Bernard Saisset (c. 1232 – c. December 1314)[1] was an Occitan bishop of Pamiers, in the County of Foix in the south of France,[2] whose outspoken disrespect for Philip IV of France[3] incurred charges of high treason[4] in the overheated atmosphere of tension between the king and his ministry and Pope Boniface VIII, leading up to the papal bull Unam sanctam of 1302.

[5] As an ardent Occitan aristocrat of an old noble family, he despised the northern “Frankish” French, and publicly demonstrated it by decrying the Parisian bishop of Toulouse, Pierre de la Chapelle-Taillefer, as “useless to the Church and the country, because he was of a speech that was always an enemy... because the people of the country hate him because of that language.”[6] Further, Saisset was sent in 1301 as a papal legate to Philip IV to protest the king’s anticlerical measures.

But on his return to Pamiers he was denounced to the king as having tried to raise a rebellion of Occitan independence, associated with Navarre, under the banner of the Count of Foix (with whom Saisset had until very recently been embroiled in the courts).

The king charged two northerners, Richard Leneveu, archdeacon of Auge in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lisieux, and Jean de Picquigni, vidame of Amiens, to make an investigation, which lasted several months.

Philip’s ministry had a well-earned reputation for judicial violence, and Saisset was on the point of escaping to Rome when the vidame of Amiens surprised him by night in his episcopal palace at Pamiers.