Martin Alvira Cabrer
Muret 1213. La Bataille décisive de la croisade contre les albigeois
(Vent-Terral, 2024), 448 pp. €37.00
For roughly a quarter-century, the Spanish historian Martin Alvira Cabrer has produced a steady stream of publications on the Albigensian Crusade, the battles of Las Navas de Tolosa and Muret, and other topics on medieval military history. Despite this output, his work remains little known to Anglophone scholars except for those who study the Albigensian crusade or the Iberian Peninsula, although some of his articles have appeared in French. This book, the fruit of an earlier work in Spanish now translated into French but also expanded, rethought, and updated, offers French readers the bountiful harvest of Alvira’s scholarship, though it may remain unknown to most Anglophone readers. That is a shame.
As Alvira notes, of the “big three” decisive battles of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, Muret in 1213, and Bouvines in 1214, Muret has received the least attention, especially in recent decades. Alvira argues that Muret’s consequences were as pivotal and important as those of the other two. Many scholars continue to ignore or misunderstand Muret’s impact, mostly because they see the battle as a victory, whereas Alvira studies the other side of the coin: Muret as a defeat. Although he intends this book to stand as an analogue to Georges Duby’s 1973 classic Le Dimanche de Bouvines (translated into English in 1990 as The Legend of Bouvines) perhaps Alvira is being too modest. If anything, Muret 1213 resembles more Dominque Barthélemy’s 2018 La Bataille de Bouvines except both Duby and Barthélemy treat Bouvines as a French victory, not as a defeat for the Angevins or Otto of Brunswick. Alvira’s different perspective derives from his position outside the French scholarly orbit which allows him both to question assumptions taken for granted by insiders and to showcase the neglected Catalan-Aragonese side.
Alvira has produced both a fine-grained and a long-view study of the battle. In fact, in its early chapters Alvira’s study is less like Duby’s and more like Herodotus’s. For Alvira, Muret had a long genesis; one not merely precipitated by the Albigensian Crusade or Simon of Montfort’s successes. Its root causes date back to the eleventh century when the counts of Barcelona, who became kings of Aragon in the twelfth century, made strategic marriages and extended their influence into territories north of the Pyrenees. Before the Albigensian Crusade unwittingly challenged that growing influence, Occitania was on the cusp of becoming a permanent part of a “Grand Crown of Aragon.”
The king of Aragon, Peter II, arrived at Muret with virtually every advantage over his opponent, including his military and religious reputation. As one of the leaders in the great victory over the Almohads less than eighteen months prior, he had stratospheric crusader credentials; far superior to Simon of Montfort’s, which prior to 1209 consisted of his refusal to follow other members of the Fourth Crusade in attacking Zara. Peter had held his kingdom as a papal fief since 1204 and considered himself an impeccable Latin Christian, hence his sobriquet “the Catholic.” As the suzerain of many Occitan nobles, including several dispossessed by Simon, Peter also had feudal custom on his side when he intervened. Nobles who were not his vassals, like Raymond VI, threw their lot in with him to avoid Simon’s relentless depredations. Because the pope had withdrawn the indulgence for service on the Albigensian Crusade earlier in the year in favor of a new crusade planned for the eastern Mediterranean—the Fifth Crusade—Innocent hamstrung Simon’s ability to receive reinforcements. Many of Peter’s Catalan and Aragonese vassals were experienced veterans of Las Navas. Combined with Occitan vassals or those willing to become his vassals, and the civic militia of Toulouse, by the autumn of 1213 Peter enjoyed a solid numerical advantage over any army Simon could muster. On the face of it, Peter should have won handily, yet the battle was a crushing tactical defeat and he lost his life.
Alvira proposes that Peter’s advantages caused him to suffer from the “malady of victory,” i.e. overconfidence in his reputation and a cavalier lack of appropriate preparations for the battle. The king arrived at Muret expecting an outcome in his favor. Peter, a notorious womanizer, may have had a dalliance the night before the battle, further suggesting that he believed he could afford distractions rather than mentally preparing for combat. He lured Simon into a pitched contest—a dangerous proposition in asking for God’s judgement—to end the French invasion once and for all.
The loss had tremendous consequences. For the people of Occitania, who for centuries had been nominal subjects of the French king, the triumph of mostly French crusaders at Muret was a critical step that the French crown exploited, especially after Philip II’s victory at Bouvines less than a year later freed him from his traditional enemy, the Angevin monarchs. The Occitan region, which prior to 1209 was on its way to becoming part of the “Grand Crown of Aragon” became destined, after a few additional steps and decades, to be fully and permanently incorporated into the French monarchy. For the Aragonese crown and Peter’s heir, the loss at Muret was devastating, and not merely for depriving a people and government from its head of state. The catastrophe proved that God had indeed intervened by so decisively favoring the weaker side. The five and half year old James I, now king, grew up believing that his father had gone against God and the church and paid the price. The kingdom’s disarray and the long regency meant that when James came of age, rather than trying to reassert suzerainty north of the Pyrenees or pursue a “Grand Crown of Aragon,” he reoriented his expansionist impulses southward against Muslim lands in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean. In these lands no ambiguity existed as to whose side God was on.
Alvira incorporates psychology, politics, and military history supported by all conceivable relevant primary sources and an exhaustive, current secondary bibliography. His examination of the battle is a model. The author uses a fine-tooth comb in a blow-by-blow account, including various theories that correct older scholarship. This scrupulous, painstaking approach extends even to the book itself. It contains sixteen pages of high-quality color plates, eleven genealogies of the major leaders at the battle, twenty-two detailed maps, thirteen which diagram the battle itself, and five appendices, two showing each army’s organization with lists of named participants. The quality of the book’s construction is superb, leaving me wondering how the publisher produced this volume for its modest price. In short, Alvira’s consideration of Muret as a loss instead of a victory is not only refreshing but a remarkable piece of erudition, detail, and insights which will stand as the definitive work on the battle and its results.
Laurence W. Marvin
Berry College, Mt. Berry GA
