Guillaume de Lahille

Guillaume de Lahille ( Occitan Guilhem de Lahille ; † March 16, 1244 , Montségur ) was an Occitan knight , Faydit and Cathar in the 13th century.

Lahille belonged to a landlord family from the area around Laurac who was deeply rooted in the Catholic faith and fought against the Albigensian Crusade in the wake of the young Raymond VII of Toulouse . In 1220, together with the knights Bernard-Othon de Niort and Bernard de Saint-Martin, he managed the escape of the Cathar dignitaries Guilhabert de Castres and Raymond Agulher from Castelnaudary, which was besieged by the Crusaders . After the Count of Toulouse had to submit to the French crown in the Peace of Paris in 1229 , Lahille joined the entourage of Pierre Roger de Mirepoix on the Montségur , the last retreat of the Cathars and the base of operations of the militant resistance against the royal and Roman Catholic authorities. In 1240 he took part in the uprising of Raimund II Trencavel and was charged with collecting the hearth tax for the benefit of the rebels.

On October 17, 1241, Lahille was sentenced in absentia as a heretic along with Bernard de Saint-Martin and Guillaume de Balaguier by the inquisitors Guillaume Arnaud and Étienne de Saint-Thibéry , which would have resulted in death at the stake . On May 28, 1242, all three Faydits belonged to the Montségur command led by Pierre Roger de Mirepoix, which moved to Avignonet , where the two inquisitors had taken up their quarters in the palace of the Count of Toulouse. On the night of that day, Ascension Day , the three at the head of an advance party broke into the apartments of the inquisitors and murdered them with battle axes. This act resulted in the siege of Montségur by a royal army in May 1243 , in whose defense Lahille and Saint-Martin took part; Balaguier was seized and hanged by Count Raymond VII of Toulouse that same year. In the spring of 1244 Lahille was seriously wounded in battle, but he survived. In the terms of surrender negotiated on March 2, the royal seneschal issued a general amnesty for the Avignonet assassins, while all professed and consecrated Cathars who were unwilling to renounce their faith were sentenced to death at the stake. Both Lahille and Saint-Martin received the Consolamentum on March 13th from the Cathar bishop Bertrand Marty , the consecration to the professing Cathar perfectus . Like all other believers from Montségur, including his sister and cousin, he refused to convert on March 16 and was burned at the stake at the foot of Montségur.

literature

• Michel Roquebert: The History of the Cathars. Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Languedoc. Translated from the French by Ursula Blank-Sangmeister. Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-010765-2 (French first edition. Histoire des Cathares. Hérésie, Croisade, Inquisition du XIe au XIVe siècle. Éditions Perrin, Paris 1999, ISBN 2-262-01268 -7 ).