Simon de Montfort

After Carcassonne fell in 1209 the leaders of the crusade chose Simon de Montfort as prince and lord of the conquered land; the legates described him to the pope as a man strong in arms and devout in faith, who had at once ordered tithes to be paid to the churches and three pence a year to Rome from every hearth (Arnaud Amalric and Milo, Report to Innocent III (1209) cols 140–141). Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, the crusade’s historian, calls him “our count”. He tells how at Minerve in 1210 Simon urged the “perfect” heretics to convert and, when they refused, had a great fire made, into which, Peter says, a hundred and forty or more threw themselves of their own accord (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensians 37, cols 585–587), and how in 1213 King Peter of Aragon fell in battle against his knights at Muret (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensians 71–72, cols 667–672).

At the council of 1215 the pope, with the approval of the greater part of the council, awarded him Toulouse and the other lands the crusaders had taken, and the king of France invested him with them (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensians 83, cols 700–701). Toulouse turned against him. Peter says that he besieged it from 1217 and that, after some nine months, on the day after the feast of John the Baptist, a stone from a mangonel struck him on the head; he calls him a martyr (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensians 85–86, cols 708–711). Caesarius of Heisterbach, in the Rhineland, calls him a Catholic man who held the count of Toulouse’s lands by right of war (Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles 5.21 (Strange, vol. 1, p. 302)). See the Albigensian Crusade.