Richard’s son Philip seems to have died young, for the last mention of him occurs in 1201. The usually reliable chronicler Roger de Hoveden reported that Philip killed the Viscount of Limoges to avenge his father’s death. Viscount Aimar did die in 1199, but historians tend to discount the story because it was not reported anywhere else. Since Roger de Hoveden would not have invented it, there must have been a rumor to this effect, which is interesting in and of itself, for rumors shed light on medieval public opinion. It is sometimes reported that Richard had a second illegitimate son, Fulk, but this has not been documented.
Raimond de St Gilles’s subsequent history is a tragic one, for he would find himself caught up in the Albigensian Crusade, one of the darker chapters in the history of the Church. I will discuss his fate in greater detail in the Author’s Note. The year after Joanna’s death, he wed Anna, the Damsel of Cyprus. I was not surprised by this, as Anna was said to be very attached to Joanna and people grieving for a loved one often turn to each other for comfort. Whatever their reasons for the marriage, it did not last long—less than two years. We do not know the grounds for their annulment, but in 1204, Raimond wed again, this time a political match with Leonora, the sister of the King of Aragon, who would survive him. I should mention here that Raimond had five wives, not the six that many historians have given him. The confusion can be traced to the chronicler of Historia Albigensis, who reported that Raimond had wed “la damsel de Chypre.” She would later be misidentified as Bourgogne, the daughter of the King of Cyprus at that time, Amaury de Lusignan. There is no evidence that Bourgogne ever left the Holy Land, where she wed Gauthier de Montbeliard, the constable of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There are historians who are well aware of this mistake, but it is surprising—and depressing—that so many others simply report the Bourgogne marriage like so many sheep, most likely because Raimond’s marriages were peripheral to the subject they were writing about and so they did not do the in-depth research that would have revealed the error.
Raimond was a man with his share of flaws, but what caused his downfall was a sin that we would consider a virtue—he was genuinely tolerant and was unwilling to persecute his subjects for their religious beliefs. He would pay a high price for that tolerance, would be publicly whipped, betrayed by men willing to violate canon law to entrap him, and then excommunicated. He died on August 2, 1222, at age sixty-six. He’d spent the morning on the threshold of a church as the sympathetic priests within raised their voices so he could hear the celebration of the Mass. He passed out from the heat and apparently then suffered a stroke. He had sought absolution repeatedly in the years since his excommunication, but it was always denied him, as it was now by the prior of St Severin’s. The Hospitallers showed more mercy and accepted the dying man into their Order. The Church’s enmity did not soften, though, and he was denied the last Sacraments, denied a Christian burial in consecrated ground. This would be a source of deep grief to his son, who tried desperately to get the Church to relent. The promise of mercy to his father was used as bait to force him into making greater concessions, but the promises were never honored, and Raimond’s unburied coffin rested for years in the commandery of the Hospitallers in Toulouse, where it was eventually discovered that his body had been devoured by rats.
His son, the seventh Count of Toulouse, knew nothing but war from his twelfth year. He could not have remembered the mother who’d died when he was only two, but Raimond seems to have kept her memory alive for him, as he showed himself to be devoted to that memory, often mentioning her in his charters, naming his daughter Joanna, and asking to be buried beside her at Fontevrault Abbey when he died in 1249, at age fifty-two. His daughter had been compelled to wed the brother of the French king, and when their marriage was childless, Toulouse was swallowed up by the French Crown.
Very little is known of Raimond and Joanna’s daughter, born in 1198. Most historians only mention the son born in 1197 and the son who did not survive. Others know there was a daughter, but claim her name was Mary or even Wilhelmina. That it was Joanna is proven by the necrology of Vaissy Abbey in Auvergne, which records that on May 28, 1255, died “Johana, filia Raymundi comitis et Reginae Johannae.” She was the second wife of Bernard III, Seigneur de la Tour, and had two daughters and three sons.