End of the Game in Venice

Introduction

Introduction

Montsegur, Occitania, France. March 1244

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

(Kill them all, God will separate His people)

The Chevalier Arnaud des Casses entered the vast room where the women were doing their needlework, but the nervousness was evident and predictable completing a two-week period in which the siege was narrowing on the doomed citadel and clouds hovered over the remnants of the ancient Cathar nobility who resisted abjuring their faith and traditions. The smoke from the Inquisition bonfires had already covered the fields of southern France. The crusade against the Cathars that had begun years before under the direction of the brutal Simon de Montfort was already concluding with the fall of the last bastions. The Seneschal of Carcassonne and the Archbishop of Narbonne had besieged the city of Montsegur with an army of ten thousand soldiers and there was no power that could confront them.

The Chevalier des Casses set his voice on the murmurings of the women so that silence seized the hall. Des Casses went straight to the point.

"The Council of Perfects has ordered that all children up to twelve years old be evacuated from the city with immediate effect. The mothers who are breastfeeding should accompany their children and other thirty mothers will be selected to accompany the infants. I know this separation will be terribly painful but we must safeguard our seed and our lineages so that our faith will not be lost in the terrible days that will follow. We also know that those women who are selected will be reluctant to leave their husbands but they must fulfill the task entrusted to them because children need adult guidance.”

De Casses walked to the center of the room and had to overcome his emotions to continue his speech.

"Thirty carts will leave the city tonight, escorted each by a knight and six soldiers. Children and mothers will travel there.”

Tears and sighs had become shrieks as the ladies realized they would have to abandon their children to save them from a horrible fate that the bonfires anticipated.

That night the caravan of wagons departed. The Chevalier Arnaud des Casses supervised the exodus accompanied by the Perfects Raymond Agulher and Guilleme Aicard. Tears bathed the cheeks of the rough men as they watched the children ascend to the sinister wagons to proceed in an unknown direction, lead only by the hand of God.

With his usual sagacity, Aicard asked.

"What do those three carts that are at the end of the caravan contain? I do not see any children or women in them.”

"I have not been informed," Replied Casses. "Nor do I want to ask.”

The shadows of parents greeting their children for the last time moved on the ground projected by a few torches that threw a minimum of light to not warn the besiegers of the maneuver.

And so, quietly and with great grief the carts caravan departed to transport their precious human cargo across Aquitaine and Languedoc, south to Navarre and Catalonia and east towards Piedmont and Lombardy up to Milan.

Unknowingly, those children were carriers not of a theology but of the seeds of religious and political freedom.