Pierre Amiel

Pierre Amiel ( Latin: Petrus Amelii ; † 1245 ) was an archbishop of Narbonne from 1226 to 1245 .

He came from Béziers , where he worked as a canon of the Marie-Magdalena Church (today the Saint-Nazaire Cathedral ) from 1201 . On July 22, 1209, he was likely to have witnessed the massacre of the city population and the destruction of the church by the army of the Albigensian Crusade , for which his later predecessor in Narbonne , Arnaud Amaury , was largely responsible.

When he was elected Archbishop of Narbonne in the spring of 1226, the Albigensian Crusade had in fact failed, but King Louis VIII of France had a new campaign proclaimed at the same time. Pierre Amiel immediately placed himself in the service of this new crusade and, with a propaganda campaign, was able to persuade several Languedoc cities to submit without a fight to the king who marched in the autumn of 1226. After the king's death in November of the same year, he supported the royal governor Humbert de Beaujeau in the fight against Raymond VII of Toulouse , about whom he had pronounced the excommunication because of his resistance . On this occasion he had also ordered the persecution of the Cathars by "synodal witnesses" for the first time , that is, by document commissions that were set up in all parishes and that were supposed to convict heretics by means of the "investigation" ( inquisitio ). An anticipation of the inquisition jurisdiction established only a few years later . In 1227, Pierre Amiel took part in the storming of Labécède, defended by Olivier de Termes , by the French, who massacred the population there. In 1229, however, he was also involved in the negotiation of the peace conditions to be fulfilled by Raimund VII in Meaux , which were sealed in the Peace of Paris and finally ended the Albigensian Crusade.

In 1234, Pierre Amiel had to flee Narbonne when a real civil war broke out there between the Cité and its independent Burgus , which was sparked by the arrest of several heretics by the Dominican prior Ferrer . To calm the situation, Raimund VII had sent the two notorious Faydits Olivier de Termes and Géraud de Niort, who, however, as enemies of the church, fueled the turmoil and plundered church facilities. Only the Abbot of Fontfroide was able to secure a truce in 1236, which was pacified permanently in the following year under the authority of the royal seneschal of Carcassonne. In 1238, Pierre Amiel moved to Catalonia with 40 knights and 600 foot soldiers to support King James I in the conquest of Valencia , which was successfully completed in September of that year.

During the uprising of Raymond VII in 1242, Pierre Amiel had to flee again from Narbonne, in which the Count of Toulouse triumphantly entered in July. Against him and his colleagues he pronounced excommunication again in Carcassonne . The uprising ended towards the end of the year with the submission of Raymond VII to the royal authority. During the uprising, the inquisitors of Toulousain were murdered in Avignonet . The assassins came from the last notorious Catholic resistance nest, the Montségur . During the siege of this castle from 1243 to 1244 , Pierre Amiel was temporarily on site. This was also the case with their surrender on March 16, 1244, after which he had 224 Cathars who did not renounce their faith burned at the foot of the mountain.

literature

• Michel Roquebert: The History of the Cathars, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Languedoc. German translation by Ursula Blank-Sangmeister, Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart 2012. (French first edition, Histoire des Cathares. Hérésie, Croisade, Inquisition du XIe au XIVe siècle. Éditions Perrin, Paris 1999).

Remarks

1. ↑ Gallia Christiana, Vol. 6 (1739), No. 37, Col. 65-71.
2. ↑ Roquebert, p. 289.
3. ↑ Guillaume de Puylaurens , Historia Albigensium , In: Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France , Vol. 19 (1880), p. 218.
4. ↑ Guillaume de Puylaurens, Historia Albigensium , In: Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France , Vol. 19 (1880), p. 219.
5. ↑ Roquebert, p. 321.
6. ↑ Llibre dels fets , ed. by Damian J. Smith and Helena Buffery in: The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon. A Translation of the medieval catalan Llibre dels Fets (2010), pp. 221, 229. Joaquim Miret i Sans, Itinerari de Jaume I “el Conqueridor”. Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Barcelona 1918, p. 286.
7. ↑ Roquebert, p. 363.
8. ↑ Guillaume de Puylaurens, Historiae Albigensium , In: Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France , Vol. 20 (1840), p. 770.
9. ↑ Roquebert, p. 382.

predecessor	Office	successor
Arnaud Amaury	Archbishop of Narbonne 1226–1245	Guillaume de Broue