Raymond VI of Toulouse

Everything cited here about Raymond comes from his opponents. Pope Innocent III, writing in March 1208, calls him a minister of the devil, shifty and inconstant, often censured and often absolved on a show of repentance. He had threatened the legate Peter of Castelnau with death, and the pope presumed him guilty of the murder, declared him excommunicate and offered his lands to any Catholic who would take them (Innocent III, Letters, 11.26 (March 1208), PL 215, cols 1354–1358). Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay describes his penance at Saint-Gilles, where he was led stripped to the church door, sworn to obedience and beaten into the church by the legate, and says that he then took the cross, in pretence (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensians 12–13, cols 564–565).

At the council of 1215 he and his son came to ask for their land. The pope, with the approval of the greater part of the council, gave Toulouse and the conquered lands to Simon de Montfort and kept the lands in Provence for the son, should he prove worthy (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensians 83, cols 699–701). Caesarius of Heisterbach, writing between about 1219 and 1223, says that the count had moved into Toulouse and was harassing the faithful from it “to this day” (Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles 5.21 (Strange, vol. 1, p. 302)). The peace of 1229 was made by his son, also named Raymond. Its preliminary articles speak of the excommunication and the other measures decreed against him and his father in the general council or afterwards (Treaty of Paris (1229) preliminary articles, cols 879–882). See the Albigensian Crusade.