The Burning of the Amalricians before Philip II, from the Chroniques de France
Heretics burned in the presence of the king of France, illuminated in a Chroniques de France of 1487. The scene shows the Amalricians condemned at Paris in 1210 rather than the southern trials, and it was painted almost three centuries after the event — but it records what a French audience of the late fifteenth century took a heresy execution to look like.
The Amalricians were a Parisian group condemned in 1210, in the same years as the campaign against the Cathars in Languedoc and under the same legal pressure. Their burning matters for the southern story because it shows the machinery being assembled: a doctrinal condemnation by the university, a royal presence at the execution, and a procedure that would shortly be handed to a standing inquisition rather than to bishops acting case by case. The manuscript is London, British Library, Royal 20 E. III, f. 177v. See how the Albigensian trials turned medieval religious justice.
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