IN the version of the Albigensian crusade prominent from the later thirteenth century on, Raimond Roger, if he was remembered at all, usually became an archetype. Guillem Augier used his blond hair to signal that his representation in the sirventes ‘A people grieving for the death of their lord’ was as a stock character and not a real person: the young, proud, reckless lord, whose personal history and family background were equally unimportant. For the Italian audience for whom Guillem Augier was writing, the lack of such details allowed the viscount to stand for the then popular idea of pre-crusade Languedoc as a place of chivalry and culture destroyed by the undiscriminating crusaders. However, it is clear that the crusaders treated Raimond Roger and his family in the way they did because of who they were; far from random or unfortunate, the crusaders’ approaches to the Trencavel were bound up with the Trencavel past.

It is clear that the crusaders attacked Béziers and Carcassonne in their first campaign because they were Trencavel towns, not the other way around. Carcassonne in particular was evidently a prize and its value to the crusade should not be underestimated. However, the crusaders had to balance their need for a base from which to conduct further operations with an equal need to win as many of the Occitan nobility as possible to their cause. In his approaches to heresy, Pope Innocent had been consistent in his desire to encourage the local laity to deal with the problem. The aim he gave to the crusaders was not to destroy the noble families of Languedoc but to persuade them to fight with them. If the crusaders had simply taken one town away from the Trencavel, or any other lord, this would scarcely have disposed that lord and his family and connections to become their allies, but rather would have created another enemy for the crusade near at hand. The wholesale removal of the Trencavel, compared to the treatment of other members of the higher nobility, was not so much victimisation as a way for the crusade to minimise antagonism from the higher nobility while obtaining the strong fortress they required.