ABSTRACT
The sources confirm the general circumstances described by Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cemay, even though they offer less detail and sometimes distribute blame differently. William of Tudela portrays the ribauds who began the attack in Beziers as "in a frenzy, quite unafraid of death, killing everyone they could find." When Marmande fell to the forces of Louis of France and Amaury of Montfort in June 1219, the crusaders indulged in a general massacre of the population. Lords, ladies and their little children, women and men stripped naked, all these men slashed and cut to pieces with keen-edged swords. Flesh, blood and brains, trunks, limbs and faces hacked in two, lungs, livers and guts torn out and tossed aside on the open ground as if they had rained down from the sky. The perspective offered by William of Puylaurens is quite different because he was writing a generation or more later.
