Report of the Legates Arnaud Amalric and Milo to Innocent III
The letter in which the two papal legates with the crusading army told the pope of the taking of Béziers and Carcassonne and the choice of Simon de Montfort as lord of the conquered land. It gives their own figure for the dead at Béziers, nearly twenty thousand.
The letter was written by the leaders of the expedition a few weeks after the events, to the pope who had called for it, and was copied into his register. It is the nearest thing to an official account. The legates say that the citizens of Béziers had been warned to hand over the heretics or leave them, that the assault was begun by camp servants without orders while the barons were discussing how to save the Catholics in the city, and that “our men”, sparing neither rank nor sex nor age, put almost twenty thousand people to the sword. They call the outcome a miracle and a work of divine vengeance.
The figure is the victors’ own, and they give it as an approximation (fere, “almost”). The letter does not contain the words that Caesarius of Heisterbach later attributed to Arnaud Amalric.
Cited in
- 1209 to 1229, firm date