Page "Catharism" Paragraph 23

Their first target was the lands of the Trencavel, powerful lords of Albi, Carcassonne and the Razes — but a family with few allies in the Midi.

Little was thus done to form a regional coalition and the crusading army was able to take Carcassonne, the Trencavel capital, incarcerating Raymond Roger in his own citadel where he died, allegedly of natural causes ; champions of the Occitan cause from that day to this believe he was murdered.

Simon de Montfort was granted the Trencavel lands by the Pope and did homage for them to the King of France, thus incurring the enmity of Peter of Aragon who had held aloof from the conflict, even acting as a mediator at the time of the siege of Carcassonne.

The remainder of the first of the two Cathar wars now essentially focused on Simon's attempt to hold on to his fabulous gains through winters where he was faced, with only a small force of confederates operating from the main winter camp at Fanjeau, with the desertion of local lords who had sworn fealty to him out of necessity — and attempts to enlarge his newfound domains in the summer when his forces were greatly augmented by reinforcements from northern France, Germany and elsewhere.

Summer campaigns saw him not only retake, sometimes with brutal reprisals, what he had lost in the ' close ' season, but also seek to widen his sphere of operation — and we see him in action in the Aveyron at St. Antonin and on the banks of the Rhone at Beaucaire.

Simon's greatest triumph was the victory against superior numbers at the Battle of Muret — a battle which saw not only the defeat of Raymond of Toulouse and his Occitan allies — but also the death of Peter of Aragon — and the effective end of the ambitions of the house of Aragon / Barcelona in the Languedoc.

This was in the medium and longer term of much greater significance to the royal house of France than it was to De Montfort — and with the battle of Bouvines was to secure the position of Philip Augustus vis a vis England and the Empire.

The Battle of Muret was a massive step in the creation of the unified French kingdom and the country we know today — although Edward III, the Black Prince and Henry V would threaten later to shake these foundations.