had intimate familiarity after fighting in dozens of apocalyptic battles in a war that had killed 620,000 Americans—more casualties than in all the wars the US fought before and since combined—two percent of the American population killed in the four year span of 1861-1865.

The Canadian boys on the other hand had come from a generation that had not seen any rebellion at home or border raiding from the US since 1838—nearly thirty years earlier—and no major invasion of Canadian territory since the War of 1812—a conflict their grandfathers had fought in.  Strapped by the cost-saving policies of the colonial provincial government of United Canada, many had not even been given an opportunity to practice firing any live rounds from the rifles issued to them the day before. 

The youths were almost entirely parade-ground drilled and led by upper-crust social-climbing gentlemen part-time officers —wealthy merchants, attorneys, professors, landlords, civil servants, politicians and entrepreneurs who saw their militia service partly as a route for social advancement and prestige, partly as a function of their class to lead the “lower orders” forward in their duty to Queen and Empire. 

When on that Saturday morning of June 2 they unexpectedly collided with eight hundred Fenians waiting for them at a place called Limestone Ridge, twenty-eight University of Toronto students ended up taking the brunt of the attack.        

The result was inventible.  Two Canadian volunteer militia battalions, the dark-green uniformed Queen’s Own Rifles (QOR) of Toronto and the traditionally redcoat clad 13^th Battalion of Hamilton, reinforced by two local country companies from Caledonia and York, were cut to pieces and in their panicked retreat they left their dead and wounded in the field.

It was the first celebrated Irish victory over the forces of the British Empire since the Battle of Fontenoy when in 1745 the Irish Brigade –“The Wild Geese”—in the service of the French army charged the Duke of Cumberland’s elite Coldstream Guards and routed them during the War of Austrian Succession.

The Battle of Ridgeway (or Lime Ridge or Limestone Ridge) took place less than a year before Confederation brought together several British North American colonies into the nation of Canada.  It was the last battle fought in what would become the Province of Ontario—and it was the first battle of the modern era fought by what would become the Canadian Army.  There were no British troops at Ridgeway and the battle was led entirely by Canadian officers; it tested the mettle of Canada’s ability to defend itself, by itself, in the wake of colonial military budget belt-tightening by Britain.

The Battle of Ridgeway marked the beginning of Canada’s rising sense of self—the tipping point of when we stopped being only British colonial subjects and began our transformation towards becoming a Canadian people; our rite of passage for heroic citizenship in a new modern sovereign nation.

As C.P. Stacey, Canada’s 20^th century dean of military history argued

Fenianism tended to engender among Canadians an attitude that gave practical significance to that platform phrase “the new nationality.” No mere constitutional proposal could have aroused the feeling that was awakened by the threats…  The menace imposed itself strongly upon the popular imagination, and in such a fashion as to cultivate a patriotic feeling which was distinctively Canadian. The resistance to the Fenians was in defence of the British connection, but it was also an act of simple self-defence in which Canadian eyes turned as never before to local resources. The volunteers received vast publicity, did the little fighting and sustained the few casualties. [1]

In one of the earlier histories of Confederation, John Hamilton Gray writes in 1871 that the Battle of Ridgeway and the Fenian Raids

…though not one of the causes which led to Confederation, was yet one of those incidents which essentially proved the necessity of that military organization which, it was alleged, would spring from Confederation, and which was one of the first measures carried after Confederation was adopted.  It exemplified in a strong degree the alacrity with which the young men of the country were ready to spring to arms at the call of duty, and intensified the devotion of her people to Canada.[2]

Indeed, the soldiers’ marching songs in 1866 celebrated a Canada not yet formally born as a nation

Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching,

Cheer up, let the rabble come!

For beneath the Union Jack, we’ll drive the Fenians back

And we’ll fight for our beloved Canadian home.[3]

Cheer up boys, come on, come on!

It will not take us long

To prove to their dismay, that their raid will not pay

And wish that from Canadian ground

They stayed away.[4]

A year after Ridgeway a Toronto schoolteacher, who had fought there, Alexander Muir, composed what became Canada’s unofficial national anthem—The Maple Leaf Forever.   Canada had become a place and a home for its defenders—not Britain or the Empire first.  Ridgeway was where we first fought for the maple leaf before the crown.  It was our Bunker Hill.   Ridgeway was the battle that made Canada.

It is also the battle that most Canadians have never heard of…

[1] C.P. Stacey, “Fenianism and the Rise of National Feeling in Canada at the Time of Confederation”, Canadian Historical Review, 12:3 (1931). pp. 238-261.  p. 255

[2] John Hamilton Gray, Confederation; or, The Political and Parliamentary History of Canada from the Conference At Quebec, in October, 1864 to the Admission of British Columbia, in July, 1871, Toronto:  Copp, Clark & Co., 1872.  p. 361

[3] Captain John A. Macdonald, Troublous Times in Canada:  The History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870, Toronto: [s.n.] 1910.  p. 41

[4] Toronto Globe, March 28, 1923.   Another version of the song had a chorus that went, “Shout, shout, shout, ye loyal Britons” instead of “Tramp, tramp, tramp, our boys are marching” contrasting the Canadian version.

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A history of justice, policing, crime and punishment in Canada.  This website focuses on the history of justice and policing in Toronto Ontario from 1790 – 1960.

Also:  proposal for TV documentary on justice and policing in Canada 1500 – 2000.

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