The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (The Medieval World)

There is some irony in the story of this family’s involvement with the Cathars, for it had been Galharda Escaunier who had first persuaded Raymond Peter and Sibylla to seek comfort in the Cathar Church in their great sadness following the premature death of a previous infant daughter, Marquesia, in 1306. Raymond Peter’s enthusiastic conversion had led directly to the heretications of Galharda and Jacoba and to the temporary estrangement with his wife. Sibylla herself became disillusioned with the Cathars after this, believing them too avaricious and envious. As far as she could tell, Peter and William Autier did not live as they ought, but accumulated money, even though according to their own precepts, they should receive only enough for immediate necessities. Indeed, since that time she had heard heretics say to believers that they should betray and kill those who persecuted them since ‘the tree of evil’ ought to be cut off and killed. She nevertheless allowed them to continue to use her house, ‘since she was very much afraid and loved her husband, and did not wish to offend him’

Almost immediately Sibylla suffered a trauma of her own, when her daughter, Jacoba, a baby only a few months old, became so ill that her father wanted her, too, hereticated. Prades Tavernier was still in Arques, staying in the home of another neighbour, Raymond Mauleon, while waiting for the death of Galharda, and he came that night. After hereticating the child, he said that Sibylla ‘should not give the girl food or milk, or anything which is born of flesh, and that, if she lived, she should from then on feed her with Lenten food’. Raymond Peter, her husband, was very pleased, ‘saying that if his daughter died in this state, she would be an angel of God’, but Sibylla could not, as she said ‘see her daughter die in this way’, and she suckled her when her husband was out of the room. The resulting quarrel was so serious that ‘her husband did not love her or her daughter, nor speak to them for a long time until’, as Sibylla put it, ‘he recognised his error’. At the time he was supported by Peter Maury, who called her a bad mother and said that women were demons.