The Dove and the Devil
The novel, The Dove and the Devil, is the story of the events that were set in motion one cold winter’s day in the year 1199 at a tournament on the estate of Thibaut of Champagne. It was then that Simon de Montfort, the father of the well known de Montfort in English history, first answered the Pope’s call to a Crusade. He never made it to the Holy Land and the reasons why he refused to go, having sworn his oath over a saint’s relics, were what first called him to the attention of Pope Innocent the Third. When the Holy Father called the Crusade against the Cathars in 1208/9, he was pleased to put this faithful son of Holy Mother Church in command of the first army ever to fight Christians in a Christian land.
A holocaust follows when this able soldier and son of the church, charged with ridding the world of a dangerous threat, sweeps into Occitania in the South of France. Over a million souls are wiped from the scorched face of the earth in what we now know as Languedoc and the modern notion of genocide is born.
The novel weaves between the lives of the noble de Montfort family from the north and the humbler family of the heroine, Maurina, in the south. Maurina is a Cathar, brought up by Cathar foster parents, for which, if de Montfort has anything to say about it, she is to be punished. She is one of the group de Montfort is intent on destroying. The clash of cultures which ensues, when north meets south, changes the face of the country forever. A tolerant society, which welcomes all faiths, is turned into a suspicious and priest ridden one which gives birth to the first Inquisition.
Maurina and Guy, de Montfort’s youngest son, become friends when he rescues her from the clutches of some of his father’s less than noble soldiers. Having been brought up on the estate of one of his father’s friends in the south of France, in the very place where his father is now making war, Guy does not subscribe wholeheartedly to his father’s political and religious views. He has learned to love the people of Occitania, with their tradition of singing and poetry. He speaks their language, the langue d’Oc, better than he speaks his own, a fact which does not go unnoticed by his scheming father.
Simon de Montfort was a man with strong ideals, a loving family man. . He despised the people who dared question the religious status quo of that period, however, but not more than the people he conquered despised him and that for which he stood. He was contemptuous of the rulers of the area and did his best to destroy all they held dear. He did it in the name of the Church, aided and abetted by religious leaders, sometimes without the knowledge of the Pope. His deeds have passed into the annals of French history and into the psyche of the people who still consider themselves, to some degree, Occitanian. He still called the Devil by some and the Wolf by others and his name is used to this day as a threat by some mothers when their children are naughty!
The Dove and the Devil is the first part of a trilogy which will follow the de Montfort family from 1199 in Champagne, in Northern France through to the Battle of Evesham in 1265 in England where it has been said that chivalry died that day!