It was a choked spring. De Montfort
got up both drums and peace offers.
His words puffed like wind off the Garonne.
We turned plows over for arms.
Our count Raymond Roger* would stand no truce.
So we passed
silenced bells, bared altars, locked churches.
The priests too marched through the town gates,
carrying out the Eucharist on platters,
ritual backs turned on their villages.
April we rode out to the wood of Montgey,
lay in ambush, descended
on a handful--
scullions, Germans
enroute to Simon's camp--
and smote them.
This in a few days. Then news from Lavaur
of retaliation, burnings, a woman
stoned to death at a well's bottom.
That summer the campaign progressed,
laid waste to the Roman road
and we smote our own fields.
They seized Castelnaudry. In September
we fell like locusts upon that city,
Overtook on the highway
Simon's hirelings,
Full force they charged us
and we, blow for blow parrying,
and my companion pared by one of them
and I know Death's hand
And the devil take it.
This is no tournament.
But the South before this
was rank with peace
and Raymond of Toulouse
like that old "Oc-e-No"**
wavering on horseback.
Now the land has opened
wide with blood. The crusaders
barricade themselves at Pamiers.
Out here we patrol the dead
in stripped fields.
Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA; Fall, 1979
This poem is spoken by an imaginary soldier under the Count of Foix. Nearly every other detail/incident in this poem is taken from Jonathan Sumption's well-researched, The Albigensian Crusade. The allusion to Richard Lionheart, "Oc-e-No" (see note on him below), is from Bertran de Born's poems and from the information in Karen Wilkes Klein's The Partisan Voice (Klein correctly dubs Bertran a "nationalist"). The poem was originally composed to introduce my translations of the trobadors, my undergraduate thesis, and was the only poem I composed during the 1979-80 school year (that year I resigned midterm from my editorial duties of the literary magazine, Pegasus, because I wanted to devote myself wholly to the trobadors, my Chaucer class, and the Middle Ages, and to forget about the present for a bit. (I did attend as a staff-participant a literary magazine workshop and continued to be a poetry board member.) More Albigensian Crusade history, including an outline of the 1211 campaign, can be found at: http://xenophongroup.com/montjoie/albigens.htm.
* Count Raymond Roger: Raymond, Count of Foix; an excellent military commander. I believe this is the same '[E]N Roger,' ("Sir Roger") mentioned by Bertran de Born in the tornada to his verse satire "Non puosc mudar mon chantar non esparga" (I hope I've got the Occitan spelling right; "I just can't keep myself from song;" Bertran goes on to say how he loves "to hear the noise/din/commotion of kings"): "Vai Sirventes, ades tost e correns,/a Trainac sias anz de la festa/di.m a.N Roger e totz mos parens [la?]/que no i trob plus ni ombra ni om ni esta (again I may not have the spelling right; I quote from memory: 'Go biting verse, and speed;/be at Trainac before the fest there/Tell Sir Roger and all my kin for me/That I find no more of shadow, man, or this verse!;" one can argue whether or not Bertran thought that the time had come for war again, but Bertran's poem [like most poems by Bertran; the exception is his lament for 'the Young King'] is a sirventes, a satire in verse, and does make fun of war, whether or not Bertran thought that he would "trob" ('find') no more verse, that it, as had shadow and man and all things of peace, been exhausted; in this sirventes Bertran says of his sometime ally and sometime foe Richard Lionheart, 'He finds war's trouble and expense so pleasant,/that he storms his friends with his opponents; some things never change!) Raymond Roger is not to be confused with Raymond VI Toulouse (ah the importance of being 'Raymond' ), the count who harbored heretics (although the two Raymonds were in allegiance). For more on the Count of Foix, see http://www.speedylook.com/Raymond-Roger_de_Foix.html
** Oc-e-No: Richard Lionheart of England; dubbed 'Oc-No,' 'Yes and No,' by the poet-soldier-nationalist Bertran de Born, who sometimes allied with Richard and sometimes opposed him.