Europe's inner demons

(In the year 1275) the Dominican Hugues de Beniols (or de Bajol), who was at that time inquisitor at Toulouse, carried out in the town a persecution of heretics and sorcerers, in the course of which a widely respected woman, Angela de la Barthe, was denounced by her neighbours as suspect of having dealings with the Devil. The 56-year-old woman confessed to the judge that for many years a demon had visited her and had intercourse with her every night. From this intercourse was born a monster, wolf above, serpent below, and human in between. She fed the monster on small children, making nocturnal excursions to catch these. After two years the monster vanished. The woman, who was obviously mentally deranged, was handed over by the inquisitor to the secular arm. On the orders of the seneschal she was burned in the square of St Stephen at Toulouse, along with several other individuals who had confessed to being magicians, necromancers and diviners....⁽³⁾

As his sole source for this story Hansen gives the Histoire de l’Inquisition en France, by the Baron de Lamothe-Langon, published in Paris in 1829. The relevant passage in Lamothe-Langon, however, turns out to contain no primary source but merely another summary of the story, accompanied by references to two earlier works: the

Histoire ecclésiastique et civile de la ville et diocèse de Carcassonne, by the Augustinian monk T. Bouges, Paris, 1741; and the Chronicle of Bardin.⁽⁴⁾ On examination these two sources melt into one: Bouges has simply translated the story of Angela de la Barthe from a chronicle written around 1455 by a councillor of the parlement

of Toulouse called Guillaume Bardin.⁽⁵⁾And that chronicle is the earliest known source of the story.

But the chronicle of Guillaume Bardin is highly unreliable. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it was trusted and used by many historians; but in 1742, the very year after the publications of Bouges’s history, the great scholar Dom Joseph Vaissete printed it in the fourth volume of his Histoire générale de Languedoc, and at the same time entered a caveat. In his view a chronicle so manifestly inaccurate might well be a fabrication, concocted by some unknown impostor in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. And although Vaissete went too far — Bardin’s authorship is not seriously in doubt — his instinct was sound. When Auguste Molinier came to re-edit Bardin at the beginning of the present century, as part of a new edition of the

Histoire générale, he too insisted that the chronicler was careless, even somewhat unscrupulous, and not above falsifying his documentary sources.⁽⁶⁾

These strictures certainly apply to the passage concerning Angela de la Barthe, for this contains a ruinous blunder. Bardin says nothing of the inquisitor Hugues de Beniols: that detail was added by Lamothe-Langon, who took the name from a standard list of the inquisitors for Toulouse.⁽⁷⁾

Instead, Bardin attributes the whole persecution not to the Inquisition but to a seneschal of Toulouse called Pierre de Voisins; and he goes on: “I have had in my hands, and have read, the sentence pronounced by the seneschal, in which all these things are laid out.”⁽⁸⁾ But it is known that Pierre de Voisins had ceased to be seneschal of Toulouse by late 1254, and was dead long before 1275;⁽⁹⁾ so Bardin cannot possibly have read such a sentence.