In March 1208 Pope Innocent III had called a crusade against the dualist ‘Cathar’ heretics and their sympathisers among the southern French nobility. The trigger for the ‘Albigensian crusade’ was the murder of the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, a crime thought to have been carried out by supporters of the count of Toulouse, Raymond VI de Saint-Gilles (†1222). Over the next few years, an army of crucesignati under the leadership of Simon de Montfort occupied much of Languedoc, and at the Fourth Lateran council (November 1215) Raymond’s lands and titles were officially conferred on the chief crusader. The count’s protestations to the council are described by one of his partisans, the anonymous continuator of the Occitan canso begun by William de Tudela:

Whether dramatised or not, Raymond’s appeal expresses something of what it meant to be an exile. The landless man was cut off from the fount of power, while separation from the trappings of nobility brought with it a new sense of vulnerability. Not only was the count ‘prey to all dangers’, but he could question whether it was proper that his son, ‘nobly born, of good family and better lineage than anyone can describe … go wandering through the dangers of the world like some wicked thief?’ Displacement from one’s base occasioned a profound emotional response and an adverse psychological effect. ‘A man who loses his land suffers deeply’, pronounces the Song’s continuator elsewhere, or in one French translation of the Occitan, a le coeur douloureusement serré – he ‘is grievously wounded in the heart’. But while one man descended on Fortune’s wheel, another was raised up. One of those to benefit from Raymond’s difficulties was another political exile, Hugh de Lacy, who joined the crusade in 1211 and was rewarded with lands in the county of Toulouse.